Caswallon’s fury stunned Maeg, who had never seem him lose control. His face had turned chalk-white, his hands sweeping across the pine table top and smashing pottery to shards.
‘The fool!’ he hissed. ‘How could he do such a thing?’
‘You think the danger is that great from twenty men ?’ Maeg asked softly, ignoring the ruined jugs and goblets.
Caswallon said nothing. Taking his cloak and staff, he left the house and set off in a loping run towards the hills and the cave of Oracle.
Taliesen sealed shut the door to his private chambers and opened a small, hidden recess in the wall. Reaching in he touched a sensor and light bathed the small room, radiating from panels set in the four walls. With another touch he activated the viewer. The oak veneer of his crudely carved desk-top slid back and revealed a dark screen, which rose into a vertical position. Taliesen moved to the rear wall. Scores of paper sheets were pinned to the panelling here, each covered in lines and scrawled with symbols. To the unskilled eye the drawings would appear to be of winter trees, with hundreds of tiny, leafless branches. Taliesen stared at them, remembering the perilous journeys through the Gateways that each represented. Here and there, on every sheet a branch would end with a single stroke drawn through it. By each was a hastily drawn star. Taliesen counted them. Forty-eight. On the desk-top, beside the dark screen, was a newly drawn tree which showed no stars. Taliesen pinned it to the wall.
This was the tree of the Hawk Eternal.
The tree where Sigarni regained her sword that was stolen. Where she did not die in some last despairing battle, but survived to reach the Farlain and save the children. Taliesen gazed at the drawing. ‘Simple to see,’ he said, ‘but where are you? Which of the Time Lines will bring me to you?’
Seating himself before the screen, he opened the right-hand desk drawer and removed a round earring with a spring clip. It was in the shape of a star. Clipping it to his ear, he closed his eyes. The screen flickered, then brightened. Taliesen took a deep, calming breath and opened his eyes.
‘Be careful,” he warned himself. ‘Do not seek to see too much. Concentrate on the minutiae.’ The screen darkened, and with a soft curse Taliesen reached up and touched the star upon his ear, pressing it firmly. The screen leapt to life, and the old druid stared hard at the scene which appeared there.
For more than an hour he watched, occasionally scribbling short notes to aid his memory. Then he removed the earring, touched a button below the desk-top and stood. The screen folded down, the oak veneer covered it once more.
Taliesen studied the notes, adding a line here and there. Rising, he moved to the wall, pinning the notes alongside the tree of the Hawk Eternal. He shook his head. ‘Somewhere there is a rogue element,’ he said, ‘and it has not yet shown its face. What, where and when?’ A thought struck him and his mouth tightened. ‘Or perhaps I should be asking: Who?’ he mused.
‘Pah! Do not be so foolish,’ he told himself. ‘There is no one. You are the Master of the Gates, and the rogue element is a figment of your paranoia. If there was someone you would have found him by now. Or seen greater evidence to point towards him. You are an old fool! The secret lies with the Hawk Eternal – and you will teach him.’
His eyes were drawn to the stars scrawled on the sheets. Focusing on each, he dragged the painful memories from die depths of his mind. The most galling of them was the last. Having defeated Earl
Jastey, Sigarni contracted a fever and died in the night. By Heaven, that was hard to take. Taliesen had all but given up then.
For several months he had made no attempt to scan the Lines, in order to find a new Sigarni. The quest felt hopeless. Yet as he gazed down on the valleys of the Farlain, and at the butchery taking place in the lowlands, he knew he had to struggle on.