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The moment of unease passed and Tashil bent to the task of helping to lift Ondene into the carriage, then climbed up and squeezed in beside him. Back in the driver seat, Calabos took up the reins and flicked the horse into motion. Great clouds of vapour fumed from the animal’s mouth and nostrils as it hauled on the traces.
    “Where are we taking him?” Tashil said. “The Watch-house?”
    Calabos shook his head. “I think it would be better if we made for the townlodge — we should be safe there.”
    Tashi knew that was certainly the case — Calabos’ lodge was build like a fortress. So she sat back in the hard seat as Calabos steered the carriage round to head down the other side of the park, towards the eastern districts of Sejeend.
    * * *
    From a shadowed doorway, a tall, gaunt figure stared at the horse-drawn vehicle as it rattled away from him. The timely intervention of the two mages had saved him the trouble of having to retrieve Ondene from his predicament, yet they struck him as suspicious, especially that powerful older man who at all times had a secretive air about him. The young woman may have been weaker in power but she was still able to perceive his presence, even this far back along the street.
    He sniffed the cold fogginess of the air and was so reminded of sea mist that he smiled. He longed for a return to the Stormclaw’s deck, but he and his companions had been entrusted with the guardianship of Ondene’s mystery by the exalted Prince Agasklin himself, who hinted at mysterious lines from the Book of the Vortex. Thus duty commanded that he follow Ondene’s rescuers and discover their destination, which would not be difficult given their nature.
    Stretching, he rocked his head around to loosen the stiffness in his neck, then set off in trudging pursuit.

Chapter Three
    From the first crystal morn,
To the final luckless night,
He trod a hundred islands,
And slept in a hundred caves,
With Time at his back,
Like a vast, lost country.
    —
The Last Shieldring
by Ralgar Morth
    Crossing and recrossing the threshold of awareness, Corlek Ondene was harried and hedged in by pain, which slowly faded into the memory of pain. It seemed that he was being taken from place to place in a cart of some kind, then later physically carried. Snatches of conversation slipped through the fitful fog in his mind to disrupt those other recollections that were stubbornly marching to and fro. How his attackers rushed him from all sides before dragging him into the wooded park, how they tied him to a tree and began beating him, and how one said ‘You should never have come back…’
    Then he was aware of lying on something soft and warm amid the dimness of a room bathed in the amber of fire and lamplight. There were another two people there sitting either side of the bed, and sensations cold as coils of ice creeping through his body, coalescing around his aches and hurts….
    And then there was only one person there, her cool and gentle hand stroking his brow, brushing back his hair. In the buttery yellow firelight her features took on the semblance of his mother, her aristocratic sternness softened by a careworn sadness.
‘My son,’
he seemed to hear,
‘My poor, ill-treated son….’
Then the firelight wavered and her features became that of Lyndil, the emperor’s daughter who just smiled at him for a long, sweet moment before the flame-shadows danced across her face, changing it to that of a young woman he did not know…
    But the ebb and flow of wakefulness took her away and after another spell of oblivion he became aware of another presence, a taller, darker figure who stood by the bed, whose irresistable scrutiny he felt as a great pressure upon every fibre of his being. Only when that strange burden eased did he realise that the knots of terrible pain were gone.
    The dark figure’s face was hidden in the dimness of a capacious cowl while, in contrast, firelight glinted brightly on the brass-ornamented sheath of a