“It’s too perilous to have out in the world!” shouted the Linularinan prisoner. He tried to get to his feet, but the soldiers hastily caught his shoulders and held him from rising.
“Of course it is,” murmured Beguchren, catching and holding his gaze. “What is it, man? What is this thing that is so perilous for anyone but a Linularinan to hold?”
The prisoner stared at the small, elegant Casmantian lord in very much the way a bird was said to stare at a serpent. He said in a quick, sharp tone, “Do you not understand? Not even yet? This was a working against—for—it was a working of natural law. Do you not perceive the terrible distortion of the world around this thief, as the world seeks the proper bindings of law? Do you not understand what desperate peril we are in, now the strands of natural law are breaking?”
“The proper bindings of law,” murmured Lord Beguchren.
The prisoner sat back on his heels and stared at Beguchren, furious, his bound hands raised in urgent supplication. “You must understand. A thousand years ago, we founded the age by binding into place the laws of earth and fire, and pressing aside the unbounded wild magic of mountains and forest. And then that fool”—he glared furiously at Tan, who looked merely blandly attentive—“that fool,” the Linularinan prisoner repeated, “undid half our bindings in a day. The rest will break in time. And you shelter him? From us? Give him to me—for all of us. Let us recast our bindings, if any legist of our age has such power—will you leave the law of the world unsettled and wild?”
“The law of the world,” Lord Beguchren repeated. He still spoke quietly, but his tone had become biting, cold as the gray heights of the mountains, and his storm-gray eyes were dark with fury. He took a step forward and said, “The laws of earth and fire, do you say? Gereint has described to me a certain strange quality he has recently found echoing behind the magecraft he has tried to work. We had assumed this strangeness was due to the cracking of Tehre’s Wall. Now I wonder whether both the breaking of the Wall and this disturbance to mage power might be due instead to a common cause.” He paused and then added, his voice dropping even further, “I wonder why Linularinum seems so untroubled by the threat the griffins pose to all our countries? Certainly Mariddeier Kohorrian seems perfectly ready to distract and weaken Iaor Safiad, and this at a time when one would expect him to see the necessity of supporting Feierabiand against griffin-fire.”
The Linularinan agent did not answer.
“Indeed…” said Lord Beguchren. “Indeed, one might almost wonder why it is that Casmantium has endured the continual threat of fire, why it is that Feierabiand’s border with the desert has now and again been breached and is now threatened again, and yet Linularinum has never seen so much as a grain of red sand blowing in the wind. Fire stays well clear of Linularinum. It always has. I wonder why that is? Just how have the legists of Linularinum written their binding law, this law that their clever kings have owned from the beginning of the age, and have hidden from the rest of us?”
“Only we—” said the prisoner, and stopped.
The Arobern, whose grip on the arms of his granite throne had tightened until his knuckles whitened, stood up at last. He seemed to loom massive as the mountains. The expression in his deep-set eyes went well beyond rage.
The Linularinan prisoner flinched back from the king, for which Mienthe did not blame him at all. She would have backed away herself except she could not move. But then the prisoner abruptly reached down with both his bound hands, sketching a swift line of writing on the stone floor with a fingertip. The letters that followed his tracing finger were sharp, angular, jagged things, nothing like ordinary letters. They were black, but not the shining black of fresh ink. They were a strange, bodiless, empty black, as though the man were carving narrow but bottomless cracks right into the stone, so that the blackness at the heart of the earth showed through.
To Mienthe, it seemed that the whole world abruptly tilted sideways. She did not lose her balance; it was not that sort of tilt. But everything seemed to stutter and pause, and the cracks ran swiftly out across the stone and yawned wide—she thought someone was shouting and someone else was cursing and someone else was screaming, or maybe that was all the same person. She seemed caught in a timeless moment that did not contain alarm or movement, around which urgent sound pressed but into which it did not intrude. She seemed to watch the empty black letters slashed into the stone lengthen; they sliced out like knife cuts toward Tan. But Mienthe felt neither frightened nor rushed. She seemed to have all the time in the world to move; indeed, she seemed to be the only person in the world who was moving, or who could move. She stepped dreamily through the slanted world to intercept the black writing before it could reach Tan, and stooped, and drew a spiral on the floor to catch the sharp letters. Then she straightened and stood quietly, watching.