‘This is now,’ Drako said. ‘Now. There are forces seeking to roll back the Founder’s reforms. Because only the Pure should work power. The Impure should never touch it – they waste it. Like cattle in a fresh spring, they muddy it with their dung.’ His voice took on an odd tone. ‘Power is only for humans. Only for men. All the other sentients should be eradicated. This is our time.’
‘Drako?’ Aranthur asked.
Drako sighed. ‘I hate them.’ He shrugged. ‘Our dead man worked for them. That is, I thought he worked for me, but in the end he worked for them, and I was very close to catching him.’ He raised his eyes. ‘You asked Lightbringer Kurvenos if there were Darkbringers – men who actively work for the Darkness. Do you remember?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Aranthur said quietly.
‘Well. The Pure and their Master do not think they work for the Dark.’ He shrugged. ‘But they do. They want to roll back a thousand years of progress and restore the world to slavery.’
Aranthur was shaken. ‘Sunlight! But why?’
Drako shook his head. ‘I have no idea. Up until now, it has all been about gaining control of the sources of the crystals in the East, and a ruthless programme to exterminate the Dhadhi, and kill off all the drakes, or so it appeared to us. We understood that the Pure wanted to control all the crystals, and they use that two ways – to control the market price, and to use the black market to fund their wars.’
‘By the Sun!’ Aranthur said. ‘You are frightening me. And I have never heard any of this. It’s like some traveller’s tale told for a few coppers on a cold night at an inn. The Master. The Pure.’ He frowned. One of the voices had asked him who The Master was. And the graffiti on the tenements … ‘Kill the drakes?’
‘Drakes are natural magik users. They can also consume power. Raw. They destroy it, when they choose, and the Pure hate them.’ Drako sounded frustrated. ‘Apparently. I have almost none of this first hand.’
Aranthur leant back, putting his head against the wall.
‘No offence, Syr, but why should I believe you?’
Drako nodded. ‘I really don’t know anything. There are people – intelligent people – who say that the Pure are an invention of my faction at court, to seize wider powers.’ He nodded. ‘And I confess that up until the kotsyphas attacked my friend Aranthur, that seemed possible, even to me.’ He nodded again. ‘This is like hunting a snow hare in a snowy field, where the field is also studded with mirrors.’
Aranthur struggled with the whole idea.
‘Does the Academy agree?’
Drako smiled. ‘They do now. Everything I know I have passed to the Master of Arts and her council. And you. By chance or tyche, fortune, you were about to begin work on a grimoire from the Far East; in Safiri.’
‘Yes,’ Aranthur said, panicking at the word were.
‘Don’t worry, you still are. We need that book. We need people who speak Safiri. It is the Safiri kingdoms that are threatened now – if this whole story is true. And I think it is. The Safians are the front line – indeed, it is possible that the Safian heartland has already fallen.’
‘By the Eagle, this is a mare’s nest and no mistake,’ Aranthur said. ‘Why tell me?’
Drako smiled grimly. ‘You were chosen to work on the Safiri. You were at the inn. You met the Prince of Zhou on the docks. Either you are at the very centre of a vast conspiracy – a possibility I have, in fact, investigated – or you have been tossed at my feet as an ally by Sophia herself.’ Drako winked. ‘I’m here to recruit you.’
‘What’s the Prince of Zhou have to do with it?’ Aranthur asked.
‘Join me and I’ll tell you.’
‘Join you and do what? With my minimal sword skills and my non-existent talent for Safiri and power, join you and we’ll save the world?’
Drako thought about it for a moment.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s about it.’
‘How do I know that you are telling the truth?’ Aranthur asked. ‘How do I know that you are even the side of Light?’
Drako smiled grimly. ‘You never will. You know Tirase’s statement about how principles are unprovable from experience? About hot iron?’
Aranthur nodded. It was like a school exam. But he did know the quote. When he’d been a boy, writing his first exams, coming to the attention of the village priest and the county noble, he’d learned Tirase’s Metaphysiks.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know it.’
