The following days were spent in the hardest of physical toil. Everyone set to, gathering fuel and scavenging for what food they could find, though that was practically nothing after the war. The only other source was the high forest, normally untouched because it was so inaccessible that it was not worth the trouble. Up there were mushrooms and nuts, animals large and small, and fish in the lake. But foraging so far away and carrying it down the cliff was an impossibly time-consuming task. Time they did not have-the next snowfall would cover everything on the ground for a hundred days.

Llian, however, felt much better in Gothryme. Perhaps it was the nature of the place, for Gothryme was not grand, either in size or proportion or ornament, but it had the comfortable feeling that comes with great age and continued use. Its walls were mostly unplastered stone, decorated with a few rustic woolen tapestries and hangings, most threadbare and repaired many times. They were the ones that had not been worth stealing. Its floors were bare stone too, slabs of slate or shiny schist with a scatter of rag rugs.

Perhaps the exhausting toil had something to do with it, for Llian slaved, as did everyone, from the hour before the dawn until late in the evening, long after the early dark. And his were the dirtiest, most menial tasks, for he was good for nothing else. He could not do anything more skilled than mixing lime and sand to make mortar. So he worked, lumping stone, timber and slate, filling buckets with mortar, carrying water or cleaning out barrels.

And perhaps it was the lack of time to think, to brood and bend over his books until the middle of the night, for there was never time for that, and even if there had been, candles were precious and he was far too tired to concentrate. No one in Gothryme cared to talk about the affairs of the world, and perhaps by tacit agreement neither would Karan or Shand. In any case Karan had no interest in outside affairs, unless they affected Gothryme itself. She steadfastly refused to discuss such things.

Or perhaps it was the ambience of Gothryme-some characteristic of land or house that made it a poor place for receiving outside influences. Whatever the reason, neither Karan nor Llian had any bad dreams for some time.

Llian was so much better now that Karan began to doubt what had taken place in Tullin, to feel more and more sure that Shand had been wrong. But she did not raise the issue with Llian, nor he with her. In their desperate struggle to get ready for winter Karan put that fear to the back of her mind. And though their bodies cried out for the comfort of each other he never came to her bed again, nor she to his. The barrier between them was too high to overcome.

"We're not going to manage it," said Karan to Shand, halfway through stacking a wagonload of wood. Her anger had thawed somewhat, since he'd been working so hard for her. "There just aren't enough of us."

Shand grunted as he heaved another length up to the top of the stack. "Talk uses energy," he said. "Don't waste it."

"Well, without a miracle we'll all starve."

The mood was gloomy that night-the whole household infected by the realization that they had enough food for barely two months, even if they ate the precious seed and the few remaining breeding animals that they would need for the spring.

That night Karan called the household together. While they assembled she went down to the cellar and rummaged among barrels that had not been tapped since her father was alive. Surprisingly, the cellar had not been discovered by the looters. She came back with a small cask on her shoulder, which she put in the middle of the table. It was thickly coated with dust, as was her coat and her hair.

"I called you together tonight," she said, "to put our position before you." As she spoke Karan dusted off the cask with a rag. She tapped it expertly and drew off a jug of golden liquid. Pouring a measure into mugs the size of eggcups, she handed them round. They touched their mugs.

Llian sipped his liquor. It was a kind of fortified wine, luscious, sweet and strong.

"Things are very bad," she said. "So bad that we may well starve if we stay here, and even if food is to be had I've no money to buy it. So whoever wishes to go and has a place to go to, leave with my blessing."

Beside the barrel sat a small chest. She lifted the lid. The hundred or so small coins that remained did not even cover the worn red velvet on the bottom. "Here is all the money I have. Whoever would go, take two tars from the chest for your traveling expenses. I am deeply ashamed but I can offer you no more. If we survive the winter the tax collector will ruin us in the spring. Come up, whoever of you would go to a better place, and take what is your due."

She stood back, expressionless, doing nothing to influence them. They must do what was best for themselves. They filed up one by one, young men and women, weatherbeaten laborers and hunters, ancients who should have been in their rocking-chairs for a decade. Even the cook's boy, Benie, came forward.

