The horse pounded across the foothills, Malini urging it on, plains and woodland to their left and mountains to the right. As they skirted an old swallow hole the horse stumbled and almost spilled Lucien to the ground. He hung on to the animal’s mane, gripping with his knees, glancing back at the hole in the land and wondering how many more were waiting beneath the surface. Perhaps they would erupt and conjoin in one final explosive event, swirling the whole of Noreela into a giant whirlpool of earth and flesh, mountains and cities, people and dreams. The land was fading fast—he had traveled far, he had seen it all—and the Monks knew that its eventual demise, or a transmutation into something else entirely, would be the only final outcome. That saddened him, but it pleased him too. It meant that the Mages would be defeated forever. With no land there was no magic, and with no magic . . . the Mages would rot their lives away, unfulfilled, powerless, their evil fragmenting into eternity.

That thinking did not detract from his aims today. The future was a shy place, and it might be far different from how any of them imagined. The Red Monks believed in the final cataclysm, but there was no guarantee, no sure way to confirm their beliefs. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen a thousand years from now. However soon, now that magic was bleeding back into the land they had to fight to keep it from the Mages’ hands.

He was riding for the Monastery. The rest of the Order had to be warned that magic had returned. It had gone far beyond those few Monks who had searched through Pavisse, the one that had died in Trengborne without killing the boy. Rafe Baburn was young, naïve and inexperienced, and he should have been killed long before now. Three Monks dead already—each worth a dozen men in strength and tenacity—and still the boy ran, accompanied by the Shantasi and those others that had taken to his cause. Lucien did not mourn the dead Monks, but their failure rankled. This should have been finished already. And he knew that the more time passed and the more powerful the boy became, the more likely it was that the Mages would hear of magic’s reemergence.

There would be no recriminations, no blame, no reprimands; the Order was too mechanical for that. The fleeting idea that one of them should have ridden for the Monastery days ago, when they first got wind of the magic in the boy, flashed across Lucien’s mind but he pushed it down. The rage had been upon him. There had been no reason to believe that the boy would survive.