Something marvelous was seen in the skies above the holy mountain Nusgwéden today, but already many people are wondering whether it might mean trouble for Ghadáreim. A dragon of unconfirmed origin brought two strangers to Nusgwéden, one of them a Ghadári woman and the other an Amikni man. Despite the efforts of the Guild of Sympathies to learn more, the strangers proved uncooperative and hostile, and soon disappeared into the lower city. The people of Nusgwéden would be well advised to keep their eyes open for these strangers, so that we can all learn the truth about where they came from and what they intend to do in our land.

In what I believe to be a rather artistic touch, I’ve placed one of the broadcasts of the Guild of Sympathies at the head of this section, even if my readers won’t discover exactly what that was until later. It may serve to give some idea of what we encountered in Ghadáreim.

It seemed, as we passed through the portal, that our limbs were stretched and distorted, but there was no pain as there had been in the passage from Xuadhali to Rinthlep Roukos. Rather it seemed to be a trick of my eyes or of the light, as when one looks into water and sees a straight branch bend at an angle. So now the head of the dragon seemed to twist around to surround us as a ring, while my arms around Rosédan’s waist seemed to be yards away from the rest of my body. How these things were I cannot explain.

Rosédan did attempt, later on, to explain to me some of the peculiarities of the portal. She drew a diagram, saying that one axis was distance and one was the duration of time, and added a number of curious curved lines, but her explanation completely lost me. As I understand it, there is a connection between travel across some distance and the passage of time, but it is not a straightforward one and there are certain mathematical subtleties that I lack the space to describe here. Something about the angle of the previous portals we had encountered prevented them from moving us backwards in time as was the case with Rosédan’s portal.

But we emerged from the portal into an entirely different world. The sun was shining and the air was warm. I heard Rosédan laugh exuberantly. “This is home! This is my home!”

Taking a chance, I peered over the gap between the dragon’s neck and its right wing, but I could see very little of the land below. Rosédan clapped her hands and pointed ahead. Dimly I could see the slope of a mountain and I asked her what was so special about it.

“It’s the holy mountain! Where the archon and his priests live!”

“And the magicians?” I wondered.

“I’ll show you!” she said, but at that moment the dragon gave a screeching cry and began to ascend again. I had not particularly enjoyed riding on its back to this point, having perhaps been too trusting when Rosédan assured me that it would be a short and gentle flight. Now, as I felt myself begin to slide backwards in the leather and wood saddle Rosédan had constructed, I clung even more tightly to her waist and began to say prayers to the Flame. I would have attempted invoking the Shimas, but my alarm had reached such a point that I could not remember any of their visages.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw more dragons rising up from dark patches on the mountain and flying towards us, each with a rider on its back. After a few seconds I could see the nearest of the riders learn forward, and he called out to us, a curious timbre to his voice. “Name yourselves! What are you doing so near to Nusgwéden?”

Keeping one hand on the dragon’s neck, Rosédan used the other to fumble through her satchel, finally pulling out a glass lens that she held over her mouth. “I am Rosédan of the Césalh family!” she proclaimed in a voice that was almost painfully loud. “I’ve been lost for many years, but finally I’ve found my way back to my home. If you want passwords, I know them all.”

“You say you come to Ghadáreim in peace? Then follow me down to the inquisitors’ dock to be examined.”

There was, I decided, an ominous air to the phrase ‘inquisitors’ dock,’ but Rosédan showed no hesitation in guiding our dragon down towards the place on the far side of the mountain where the other dragons were heading, a space sheltered on three sides by natural rock. As soon as Halgh’s feet touched the ground, we were surrounded by men aiming spears at us in a most offensive way. All of them, I noticed, had the same shade of yellow hair as Rosédan.

“Is this the welcome that Ghadáreim shows its daughters?” Rosédan asked.

One of the men did not bear a spear, but instead a scepter with a round headpiece that he pounded against the ground as he spoke. “Your companion,” he said. “Who is he? He’s not one of us.”

“He is a dear friend of mine whom I met in my travels,” she said. “Without him I never would have returned here alive. I hope that he will be treated with tenfold the respect due any normal guest.”

“You make many demands for a stranger under the question.”