Llian sat watching Karan. Despite his own feelings, he could not help pitying her. It seemed that she was going to lose everyone and everything. Then to Llian's amazement, Rachis came up too, slipped his hand in the chest and all the coins chimed. Had Llian a handful of grints to his name he would have flung them in, in spite of their woes. But he had nothing left.

Yes, he did! The silver knob that he had unscrewed from Kandor's bedpost in Katazza, against the time when his wallet must be empty, still lay at the bottom of his bag. It must be the weight of a hundred tars, at least. He ran out.

Karan watched him go, dismayed. Every single person came up, touched their glass to hers and went to the chest. The coins tinkled like bells heard from far away. Llian reappeared with his hands in his pockets and followed the procession.

Just as he put his hand in Llian looked up and caught Karan's eye. She had gone white, absolutely stricken. Despite their troubles, she had not thought that Llian would abandon her too.

The whole room held its collective breath, then Shand lifted the chest and shook it, making the coins cry out in a great voice. He laughed, a rich cheerful roar. Karan looked offended.

"Your people deserve you, and you them," he said, tilting the chest so that they could all see inside. The bottom was heaped with coin, copper and silver. In one corner was a big familiar silver knob, here and there a flash of precious gold, and mischievous Benie's shiny copper grint sat proudly on top of the pile. No fortune, but enough to get them through the winter, if there was food to be had. Karan burst into tears, ran down and embraced them every one. While her back was turned Shand slipped his own contribution into the chest.

A LIGHT IN.

CARCHARON.

Karan woke well before dawn to a persistent banging, as if one of the shutters had come loose. Better fix it before it smashed itself to firewood in the wind. Rousing slowly from too little sleep she realized that there was no wind! It was the front door. Someone had been pounding on it for ages. Who could it be at this hour? Every muscle ached from the previous day's toil, but it was time she was up and doing. She ran down the stone stair, wrapping her robe around her. Perhaps the war had started again. Perhaps it was Yggur's tax collectors come early.

At the door she found another small miracle. The threshold was crowded with laughing people. It was Malien and eleven of her Aachim.

"In Thurkad I heard of your troubles," said Malien, "so we came earlier than we'd planned. We're all here, save Tensor, Asper and Basitor, you'll no doubt be pleased to hear."

"How is Tensor?"

"Well enough, considering."

"I can hardly tell you how glad I am to see you," said Karan, kissing each of them. "I don't know how we're going to feed you, but we'll worry about that later. Come in."

"We didn't come empty-handed," Malien laughed. "Look!"

Karan put her head out the door and saw, looming up out of the fog, the biggest wagon that she had ever seen, a vast affair with six wheels and a canvas-covered load that extended a span and a half above the sideboards.

"What's for breakfast?" asked Malien.

"Porridge and pancakes," said Karan.

Malien jumped up on the tongue of the wagon and rummaged inside, coming back with a huge flagon of black syrup. "I've just the thing for porridge and pancakes," she said, and they all followed Karan inside to the kitchen fire.

That night Karan, Malien and Shand discussed the affairs of the last months, including Llian. Later, Shand took Karan aside. "You don't need me now, so if you can spare me I'll go at dawn."

"Go with my most heartfelt thanks," she said, unable to hold her grudge any longer. "Without you I would never have coped. And I know what you put in my chest last night. More than I can ever repay."

"I deny putting anything in your chest," he said with a straight face. "And therefore I beg that you never mention it again."

"Very well. Are you going home?"

He sighed, running thick fingers through sparse hair. "I wish I was. No, I must bear tidings to Thurkad."

"About Llian," she said in alarm. "Must you tell Yggur about him too?"

Shand hesitated.

"Please, Shand. He's much better now. Give me this chance. What can he do here, with Malien watching? Surely even you must admit that you could be wrong."

Shand looked reluctant. "Very well," he said grudgingly. "There is an infinitesimal possibility that I am wrong, and if so it could have very bad consequences. I will say nothing until we next meet, but be careful."

He was already gone when Karan rose with the sun. The weather was good so everyone headed up the cliff path, seldom used, that led to Gothryme Forest. Beyond that the track wound higher and higher, to the long-abandoned fortress of Carcharon, high in the windswept mountains to the west. Karan's father had been slain up here when she was eight. On this path had Karan wandered when she set out to find Shazmak at the age of twelve; and when she left it again, six years later. And this way Tensor had returned to Shazmak the previous year, to try and catch her with the Mirror. Every step of the path was embedded with memories for Karan. But they did not go beyond the forest: Carcharon was a folly and Shazmak was occupied by the Ghashad.

