From the steep hill they called the Wounded Bear the Acolyte had a good view of Arandia. The city sat by the first real cataract on the Black Sand River, the highest point to which, at the right season, with the right amount of water, boats could be rowed, dragged and otherwise coaxed to and from the sea. Its walls looked spotted, because the light gray stones were interrupted with blocks of black obsidian. Up around the source of the river in the western mountains were great veins of the glassy stone, some of which washed down the river and formed the black sand for which it was named. Across much of the world obsidian was a wonder, but here it was as common as rock, and poor people used knives and razors made of obsidian rather than steel. In the town there was a whole street of obsidian workers who shaped it into jewels and figurines and amulets for sale to the rest of the world. Even in Kadakan, it was said, one could see black glass from Arandia around the necks of elegant ladies and black glass idols in the temples.

  The town’s walls were tall and strong. Within them the Acolyte could see the towers of the Baron’s palace and the mayor’s hall, built by the mages, impossibly thin and tall and topped with roofs of black glass. Around the walls he could see the refugees. So many thousands had been driven from their homes in the western hills, and many had kept going until they ended up here. Since he first saw this colony something had been done to bring it to order. It was divided, roughly, into three parts: upriver, downriver, and across the river. A wooden gate had been built for each where the high road entered, making them look a bit more like towns and less like flotsam. They had streets now, too, and small squares with deep wells. But the habitations themselves were still a crazy jumble. Many were tents. Some were wattle and daub houses with roofs of reed thatch. These were better than tents, but they had been built so hastily that the older ones were already leaning at disturbing angles. A few new houses had been built of brick and stone. These belonged, the Acolyte had been told, to neighborhood bosses who mobilized the Baron’s work crews and brewers whose strong ale supplied the refugees with what they desperately needed: cheap oblivion.

  The Viscount and the Baron were doing what they could. Many refugees had been moved from here to coastal towns where there was room for them. Those who remained at Arandia were offered work of various kinds, such as building houses, digging wells, and clearing the boat channel of sand and rock. All the healthy men who could be armed were sent to join the war in the hills.

  Yet still a miasma of desperation hung around these places. There was not enough money to pay everyone, or enough work for them to do, so many simply did nothing. People with hollow eyes looked silently out of doorways, glaring at passers-by, or failing even to notice them. Women with shadowed faces spoke in low voices, as if passing awful secrets. Men sat alone and drank until they collapsed. Gangs of boys fought battles with stones and their fathers killed each other with knives over imagined slights. Bereft mothers cradled bundles of rags in place of the children who had starved in their arms or been killed before their eyes. There was a suicide, they said, every day.

  The Acolyte passed them all by and made his way up to the gate and into the city. His goal was a small temple attached to the mayor’s palace. This was not a temple to one of the great gods but to a deity from far to the southwest, a place with a name shown on no map ever made in these lands: Sintar, the god of teachers and scribes. It also served as the archive for the town, holding its legal records and account books. He entered, bowing before the statue of the fat, smiling, balding god, and went to look for the priest. He found him standing at his desk in the back room, where he could almost always be found.

  “Euthemio,” he said, “how goes the book?”

  “Poorly, Acolyte,” said a thin man of about sixty, robed in gray, his blue eyes twinkling in his gentle face. “Every sentence is a battle. Every word raises a hundred questions, and I never know in what order to treat them.”

  “Perhaps you should consider writing a book on a less difficult subject than the fall of the Servants. One that, perhaps, we actually know something about.”

  “What purpose would that serve? If we already know it, why write a book about it?”

  “I take your point, but on the other hand this useless book might at least one day be finished.”

  “Unfinished or pointless? A hard problem. But you did not journey here from the College to ask about my book.”

  “In the Currascuro Valley only two days from here I found a woman trying to convert a troop of bandits to the cult of Scorceral. But she mangled the prayers and her preaching was garbled. She spoke of a coming cataclysm when the powers of this world would be cast down and the poor would be freed from fear and suffering.”

  “Which prayer did she mangle?”

  “The Ungrask.”

  “I think I know where she learned it.”

  “That is interesting news.”

  “There have been other reports of a dark priest wandering the riverlands, preaching to bandits and refugees. He even dared to come here, under the Baron’s nose, preaching first in the camps and then in a tavern full of boatmen. The hue and cry went up for him but he somehow slipped away. He was not young but mature, even on the cusp of old age, but still no one could catch him. I helped the magistrates interview people who had heard him and one was able to recite a prayer the priest used, phonetically and from memory. He remembered it well enough for me to recognize the Ungrask.”

  “Did he preach the same sort of thing? Rebellion, apocalypse?”

  “Yes, so far as I could tell.”

  The Acolyte stood silent for a long moment, then he said, “Euthemio, what does it mean? Our mighty lords are dead, enemies besiege our borders, and now this, death cults among the common people. At the College they think the dark times that followed the fall of the Servants are come again.”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Of course people say that. We know only two great empires, the realm of the Servants and that of the Mage Lords. People say there was another, but if so we know nothing about it, so that hardly signifies. Both empires we know fell after terrible catastrophes overwhelmed their capital cities and killed their leaders. It is natural to assume that our time will follow the course of the last collapse, and we will have to endure what they endured. That we will be forgotten as the people of that time have been.”

  “And you? You are, so far as I know, the greatest living expert on that time.”

  “That may be, but even I have not been able to finish my book in twenty years.”

  “What does your gut tell you?”

  Euthemio laughed. “Those are strange words to hear from an Acolyte of the College. Should you not be asking for logical argument and careful citation?”