“But I’m not a stranger! Call one of the heads of the Césalh family: they will remember the girl who disappeared six years ago. Maybe a little more or less, depending on my aim. But who are you? You’re not a priest, but you must be a servant of the archon.” There was a querulousness to her voice that I didn’t recall having heard before, but I attributed to the trying circumstances in which we found ourselves.

The man looked baffled, then he laughed sharply. “You must be a stranger, though you look like one of us. You speak our language oddly enough. But you ask for the Césalh family?” He rubbed his chin. “Go ahead and dismount. I have many questions for both of you.”

“I trust that Halgh will be treated well,” she said, patting the dragon’s neck. It gave the man with the scepter a fierce look, as if it understood and agreed with her, but he seemed utterly oblivious to it.

“Of course. We are a people of the dragon, aren’t we? And a white dragon is a remarkable rarity.”

So while Halgh was taken off to a stable (or whatever one calls the place where a dragon is sheltered and cared for), Rosédan and I were taken off to a small room adjacent to the dock, where we were made to stand while the man with the scepter seated himself in the room’s only chair. I assumed that he wanted to hear our account of ourselves, and so I prepared the pertinent details in my mind, but I was taken aback when his first question was “Are the two of you lovers?”

I coughed, stammered, and possibly turned red to some extent. Rosédan, of course, was more composed, and answered, “No, we are not.”

“Oh? Remarkable.” There was something vaguely insulting about his tone, though I couldn’t put my finger on who he was insulting or how. “Well, then. You claim to be from Ghadáreim, Rosédan?”

“Do you think I’m one of our wandering cousins? My parents are Kráso and Grai Césalh. I was born in Kálhdä and attended the school in Xarkív, where I learned elementary magic and how to ride a dragon.”

The inquisitor (for this, I later learned, was the name of his office) raised his eyebrows. “The school in Xarkív, you say? Remarkable. And the Césalh family. There aren’t many people in Nusgwéden who put such stock in the old families. You wouldn’t be a believer in the archon, would you?”

“A believer? I’m certainly loyal to the archon, but I don’t know what you mean by that.”

He squinted at me, then asked, “Your friend here.”

“Kësil,” I said politely.

“He’s not one of the Amikni, is he? He looks like he might be.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer this. Certainly I wasn’t an Amikni, but I doubted this man would have heard of the Sëril empire, primarily because it didn’t exist yet. “I’m from the north,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure where this place was in relation to any part of the world I knew about, but the warm climate reminded me of Dūrī in the south.

“So you’ve been in the north, Rosédan. I wonder if you met any of the dissenters when you were up there.”

“The dissenters? I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know what any of this means. I just want to go home!” she said, shaking her head so that her hair fell in front of her face. She brushed it aside with an irritated gesture.

“I understand entirely, but it is my office to ask these questions. Our people have a right to know the answers.”

“And I have a right to see my family again. Is it by the archon’s authority that you hold us?”

“I don’t have any authority to keep you here against your will. Yes, you may go when you please.” Throughout all of this, the inquisitor’s face had borne the same expression: utterly calm, but with a certain superior expression that I found wearying the more the conversation went on. It seemed to convey the idea that the inquisitor knew more than we did about ourselves and was only asking these questions out of some generous whim.

“Then we will go,” said Rosédan. “But before we do, you don’t happen to know a priest of the Césalh family, a Dancer by the name of Herákla?”

For the first time the inquisitor’s calm expression broke. His eyes went wide and he hesitated before he spoke. “Herákla Césalh? These days you can find him in the Avenue of Ashes, down on the fourth level.”

“Thank you,” said Rosédan, and turned to walk out. I took a few steps after her before the inquisitor's voice rang out behind us.

“You might want to be careful in the coming weeks,” he said. “Word spreads quickly in Ghadáreim, and I have no doubt that in a few days everyone will have heard of the strangers on the white dragon. The phrase has a nice sound to it, doesn’t it?”

If it was a threat, it was one I couldn’t interpret, so I ignored it and left with Rosédan. She seemed tense, so I asked her about the Avenue of Ashes to try and take her mind off the recent conversation.

“I hadn’t heard of it, but Nusgwéden is a great city, greater than Edazzo, and I never did spend much time here. We can ask about it once we get to the fourth level.”

