“I know it only too well, but I cannot risk excommunication. With Macrobius gone there is no voice of reason left among the senior Church leaders, except possibly Merion of Astarac. By the way, how is the Synod coming together? What have you seen in your sorcerous travels?”

“They are still gathering. Our worthy Prelate had a good passage once he was out of the calms around these coasts. His vessel is currently crossing the Gulf of Almark, south of Alsten Island. He will be in Charibon in ten days, if the weather holds.”

“Who is there already?”

“The Prelates of Almark, Perigraine and Torunna have preceded him. Their colleague, Merion of Astarac, had a longer journey to make than any of the others, and the Malvennor Mountains to cross. It will be two weeks, I fear, before the Synod is convened, sire.”

“The longer the better, if it keeps that tonsured wolf from my door. I will soon be setting off myself for the Conclave of Kings at Vol Ephrir. Can you keep me informed about the doings here while I am away, Golophin?”

The old mage sucked deeply on his pipe, and then shrugged with a twitch of his bony shoulders.

“It will not be easy. I will have to cast through my familiar, something no mage likes to do at any time, but I will do my best, sire. It will mean losing our eye on the east, though.”

“Why? I thought all you wizards had to do was gaze into a crystal and see what you wanted to see.”

“If only it were that simple. No, if my gyrfalcon accompanies you I will be able to send you news from here through it, but do not expect regular bulletins. The process is exhausting and dangerous.”

Abeleyn looked troubled. “I would not ask, except—”

“No, you have a right to ask, and it is a thing which must be done. Let us speak no more of it.”

No one else could have spoken thus to the King of Hebrion, but Golophin had been one of Abeleyn’s tutors when he had been a runny-nosed little miscreant, and the young prince had felt the back of the wizard’s hand many times. Abeleyn’s father, Bleyn the Pious, had believed in a stern upbringing laden with religious instruction, but Abeleyn had always hated the Inceptine tutors, dry men whose imagination was a thing of dust, a storehouse of past aphorisms and never-to-be-questioned rules. It was Golophin who had saved him, who had defused the incipient rebellion in the youngster and coaxed him into an appearance at least of dutiful submission. The wizard’s closeness to the King’s son had been one of the things which had protected him from the malice of the Inceptines when they had tried to rid the court of all vestiges of unorthodoxy and sorcery. The irony was that with the wizard’s pupil at last on the throne, they had finally succeeded. Aekir’s fall, Golophin thought with real bitterness, had been a Godsend to them.

“Speaking of the east,” Abeleyn said conversationally, “how are the Torunnans holding out?”

Golophin tapped his long pipe out delicately on the table. He preferred leaf imported from Ridawan flavoured with cinnamon. The smoking pile of ashes smelled like an essence of the east itself. Abeleyn wondered if there were a tinct of kobhang in the leaf, the mild euphoric that easterners chewed or smoked to fight tiredness and clear their thinking. Golophin made patterns in the ashes with one long, white finger.

“I have been working the bird hard lately. He is tired, and when he is tired he begins to slip away from me, and I receive pictures of the stoop, the kill, blood and feathers drifting in the air. It is said that a tired or a despairing mage will sometimes let his self slip wholly into his familiar and become one with it, leaving his body an empty husk behind him. He glories thereafter in the animal emotions of the creature, and eventually forgets what he once was.”

Golophin smiled thinly.

“My familiar sleeps on a withered tree not far from Ormann Dyke. Today he has seen a hundred thousand people go by, dragging their feet through the mud towards the last Torunnan fortress before the mountains. They have left thousands on the road behind them, and on their flanks the Merduk light cavalry prowl like ghouls. Ormann Dyke itself is in chaos. Half its defenders are taken up with dealing with the refugees, and the land to the west of the dyke resembles an enormous shanty town. The poor folk of Aekir can walk no more. Perhaps they will squat in the rain and await the outcome of another battle before they will have the strength to trek further west. But after Ormann Dyke, where can they go?”

“You believe the dyke will fall,” Abeleyn said.

“I believe the dyke will fall, but more importantly so do its defenders. They feel forsaken by God, and King Lofantyr of Torunna they believe has abandoned them. He has drawn off men of the garrison to defend the capital.”

Abeleyn thumped a fist down on the table, making the beer jump in the flagons. “The damned fool! He should be concentrating all he has at the dyke.”

“He is afraid he will lose all he has,” Golophin said calmly. “There are less than eighteen thousand men left in the garrison, and the Knights Militant have been riding away to the west in large bodies for days. If Shahr Baraz finds more than twelve thousand manning the defences when he arrives I will be surprised. And even leaving troops to garrison Aekir and their supply lines, the Merduk can still put a hundred thousand men before the dyke, probably more.”

“How long do we have before the assault?” Abeleyn asked.

“More time than you might imagine. Sibastion Lejer’s fighting rearguard badly mangled the Hraibadar, the shock-troops of Shahr Baraz’s forces. He will wait for them to come up before launching a serious assault, and with the Western Road in a shambles and the weather showing no sign of changing, his transport will have difficulties moving with the troops. The River Searil is swollen. Once the Torunnans cut the bridges, the Merduks will have to force a river crossing under fire; but the Torunnans will not cut the bridges whilst there are refugees on the eastern bank. If I were the Khedive, I’d wait until the roads improved before I advanced. The refugees are still pouring west, so for the moment time is on his side. That is not to say that his cavalry will not attack the dyke first, before the main body comes up, but the dyke will hold them for a little while. Its defenders are Torunnans, after all.”

Abeleyn nodded absently. “I begin to see that Ormann Dyke is not solely a Torunnan affair. Lofantyr needs troops, needs them desperately. But what do I have to give him, and how could they get there in time? An army would take five or six months to march to the dyke.”

“By sea it might take five weeks, with fair winds or the aid of a weather-worker,” Golophin said.

“By sea?” Abeleyn shook his head. “The navy has its hands full patrolling the Malacar Straits against the corsairs; and then there is Calmar to consider. A western armament sailing into the Levangore would have to contend with the Calmaric Sea-Merduks. They have been quiet since Azbakir, but they would not tolerate an incursion of that size. It would be Azbakir all over again, save we’d be fighting it with transports instead of war-carracks. No, Golophin, unless you can magically spirit a few thousand men halfway across the world there is nothing we can do about the dyke. Lofantyr will love hearing that when I meet him at the conclave. Already he thinks the other monarchies have abandoned Torunna.”

“Perhaps he is right,” the mage said sharply. “There were seven great Kingdoms after the Fimbrian Hegemony ended; now the Merduks have reduced it to five. Will you sit in Abrusio until their elephants come tramping over the Hebros?”

“What would you have me do, teacher?”

Golophin paused, looking suddenly weary. “Teachers do not always know the answers.”

“Nor do kings.” Abeleyn set his brown fingers atop the old mage’s lean wrist and smiled.