‘Well,’ Drako said. ‘I can’t prove we’re cold iron. But we are.’
Aranthur stretched and yawned. ‘Who were the men in armour?’ he asked, ready to sleep again.
‘Magdalenes,’ Drako said. ‘Members of a military order two thousand years old. Followers of an old goddess called Magdala. They fight sorcery.’
‘They’re on our side?’ Aranthur asked.
Drako looked out of the window. ‘Yes. No. Sometimes.’
Aranthur looked at him.
Drako shrugged. ‘I’m not really good with truth. It’s slippery.’
Aranthur lay back. ‘Is the Duke of Volta on the other side?’
Drako stiffened. And then relaxed and turned with an oily smile.
‘Oh, no,’ he drawled. ‘Why?’
Aranthur thought he was lying.
‘Have you seen the drake that the Zhouians sent?’
Drako all but quivered. ‘Yes, I’ve spoken to him.’
‘Volta tried a working on the drake.’
Drako nodded. ‘I’m sure you must have misinterpreted …’ he began.
‘I have his notes for the working, right there on the wall,’ Aranthur said.
Drako tore the parchment off its pins.
‘Damn,’ he said.
Aranthur heard him pounding down six flights of stairs before he fell asleep.
The next morning, Aranthur dragged himself from his bed. His left hand still tingled, and his vision seemed … odd, in that he had unusual spots in front of his eyes – dark spots. Otherwise he felt capable. When he put on his gown, he discovered that it had a long tear from the hem almost to the waist. He couldn’t find his sewing kit, and called out for Daud.
His room-mate appeared, fully gowned, and with a book bag on his shoulder.
‘I’m moving out,’ the young man blurted. ‘Sorry, Aranthur. I can’t stay here. Arnaud died. He died. Right there. Can’t you feel it?’
Aranthur shrugged. ‘Yes … Wait. The rent is due.’
Daud shrugged. ‘Well, I put my money on a new room. Get one of your rich friends to pay.’ He went through the door.
Aranthur began to look for his sewing kit, and found that all of Daud’s kit was gone. The man had already moved out.
Aranthur found his own sewing kit in the wreckage of Syr X’s leather case, sat on his own bed and sewed up the long rent in his gown. Then he ran down a flight of stairs, looking automatically at Kati’s door.
It stood open, and there was a large man inside. Aranthur knew him; he owned the building and was showing the room to a trio of young men. The rooms were empty – not a stick of furniture, not a carpet left.
‘Where is Myr ai Faryd?’ he asked.
The landlord shrugged. ‘She moved out. This morning. Her rent was paid.’
Aranthur fled for the street. He found a quaveh seller in the Founder’s Square and carried two cups, piping hot, to the Master of Arts’ study off the Great Hall. He noted that he received dozens, if not hundreds, of broad stares as he made his way through the crowded halls and narrower corridors.
The master’s notary was busy copying a manuscript at incredible speed, but he stopped, wiped his nib, and rose to bow with great courtesy.
‘That is very kind of you, Syr Timos,’ he said. ‘We were all sorry to hear of your troubles.’
Aranthur went through into the great office, where the Master of Arts sat on what might as well have been a throne of ivory, her slippered feet on an ivory stool with a silk velvet cushion.
‘Magistera,’ A
ranthur said with a bow. He handed her the cup of quaveh.
She looked up at him and let the spectacles fall off the tip of her nose.
‘Syr Aranthur,’ she said. ‘I hope that you have made a complete recovery?’
Aranthur nodded.
She rose and put a hand under his chin, and dragged him, like a child, to the light of her vast window. She looked into his eyes for so long that it seemed she was about to kiss him.
‘Hmmf,’ she said. ‘That a second year student had to face a malign spirit inside the precincts. I offer you my apologies, Syr Aranthur. I have been told how this terrible thing happened, but it remains terrible that it happened at all.’
‘Yes, Magistera,’ Aranthur said. The whole idea of the Master of Arts apologising to him was more than he could take in easily.
‘Well,’ she said with a brittle smile, ‘there are no certainties. We are trained to know that. You had a meeting yesterday?’