Here is the best place for me to describe Nusgwéden, I think. The mountain itself is a lonely one, standing in the midst of hills that come nowhere near its height. The city rises only partway up the slope of the mountain, at which point the slope becomes steep and barren, though canals carry water down from springs in the heights, and the figures of great heroes are carved into the stone at certain points. But the bottom third of the mountain is where the city is built, in seven rings from bottom to top, and it is wondrous. It is, in a truer sense than A’ula Zölkhöh, a city of magic. There the students and masters had been striving after something they couldn’t reach (though I suppose I should say that they will be striving after something they couldn’t reach. Tense can be a trickier matter than I ever anticipated it to be). But here in Nusgwéden, magic is the stuff of daily life. Magical artifacts are so common that I can name a dozen different kinds that I saw every day. Even the buildings are so grand that I’m convinced they must have been carved out of the mountain’s face by magic.

The Inquisition, the guild that had so courteously greeted us on our arrival, was based on the third level of the city, counting from the top. There they had their spires and their docks and stables, for their dragon-riders were granted special privileges that others were not. At the time, however, I knew very little about the Inquisition other than that I didn’t much care for it, and I was relieved when Rosédan and I descended to the fourth level. The levels were connected by stairways whose steps were carved from a rough black material that felt like rock but shone like glass.

“Something is wrong here,” Rosédan said. Possibly she had been speaking to herself, but I heard her and asked her what she meant. “As I told that offensive man, I’ve only been to Nusgwéden a couple times before, but I remember something about it being different.” She paused—we were halfway down the stairway—and with her hand on the railing she said, “But I’m sure Herákla will explain who exactly those people were. When I left he was a Dancer: that’s one of the higher ranks in the priesthood, and he might be a Temple by now. He’ll know everything that’s going on in the city.”

There was an admiring tone to her voice that I was not sure I liked. There are cousins and there are cousins, and even though I knew I was going to be leaving her soon, I couldn’t help but wonder how close she was to this Herákla.

Down on the fourth level, Rosédan asked about the Avenue of Ashes. The woman she asked gave us both a careful look, then said, “About a quarter of the way to the west. You shouldn’t have any problem finding it.”

“And Herákla Césalh is there?”

“Well, of course he is. Where else would he be?”

“This Herákla of yours seems to be well known,” I remarked as we walked on.

“It would seem he’s made a name for himself in the years I’ve been gone.”

We passed a number of avenues rising and descending from the main course of the fourth level, but none of them stood out as being particularly likely to be the Avenue of Ashes. So Rosédan asked another passer-by, who gave us a careful look nearly identical to that of the first woman. Not that he was a woman, but a rather short man whose multitude of rings made me wonder whether he was, like Rosédan, a magician. “You can’t have missed it,” he said in precise tones, and pointed to a downward-sloping avenue behind us.

The reason we had passed by this particular avenue was that it was obviously the route to a cemetery or mortuary of some sort. The walls on either side featured images of skeletons, the lintel above the entrance depicted skulls, and there were various other decorations of that sort. Rosédan and I exchanged glances, then went back and turned into this avenue. All along its length there were slabs of smooth rock with a particularly odd feature: realistic faces were carved into them so that we seemed to be walking past rows of men and women staring out at us. Rosédan seemed to be troubled by something as she looked at each face, so I suggested that she turn to a real face instead.

“You’re right,” she said, but to my dismay she began walking away from me. Only then did I notice the man at the far end of the avenue, standing with his hands crossed behind his back and apparently contemplating the slabs. Though I have to admit that his face was worth consideration, as his skin was a darker brown than any I had seen before. Certainly he was not one of the Ghadári , with their light skin and yellow hair, though he was dressed like one of them. “Excuse me,” she said to this man, “but could you direct me to Herákla Césalh?”

He nodded wordlessly and led us to one of the slabs, where we encountered the face of a man who reminded me somehow of Rosédan, though in a masculine rather than a feminine key, if I may use a musical metaphor. Rosédan gave a small cry and fell to her knees. Her cousin was dead, then, and I immediately felt guilty for all my untoward thoughts.

