‘How many hired men do you know who are over thirty and still front-line quality?’
Hirad drew breath. ‘Well, not many but, I mean . . . we’re different. We are The Raven.’
‘Yes, we are The Raven. And we’re getting too old to fight.’
‘You’re kidding! We hammered that lot yesterday.’
‘That’s the way you saw it, is it?’ Hirad nodded. Sirendor smiled. ‘I somehow thought you might. The way I saw it is we didn’t have our edge.’
‘That’s because we spend too much time standing and watching. Like I said, if we don’t do it, we’ll lose it.’
‘Gods, Hirad, you’re stubborn in the face of the facts. Do you think it’s a coincidence that we’ve slowly taken fewer front-line contracts and more advisory and back-up jobs over the last couple of years?’ Hirad said nothing. ‘What we had, that edge, has gone. When we were called in yesterday, we almost weren’t up to it.’
‘Oh, come on, Larn . . .’
‘Ras died!’ Sirendor looked around, then lowered his voice. ‘You could have died. Richmond made an unbelievable mistake and Ilkar lost the shield. If it hadn’t been for The Unknown we could have been wiped out. Us. The Raven!’
‘Yeah, but the explosion . . .’
‘You know as well as I do that two years ago we’d have been through them and at the mage before he had time to cast that spell. We have to adapt . . .’ Sirendor trailed off. He took a gulp of his coffee. Hirad just stared at him.
‘Hirad, I want us to be able to look back on the good days in another ten years’ time. If we try and keep The Raven going as it is, there won’t be any ten years.’
‘One dodgy fight and you want to give up.’
‘It’s not just about one fight. But yesterday was a warning of what could happen any time. We’ve seen the signs these past two years. We all have. It’s just that you chose to ignore them.’
‘You want to disband The Raven, the rest of you?’ asked Hirad. He was only half surprised to find his eyes moistening. His world was dropping to pieces before him and he couldn’t see a way out. Not yet.
‘Not necessarily. Perhaps just a rest to take stock.’ Sirendor leant back a little and spread his hands wide. ‘God knows, none of us needs the money any more to be comfortable. I sometimes think we must own half of Korina between us.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Look, the reason I’m bringing this up is that we want to have a meeting when we get back to the City. We need to talk it through, all of us, when we’ve had a little time to think.’
Hirad stared into his coffee, letting the steam warm his face. Silent again.
‘If we go on pretending it’s still like it was a few years ago, one day we won’t be fast enough. Hirad?’ The barbarian looked up. ‘Hirad, I don’t want to lose you the way we lost Ras.’ Sirendor sucked his lip, then sighed. ‘I don’t want to see you die.’
‘You won’t.’ Hirad’s voice was gruff. He swigged back his coffee and stood up, having to push his lips together to be sure they wouldn’t tremble. ‘I’m going to see to the horses,’ he said at length. ‘We may as well make an early start.’ He strode out of the kitchens and through the castle to the courtyard, where he stopped, staring at the place that might have witnessed The Raven’s last fight. He wiped angrily at his eyes and headed for the stables.
Ilkar too decided against further rest and went instead to Seran’s chambers. The mage from Lystern, smallest of the four College Cities, had been moved to a low table in his study, a sheet covering his body. Ilkar pulled the sheet back from Seran’s face. He frowned.
The dead mage’s skin was taut across his skull and his hair completely white. He hadn’t looked that way the previous evening. And the cut on his forehead, now it was clean, looked as if it had been made with a small claw.
He heard movement behind him and turned to see Denser, the Xetesk mage, standing in the doorway to the bedroom. His pipe smoked gently in his mouth and the cat was in his cloak. Ilkar found the pipe incongruous. Denser was by no means an old man, though his exertions had given him an appearance well beyond his mid-thirties years.
‘An unfortunate result, but inevitable,’ said Denser. He looked terribly tired. His face was grey and his eyes dark and sunken. He leaned against the door frame.
‘What happened to him?’
Denser shrugged. ‘He was not a young man. We knew he might die.’ He shrugged again. ‘There was no other way. He wanted to stop us.’
‘We.’ In Ilkar’s mind, the coin dropped. ‘The cat.’
‘Yes. He’s a Familiar.’
Ilkar pulled the sheet back over Seran’s head and moved towards Denser. ‘Come on, you’d better sit down before you fall down. There’s questions I need answering.’
‘I didn’t think this was a social call.’ Denser smiled.
‘No.’ Ilkar did not.
Once seated, Ilkar looked at Denser sprawled on Seran’s bed and didn’t have to ask his first question. The Xeteskian wouldn’t have had the strength to try leaving the castle last night.
‘Overdid it yesterday, did you?’ asked the Julatsan.
‘There was work to do once I had recovered this,’ agreed Denser, pulling the amulet from his cloak, where it hung from its chain round his neck. ‘I presume this is what you wish to talk about.’
Ilkar inclined his head. ‘What sort of work?’
‘I had to know whether it was the piece we were after.’
‘And was it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Xetesk sent you?’
‘Of course.’
‘And this battle?’ Ilkar waved a hand around vaguely.
‘Well, let’s just say it was fairly easy to place me in an attack force but it wasn’t staged for my benefit, if that’s what you mean.’
‘So why didn’t you just join the garrison defence?’
‘With a Dragonene mage in residence? Hardly.’ Denser chuckled. ‘I’m afraid Seran and Xetesk didn’t see eye to eye.’
‘Surprise, surprise,’ muttered Ilkar.
‘Come now, Ilkar, we are none of us that different from each other.’
‘Bloody hell! Is the conceit of Xetesk that great that your Masters really believe all mages are essentially alike? That is an insult to magic itself and a failing in your teaching.’ Ilkar could feel the anger surging in him. His cheeks were hot and his eyes narrowed to slits. The blindness of Xetesk was sometimes staggering. ‘You know where the power comes from to shape mana for the spells you were casting yesterday. There is no blood on my hands, Denser.’
Denser was quiet for a while. He relit his pipe and picked his cat out of his cloak, dropping it on to the bed. The animal stared at Ilkar while the Dark Mage ruffled its neck. Ilkar’s temper frayed further but he held his tongue.
‘I think, Ilkar,’ said Denser at length, blowing out a series of smoke rings, ‘that you shouldn’t accuse my Masters of failings in their teaching until you are aware of the shortcomings in your own.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Denser spread his palms. ‘Do you see blood on my hands?’ ‘You know what I mean,’ snapped Ilkar.
‘Yes, I do. And you should also know that a Xeteskian mage has more than one source for his mana. As, no doubt, have you.’
There was silence between them, though around them the castle corridors were beginning to echo with the sounds of another day.
‘I will not discuss College ethics with you, Denser.’
‘A pity.’
‘Pointless.’
‘A shortcoming in your teaching, Ilkar?’
He ignored the jibe. ‘I need to know two things. How did you know about Seran and that amulet, and what is it?’
Denser considered for a while. ‘Well, I’m not about to divulge College secrets, but unlike you, apparently, Xetesk has always taken Dragonene lore seriously - patchy though it may be. Our work in dimensional research has led us to develop a spell that can detect the kind of disturbance caused by the opening of an interdimensional portal, like the one we went through yesterday. We suspected Seran - I won’t tell you why - we targeted his chambers and got the desired result. I was sent to retrieve Dragonene artefacts and I got this.’ He took the amulet from its chain and tossed it to Ilkar, who turned it over a couple of times, shrugged and threw it back.