‘Yes, Magistera.’
‘Good. So you understand the relative urgency of your studies.’
‘Not really, Magistera. Which is to say …’ He paused. ‘I understand that Safiri is important—’
‘Yes.’ The older woman sat in her throne again. ‘Important immediately. A very important book. Work heals many wounds. Let us do some work.’
Aranthur looked down the table.
‘Magistera, was not Kati …?’
‘Myr Katia ai Faryd is no longer at the Academy.’ The Master of Arts raised her eyes, and the weight of her gaze made Aranthur flinch. ‘In less than a week, despite all the difficulties of communication, her parents called her home to Persepolis. In fact, every Safian family has removed their children from the academy, Syr Aranthur. Fifty-six students.’ She looked down at her book. ‘What does that say to you?’
‘I, er, I wonder if …’
‘I wonder too,’ the Master of Arts said. ‘I wonder if the Pure are already hard at work in Safi. Because by all reports, they forbid women to study power, on pain of death.’ She glanced at him. ‘Work, Syr Aranthur. It is possible that there is nothing in the whole of the Academy more important than your learning that book. I think you should get started.’
‘Magistera, I don’t know where to start. Why me? Surely there are scholars …’
He felt a sort of black despondency settle on him. Kati gone, Arnaud dead, Daud left, rent due.
‘Yes,’ the Master of Arts said. ‘I have two good Safian scholars, neither of whom has much talent. Both will be available to you. I know some Safiri myself. You will learn the book. From it you will learn the basis of a different system of control and access to saar in a whole different way – a way that the Safians perfected before Tirase’s reforms. I want a blank slate for this project, young man, and you are it. Now, please, get to work.’
‘How?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘The admission of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. How do you think?’
Aranthur opened the first scroll. It was rolled on beautiful heavy bronze rollers, the vellum was so thin it was almost translucent, and the ink was porphyria, a strong purple red.
‘Right to left,’ the Master of Arts said. ‘Let us begin with the first words.’
Six hours later, Aranthur walked along the third canal, his head awhirl with the sound and taste of an alien language, strange verb forms, a sentence structure that seemed inhuman.
‘They say the Safians intermarried with the Dhadhi,’ the Master of Arts had said. ‘Perhaps that is why they are so beautiful.’
He bought a bowl of fish soup and ate it by the stall, using his folding spoon. Then he washed the bowl at the fountain like a good customer and returned it to the seller, a middle-aged woman with zarca scars on her face and the backs of her hands. She gave him a large smile and he went back to his room, where he sat looking at the spot where Arnaud’s body had lain. Someone had cleaned up, but not very well; flies buzzed on the dried blood in the floorboards.
His things were still strewn over most of the room, which had seemed very small with four young men, and was now ominously large for one.
Aranthur sat for too long, so that the shadows began to form at the corners of the room. But a ray of the winter sun caught his talisman in the window of glass, and he sat up. He had two paradoxical ideas – that he should go for a ride, and that he should sell a horse. Perhaps both horses.
He put on his best doublet and hose, and went out. He had a single silver cross left, and half a dozen bronze obols; he’d missed a week of work and wasn’t sure he was even employed. So he stopped first at the leather-working shop.
Myr Ghazala frowned when she saw him.
‘A soldier came,’ she said with some asperity. ‘We were asked many questions about you.’
Manacher emerged from the back.
‘Mama, they came back and apologised. What happened?’ He gave Aranthur an odd look. ‘You look like a noble. Where’d the clothes come from?’ He glanced at Aranthur’s long knife. ‘You carry a dagger now?’
Aranthur had found his dagger, the belt wrapped around it, under his workbench in one of the Practical Philosophy classrooms.
‘I was attacked,’ he said.
Myr Ghazala put a hand on his shoulder.
‘That is bad,’ she said. ‘Was it bad?’
He sat down, more suddenly than he had intended.
‘Yes,’ he said.
But he didn’t want to tell them about it; he’d been told to keep the sorcery to himself. So the attacker became a mere man, with a knife, in his rooms – the story Drako had given him.
