She had promised that she would not seek him out. She could hold to that promise, for now. Three religions in conflict was an untenable situation. The river god and its followers would have to be expelled, perhaps sent beyond the borders of Kurald Galain. This could be done with little or no bloodshed. It was said that Dorssan Ryl flowed south across vast, empty lands before issuing its black waters into a distant sea. Not quite empty, perhaps, but then, the Forulkan were hardly in a position to argue at a sudden invasion of refugees. The Legion had turned half their settlements into burnt-out graveyards, and had driven the rest to the edge of that distant sea.

There were ways through the times ahead that could bring to an end the violence, and if she was seen to have taken a dominant role in averting open civil war …

Still, the promise of light remained locked within her. Did she need sacred ground? A temple of her own, blessed in the name of … of what? Light, in answer to Mother Dark? Liossan … who can deny the cleansing powers of revelation, when the very word points to something revealed, to the hidden exposed; and if we make of her mystery a host of banal truths, then Urusander can stand before her and be seen as her equal.

Cut me free, Mother Dark, and see how I take you down a notch or two. For the good of us all, of course. The good of Kurald Galain.

Back in the Citadel, there had been little time for contemplation. But now she began to see its manifold rewards. She rose from the chair and then turned to study it. Mother Dark sits upon the Throne of Night.

We shall need an answer to that.

* * *

Renarr stepped out on to the narrow balcony girdling this side of the Old Tower. She could look down on the courtyard with its scurrying figures, and beyond that to the settlement below ringed with rows of white tents.

Smoke and dust hung over Neret Sorr in thickening palls. Her home had been transformed, far beyond the details she could observe from this height. For all the crowds and canvas tents, it seemed small, paltry in its ambitions and frail in its presumptions. She remembered its streets and alleys, its crouched houses and cramped shops, and looked with a strange kind of envy upon those tiny shapes moving where she had once walked.

Modest lives marked only the succession of dreams set aside, or broken underfoot. The game of living was one of focus, an ever-narrowing horizon of what was possible and what could be achieved; but this made sharp and bright the lesser triumphs. A partner’s love, a child given to the world, an object well made by a crafter’s hands. Glories hid in the elegant fold of a new cloak, in the unscuffed and unworn display of new boots or moccasins; in a head of hair artfully arranged to complement clear features and vigorous health, or the paint that pretended to the same.