Squinting against the brightness, he turned to his room, to its racks and rough-hewn tables, to the endless sheaves of scribbling stacked in precarious piles across random surfaces high and low. The broad curve of the stone walls embraced the morning gloom, its mortices lending the appearance of a Galeoth millery. A broad fireplace stood fallow opposite his plank bed. Immense ceiling timbers ran overhead, black with pitch, the spaces between insulated with layers of animal pelts—wolf, deer, even hare and marten.

He smiled a sad upside-down smile. Some small memory winced at the barbarity of the place, for he had spent a good portion of his life travelling the fleshpots of the South. But it had been home for far too long to seem anything other than safe. For nearly twenty years he had slept, studied, and supped in this room.

He walked different roads now. Deeper roads.

How long had he travelled?

All his life, it seemed, though he had been a Wizard for only twenty.

Breathing deep, drawing fingers from his balding scalp to his shaggy white beard, he walked to his main worktable, braced himself for the concentrated recital to come …

The meticulous labour of mapping Seswatha’s labyrinthine life.

He had hoped to write a detailed account of everything he could remember. He had developed a talent, over the years, for recollecting what he dreamed. He had literally accumulated thousands of recitals, each the focus of innumerable critiques and speculations. Writing from memory was treacherous enough: Sometimes it seemed as though only the bones of things were actually remembered and that the flesh had to be invented anew with each resurrection. But when it came to the Dreams, everything carried the taint of contrivance, even when they tossed him whole into the heart and bowel of Seswatha’s life. The key, he had learned, was to start writing immediately, before the afterimage found itself shouldered into obscurity by the brute insistence of the waking world.

But instead, all he could write was,

NAU-CAYÛTI?

He found himself staring at this ink scribble throughout the morning, the name of Celmomas’s famed son, whose theft of the Heron Spear would lead to the No-God’s ultimate destruction. In the libraries of the Mandate, dozens if not hundreds of tomes were dedicated to his exploits, the predictable stuff mostly: the Slaying of Tanhafut the Red, his string of victories after the disaster at Shiarau, his death at the hands of his wife, Iëva, and of course the endless interpretations of the Theft. But a few scholars—at least two that Achamian could remember—had focused their attention on the sheer frequency of the Dreams involving Nau-Cayûti, which seemed far out of proportion to his short-lived role in the Apocalypse.

But if Seswatha had bedded his mother …