She heard the chase, dwindling away, until all was silent once more.

Careful, boy. Now you’re playing Gallan’s game.

Rustleaf offered none of the escape that came with d’bayang. Instead, it but enlivened the brain. For this moment’s repast, she’d chosen wrongly. And the loss of… company… left her feeling bereft.

* * *

Endest Silann set out from the Citadel, in search of decency. Crossing the two bridges, he made his way into the city, where the cold had drawn most people indoors. The snow had retreated to places less travelled, up against walls and in alleys where the white smears were dusted with grey soot. He moved between high estate walls, passing barred gates of iron and wood. Where the street ascended the bank, away from the river and above the floodplain, the estates burgeoned in size, and many of the long walls bore niches in which stood old statues, the marble figures painted in lifelike colours, with oversized eyes in each face offering a dispassionate regard to the cloaked man shuffling past.

In more ways than he deemed healthy, Endest preferred their blank stares over the intensity that plagued him in the Citadel. Followers stalked him now, fixing upon his every gesture with febrile attention, leaning into his every word, his every passing comment. He had met the need for a prophet with denial, and, when that failed, with silence. But this did little more than intensify their regard, crowding with imagined significance all that he did.

Any catalogue of mortal deeds could only assemble a list of flaws. Perfection belonged to the dead, where in the act of passing from what the senses could observe to what the memory reinvented, any fool could ascend into legend. But Endest Silann was not yet dead, not yet freed from mortal constraints. Sooner or later, prophets returned to their god, only to slip beyond and away, sliding their cold flesh into apocrypha – holy texts and blessed scrolls – and this was an impatient passage for the would-be witnesses waiting in the wings. He felt that he was already outliving his usefulness, and those who would pontificate and interpret his life would rather that life ended soon, if only to get him out of the way.

He walked towards the Winter Market grounds, and thirty paces behind him, as they had done since the Citadel, a score or more priests tracked him. They would do better with Cedorpul, but for all the manifestations of magic his old friend now commanded, there was nothing sacred in curious games with smoke and shadows, and even darkness made to flow like blood left no trail on the stones.

That gift, it seemed, belonged to Endest Silann alone.