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often they forgot about his horde of languages). What they needed, how exactly they wanted her to touch them, who they imagined she already was—
    “Pathkendle.”
    Pazel jumped. It was Hercól who had whispered. The Tholjassan lay with his eyes open, looking at him intently, and Pazel blushed, wondering how much Hercól had guessed of his thoughts.
    “I wasn’t—”
    Hercól put a finger to his lips. Then, after a long, listening moment, he rose to his feet, beckoning Pazel to do the same. Pazel stood, balancing carefully among the sleepers. Hercól moved swiftly down the beach toward the gulf. Pazel followed reluctantly. Two steps away from the fire and he was cold.
    The moon suddenly brightened, and looking back Pazel saw it emerging from behind the twisted snag of Narybir Tower. Hercól walked in the foam, through the rainbow threads of surf. “Do as I do,” he whispered. “Stay deep enough to hide your tracks. I don’t want them waking and following us.”
    He started west, and Pazel splashed along behind. “You’re taking me to read that memorial, aren’t you?” he asked.
    “No need,” said Hercól. “I told a lie back there, lad. I could read the inscription well enough. It is in their Imperial Common,and even in written form it resembles Arquali. But the message is somewhat terrible.”
    “What does it say?”
    Hercól paused in his march. He spoke without looking back at Pazel.
Here two hundred traitors were thrown chained into the sea. Here the Chaldryl Resistance met its demise. We are Bali Adro, the Limitless; in time we will conquer the sun
.
    Pazel felt the words like a blow to the chest. “Oh Rin,” was all he could say.
    “I thought it best to spare the others,” said Hercól. “They have heard enough bad news tonight. Come on, then, lad.”
    With that he stepped out of the surf and began to climb the beach again.
    “But where are we going?” asked Pazel, hurrying after him. “Did you find a village, like the one across the inlet?”
    “Nothing of the kind. Ibjen spoke the truth: this place is abandoned.”
    “Then what are we doing out here?”
    “Spying,” said Hercól. “Now hold your tongue.”
    They crossed the beach and mounted to the dunes, which were tall and crowned with brush and cast black shadows. It was perhaps the strangest walk of Pazel’s life: naked, freezing, the enormous crabs darting suddenly across their path, lifting armored claws. Spying on whom? Bolutu had claimed that there were still other peoples, neither dlömic nor human, in his beloved South. Was that what lay ahead?
    They threaded a path through the dunes, Hercól now and then bending to pluck some small twig or shell from the ground, which he would examine and then toss aside. In this way they slogged a mile or more. It was hard going, but the exertion lessened the cold.
    “Hercól,” Pazel asked, “what’s the matter with Thasha? Do you know?”
    Hercól stopped long enough to take a single breath. “I cannot say,” he answered at last, “nor have I ever known just what ails her, since the day Empress Maisa sent me to Etherhorde, to keep watch over her family. But I think we must expect her condition to grow worse before it improves. Worse, or at the very least more intense. Ramachni, Oggosk, Arunis himself—every practitioner of magic she has ever encountered—has taken an interest in Thasha, and that cannot be coincidental. And now, when we face a deluge of magic, Thasha herself has begun to change.”
    “She’s changing, all right. But into what?”
    “I will not voice my guesses until I can trust them further,” said Hercól. “Yet of one thing I am certain: Thasha faces a trial that will demand all her strength. And as her friend, Pazel—her irreplaceable friend—it may demand just as much from you.”
    He marched on, and Pazel, brooding grimly on his words, struggled to keep up. At last they came to a point where they could hear the Nelluroq booming distantly on their right.