  “Perhaps I am an unusual Acolyte.”

  “I believe, and this is why I keep working on this book, that whatever happened to the great city of Dulan did not doom the whole age. I believe that history is made minute by minute, that we shape every hour by the choices we make. Fate is a lie we tell ourselves to excuse our cowardice.”

  The Acolyte nodded. “I believe the same,” he said. “I feel darkness closing around us like a vise, but I only wish to fight it.”

  “I am sure you will get your chance. The stars may not fix our course but I fear they proclaim it a bloody one.”

  The Acolyte said, “Euthemio, I wish to ask about something else. A month ago an old man was brought to the College. He lived only a few days but before he died he said that he had served the Mage Lords, and told stories of the last days that had never been heard in the College. I believe he must have been wandering the Western Shore for many years, perhaps ever since the Wave. Have you heard of such a man?”

  “Perhaps,” said Euthemius, then he lowered his head and closed his eyes. The Acolyte knew that Euthemio was also a practitioner of the memory palace, and he waited while Euthemio wandered his halls in search of the right storage place. Then his face brightened. “Yes, I thought so. I am not sure it was the same man, but something tells me that it might be. It was an extraordinary story, so I made a point of remembering all the details.

  “It was ten years ago, in the middle of summer. One of the magistrates called me to his chambers to show me a strange object. It was a sort of ring, too large for a finger but too small for any but the thinnest wrist. It seemed to be carved of ivory. It had a strange quality, that while you could pass your fingers through it and feel nothing, if you held it to your eye everything you saw through it was distorted as if by a strangely shaped lens. The type of distortion depended on the angle and brightness of the light. If you tried to look directly at the naked sun, it turned black. At other angles things slanted or twisted or shimmered. It reeked of Magecraft, but I could not divine its purpose.

  “Of course I asked where it had come from. From a thief who tried to sell it, he said. Some poor country girl had offered it to a jeweler, then refused to say where she had gotten it. So the jeweler had his men seize her and bring her before this magistrate. She still would not speak so he threw her in a dark cell overnight, saying that when she was ready to talk she could start her time in the stocks. In the morning she told her peculiar story. She said that gathering berries in an old pasture on the hills above her village she had seen a strange man walking around. I believe this was somewhere near Ostico. She followed him and he went into a cave. She snuck up to the cave entrance and looked in but saw nothing. She thought she heard footsteps a long way down in the cave, so she crept in. But the cave ran only ten feet before it ended at a rock wall.

  Frustrated, she turned her back to the wall and sat down, intending to lean against it. But she fell through. She could see the wall and feel it with her fingers, but it was not there. Bewildered, she crawled farther in. The cave took two turns before it opened into a large chamber where a light was burning. She saw the man there, sitting on a stool, reading a book. She watched him for a long time, and eventually he nodded off. She crept up to him and watched as his hand opened and dropped something on the floor that rolled toward her. It was the ring. She picked it up. She had intended to search the chamber but as soon as her hand touched the ring she felt great fear, so she turned and scurried out of the cave. It seems she hardly stopped running until she reached Arandia.”

  “Did anyone investigate?”

  “Yes. I told the magistrate that this was surely an artifact of the Mages, and I even wondered if this man might have been a mage himself. He said he would send men to find this cave and speak to the people of the neighborhood. I told him that I would research this item, and I spent two days with books about the Mages. I found one account of an item that sounded similar, a device for reading a secret script they used to send private messages. I went back to tell the magistrate. But he was dead, murdered in his own home the night before, and the ring had been taken again. So I sought the girl, but she, it seemed, was also dead. I say seemed because I was never shown her body, only told that one of the other prisoners went crazy and strangled her and that her body had already been burned.

  “I asked them to tell me when the men came back from the cave. One of them came to me and said that they had found the cave but it was only ten feet deep, and the local people insisted it had always been such, and they told such stories of the girl that the men thought her a liar. But this man told me he was not sure, for there was something uncanny about the cave and he had a strong sense that the local people were lying to him.

  “I tried to make my own inquiries around Arandia. I never found out who was behind the deaths and the disappearance of the ring, but I always suspected the wife of the then Baron. She was a collector of Mage lore and had a few artifacts. But she herself died suddenly a few years later and her artifacts vanished. I suppose you heard about the scandal and the Baron’s fall. I did find out that there had been earlier reports of a strange old man living in caves or abandoned houses who was somehow able to hide from people standing next to him, and who was suspected of being a Mage or one of their servants. But I was not able to find anything definite about where else he had been or where he might have gone.”

  The Acolyte considered this. “That is exactly the kind of story I was hoping to hear, and I thank you for it. I foresee a trip to Ostico.”

  “That would be sensible. The only other path I see would be to pry into the events surrounding the fall of the late Baron. I would discourage you from that, for it would make you no friends. But be careful on your way to Ostico. I have heard the Dinnan Hills are rife with banditry, and if you run into our dark priest he may be a more formidable foe than an ignorant woman trying to ape him.”

  “Euthemio, if you found yourself in a cave and you thought it was blocked by some kind of magical barrier erected by a Mage, what would you do?”

  “You know the answer to that, my friend. The only way to use Magecraft is to think like a Mage, and what that means, none of us can now say.”

  “And yet somehow an ignorant shepherd girl passed through, backwards.”

  “Another hint that teases us. Torments us. We know the power is there, just out of reach. I have dreams in which I had the great secret but set it down somewhere and cannot remember where that was. I go mad trying to find it. I never do.”