The door of the inn opened and three men entered, all cloaked despite the closeness of the night. They ordered ale, and two took theirs to a table on the other side of the inn while the third sat down opposite Golophin. He threw back his hood and raised his flagon to the old wizard, grinning.
“Well met, my friend.”
Golophin’s narrow, lined face cracked into a smile. “You might order me another beer, lad. This one is as flat as an old crone’s tit.”
A fresh flagon came, and Golophin drank from its moisture-beaded pewter gratefully.
“The landlord seems singularly incurious about the nature of his customers,” King Abeleyn of Hebrion said.
“It is his business. This will not be the first whispered discussion he will have seen in his tavern. In places such as this the commerce of Abrusio is directed and misdirected.”
Abeleyn raised one dark eyebrow. “So? And not in the court or the throne room then?”
“There as well, of course, sire,” said Golophin with mock sincerity.
“I do not see why you could not have made your way into the palace invisibly or suchlike. This trysting in corners smacks of fear, Golophin. I don’t like it.”
“It is for the best, sire. It may seem to complicate things, but in fact it keeps life a lot simpler. Our friend the Prelate may be out of the city, but he has spies aplenty to do his watching for him. It were best you were not seen in my company while this current purge lasts.”
“It is you he aims at, Golophin.”
“Oh, I know. He wants my hide nailed to a tree, to halt what he sees as the Guild’s meddling in the affairs of state. He would rather the clergy did the meddling. The Prelate has a whole host of issues he means to address, sire, and this edict he badgered you into signing is one way of getting to the heart of several of them.”
“I know it only too well, but I cannot risk excommunication. With Macrobius gone there is no voice of reason left among the senior Church leaders, except possibly Merion of Astarac. By the way, how is the Synod coming together? What have you seen in your sorcerous travels?”
“They are still gathering. Our worthy Prelate had a good passage once he was out of the calms around these coasts. His vessel is currently crossing the Gulf of Almark, south of Alsten Island. He will be in Charibon in ten days, if the weather holds.”
“Who is there already?”
“The Prelates of Almark, Perigraine and Torunna have preceded him. Their colleague, Merion of Astarac, had a longer journey to make than any of the others, and the Malvennor Mountains to cross. It will be two weeks, I fear, before the Synod is convened, sire.”
“The longer the better, if it keeps that tonsured wolf from my door. I will soon be setting off myself for the Conclave of Kings at Vol Ephrir. Can you keep me informed about the doings here while I am away, Golophin?”
The old mage sucked deeply on his pipe, and then shrugged with a twitch of his bony shoulders.
“It will not be easy. I will have to cast through my familiar, something no mage likes to do at any time, but I will do my best, sire. It will mean losing our eye on the east, though.”
“Why? I thought all you wizards had to do was gaze into a crystal and see what you wanted to see.”
“If only it were that simple. No, if my gyrfalcon accompanies you I will be able to send you news from here through it, but do not expect regular bulletins. The process is exhausting and dangerous.”
Abeleyn looked troubled. “I would not ask, except-”
“No, you have a right to ask, and it is a thing which must be done. Let us speak no more of it.”
No one else could have spoken thus to the King of Hebrion, but Golophin had been one of Abeleyn’s tutors when he had been a runny-nosed little miscreant, and the young prince had felt the back of the wizard’s hand many times. Abeleyn’s father, Bleyn the Pious, had believed in a stern upbringing laden with religious instruction, but Abeleyn had always hated the Inceptine tutors, dry men whose imagination was a thing of dust, a storehouse of past aphorisms and never-to-be-questioned rules. It was Golophin who had saved him, who had defused the incipient rebellion in the youngster and coaxed him into an appearance at least of dutiful submission. The wizard’s closeness to the King’s son had been one of the things which had protected him from the malice of the Inceptines when they had tried to rid the court of all vestiges of unorthodoxy and sorcery. The irony was that with the wizard’s pupil at last on the throne, they had finally succeeded. Aekir’s fall, Golophin thought with real bitterness, had been a Godsend to them.
“Speaking of the east,” Abeleyn said conversationally, “how are the Torunnans holding out?”
Golophin tapped his long pipe out delicately on the table. He preferred leaf imported from Ridawan flavoured with cinnamon. The smoking pile of ashes smelled like an essence of the east itself. Abeleyn wondered if there were a tinct of kobhang in the leaf, the mild euphoric that easterners chewed or smoked to fight tiredness and clear their thinking. Golophin made patterns in the ashes with one long, white finger.
“I have been working the bird hard lately. He is tired, and when he is tired he begins to slip away from me, and I receive pictures of the stoop, the kill, blood and feathers drifting in the air. It is said that a tired or a despairing mage will sometimes let his self slip wholly into his familiar and become one with it, leaving his body an empty husk behind him. He glories thereafter in the animal emotions of the creature, and eventually forgets what he once was.”
Golophin smiled thinly.
“My familiar sleeps on a withered tree not far from Ormann Dyke. Today he has seen a hundred thousand people go by, dragging their feet through the mud towards the last Torunnan fortress before the mountains. They have left thousands on the road behind them, and on their flanks the Merduk light cavalry prowl like ghouls. Ormann Dyke itself is in chaos. Half its defenders are taken up with dealing with the refugees, and the land to the west of the dyke resembles an enormous shanty town. The poor folk of Aekir can walk no more. Perhaps they will squat in the rain and await the outcome of another battle before they will have the strength to trek further west. But after Ormann Dyke, where can they go?”
“You believe the dyke will fall,” Abeleyn said.
“I believe the dyke will fall, but more importantly so do its defenders. They feel forsaken by God, and King Lofantyr of Torunna they believe has abandoned them. He has drawn off men of the garrison to defend the capital.”
Abeleyn thumped a fist down on the table, making the beer jump in the flagons. “The damned fool! He should be concentrating all he has at the dyke.”
“He is afraid he will lose all he has,” Golophin said calmly. “There are less than eighteen thousand men left in the garrison, and the Knights Militant have been riding away to the west in large bodies for days. If Shahr Baraz finds more than twelve thousand manning the defences when he arrives I will be surprised. And even leaving troops to garrison Aekir and their supply lines, the Merduk can still put a hundred thousand men before the dyke, probably more.”
“How long do we have before the assault?” Abeleyn asked.