Wencit shrugged, as if what he'd said was self-explanatory and as simple as baking a cake, and Bahzell stared at him, appalled by the implications.

"D'you mean to be telling me," he said very slowly after a moment, "that a dwarf can simply wish something like this—" he waved at the tunnel again "—into being?"

"Hardly!" Wencit snorted. "It takes a great deal of concentration and imposes a tremendous drain on the life energy of a stoneherd. Something like this tunnel or some of the other tunnels and cuts sarthnasiks have produced for the Empire aren't anything they do casually, Bahzell. But the ability is undoubtedly the real reason dwarves seem so much more comfortable underground."

"And they still do it today?" Brandark sounded uneasy, and Wencit turned to look at him. "I mean, there's no White Council—hasn't been one for twelve hundred years." Wencit cocked his head, and the Bloody Sword frowned. "I don't think I like knowing that a bunch of wizards have been running around unsupervised all that time!"

"They're not wizards," Wencit said, and sighed at Brandark's expression of disbelief. "Sarthnasikarmanthar is no more wizardry than the elves' long life spans are, Brandark. Rock is the only thing a stoneherd can impose his will on, though most sarthnasiks do seem to have a greater affinity for metal work than even other dwarves do. I think it has something with their sensitivity to the ores in their raw state. But a stoneherd could no more 'visualize' a hole through you than Vaijon here could."

"Sounds like wizardry to me," Brandark said stubbornly, and Wencit shook his head.

"I suppose that—in a very specialized sense—you can define it that way if you absolutely insist," he said, "but no wizard would. It's a natural talent no one can learn to duplicate without the same inborn talent. In fact, most wizards would agree with the historians that sarthnasikarmanthar was the very first cleft point for the Races of Man."

" 'Cleft point'?" Bahzell repeated. Wencit nodded, and the Horse Stealer rubbed his jaw. "And what would a cleft point be?"

"A cleft point—" Wencit began, then paused. He rode in silence for a few seconds, scratching his own beard thoughtfully, then looked around at his audience. "How many of you are familiar with the works of Yanahir of Trōfrōlantha?" he asked.

Brandark started slightly, but the others only looked blank. The Bloody Sword waited to see if anyone else would speak, then shrugged. "I've come across the name," he said cautiously. "I've never seen any of his actual writings, but I've seen some older works cite him as a secondary source. He's supposed to have been a historian and philosopher from the time of the First Wizard Wars, isn't he? Frankly, I always thought he was a myth."

"He wasn't," Wencit assured him. "And you're right about when he lived. In fact, he was court historian for Ottovar the Great and Gwynytha the Wise."

Brandark's weren't the only eyes that went wide and round at that. Ottovar the Great had lived over ten thousand years ago, and the wizard smiled wryly as he saw the unvoiced thought behind their eyes.

"No, I wasn't around at the time," he told them in a dry tone. "I did, however, have the opportunity to read his works before the Fall. The Imperial Library in Trōfrōlantha had an almost complete collection." He paused again, meditatively, and his voice was thoughtful when he continued. "You know, I haven't thought about Yanahir in centuries. I'd forgotten that no one in Norfressa ever had the chance to read him." He shook his head again. "Maybe I should find the time to sit down and jot down what I remember. It certainly couldn't hurt... and it might do quite a bit of good, now that I think about it."

His voice trailed off, and he gazed into space, looking at something no one else could see. The others glanced at one another, waiting for him to resume, but over a full minute dragged past without his saying another word, and Bahzell cleared his throat.

"I'm sure that's all very well, Wencit, but would you be so very kind as to be getting on with whatever it was you were telling us before you came all over historical?"

The wizard twitched, then grinned at the hradani's acerbic tone.

"Forgive me, Bahzell. When you have as many memories as I do, you sometimes get a bit lost sorting through them. As for what I was about to say, Yanahir was a wizard himself, as well as a historian, and he was fascinated by the Races of Man. Of course, there were only three then: humans, dwarves, and hradani."

"Three?" Brandark looked up sharply. "What about the elves?"

"Oh, they didn't even exist until after the First Wizard Wars," Wencit told him. "In fact, it was watching them come into existence that started Yanahir wondering about the original three races."

"The elves 'came into existence ' after the Wizard Wars?" Brandark sounded stunned, and Wencit nodded.

"Of course. Ottovar and Gwynytha created them."

"What? " Bahzell stared at the wizard in disbelief, and Wencit sighed.

"I see I do have to get as much of Yanahir's history written back down as I can." He turned his glowing eyes on Kaeritha. "I know Mistress Sherath gave you a good, solid grounding in history, Kaeritha. Didn't she ever mention Yanahir or the Cleaving to you?"

