Guinalle caught her breath and opened her eyes. I shut mine guiltily.

“I’m sorry, Ryshad.” Guinalle shook her head. “Your mistrust of Artifice is too strong.”

Ryshad’s face betrayed an instant of chagrin. He dropped Guinalle’s hand before giving mine a courtly kiss. “I’m sorry, everyone.”

“You can keep watch with me for anything going awry.” Usara was by the door, all the while watching Guinalle intently.

“What do we do if it does?” I heard Ryshad mutter under his breath as he went to join the mage.

“Let’s continue, shall we?” Temar set his jaw and held out demanding hands.

’Gren and I shuffled our stools to draw the circle tighter. Guinalle began a low incantation as soon as her hand touched mine and the crude cabin faded around me much as the Eryngo had done. The others were clear enough but everything outside our linked hands was as indistinct as smoke. This time I didn’t see a new place but rather a face. It hung in the air between us, motionless, expression slack in sleep. It was the woman, Yalda, the silver gorget that marked her as enchanter among the Elietimm bright around her neck.

Guinalle opened her eyes. “Concentrate on her.” In some distant recess of my mind, I could hear the first incantation still binding us with its rhythms but Guinalle was somehow separating her thoughts into several, separate threads, each with its own focus. Was this the secret to Higher Artifice, I wondered, no more complicated than remembering the roll of the runes at the same time as anticipating an opponent’s next wager and all the while keeping a weather eye out for the Watch?

I still wasn’t sure I wanted to learn this Higher Artifice though. Emotions swirled around our circle. Pered had framed the girl in the imagined oval of a miniature frame, picking out details to paint like the gathering creases at the corner of her eyes. ’Gren was comparing her, none too flatteringly, to a golden-haired dancing girl of his acquaintance and I did my best to ignore his speculations about what lay beneath Yalda’s nightgown. Temar saw her only as an enemy, determined to secure whatever knowledge might aid our cause.

All that was to be expected. What unsettled me was Guinalle carefully masking her hatred, lulling the girl’s sleeping mind with an insidious charm that she spread to net first the man Moin and the younger Darige. There was none of the brutality the Elietimm had used on Parrail but I knew beyond doubt that Guinalle’s revenge could more than repay them for his murder, if she so chose. I made a mental note never to play against the demoiselle for money or favours and then wondered if everyone else knew I’d thought that in that instant.

Guinalle began a new incantation quite different in pitch and pace and new images hung in the empty air. The fluid, distorted shapes were nothing like the vividness of scrying or bespeaking and I wondered what Ryshad and Usara might be seeing.

The images slowly coalesced to a grey stone keep on a rise above a harbour cutting sharply into a meagre, dune-swept coast. I couldn’t help a sharp intake of breath as I recognised the place where Ryshad, Shiv and I had been held prisoner, caught in our fruitless quest to rescue poor Geris. Me, Ryshad, Shiv and Aiten. Aiten’s was another death we owed these scum.

“Do not rouse them with your anger,” Guinalle chided me soundlessly. The image drifted to show us the garden within the keep. It was much as I remembered it; no mere pleasaunce but closely planted with vital crops while glasshouses on all sides reared plants too tender for the harsh climate. The chill I felt owed nothing to the cold winds of the far north. Fear, pure and simple, was raising the hairs on the back of my neck but, to my surprise, I realised this wasn’t my dread.

A white-haired man was tending a climbing plant, clipping undisciplined shoots from the base and training wayward tendrils within the strict confines of a trellis. This was the bastard who’d set all the confusion of these last few years in motion. This was the man who’d sent Elietimm spies to Tormalin and beyond. They had robbed and murdered with the help of his Artifice as they hunted for those artefacts that would enable their master to kill all who might oppose his seizure of Kellarin’s rich lands. I sensed Temar throttling his own rage and tried to contain my own hatred but our detestation was a muted note beneath the resounding apprehension of all three sleeping enchanters. They saw themselves as much subject to him as the mindless vine. They must seek nothing but his bidding, so their skills and knowledge of Artifice might flourish under his guidance. Painful awareness lurked just beneath such thoughts. Any deviation from his will would be cruelly punished, their freedom curtailed with every last person they loved sharing their fate for any dire transgression.

“Ilkehan,” breathed Guinalle with satisfaction. “Now we have his name.”

We’d just called him the Ice Man when we’d been his captives. It had suited his dead white hair, fleshless, merciless face and his calculated brutality, lethal and indifferent as winter’s bitterest chill.

Faces flickered across our vision like memory slipping out of reach. A baby, too small to be identified as boy or girl, came and went almost before we realised but we all felt a surge of fatherly love from the sleeping Moin. A couple, elderly by Ice Islander reckoning, prompted filial affection from Darige that touched even me, who’d walked away from such ties without regret. The girl Yalda kept her devotion for a barrel-chested warrior looking not unlike Sorgrad, his leather armour studded with emblems of rank.

“He’s that bastard Eresken’s father,” remarked ’Gren with interest.

“Who?” Temar frowned.

“The warrior?” I was puzzled as well.

“Yon Ilkehan.” At ’Gren’s naming of him, we saw the Ice Man again. He was addressing cowed Elietimm among a scattering of squalid hovels, who waited in rags for grain doled out by Ilkehan’s well-fed minions. We couldn’t taste their hunger but we felt their trepidation. On every side, black-liveried troops stood alert for any dissent.

“No, who’s Eresken?” Temar let slip exasperation.

“The Elietimm enchanter who tried to rouse the Mountain Men to war last year.” Pered summoned sufficient confidence to join our silent conversation. “The one who seduced Aritane from the Sheltya.” She’d been all too ready to believe Eresken’s promises that Artifice would right the many and manifest wrongs the Mountain Men had suffered as recent generations of lowlanders encroached on their territories. Personally I’d have been suspicious, given Eresken openly acknowledged his descent from a clique long exiled from the Mountains for the highest crime of using enchantment to serve their ambitions. But I hadn’t suffered the frustrations of Aritane’s celibate life and the curbs the Sheltya voluntarily imposed on their own so-called true magic.

The image suddenly shifted. We saw Eresken’s face, coldly handsome and then a ghastly mask of blood, neck half hacked through.

“I thought cutting his head off was safest,” ’Gren explained genially.

Eresken vanished to whatever punishment Poldrion’s demons had prepared for him. Then we saw another Elietimm enchanter, the one who’d sought Ryshad’s death by conniving at his enslavement among the perils of the Aldabreshin Archipelago, for the sake of the D’Alsennin sword he carried.

Temar knew this one’s name. “Kramisak.” Quick as imagination, I saw Ryshad’s sword foiling the bastard’s mace stroke and ripping out his throat when their rival quests for the lost colonists had brought them face to face.

“Ilkehan’s sent three because one alone is too vulnerable.” Guinalle nodded to herself.

“But they’re not as strong as either of the other two.” Inadequate as Temar’s Artifice might be, it was showing him something hidden from the rest of us. I shared a shrug of incomprehension with Pered and ’Gren.