“If you’ll pardon me,” said the brown man, “it’s strange to see a young woman mourn for a man who died so long ago. There is a story here and I, forgive me, am a collector of stories.”

“I don’t know if you’ll believe this one,” I remarked. After a few minutes Rosédan was still kneeling before the slab, so I helped her up as she wrapped her arms around me.

“He’s dead,” she whispered in my ear. “They’re all dead, and I should be dead too. I made a mistake. This is the wrong year, long after I left.”

“I can tell you the story of Herákla, if you like, and how he obtained an honored place on this avenue,” said the brown man (whose name we would later learn was Lugwin.). Rosédan didn’t say anything, so I nodded for him to continue. “He was a priest born in the twenty-eighth year of the archon Viréín, when Ghadáreim was at peace. But it was in those days that the prophet Tlosdún began to teach the doctrine of Rakka’s lament.”

“It sounds vaguely familiar,” Rosédan whispered to me. “I heard Herákla mention Tlosdún’s name once or twice, but I didn’t pay much attention.”

“Who is Rakka?” I asked.

“Ah, my friend, don’t you know Rakka? You must be from a far country indeed. Was it not Rakka who first tamed the dragons and learned to ride them? That’s what the Ghadári say, but my people know that the dragons were here before Rakka.” He winked and said, “But back to Herákla. When Tlosdún began teaching people the lament that he said was Rakka’s, Herákla was one of the foremost skeptics. He condemned Tlosdún and Tlosdún’s picture of Heaven in strong terms and was even brought before Viréín Dárat himself to defend himself. It must have been a remarkable sight, to see Herákla Césalh stand in front of the aged archon proclaiming his arguments.”

“I can imagine it,” said Rosédan.

“He was accused of disturbing the peace, he was never raised to the rank of Temple, and he was several times thrown in prison, but his spirit was not once dimmed or defeated, and each time he emerged ready for the fight.”

“And he won in the end, I suppose,” I said.

“You are from a far country. Isn’t Rakka’s lament taught in every school today? But the present archon’s father believed that Herákla should be honored for his courage and his brilliance, even if he didn’t prevail.”

Slowly Rosédan nodded. With my typical perceptiveness, I saw the tears forming in the corners of her eyes, but I wasn’t sure what I could or should do to comfort her. Lugwin was quick to speak, however.

“Forgive me, I don’t know what brought you here to look for Herákla, but I have the impression that you are strangers here in Nusgwéden.”

“It’s been a very long time since I last visited,” Rosédan said, her voice cracking.

“My wife and I would be happy to let you stay with us, if you have nowhere else. I hope I’m not being presumptuous.”

“No, you aren’t. We’d be happy to accept.”

Lugwin’s home was down on the first level of the city, not far from the course of the canal. While the architecture and layout of the city were utterly foreign to me, I was fairly certain from what I could see that Lugwin did not live among the wealthy and powerful of Nusgwéden. The streets were too crowded and the houses too small, though it was a definite improvement over the slums of lower Edazzo.

Lugwin’s wife, a tall, imposing woman as brown as he, greeted us at the door, seeming unsurprised by our appearance. Rosédan explained, when I asked her about it later, that Lugwin had probably contacted her with a sympathy. “A what?” I replied, and she told me how the Ghadári used magical devices called sympathies to send messages back and forth. When I told her that she should make a pair of sympathies for us to use in the event that we were separated, she said that there was some technical reason that sympathies needed to be manufactured by a pair of magicians.

“But I’ll see what I can do now that I’m home again,” she added.

We sat down to share the evening meal of Lugwin and his family. His wife’s name was Hárasônan and she had prepared a meal of roasted lamb with a sauce that reminded me of the flavors of the food I had eaten during my sojourn among the fair folk, oddly enough. Though perhaps not that odd. It is a possibility I have considered, that the fair folk are descendants of the Ghadári, inheriting their yellow hair and aptitude for magic. But I wander from my story.

Lugwin and Hárasônan had a number of children, but all of them except one daughter lived elsewhere. This daughter was named Pikuln, and to her credit, she was an eager conversationalist, the most willing of all of us present to engage in the back and forth of argument. Lugwin and Hárasônan were too polite, and Rosédan and I too accustomed to concealing our pasts, to be as straightforward as Pikuln.

