And why am I not standing at the side of the empress? he wondered. She needs my guidance, and she likes me. Why did I choose to go with Ser Alison?

And then he thought, Of course, she must resent me; she must see me as the emperor’s eye on her.

Of course.

He sighed.

He spent a good deal of the ride examining the problem of the secret rivals as he called it in the code inside his own head. He had access to details and nuances that he merely summarized for the emperor.

There was a fairly reliable report, for example, that people who touched the Patriarch were burned, and that the robes he wore were woven almost entirely from metallic wire and some Ifriquy’an substance that would not burn. There were tidbits; he’d read a dozen reports on the Ifriquy’an fabric, trying to find a commonality.

The commonality had been reported four days ago, when Brown reported that the Duke of Mitla burned people he touched, and wore clothes woven for him in Ifriquy’a, and had done so for over a year.

And Kronmir had begun to piece together a theory about the Odine that held water, but for which there was little evidence. That the Necromancer was the “Rebel Odine.”

Old rebels. Rebels from the last opening of the gates, when the dragons were triumphant. The rebel Odine must have been allies of the dragons. The will was imprisoned; might still be imprisoned, capable of acting only through intermediaries. Until it was released. Thus, it would have only allies, not not-dead. Perhaps the Patriarch and the Duke of Mitla.

Kronmir tasted his theory, testing it the way a man might suck at a bad tooth. He was almost certain that he had detected a real flaw in the way that Odine matured; that as they took other creatures into their thoughts, the thoughts themselves matured. Perhaps the Odine functioned like democracies, and in time, the will ceased to be a unified entity and began to divide and divide again . . .

Perhaps not.

How many of them will appear on the day the gates open, Kronmir wondered.

The sun was no longer visible and he had pulled his hood out of his pack when he found the ruined temple. There were two Venike rangers there; they passed him forward to a long ridge overlooking the Mitla road, where he found a hand of the green banda eating a hasty supper.

They sent him south; one offered to guide him, and he declined. He crossed two ridges as darkness fell, and he cursed when his horse almost fell in a deep hole. He was tired, both of his mounts were done, and the woods and hills of northern Etrusca were vast.

The moon rose, and Kronmir dismounted, had a mouthful of wine, and listened. It didn’t help. He rode south again, and tried angling east.