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He felt for the door and leaned there in the fresher air, slowly taking his breath. There was a pain in his chest that came with passions an exertions. It came more frequently in this last year.
Mortality, he thought. He might well have lived a century longer, might even have reached Mauryl’s fabled years, had he not renounced his arts in favor of—what? A fabled but insubstantial immortality—a priest immortality—which priests could not in concrete terms describe, could not produce, could not remotely prove? His outrage for the waste of life frightened him. His doubt made mockery of all his deliberate, studied years of abnegation. His doubt raised up anger, and impulse to action, and separated him from all the choices he had ever made.
Still turning away? he could hear Mauryl ask him. Still ru
Still the hand on the latch, boy, and will not open the door?
But all wizardry since that night had held peril for him such as h could not bear. He did not wish to contemplate it, knowing he hat bathed himself in blood, betrayed a trust, crossed thresholds each one o which could lead him to darker and angrier magic than he wanted to contemplate—to sorcery and damnation indeed.
His weakness was his own strength. His weakness was his own knowledge. It was fear of both which had led him to the Teranthines—seeking tamer certainties.
And he had found believers who linked their hopes to milder things. Oh indeed, believers. Unquestioning believers who thought they questioned everything, unhearing believers who heard nothing that in the least degree questioned the tenets of their sacred quest toward a salvation they predetermined to exist. What denied that, —why, shut it out. What threatened that, never was; what threatened that, never had existed. What threatened their confidence had no validity at all for the true and determined believers.
And came this, —Mauryl’s evidence of an access to souls departed, power the Teranthines denied existed?
Came this, ——calling up the nightmare that was Althalen, the ruin of the last of the Old that had flickered on this side of Lenfialim, and the death of the one wizardling among Mauryl’s students who might have been the greatest of them ... who might, if he had lived, if one could believe the promises that still came whispering in one’s dreams, have restored lost Galasien and undone the spells of the Sihhé?
Hasufin would have become, so far as the Teranthines remotely imagined such power, a god.
But for doubt, they—who, through Hasufin, might have inherited the Old Magic—had murdered Mauryl’s old student and stranded him in a second death: at least that was the belief Mauryl had urged upon them. A second death—because Hasufin was not the fair, soft-spoken child he seemed to be, a mere fourteen years in the world, and was by no means the Sihhé king’s young brother. They had died, all the wizards at Althalen, all but himself and Mauryl, in that desperate assault on Hasufin’s wizardry, while the Marhanens ran through the halls with fire and sword. The wizards had all perished, except himself, except Mauryl, who had parted from him thereafter and called him coward.
Him—coward. He still trembled with the indignity of it.
Ask—what this Shaping was. Ask about its i
He felt a clammy chill despite the heat of the candles. He turned from the door and fought down the smothering panic that urged him to flee all involvement, panic that urged him to seek retreat at the shrine at Anwyfar among the pious, the modest Teranthines, and to take refuge in the semblance, at least, of godly and human prayers.
Why? the essential question pressed upon him. Because Mauryl knew he was dying?
Because somehow, by some means, what they had trapped and banished had found a Place to enter again that they who bound him had not thought of?
Temptation offered itself: there were ways to find those answers. He could even yet set himself mind-journeying; that art did not leave a wizard, once practiced. It seemed reasonable, even sanely necessary, to look however briefly at Ynefel, where none of Cefwyn’s patrols dared go, to confirm or deny human agency in this.., apparent wakening of an old, old threat.
It was appallingly easy to make that slight departure, that drifting apart from here ... they had gone far beyond illusioning, the brotherhood at old Althalen. He had not been the least of Mauryl’s students, only—for a time, only for a time, evidently, after that dread and bloody night—the last.
Out and out he went faring, through gray-white space.
And drew back again, shivering, an impression of blinding light yet lingering in his mind, a glimpse of something too well remembered—too tempting—that final reach for power, first, to govern those who had no power, and then to contend with each other for more power, the greater against the lesser, for the ambition of gods ....
He carried the Teranthine circle to his lips, clasped it in his two hands, warming it with his breath, attempting again the peace of meditation. His mind was too powerful for easy diversion into ritual inanity, endless repetition of prayers. That was the reason he had sought the once-obscure Teranthines—not a confidence in their pantheon, which was in major points of belief the same as the Quinalt’s—but rather interest in the intricate, interwoven and demanding patterns of their approach to meditation, which sought, in their most convolute supplications, all gods, lest any be neglected.
For one who did not, in any case, believe in the new gods the Guelenfolk had brought to the land, it had been very attractive. For one who did not wholly desert the gods of his youth and his art—it had given comfort and stability in a world he perceived as entirely conditional.
Now, considering what he knew and what he feared of Mauryl’s workings, he found his meditations at once terrifying—and liberating, to wizardly powers the Teranthines did not remotely guess.
He had continually, in his devotions, approached the Old, the Nineteen, seeking answers to questions which would have horrified even the all-forgiving Teranthines: it was in consideration of their sensibilities that he had never explained to them that the Sihhé icon for which he had asked—and bought—their secret indulgence, for its presence in a Bryaltine shrine.., was not mere honor to an ideal. That this particular form of the Sihhé star was older than the Sihhé, who had needed no gods—he had not mentioned that. He never murmured Old names aloud in his devotions. He applied himself to intricate and many-sided rituals the origin of which the eastern-born Teranthines, jackdaws of all religion, had themselves appropriated from the western-bred Amefin.
Sometimes he provided them i
He should, he thought, feel profoundly guilty for those inclusions, for the Teranthines were i