LITMIR.BIZ

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were being quickly overgrown with vines and wild grasses. In not too many more years it would be difficult for anyone chancing on the site to recognize it as the once-proud home of a thriving community.

      Without further comment Pug turned and walked away to speak with Jason, the magician who acted as the castle’s reeve, the man who was responsible for the fortification and those living within it while Pug and Magnus were absent.

      Brandos glanced at Magnus who shrugged slightly. If the white-haired magician understood his father’s reason for keeping the villa abandoned, he wasn’t sharing it. At first it had simply been a matter of expediency, in case enemies were spying on them, suggesting that the Conclave had been destroyed and that only a few refugees were left huddling for safety in the old castle on the bluffs overlooking the Bitter Sea. Which, Brandos conceded silently to himself, wasn’t that far from the truth.

      But the Conclave had endured, even thrived, though it was now scattered across the entire span of the world, with pockets of research and teaching located in isolated spots, while many who worked for the organization did so in the hearts of power, in various courts and capitals.

      Amirantha watched Magnus follow his father and turned to his old companion. ‘You still have a knack for it, don’t you?’

      ‘Apparently,’ said Brandos. He let out a long sigh. ‘I’ve seen it before and I know you have. He’s hanging on by sheer will and there’s no joy in him.’

      Amirantha took a moment, then looked around. ‘Could there be any joy here?’

      Both men knew the answer already. They had supped with others from the Conclave here many times, a warm fire in the hearth, chatting about this and that, but on none of those occasions had there been anything close to a sense of celebration. When a child was born, it was somewhere else. When the great holidays of Midwinter Day or Midsummer Day, the Planting Celebration, or the Harvest Festival came along they were largely ignored save perhaps for a minor remark.

      Of all in the Conclave, there was only a handful who resided permanently here in the castle. Among those who stayed were Amirantha, Brandos, and Brandos’s wife Samantha. Jason, the castle’s caretaker, Rose, his wife and a magician in her own right; and a very young apprentice, Maloc. And of course Pug and Magnus. There were always one or two others coming and going but those eight comprised the whole of the household of the castle.

      Brandos said, ‘We’ve seen a lot here, but there’s more to this than just a man having trouble moving on after the death of his wife and son.’

      Amirantha motioned for Brandos to follow him up the stairs leading to the tower room put aside for him. They passed the door into Brandos and Samantha’s quarters and the old fighter stopped briefly to put away his sword and shield and change out of his shirt. Then he followed his adopted father up to the topmost room.

      Brandos said, ‘We could go back to Gashen Tor. Samantha misses the women from the village.’ The village was called Talumba and it was situated two days east of the city of Maharta, now the capital of the kingdom of Muboya. For an idle moment Amirantha wondered how Kaspar of Olasko was faring; he was the First Minister to the Maharaja of Muboya and had returned to serve his lord and master when they had finished with the demon gate business five years earlier.

      ‘No,’ said Amirantha. ‘But take Samantha and go for a visit. I think it would do both of you some good.’

      ‘What about you?’ asked Brandos, scrutinizing his foster-father for any sign of distress or sadness. The mood throughout this place tended towards melancholy and the Warlock was already a man given to dark introspection if given half a chance.

      ‘Actually, Gulamendis has invited me to visit him at E’bar.’

      Gulamendis was another Demon Master, one of the taredhel, or Star Elves, and he and Amirantha had become friends, or as friendly as one of those arrogant creatures could be with a human. Their affinity stemmed from a ravenous curiosity about all things demon, and Gulamendis has spent close to a year in residence here before returning to the city built in the Grey Tower Mountains by his people.

      ‘Well, say hello for me,’ said Brandos. ‘Now, how do we get to Gashen Tor? Do you have one of those orb things, or is it a long sea voyage?’

      ‘I’ll ask Jason if he has one to lend.’

      ‘He may say no,’ answered Brandos. ‘Seems they’re breaking down and none of the artificers, even of Tsurani descent up in LaMut, know how to fix them or make new ones.’

      Amirantha frowned. ‘I would have thought after all these years Pug would have seen to that.’

      A voice from the door said, ‘I know a great deal, Amirantha, but I don’t know everything.’

      Brandos hadn’t heard the magician come up the stairs, and he stepped aside to let him into the room.

      ‘No disrespect intended, Pug.’

      ‘I know,’ said Pug. ‘I overheard a bit. So you’re going to visit the elves in E’bar?’

      ‘Overdue,’ said Amirantha. He motioned for Pug to take the chair by the small desk, while he sat on his bed. ‘We’re at something of a dead end. I’m not entirely sure what specifically you’re seeking, but each piece of information your agents turn up leads us to a dead end.’

      ‘Very dead, sometimes,’ said Brandos. Seeing his humour fall flat, he said, ‘I think I’ll go tell Samantha to pack up and we’ll talk about a visit home.’

      ‘Ask Magnus to take you and arrange a signal to fetch you back. You were right about the Tsurani orbs: we’re down to a scant few and need them for more pressing use.’

      ‘I understand. Thanks for lending us Magnus,’ said Brandos as he departed.

      Amirantha watched him go. Then he looked over at the magician. ‘Pug, I don’t claim to know you well, but it has been over five years now. And I do know what a driven man looks like. I even share your sense of alarm over what we’ve discovered up to this point, but I detect an urgency in you that doesn’t seem entirely born out of what we know. What is it you’re not telling me?’

      Pug’s face was immobile, though his eyes searched the Warlock’s face. ‘A time is coming, soon, when I will tell you things you will wish I had never told you.’ Then he got to his feet, turned away and hurried down the tower stairs.

      Amirantha was left alone to reflect on this. He had a nasty feeling that what Pug had just said was almost certainly true.

• CHAPTER FOUR •

       Journey

      AMIRANTHA WAS ASTONISHED.

      He had been unprepared for the magnificence of the Star Elves’ city, E’bar. Although less than three years had elapsed since it had been completed, the city was anything but unfinished or roughly hewn but showed grace and beauty far beyond even the most impressive human achievements in Rillanon, the Jewelled City, capital of the Kingdom of the Isles, or the Upper City in the city of Kesh, home of the Imperial Family and the Truebloods.

      Here were few of the massive stone-and-wood constructions of humans; here, stone had been sculptured in a fashion far beyond any mortal mason’s ability. Amirantha roughly understood the concept: geomancers willed stone into a fluid state, then sculpted it. Human geomancers were rare, though some did exist, but their craft was crude compared to what Amirantha saw before him.

      The entire wall around the city appeared seamless, as if crafted from a single stone of mountainous size. Gates to the north and south and smaller portals to the east and west appeared to have organically grown within the wall as it was formed, and the Warlock thought this might not have been far from the truth. Even the gates themselves were of stone, though how they were engineered to swing freely upon unseen hinges was beyond his ability to even guess at.

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