Llian felt good today. He walked beside her all the way up, fascinated by the Histories of her family, and noting everything so that he could tell them one day.

For more than a week they were blessed with fine, cold weather, and they collected hundreds of sacks of nuts, still good; several barrels of fish from the lake; dozens of baskets of fruit, most spoiled though still edible-these they would make into jam; and some autumn berries that in the drought had shriveled on the brambles. They also gathered mushrooms, wild onions and edible roots and tubers. And game, more than they expected. Enough, with what the Aachim had brought, to tide them over, unless the winter was very bad, and some to send down to the town.

By this time, prodigious labor by the Aachim had repaired some of the stone walls and put a new roof over them. That would give them five extra rooms when the inside work was done, though they would still be terribly cramped. Then winter really set in and it snowed for a week without stopping. Gothryme was completely cut off.

Winter's fury meant that there was less to do-only emergency work could be done outdoors. The rebuilding went on inside, but now it was artisans' work and proceeded at a more leisurely pace. Some of the Aachim went up to the forest to hunt. The cold meant nothing to them.

Karan spent most of that week sitting with Rachis at the big table in the refectory, surrounded by the records of the past year: ledgers as long as her arm, made of thick homemade paper-her family Histories. In these books every detail of life at Gothryme had been recorded for over a thousand years: births, deaths; crops, yields, failures; stocking rates and breeding records; fires, floods, pestilences, famines, droughts, wars ...

But every time she sat down to work some distraction arose, or if it did not she found that she could not concentrate anyway. Then, lying awake in the middle of the night Karan looked up and saw that the dark face of the moon was full. Suddenly she sensed, what the matter was. In the black abysses of the world another piece had just clicked into place. The enemy was abroad! Karan realized that she had been waiting for it to happen.

Llian went back to his books, reviewing the notes he'd made of the time he'd spent with Tensor, his descriptions of the Nightland, and Kandor's papers too. He worked away at these tasks placidly and methodically, but without fire or any real interest in what he was doing. There was no intensity in him, and generally he put his books away early in the afternoon and sat staring out the window at the snow. He felt terribly sad.

Or he would walk about the house, sometimes browsing in Karan's family archives, sometimes studying the architecture, or just dreaming. He especially liked the old keep, said to be two thousand years of age. Several times Malien came upon him there, lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling, or sitting on a bench staring at a tapestry, absently dreaming.

The night of Karan's premonition he was woken from an exhausted sleep by an unpleasant dream. He sat up in bed, trying to piece the fragments into something that he could make sense of.

He had dreamed that he was carrying wood, stacking it in huge stacks against the stone wall of a woodshed. But it was not Gothryme, for he humped his load along the pinnacle of a dangerous ridge through a gale that wanted to sail him across the sky. Then Llian realized that it was not wood at all, but a piece of strangely curved metal that was cradled in his arms. Every time he tried to put it on the stack, it would not fit and someone shouted at him. He kept carrying his piece of metal back and forth along the ridge, and each time it was a different shape, and none of the shapes would fit where he tried to put them. Then he went back to sleep and the dream disappeared.

In the morning Malien found him sitting on a step in the keep, just staring at the wall. She stood watching him for a while, worrying about him. He looked to be trying to stare through the stone.

"Llian," she said. He did not move. She touched him on the shoulder.

Llian turned slowly, giving her a blank look. "Yes?" he said eventually.

"Come with me. There is news."

She went out and down the corridor. Llian followed, dragging his feet. He was far away, wrestling unsuccessfully with his dream.

Malien turned into the refectory where Karan was working with Rachis. There was a fifth person in the room, a farmer from the barren western part of her lands who supplemented his living by hunting in the Forest of Gothryme.

"Dutris, this is Malien and Llian," said Karan. "Tell them what you saw two days past."

Dutris was a young man, perhaps no older than Karan herself; short and wiry, with a tanned face and hard, slender hands. His hair was almost white, but his beard was dark. He spoke quickly in a soft voice, barely audible from the other side of the room. He was direct to the point of brusqueness.

