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wizard Ymrir’s personal notes had been copied nearly a hundred years ago and was the best redaction of those notes either of them knew about, the least corrupted…
    But
    
     , Rhion thought despairingly as he started to ease his way down the steep tiles, with the old man’s tall weight on one shoulder and the shifting, awkward sack of books on his back,
    
     we surely could have used that fog
    
     .
    The flight from Felsplex was a nightmare that in later years Rhion would look back upon with a kind of wonder, amazed that he’d been scared enough even to think about trying it. Wind had started up by the time they’d crossed the gangway, blowing from the north and arctically cold. Rhion could smell sleet on it but knew that neither he nor Jaldis could spare the concentration needed to turn the storm aside. With the books overbalancing him, he didn’t have the leverage to pull the gangway across after them, but had to tip it over into the deserted alley below.
    Then came the slithery agony of edging along the slanted roofs, easing their way around gables and ornamental turrets, clinging to gargoyles and rain gutters slick with ice and rotten with age and neglect. For the most part, the buildings in this crowded riverside quarter were close enough together, with their projecting upper stories and jutting eaves, to make leaping over the gaps a relatively easy matter, in theory at least. But theory did not take into account the hellish cold and slippery footing, the yawning blackness of forty- and fifty-foot drops to the cobblestones below, nor the storm gusts that came whipping unexpectedly around the corners of those tall black roof trees to pluck at their clothes and claw their faces.
    The coming storm had killed whatever dawnlight had been rising. Rhion hoped it would also discourage their pursuit, but he could still hear the angry voices in the streets below as the men fanned out through the whole district, torches leaping in the charcoal shadows of those twisting chasms, curses echoing against the crowding walls. One of the first things Jaldis had taught him, ten years ago—and he’d been studying it on his own even before that—was to read the weather; he could tell that the sleet wouldn’t hit soon enough to drive Lord Pruul’s bravos indoors. It would only soak and freeze him and Jaldis once they got clear of the town… if they could manage to do so without breaking their necks.
    Thanks a lot
    
     , he muttered, addressing the gods Rehobag and Pnisarquas, Lords of the Storm. According to the Bereine theologians who strolled in the pillared basilicas of Nerriok, Rehobag and Pnisarquas were only aspects of the Lord Darova, the Open Sky, God of the Blue Gaze, the Lord Who Created Himself… a god notoriously antithetical to wizardry and all its works.
    
     It figures
    
     .
    Rhion was trembling with exhaustion by the time they reached their goal: a tenement by the river whose five-storey bulk jutted out on pilings over the dark waters, a tenement whose inhabitants, like all those of the riverside community, routinely fished off crooked platforms that clung like swallows’ nests to the building’s side, connected by a thready tangle of ladder no more substantial than spiderweb and straw. As he helped the exhausted Jaldis down that suspended deathtrap of sticks and rope, Rhion thanked whatever gods listened to wizards that the river was deep enough at Felsplex not to have frozen, and that the intense cold had damped the smell of it here under the pilings where every privy in the district emptied.
    There were several boats tied among the piers beneath the tenement, where a single lantern hanging from a crossbeam threw hard yellow scales of light on the oily water. Rhion’s gloves had been torn to pieces by the scramble over the roofs, and his hands were so stiff they would barely close around the oars. At this season the water was low. Had it been spring, he did not think he would have had the strength to row