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hours.
    “Mornings,” Ponderos insisted, “are when all journeys should start.” His face suddenly creased into a grin. “Following a really excellent breakfast, of course.”
    Mornings… No matter that every hour was just like every other hour, every arbitrary morning like every other morning. The bells gave shape to the activities of the citizens of Sachavesku, if one said “I’ll meet you at the Bourse for tea at the sixteenth hour,” then the parties would be sitting down when Barto sang his fourth baritone chime of the day.
    In the same way, Calistrope met Ponderos just before the seventh hour as sounded by the Cristoline. A light mist hung over the water as they ate fried fish and crisp cabbage. By the time they called for another flask of piping hot Takshent to share between them, the mist was gone and Mal-a-Merrion gleamed blue as a slab of lapis. A tumble of clouds to the north showed yellows and pinks against the darker blue shading to black along the horizon. Mal-a-Merrion’s waters were shallow at this end, islands lifted above the water, the nearer ones in tones of lavender, behind these came purples and farther off, a dozen subtle shades of indigo.
    If there ever had been a Lord of all Creation, thought Calistrope, he had been a surrealist .
    The travelers went aboard. The awesome soldier ants went to the stern, out of the way as preparations for departure were completed. The humans gathered amidships. The moorings were slipped, ropes coiled; people on the quay waved farewell.
    Exactly on the ninth chime, the pilot tapped a code on the steering lines and the squid snorted water and blew it out behind. A gap opened ‘twixt quay and raft. An eel jumped out of the water and slid back again; a chain’s length from the shore, a waterskater ran across the surface on its great padded feet.
    Mornings… Mornings were for the beginning of a journey and from a balcony at the top of the College; Voss watched the departure through magnifying spectacles. The Archmage’s scrutiny might have been a physical pressure reminding Calistrope of the way in which he had been maneuvered into this journey.
    He brooded on the injustice done to him. Ponderos and Roli were accompanying him, but it was he himself who had been given the responsibility, been coerced into undertaking the quest. It would be Calistrope the Mage who would succeed or fail—no one else.
    He could remember the anger he had felt when the Archmage had shown him the treasures snatched from his manse, hot emotion rose in him once more. Those works of art had been the better part of two thousand years in the making and one still was unfinished. Calistrope remembered the scornful remarks he had made about the experiments which the High Council had embarked upon: spells and sorcery to magnify the sun’s waning heat and light—as if anything so puny could effect a change in something so stupendous. Mere experiments with planet-bound phenomena, to augment the dwindling energy.
    Now his contempt had been repaid. My masterworks sequestered and I have been compelled to make a journey as dangerous as it is inconsequential.

Chapter 4
    The sun was an orange patch spreading across the south western horizon behind the overhead mist; the distant massif, a black silhouette against the brightness. Below the layer of cloud, the air was clear and still and smelled of life: of water-borne plants and fish, pollen from the reed beds along the shores, the myriad exhalations of animals and insects since the dawn of time.
    Mal-a-Merrion’s waters were restless, however. Monstrous bergs, calving from the high glaciers, crashed into the Lake’s northern waters with monotonous regularity and sent vast and stately ripples down the length of the lake. Here, where the depth of water was unknowable, the undulations slid silently beneath the raft, rising gently and as gently, subsiding.
    A soft touch upon his cheek drew Calistrope’s attention from the squid which towed them along