"Not that I can remember," Kaeritha said after several seconds of frowning thought. "She did describe sarthnasikarmanthar to us, but I think that was because some magi have stone-working talents which could be mistaken for it by people who don't know the difference and she wanted to be certain we did. She certainly never mentioned anything about 'cleft points,' though. And she didn't say anything about the elves having been 'created' either. Of course—" she twitched a shrug and grinned "—Mistress Sherath tended to concentrate on Norfressan history, Wencit. That's quite ancient enough for most people, you know."

"Oh, dear." Wencit rubbed a hand over his eyes, and as their glow disappeared behind his hand, he looked every year of his unthinkable age for just an instant. Then he lowered his hand and smiled crookedly. "Let this be a lesson to you, my friends. Never assume that just because something was once common knowledge it must be still."

"I'm thinking it's likely you're after having a bit more opportunity for that than such as we do," Bahzell said dryly, and Wencit chuckled.

"No doubt," he agreed, then shook himself. "All right. Basically, Yanahir was curious about how the different Races of Man came into existence—or, to be more precise, about how the differences between them arose—and he decided to find out."

"But weren't they always different?" Vaijon asked, brow creased in confusion.

"No." Wencit shook his head firmly. "I'm not privy to all of the techniques Yanahir used in his investigations. Remember, he'd studied directly under Ottovar, and many of his techniques had been lost long before even the Fall. I do know some wizards are actually capable of traveling through time, though there aren't many who can do it, thank Orr. And only a madman would do so willingly, given that one can only travel backwards, not forward, and that a careless act on the wizard's part would be entirely capable of... um, uncreating the time from which he came." He grimaced. "But Yanahir had developed some of the best scrying spells of his time to assist Ottovar in the First Wizard Wars. He might have used some variant of those, and whatever he did, those of his contemporaries who were privy to his studies accepted his findings unequivocally."

"And those findings were?" Brandark asked, and his eyes were almost as bright as Wencit's with the knowledge-hunger at his core.

"Originally, there was only a single Race of Man," Wencit said simply. "Humans."

"But that's—" Vaijon began, then stopped.

"But that's ridiculous," Wencit finished for him, and shrugged. "No doubt it seems that way, but Yanahir insisted the evidence was there. According to his studies, the three 'original' Races of Man had all diverged from one another during what he called 'the Cleaving,' when the 'cleft points' that distinguish them drove them apart. As support, he pointed to the emergence of the elves. For that matter, we've had evidence of our own to support the same theory in the halflings. All the tales and histories agree that there were no halflings until after the Fall, and I can personally attest to that fact."

"So what were the cleft points?" Kaeritha asked.

"Well, for the dwarves, it was sarthnasikarmanthar . The occasional human had possessed the same talent, though in much weaker form, before the Cleaving. According to Yanahir, people with the talent—or the potential for it—were drawn to one another, and gradually, as they interbred, it grew stronger and stronger in their descendants. I said earlier that it's a talent, not true wizardry. Brandark found that difficult to accept, I believe, and now that I've had a chance to think about Yanahir's theories a bit, I'm not sure he was entirely wrong to doubt it. In a sense, it is wizardry, but a very specialized sort. It's almost like wild wizardry in that respect, and, like wild wizardry, it produced certain physical changes—" his hand flicked up, indicating his burning eyes "—in the people who possessed it.

"The most obvious one, of course, was their shorter stature, but there were others. Their life spans increased considerably, but their fertility declined. And there were no dwarvish wizards. Yanahir's conclusion was that sarthnasikarmanthar or the potential for it somehow desensitizes its possessors to the rest of what wizards call the magic field. Since they can't even perceive it aside from its manifestation in stone and ores, none of them can ever develop the techniques to manipulate it."

"And the hradani?" Brandark demanded.

"Oh, yes. The hradani." Wencit smiled sadly. "Do any of you know where the word 'hradani' comes from?" His listeners shook their heads. "It's a shortened version of the original word 'hradahnahin, ' which came in turn from the Old Kontovaran 'hra, ' which meant 'calm,' and 'danahai, ' which meant 'foxlike.' "

"Calm?" Brandark repeated very carefully. "Did you say calm ?"

"I did. And before the Fall, it was exactly the right word." He looked at the two hradani. "I know your people's tales of what the Carnadosans did to you during the Wizard Wars, Bahzell, Brandark. But even the darkest of them don't tell it all. For thousands upon thousands of years in Kontovar, the hradahnahin were considered the calmest, sanest of all the Races of Man."