He heard a dim thought, like a voice speaking in a distant room: Bleys was right—killing Kelat would break the ring and free the Guardians. But. . . .

Morlock’s body did not move, but his awareness focused on Kelat and the Witness Stone. The coronet of fire passed out of Kelat and through the Guardians and through Kelat again, like a great wheel. But there was a smaller spiked wheel of flames that passed between a fiery locus in Kelat’s brain, through his arms, into the Witness Stone, and out of the Stone into Kelat’s other arm.

Morlock’s mechanically inclined imagination saw them as meshing gears of fire. Break either one, the device would be powerless. . . .

He drew Tyrfing. With the blade to focus his power, he could move a little, even in deeper rapture than this. He approached the Witness Stone.

Rulgân shouted out threats and promises through the many mouths he had in thrall, but Morlock did not heed them, could not really hear them: he felt their vibrations in the coronet of fire.

He dropped out of visionary rapture. He swung his sword and struck his target: the Witness Stone.

“No, you fool!” screamed Bleys when, too late, he realized Morlock’s intent.

The Stone shattered. The Guardians cried out in many voices—not their own, but not all one any longer.

“I am broken in pieces!” shrieked Noreê.

“Your pearl will dissolve in the wine of death, fool!” snarled Illion.

Kelat simply screamed and screamed without words.

Morlock jumped up on the dais next to the Stone and the screaming stranger.

Kelat’s crazed eyes fixed on Morlock and his sword. “Kill me!” he begged. “It’s in me! Inside of me! It hurts so much! Oh, Death and Justice, kill me now!”

Morlock, no particular friend to Death or Justice said, “No.” He struck Kelat strategically on the side of the head and the stranger fell from the dais to the floor. Morlock jumped down to make sure he hadn’t broken his neck in the fall and was relieved to find he was still breathing.

Next to the dais, Bleys was weeping over the fragments of the Witness Stone like a child whose favorite toy has been broken. “Why did you do it?” the summoner sobbed. “Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know what’s been lost? To save the life of an invader, an outsider, mere bait in a trap, you have destroyed long ages of accumulated wisdom!”

Morlock looked down at the groveling old man with a mixture of pity and contempt. “The trap will lead us to the trapper, Bleys. And if this is the last age of the world, your accumulated wisdom will disperse in darkness anyway. Look to the stranger! Don’t let him die or awake again.”

Morlock ran around the long oval of the dais until he reached Aloê. She was slumped across the Long Table, her limbs spasming wildly. Naevros was already standing over her, but he stood back as Morlock approached. Morlock vaulted onto the dais and picked his wife up in his arms.

Her eyes were open but wild. Her limbs were still thrashing, like a baby who hasn’t learned how to use her arms and legs. On her throat were dark handprints, and on one he saw a deeper cross-mark: the imprint of the ring on her finger, the ring he had made for her.

He wondered if he should go into vision and try to search for her spirit. Who could advise him? Illion, Noreê, and Lernaion were as bad as this or worse. Bleys was babbling like a dotard. Earno was dead. . . .

Aloê’s golden eyes focused on him.

“Crazy bastard!” she whispered hoarsely, and bit him on the upper arm.

Then he knew that all would be well.

CHAPTER FIVE

Evening in A Thousand Towers

Stations of the Graith did not normally end with most of its members being examined by binders from the Skein of Healing, but this had been an odd one. It was necessary to know that there was no lingering dragonspell in those who kept the Guard. Many had bruised throats to look after as well, but no one had been fatally injured.

“And I, for one, am disappointed,” remarked Jordel, lounging with calculated nonchalance on a window ledge in Tower Ambrose, where the recently set sun still lit the sky behind him with chilly red. “All these great warriors,” Jordel complained, “and not one had a grip strong enough to break his own throat.”

Baran, his brother, sitting on a couch nearby, grunted. “Neither did you.”

“I know!” Jordel said, pointing at his heavily bruised skin. “I’m deeply ashamed!”

“We’re all ashamed of you, J,” Aloê responded from a nearby chair. “Though not all for the same reasons.”

“I’ll do better next time,” Jordel promised.

After the Station broke up in chaos, Lernaion had led the vocates who openly belonged to his faction away to some sort of private meeting. The members of Bleys’ faction, in contrast, were still consoling their leader, sobbing over the broken Witness Stone. Noreê and Illion had put a wilderment on the dragon-haunted stranger, Kelat, and conducted him to one of the nearby Wells of Healing for purposes they did not say. The remaining vocates not aligned with any summoner’s faction had scattered to their own places of refuge.

One of these was Tower Ambrose, where the group of friends and peers Jordel called “the Awkward Bastards” frequently resorted after a Station. There were some of the usual faces missing: Thea, who would never be seen again, and Illion. But Jordel and Baran were there, and Naevros and Keluaê Hendaij and a few others. The tower’s staff had all gone home for the night, so Morlock and Deor were down in the kitchen whomping up something like a meal.

Aloê sat, wrapped in her red cloak, in the chair that had always been Thea’s when she visited, and listened more than she talked. She had a sense that something was ending—the world, of course, was growing colder, and everything was very bad. But the thing she feared, and part of her longed for, was standing nearer than the end of the wide world outside these walls. She could not say what it was, and did not wish to. But she could think about nothing else.

Three pairs of footfalls grew closer: the long, steady stride of her husband; his harven-kin Deor’s quicker, shorter steps; and a third, the wooden strokes of the Walking Shelf.

The three entered in that order, to general cheering. The Awkward Bastards were hungry—hungry enough that there had been serious talk of walking down to the Speckles, the infamous rusty-ladle cookshop just a few hundred steps down the River Road. The scents and sights carried in by the Walking Shelf were enough to banish such thoughts forever.

“Please hold your applause to the end!” Deor said. “This may not be up to Tower Ambrose’s usual level of catering. You don’t know the meaning of danger until you’ve worked in a kitchen with Morlock.”

Morlock shrugged and said, “Walking Shelf, go: offer trays to people.”

The brass eye atop Walking Shelf revolved in a circle and then the shelf stumped over to Jordel. It grabbed a tray off the shelves in its interior and offered it to him.”

“All the trays are the same,” Deor said apologetically. “Fell free to swap around whatever you don’t want.”

“It’s like school,” said Keluaê to Naevros, who smiled suavely. There had been no school in the three-boat port town where Naevros grew up, Aloê knew, but she doubted that Keluaê could tell. Naevros could handle any conversation—except the ones that mattered most. He was a mirror image of Morlock, who never seemed to be able to speak unless the conversation was a matter of life or death. Often she wished she could make one whole man out of their scattered traits, and not only in this context.

Morlock served out wine, red or white, whereas Deor busied himself with the tea urn. When Walking Shelf had given everyone a tray, Morlock said, “Walking shelf, go: stand in a corner.” It looked around with its brass eye, stumped over to the nearest corner, and stood still.