Fall of Angels

XLXIV

HISSL PACES ACROSS the small room, then peers out the window toward the river and the stubbled fields that lie beyond. Although the sun glints off the puddles in the fields, the sky is turning the bluer green-blue that presages winter. The wizard looks away from the distant points of glare and paces back toward the table.

“Nothing! We sit here and wait. And Terek meets with Lord Sillek while I rot here.”

He paces back across the small room, passing the table and the screeing glass again, then back to the window. The distant puddles still throw glare at him.

Finally, he seats himself at the table that holds the flat mirrorlike glass. He concentrates. The white mists swirl. He concentrates until the sweat beads on his forehead, although the room is pleasantly cool, filled with the scents from the bakery up the street, and the hum of conversations.

At last, the image appears-that of a black tower, with a second, and lower, building rising beside it, already roofed with the same black slate tiles that cover the taller tower. A short, stone-walled causeway leads to the tower and to a heavy door banded together with strips of metal-not iron, but some metal Hissl does not recognize, though it feels like iron through the glass.

Farther uphill, the angels, some in black and others in leathers, are digging a long ditch in a line that leads toward the tower. On the uphill portion of the ditch, the black mage and an angel are placing lengths of stone in the trench. There is a trough filled with what might be mortar beside the stones.

Hissl squints and tries to focus the image, but the best he can do is catch a glimpse of a section of rock that appearsto have a deep trench gouged in it. He slumps back into the chair.

“Black angels and a black mage.” He shivers for a moment. No lord he knows could have built a tower like that, and not in a mere two seasons. Yet the black mage who lives with the angels has done so, and the mage has done other things, as well, things that Hissl does not understand.

“Still, they have not felt the winter, and the number of cairns grows. By spring …” He raises his eyebrows and smiles.

In the spring and early summer, Ildyrom and his people will be busy planting. Hissl nods to himself.