‘Offended?’ Silchas prepared to say more, but then, with a helpless gesture, he swung round and walked to a sideboard where stood a large clay jar of wine. He poured full a goblet, and, without turning to face the others, he said, ‘And you, Cedorpul? How did you come by it?’

‘Could I answer you thus, I would be a relieved man.’

‘Thus?’

‘By prayer, milord, as befits a priest serving a goddess.’

Silchas drank down a mouthful, and then said, ‘If not born of the sacred, Cedorpul, then describe to me what mundane gesture enlivened the magic?’

‘Curiosity, milord, but not mine. The sorcery itself.’

Silchas spun round. ‘Then it lives? It possesses a will of its own? Darkness as sorcery, now manifest in our realm. What does it want of us?’

‘Milord,’ said Cedorpul, ‘none can say. There is no precedent.’

Silchas faced Rise Herat. ‘Historian? Have you perused the most ancient tomes, the mouldy scrolls and clay tablets and whatnot? Is there or is there not, here in the Citadel, the gathered literature of our people? Are we indeed in a time without precedent?’

A time without precedent? Oh, surely we are in such a time. ‘Milord, there are many myths recorded in our library, mostly musing on origins of various things. They seek to map an unknown realm, and where memory does not survive, then imagination serves.’ He shook his head. ‘I would not put much trust in the veracity of such efforts.’

‘Use what you will of them nonetheless,’ Silchas commanded, ‘and speculate.’

Rise Herat hesitated. ‘Imagine a world without sorcery—’

‘Historian, we are in the midst of its burgeoning, not its extinction.’

‘Then, in principle, magic is not in question. It exists. It has, perhaps, always existed. What, then, has changed? A burgeoning, you say. But consider our own creation myths, our tales of the Eleint, the dragons born of sorcery, and indeed the guardians of the same. In the distant past, if we give such tales any credence at all, there was magic in the world, beyond even what we see now. As a force of creation, perhaps, an ordering of chaotic powers and, possibly, emerging with the necessity of a will behind that ordering. Shall we call this a faceless god?’

‘And there,’ interjected Cedorpul in a weary tone, ‘is where you stumble, historian. Who created the creator? Whence the divine will that engendered divine will? The argument devours its own tail.’

‘And in that myth,’ Rise Herat said, ignoring Cedorpul, ‘many are made as one, and one as many. Tiamatha, the dragon of a thousand eyes, a thousand fanged jaws. Tiamatha, who makes from her subjects her own flesh.’ He paused, and then shrugged. ‘Too many of these oldest of stories invoke the same notions. The Dog-Runners will sing of the Witch of Fires, from whose womb every child is delivered, even as she dwells in each flicker of flame. Again, one who is many.’