‘We are many,’ shouted a voice. ‘And the ships won’t wait. See the sails flying. To remain is to die.’

People burst forward. Fists were bunched. Crazed expressions replaced fear. Auum swayed inside a flailing blow and thumped the heel of his palm into an elven chest. The elf was propelled back into the crowd.

‘Yniss forgive me,’ he whispered.

Miirt dropped and swept the legs from another. She bounced back up to catch a punch in one hand and slam a fist into the chin of the same elf, knocking him senseless. Ghaal blocked a blow aside, paced forward and kicked out straight into the midriff of his opponent. The elf staggered back. Ghaal stepped in, both fists hammering out, taking down two more. Auum, next to him, and Miirt on Auum’s right, moved up as one.

‘We need that casting back,’ called Auum. ‘Tai, let us take the head from this beast. Arrowhead formation. Mind your flanks.’

Halis, his face contorted and reddened with his rage, was standing and shouting not more than ten yards away. Auum moved onto the offensive. He set himself a pace in front of his Tai, freeing his legs. One pace and he spun a kick into the temple of the elf in front of him. He twisted on his standing leg, reversed another kick into the chest of a second. He landed to face the next three. Auum punched the first square on the nose, splitting skin, The next he flattened with a reverse punch to the side of the head and the third pressed himself back into the crowd.

‘Get out of my way,’ hissed Auum.

All the impetus had gone from the surge. Twenty had been downed before the ordinary elf had time to draw breath. Some were unconscious. Any who moved were dragged aside by Al-Arynaar. The weight of the mass pressed against those at its head but none wanted to be next to face the TaiGethen, on whom not a blow had been landed.

A movement right and there was a scream. Auum glanced to see Miirt clutching the wrist of an elf. In his hand a blade dangled. Miirt continued to press. The wrist and two fingers broke. The blade fell.

‘Next elf who shows a weapon dies here and now,’ said Auum. ‘I want Halis. Give him to me or I will come and get him.’

There was a gap of about two paces now between the Tai cell and the crowd. Halis was still calling for attack but the heart had left those of his foot soldiers who stood in the immediate path of his intended targets.

‘I am not in the habit of repeating myself.’

A single arrow hissed from the crowd. Auum jerked his head to the side. The shaft whispered past his ear.

‘The taipan is not quick enough to strike me from cover,’ he said, his blades in his hands, his voice cold. ‘For I do the work of Yniss and my time is not yet come to die. What makes you think you are faster than the deadliest of Tual’s denizens?

‘Bring Halis. Bring him now.’

‘Spell ready. Casting on one.’

The words changed everything.

‘Down,’ said Auum.

The Tai dropped prone. Auum felt the spell come past him. It thudded into the crowd, flashed yellow and steadied. Auum rose to his feet and turned his back on the crowd, whose shouting had begun again in earnest.

‘I want Tai cells to bring in those who are granted passage. I want archers here to fire on anyone who brings down the barrier. Leave Halis. His time is done.’

He turned back to the crowd and walked all the way to the barrier.

‘And now I take my Tai and we will face the Garonin once more. That is how I serve my race, giving you more time to face your fate like elves, not frightened humans.

‘I am prepared still to lay down my life for you. And that is far more than you will ever deserve in this life or in the next. Tai, we move.’

Chapter 9

While much of Xetesk still struggled to recover ten years on from the wars that had all but seen the end of life on Balaia, the college itself had been restored to its opulent original state. The very centre of the college, the Circle Seven, six towers set around that of the Lord of the Mount, had escaped largely undamaged. But buildings of great age and importance had been severely battered or, in the case of the library, destroyed altogether.

‘The shell is complete but inside the hollowness echoes for all we have lost,’ said Denser.

‘Very poetic.’

Ilkar did not turn from the balcony. They were stood at the tower’s highest point. It was the morning after their abortive first meeting and some tempers had cooled considerably. Beyond the grand marble courtyard, on whose borders the other six mage towers stood, he could see library, Mana Bowl, long rooms, refectory, lecture theatres and the massed buildings of the college administration. All wrapped up in the college walls and all shining with recent paint and polished roof tiles.

Outside the college walls, repairs were still not complete on the city’s own defences. Many buildings would never be rebuilt, their stone stripped for use elsewhere. There was poverty in parts of the city. Resentment too but no power with which to act. Smoke from open fires rose into the still sky. To the east, the horizon was obscured by mist.

Rich drapes hung in Denser’s meeting room. Fine-spun rugs lay on the stone floor. Paintings and tapestries hung around the circular walls. Cut glass and gold-inlaid jugs sat on trays on the carved wooden table in the centre of the room around which The Raven sat. A bizarre gathering. The bodies of strangers with the shadows of lovers and friends.

‘I wonder what the criteria are for making it back here,’ said Ilkar ‘We rather hoped you might be able to tell us that,’ said Sol. He was sitting in between Hirad in his merchant’s body and Erienne in her five-year old girl’s.

‘I’m working on it. The trouble is, this whole thing is so essentially wrong I can barely bring myself to believe what I am seeing and feeling. Indeed that I have the capacity to see and feel at all.’

Ilkar gazed down briefly at the body he inhabited. Its previous soul would never have seen the sort of finery on display in Denser’s tower. Ilkar’s soul, bursting into the air over Xetesk, drawn there by the presence and strength of Sol and Denser, had sensed the body immediately and he had reached it before others could take it for their own.

It had been lying sprawled in a narrow alley between the walls of two warehouses. From the attitude of the body, Ilkar had assumed the unfortunate youth had fallen while trying to jump between them. It had been an assumption confirmed by the broken neck, arms and ribs.

He had managed to heal the worst wounds but the pain of the fall was everywhere in the body. Still, it was young and strong, not yet twenty by his reckoning. Human though, and that was fundamentally unpleasant. Like putting on a suit of crawling insects.

‘I have to say that I don’t really understand that,’ said Sol. ‘I realise you are in strange bodies and that there is pain and confusion. But this is a second chance at life. Why is it so bad? Why does Hirad keep on saying he doesn’t want to be here?”

All around the table Ilkar saw the reactions of the dead. And he saw their inability to put their thoughts into words. Hirad looked up at him.

‘Go on, Ilks,’ he said.

‘All right. You see, the trouble is you are using assumptions based on the fact that you are still living. You assume that because of the manner of our deaths we must feel robbed of the life we expected and so would desire a return to finish what we started. Am I right?’

‘Something like that,’ said Sol.

‘Well we don’t. I haven’t spent a moment regretting being dead. And that isn’t a conscious choice; the thought just never occurs.’