‘That’s terrible,’ Ghazala said. ‘Here, have a berry tart. You look pale. Get him some chai.’
Ghazala belonged to that subset of people who believe that food is the most sincere form of love.
Aranthur ate and drank and felt better.
Manacher smiled. ‘The soldier worried us. Soldiers used to bother Rachman all the time, but we are not criminals.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This is my first day … up.’
They asked no questions, with the sensitivity of people who have known some adversity.
‘Can you work tomorrow?’ Manacher asked.
‘I have a new schedule now,’ Aranthur admitted. ‘I can only work in the afternoons.’
Mother and son exchanged a glance.
‘That’s fine,’ Ghazala said. ‘If you will work in dyeing, afternoon is best.’
Aranthur nodded agreement.
When he was clear of the food, he felt the weight of despondency settle on him again, but he took himself to the Nika Gate and rode out into the winter countryside. The gate was almost empty. The festivals were all done for a while, and there had been a thaw while he was unconscious. The world of ice and snow had become an endless vista of mud that almost convinced him to stay in. But after a hesitation, he rode out into the countryside, and Ariadne clearly enjoyed the exercise, galloping at the slightest weight change. It was as if she was determined to win him over. He had never loved her so well, and he rode for stades and stades in the mild air, his tattered old half-cloak fluttering behind him like a banner. With nothing to distract him, he thought too much about his life, and he didn’t really like what he saw: Drako, Dahlia, and too much fighting. And no Kati.
Why had she left? Without a word?
He tried never to allow himself to wonder what in all the iron hells he was doing. But riding gave him far too much time to think, and his thoughts tumbled one over another, and he found that Ariadne was tiring because he was riding very fast.
As the sun went down, he rode back to the livery stable and used warm water and soap to clean her legs before drying her and brushing her. It was full darkness before he left the stable.
He was wary of going home along the spine of the city. The Eastern refugees looked more threatening than before, although he disliked that tendency in his thoughts; if Drako was right, they were as much victims as he was himself. But he made it back to his room untroubled
. He disliked the darkness and he couldn’t face the mess, so he curled up in Arnaud’s warm bed, shut the curtains, and went to sleep. His dreams were dark and evil.
In the morning, he bought coffee from another seller, taking a different route to the Great Hall. This time he went all the way around to the reservoir side of the precinct, where a dozen Easterner women with magnificently polished bronze or copper pots competed to sell him quaveh. He bought three cups and was given a tray by a pretty, small woman with hands covered in marvellous tattoos. At least, her eyes were pretty; the rest of her was swathed in scarves.
Aranthur delivered quaveh to the notary, whose name was Edvin, a barbarian name, and to the Master of Arts, who waved him off after she had seized her cup.
‘Visitors from the new government in Volta,’ Edvin said. ‘Sit with me and copy your work. She has Syr Eshtirhan coming from languages to work with you today.’
Aranthur sat at the notary’s work table. The man was a legal professional, but he was, as Aranthur had already noticed, the fastest copyist that he had ever seen. His quill virtually flew along the parchment, and yet his characters were almost perfect, with little flourishes of penmanship that marked the truly elegant and educated scribe.
Edvin, who was over forty and thin as a rake, smiled over his pen.
‘I was hired for my copying,’ he said. ‘I hardly ever do legal work here. But I can write out an entire copy of Reflections in a week.’
‘Blessed Eagle,’ Aranthur muttered. He had copied selections from Reflections of an Emperor for the whole of his first term. It was not a short work.
Edvin flexed his eyebrows. ‘Sometimes I save first or second year scholars who fall behind.’ His grin was wicked. ‘For a price.’
Aranthur went back to his own work. The day before he’d written out the first four sentences of empty, flowery compliments in Ulmaghest, but he’d only written them on foolscap. Now, with time to kill, he copied the new letters over and over, seeking the fluidity of the Safiri scholar. He’d translated the table of contents. The Master of Arts had already directed him to three occultae, one of which was a simple shield. The compliments were just practice. Practice for practice.