She immediately plied us with questions about what we thought of the archon, and I had to confess that I thought nothing of him, never having met the man. Then she asked me what I thought of the recent covenant with the Amikni, and I had to confess that I thought nothing of that, either. “I did know an Amikni man once,” I offered, though I wasn’t sure what connection Labarinud could possibly have with the treaty.

“But I’m curious about the story you promised me,” said Lugwin to Rosédan. He nodded to his wife, who disappeared into the neighboring room and returned with cups of some drink that was like wine but with a more astringent flavor. It was not to my taste, but Rosédan sipped it with a look of bliss on her face. It occurred to me that it would have been a very long time since she had eaten the food and drunk the wine of her homeland.

“I did promise, didn’t I?” she said. “Well, the story begins simply enough. There was a girl who loved to ride dragons and who loved to climb in the rocks. One day she took her dragon all the way to the western mountains, and there she stumbled into a cave. She thought at first that it was small enough for her to reach the end in no more than a few minutes, but somehow it proved longer and darker than she had expected. Finally she gave up and turned around, but the passage back seemed different somehow. Once she emerged into the sunlight, she understood what had happened.”

“I’ve heard stories like this before,” said Hárasônan. “Secret caves that connect different parts of the world, men and women who find them and travel thousands of miles in a moment.”

“This cave connected not different places, but different times as well. The girl didn’t know it at first, because she was in a strange place, among a strange people, but she would discover that eight hundred years had passed since she entered the cave.”

Lusgwin whistled in his amazement. But Pikuln said with obvious impatience, “So the girl was you, right?”

“If a strange woman appeared and began telling me the things I have to say, I’d think she was crazy. But this girl wasn’t crazy, and these things really did happen to her. She was in the hills not a long way from the coast—not the coast of Ghadáreim, but the coast of a sea far to the west—and not a long way from a city. A dirty, chaotic city where a strange language was spoken, but the girl had enough magic that she could hide and learn until she was ready to show herself.

“She made friends in Edazzo, and even a sort of notoriety as a worker of charms, but she never lost her longing for her home. She traveled to many places, hoping to find a way back, but nothing helped her until she met a man who, like her, had been taken far from his home.”

I don’t believe there is any need for me to record the rest of Rosédan’s story, as my readers will already be familiar with it in greater detail from my own accounts. Of course Rosédan didn’t tell them all of our adventures, but there was enough that when she had finished, Lugwin clapped his hands together and exclaimed, “Ah, that was a story worth hearing! I don’t know how much of it was true, but true or false, I doubt I’ll ever forget it. If this girl had mastered a magic that allowed her to make doorways between different places and times, she would surely be among the most powerful magicians that Ghadáreim has ever known.”

“No,” said Rosédan, shaking her head sharply, and surprising me, as I had been under the vague impression that Rosédan was, thanks to A’ula Zölkhöh and the Lord of Dreams, one of the most powerful magicians that her home had ever known. “There are limits to what the girl learned. It isn’t easy to put into words, but once she created a portal, it was a hundred times easier to go back and forth over the same path than to try and bore a new path.”

Needless to say, I was alarmed by this and wondered why Rosédan hadn’t told me. If we were trapped either here or in the Alka’ales that was yet to be, it made me wonder why we had gone to all this trouble in the first place. It would have been better if we hadn’t been separated in Edazzo, I decided. But there was no use trying to put a broken egg back in its shell.

“I think it’s all lies,” said Pikuln. “I’ve never heard of any of those places.”

“Darling,” said Hárasônan, “haven’t you considered that there might be parts of this world beyond what you’ve heard about?”

“You never even listen to the Guild on the sympathies, so what do you know about the world?”

“Pikuln,” said Lugwin as he stood up and faced her, his hands flat on the surface of the table. She looked down at her lap, but I heard her mutter something that was too quiet for my Bird to hear.

“Kësil, is it the custom in your land to wear a hat like that?” Hárasônan asked me.

“I think there’s a story there as well,” said Lugwin, almost greedily.

“If you found it hard to believe Rosédan’s story,” I said, “then you certainly won’t believe mine.”