"I was hunting in the forest. My camp was on the western side. Two nights past I saw a light high up on the old western path. But that path goes nowhere, only to Carcharon. I went to see. There were lights in Carcharon. I dared not go too close. I came down at once."

He looked anxious. Perhaps he had done the wrong thing.

Karan reassured him. "You did well to learn this without risking yourself. Did you see anyone?"

"Once! They were coming across from the track that goes up into the mountains. Ugly people with gray skin, skinny as sticks. Ghashad! And the lights were pale blue and burned steady. That's all."

Karan thanked and dismissed him, and turned to Malien.

"The Ghashad are coming down the path from Shazmak again. I knew it! I sensed something last night. But why can they possibly want Carcharon? There is scarcely a more inhospitable place in all Meldorin. It defends nothing."

"What is Carcharon?" asked Llian, roused from his indifference at last. "I've heard the name before."

"A folly!" Karan said. "It was a madness of one of the lords of Gothryme, in olden times. Basunez was his name, an ancestor of mine on my mother's side. A necromanter of sorts, a practicer of the Secret Art, and he thought that he had found the perfect place for it-so my father told me. Some places are thought better than others for such business, because of the resonance of the land or the intersection of lines of power, or some such nonsense.

"Basunez divined that this place was the best in Santhenar, at least in the parts of it that he had been to, for the Secret Art. So he named it Car-charon (meaning better than the Charon) though whether this referred to the character of the place or what he hoped to do there I never heard.

"Twenty years it took to build Carcharon, a terrible labor, for Basunez was never satisfied. Three times he tore it down to bare stone and built again. It's cut out of a horn of rock in the center of a steep and knife-edged ridge, utterly barren. There is no water there, and nothing grows, and it is exposed to the most violent and bitter winds. Even in summer it's terribly cold, but in winter it's perishing. Every stick of firewood must be carried in by hand, and every bit of food; up a steep and dangerous path. Why would anyone want it? It guards nothing, not even the eastern way to Shazmak. That takes the next ridge south, half a league away."

"Why they want it is of little moment," said Malien. "They are there!"

"Basunez's researches came to nought. He never found the secret he was searching for, and slowly went mad in frustration and despair. His servants left him one by one. He lost his fingers from frostbite and eventually froze to death in the worst winter of that century.

"He had made a fortune before he went mad, but every grint of it went on this folly. Our house was bankrupted by the extravagance. After he died Carcharon was abandoned. It still belongs to my family but we do not go there. Nothing remains but the folly of a madman."

"What can the Ghashad possibly want with it?" Llian wondered.

"I haven't the faintest idea."

"We'd better send word to Thurkad," said Malien.

Karan could not sleep after that. Had they taken Carcharon to prepare the way for Rulke, or because it was close to Llian and her? That night, as soon as it got dark, she imagined them swarming out of Carcharon, filing down the cliff path, coming for her. Just by being here she put Gothryme and the whole valley in danger.

But that night a runner came with an urgent letter. Men-dark was returning by ship from the east; Yggur summoned them to a council in Thurkad.

"That's all I needed," said Karan with a shudder. "I won't go! I loathe Thurkad and I'm having nothing more to do with this business."

"None of us can avoid our responsibilities," said Malien. "That's how this all began."

The news woke Llian's dormant fears as well. His respite was over; the dreams and the torments would soon return. He suddenly knew what the strange dream was all about. The metal things that he had been carrying were pieces of the construct, and in his dream he had been helping the Ghashad carry the finished parts into a storeroom. Was that what they were doing now, up there in Carcharon?

A REUNION.

After a troublesome, mostly silent journey through heavy snow, Karan, Malien and Llian slipped into the city quietly, by ways that Malien knew. They found Thurkad to be bruised and battered but not cowed. Its people were as unruly as ever, and they went about their stealthy and wicked businesses much as before. Not even Yggur had been able to curb their wantonness.

At one of the dozens of cafes on the waterfront they met Shand. He gave Karan the most perfunctory embrace and shook hands with Llian and Malien distantly.

"Is something the matter?" Karan asked as they headed back to his lodgings.

"I'm wasting precious life here, pandering to fools and waiting on villains," he said grumpily. "One more problem and I am off for Tullin, and I won't be coming back."

"Anything particular the matter?"