‘This then,’ said Narad, ‘is my only reason for hope.’

Corporal Bursa cleared his throat. ‘We collected him up in the forest, sir.’

‘You vouch for him, corporal?’

Narad felt his spirits plummet. He felt once more that woman lying under him, and heard the laughter making a ring around his clumsy motions, and how it rained down like stinging sleet.

Bursa said, ‘He obeyed orders, sir, and was accepted as one of us.’

‘Very well,’ said Scara Bandaris, his gaze shifting away. ‘The ascent to Sedis Gate is a long climb, and any who approach will be seen from half a day away, thus giving all of you time to flee into the north, on the Jheleck Trail. I am content to meet my fate alone.’

A soldier spoke. ‘We would ride with you, sir.’

‘Until Sedis Hold?’

‘Yes sir.’

Scara Bandaris offered them all a wry, bitter smile. ‘Fools delight in company, my friends.’

* * *

‘High Priestess, make of your worship an unflinching recognition of the unknown, and indeed, the unknowable. By devotion and acceptance of mystery, the chaos that haunts us all is made calm, until the sea itself becomes a mirror content with a placid reflection.’

As the words of her goddess they marked scant scripture, and Emral Lanear felt lost as she sat in her private chamber. She had sent the priestesses away, and was alone with her blurred reflection, sitting so motionless in the mirror. As befitted any adherent, she had pledged her devotion in the frail hope of gifts in return, and while this notion, so crassly expressed, laid bare the one-sided bargaining that was faith, she was no longer in any mood for dissembling. All that was indistinct and imprecise could well remain in the mirror, where every smudge was a blessing, and she would leave it at that.

Still, this face she saw before her was no placid reflection.

There was no end to the irony, if what Anomander had said about Syntara was true. Youthful beauty could bear the revelation of light, while its ageing loss welcomed the darkness; and so these two High Priestesses were indeed well positioned, and if Emral knew bitterness at finding which side she inhabited, there was nothing to be done for it. At least the darkness was eternal in its disguising gifts. In the centuries to come, Syntara might well come to curse what her light revealed.

But now they stood opposite one another, poised to attend a clash neither side could truly win. In the death of one, the meaning of the other is lost. Shall I add this truth to our modest scripture? Perhaps as a note upon the margin, less elegantly inscribed, a thing made in haste, or perhaps regret.