Lugwin tossed his head back and laughed. “Well said. I won’t press you, curious as I am.”

“I do have a more practical request,” said Rosédan, her entire air changing in an instant, from whimsical to serious, her voice taking on an edge that I had only rarely heard in it before. “I was hoping that my family would be able to help me, but circumstances have made that less likely. We’ll need money, both for ourselves and to make sure that our dragon is treated well in the stables. We’re willing to work: I am a capable magician and Kësil is quite clever in his own way.” I am not entirely sure what she meant by adding “in his own way.”

Lugwin and Hárasônan looked at one another for a long moment, and I could see Rosédan’s fingers twitch impatiently against the edge of the table. Then Lugwin said, “Well, we’ll see what we can do to help. But forgive me, we may not be as much help as you hoped. We were planning to leave Nusgwéden in a few months to return to our kin in the south.”

“Ghadáreim has changed these past few years,” said Hárasônan. “And not for the better.”

“That’s what you’d say,” Pikuln muttered. It was rather childish, I thought, even though she was, as far as I could tell, a grown woman.

“Ah, but as I said, we can help you find work here. There is always opportunity for a good magician or a clever mind. Ah, as long as you abide by certain principles.”

“And what are those?” Rosédan asked.

“All you have to do is be new-eyed and míkra,” said Pikuln, and at these words I was so surprised I felt like jumping to my feet. In fact, I did jump to my feet, and everyone else at the table stared at me until I felt embarrassed. But my readers will understand, even if no one else did. Never before, as long as it rested on my head, had the Bird refused to translate for me. It didn’t even squawk or sing to give me a hint as to what it was feeling.

“Could you repeat that?” I asked Pikuln, so she did, and again my Bird didn’t help me. It was an awkward moment, seeing as it had been some time since I had last been baffled in this way. Several years, in fact, since I had fallen among the fair folk.

“What?” Rosédan said, her voice almost painful to my ears. “What was that supposed to mean?”

Pikuln laughed in disbelief. “By Heaven, maybe you were born hundreds of years ago. If you don’t understand míkra, I don’t know how I can help you.”

“I’m sure we’ll be able to find something for you both,” said Hárasônan, smiling rather nervously I thought. That was the mood of the remainder of the meal, I’m afraid, Pikuln saying provoking things while Lugwin and Hárasônan played an awkward mediating role. Finally she stormed out of the room after Lugwin made a remark about the archon that I didn’t fully understand (though at least my Bird translated all the words in the remark).

For some time now it had been dark outside, and I was beginning to feel slumber creep up on me. I was, of course, far too polite to yawn or stretch or any such rude thing, but I may have slipped into my conversation a few courteous remarks with the same effect. Lugwin clapped his hands again and said, “Now, both of you are tired after your journeys, I imagine. We have a room ready for you. In the morning we’ll show you where the baths are.”

I was fairly exhausted, but not so exhausted that I didn’t spot the fact that there was only one bed in the (small) room. I would have exchanged glances with Rosédan, but we were both too embarrassed. (Certainly I was embarrassed, and there was a striking redness to her cheeks.) “One room for us both?” I asked Lugwin.

“Forgive me, but you are husband and wife, aren’t you?”

“No!” said Rosédan, rather more forcefully than I would have liked.

“Why not?”

I pondered how best to explain the complicated mixture of passion and reason that had resulted in our current situation, estranged without being estranged, but Rosédan forestalled me when she said, rather more forcefully than I would have liked, “We are merely traveling together.”

“Forgive me my presumption,” he said, but there was something in the tone of his voice that suggested he was still presuming things. “If you’re quite certain you’re not married, I’m afraid one of you will have to sleep on the roof. Our house isn’t a large one, I’m afraid.”

I sighed, because I knew my duty and because I have never enjoyed sleeping on roofs. It wasn’t a customary practice in my home, given our cold weather, but even on the occasions during my sojourn in warmer Edazzo when I slept on a roof, I found it an unsettling experience. There was something about the open air that reminded me of lying in an open grave, no matter how lovely the stars may have been. But I followed Lugwin outside and up the stairs to the roof. Hárasônan came us with blankets folded over her arm. She spread them out for me and then, after some polite remarks and blessings, they left me to my rest.