But it was not Vincus's job to piece together the evidence. Calmly and silently he waited to deliver it, while the fiery old planet passed through the starry harp and the last hour of the night turned into the first of the morning.
The tower bells tolled that first hour, and the city of Istar wakened slowly in the early morning dark shy;ness.
In the corridors of the great marble temple, dozens of white-robed figures filed down the shining steps from the Outer Tower toward the Sacred Chamber, the underground sanctuary in which the Kingpriest and the principal clerics of Istar greeted every new day with First Prayer. The torches that lined the stairwell and the corridors smoked and sputtered, and among the clergy were many who nodded or shuffled sleepily, wrested from hard sleep and com shy;fortable beds by ritual demand.
At other places in the temple and in the city, more clergy gathered in similar ceremony, but those in the Sacred Chamber were the chosen, the elite whose service to Istar had spanned years, decades-in some cases, even the reigns of several Kingpriests.
At an hour more daylit or in a place less secure, the guards might have counted the white robes that entered the chamber that morning. Had they done so, they would have found that four of the number were missing, and that the infirmaries of the temple accounted for only three of the absent clergy.
But the hour was early, the guards as drowsy as the celebrants. The bronze-armored sentries nodded and blinked and closed the doors to the chamber at the appointed time, never knowing that one whose presence was expected-the cleric Vaananen of Near Qualinesti-had chosen not to attend the morning's ceremonies.
Instead, Brother Vaananen remained in his medi shy;tation chamber, stirring the fine white sand in his rena garden.
Vaananen was a westerner, and therefore seemed quite austere to some of the others in the brother shy;hood-mainly the Istarians who were spoiled by the city's soft ways and easy living. He was a tall, spare man, with long black-and-silver hair, which he kept clubbed neatly at his neck. His eyes were moss green and seemed to fill his entire face.
Vaananen smiled frequently, but always in secret, under his ample hood. He was a disguised druid working among the clerics, a man whose solitary pursuits made for few friends.
All the better.
His druidic masters had set him in Istar with the purpose of salvaging any ancient texts from the Kingpriest's destructive edicts. Secretly, painstak shy;ingly, Vaananen copied what he could find, translat shy;ing from rune and glyph into the common alphabet, and smuggling the new-made books out by silent courier and under other covers and titles.
Of late, he had found new things to do as well.
Vaananen's chamber was sparely and beautifully appointed: a small carved cot, a handmade teak table and copy desk, an exquisite stained glass lamp, and the rena garden-a simple, ten-foot-square recession in the floor, filled with sharp-grained white sand and punctuated with cacti and three large but movable stones, each of which represented one of the moons.
The secret of the garden was an old sylvan magic, perfected among the elves who, in the Age of Dreams, brought the sand into the forest to build the first of the renas. These elves had also known the true meaning of the stones: that the black stone was
augury, foretelling with the fractured, fitful light of divination, while the red stone told the past, its vision warped by the many versions of history. The white stone showed the present, showed what was happening someplace, usually unknown, a hundred feet or a thousand miles from the reader.
Moving slowly, carefully over the bright sand, Vaananen stirred circles with one foot. He bent, hoisted the red stone, and set it beside the white. Then, seating himself on the black stone, he stared across the broken expanse of sand, reading the fresh geometry of dune and ripple, the violet shadows cast by the stones.
The rena garden was now only a relaxation tool among the human clergy of Qualinesti. Absorbed and tamed into the Istarian theocracy, it was little more than a sedative, its true ancient powers forgotten. Now the sand and the abstract positioning of the stones were supposed to calm the mind for contem shy;plation, create a serenity in much the same way as, say, growing flowers or watching a waterfall.
Vaananen stared intently at the red, lava-pocked stone.
Sedative, indeed. The Istarian brothers did not know the half of it.
He passed a hand over the large, squat cactus in the center of the sand, feeling its aura of moisture and expectancy.
Rain. Rain within the hour.
But still no rain in the desert.
Slowly he stood, pacing softly about the garden, his eyes on the center of the square, where the combed dunes spiraled tightly like a whirlpool around the three glyphs he had drawn in the sand.
Rolling up the white sleeves of his robe, Vaananen rubbed off a patch of concealing potion on the inside
of his left wrist and focused on the red oak leaf tat shy;tooed there. He had hidden this mark from his com shy;rades for the six years he had served with the Kingpriest's clergy.
The red oak leaf. The druid's hand.
Vaananen focused, and the glyphs glowed and shimmered and then disappeared. Now, miles away, they would rest in the floor of the kanaji.
The rebels would find water now. They would also learn of the Istarian withdrawals.
Briskly, without ceremony, he crouched and raked over the smooth sand where the glyphs had been. The area once again matched the rest of the garden's surface.
From the rumors that swirled about the temple, through the corridors, towers, and the roseate Audi shy;ence Hall of the Kingpriest, Vaananen was certain that all his meticulously drawn symbols had done their distant work.
So it had been for years.
His heart had gone out to the eccentric, alien Plains shy;man lad who had found the ancient kanaji, the boy who searched for water. And so, through the first years of Fordus's Water Prophecy, Vaananen had guided the young man, and with druidic augury located the underground sources of water for the Que-Nara, informing Fordus through glyph and kanaji.
When, after the inexplicable dream a year ago, the Water Prophet became the War Prophet, and the rebellion against Istar began, the druid had begun to shroud even more information in the ancient sym shy;bols: the location of Istarian troops and their move shy;ments.
He also kept a constant warding spell upon the golden tore around Fordus's neck. This, too, was magic at a distance, and the druid's sleep was fitful and unsettled as his incantations protected the wan shy;dering Plainsman from the elements, the Istarians …
And from something else, far more grim and dark and powerful. Vaananen was not sure exactly what this larger menace was, but he had his suspicions.
Zeboim, perhaps. Or Hiddukel. Or an evil god even more powerful. Of one thing Vaananen was certain. He was safe, and so were the rebels he pro shy;tected, only as long as he was beneath Istarian notice.
So he stayed obscure and low, and helped Fordus quietly.
Obviously, the lad had a gift. He could discover both weather and tactics in the shimmering lines on the sand. And then the elf would translate Fordus's reverie, and the Plainsmen would travel, and Istar would fall to another desert defeat.
So it had been, and so it was.
With his finger he traced the next of the spirals inward, then sat back on his heels. Slowly, the sand began to boil and turn about the white stone.
Good, the druid thought. A sign from the present.
Suddenly, the white stone dulled and grayed, its brilliance transformed to a sick, fish-belly white, and the whirling sand sent out ripple after ripple, the white stone sinking slowly into the garden until it rested at the bottom of a widening coil of sand.