only one has happened. Any day of any year, scores of hundreds die in any city
of this size. It’s probable that the spell will work itself out locally; when
there’s a thunderstorm, the lightning strikes beneath it, not a hundred leagues
away. Not inconceivably the other death may be that of someone who was as guilty
as Nizharu in the sack of Forgotten Holt. He had soldiers with him, did he not?’
‘Yes, they were all soldiers, whom I long mistook for bandits …! Oh, what a
pass this land has come to! You’re quite right! I’m going away, as far as I can,
whether or not it means I can outrun my death!’
She caught his hand, gave it a squeeze, and leaned close. ‘Name the ship that I
must look for!’
The day the ship sailed it was unsafe for Enas Yorl to venture on the street;
occasionally the changes working in him cycled into forms that nobody, not with
the kindest will in the world, could mistake for human. He was therefore obliged
to watch the tiring way, making use of a scrying-glass, but he was determined to
make certain that nothing had gone wrong with his scheme.
All turned out well. He tracked the ship, with Jarveena at her stern, until sea
mists obscured her, and then leaned back in what, for the time being, could not
exactly be a chair as most people thought of chairs.
‘And with you no longer around to attract it,’ he murmured to the air, ‘perhaps
luck may lead that second death-sentence to be passed on one who wearies beyond
measure of mad existence, sport of a hundred mindless spells, this miserable,