terms, and under those terms Kitty’s supporters in the Rankan capital had
employed him to come down here and play Hell Hound and see what he would do.
There were no wars, anywhere. He had been bored, his days stretching out never
ending, bleak. So he had concerned himself with Kitty, for something to do. The
building of Vashanka’s temple he oversaw for himself more than Kadakithis, who
understood the necessity of elevating the state cult above the Ilsig gods, but
believed only in wizardry, and his noble Ranke blood.
He was not happy about the spectacle at Vashanka’s Weapon-shop. Sloppy business,
this side-show melting and unmelting. The archmage must have been talented, to
make his struggles visible to those outside.
Wisdom is to know the thought which steers all things through all things, a
friend of his who was a philosopher had once said to him. The thought that was
steering all things through Sanctuary was muddled, unclear.
That was the hitch, the catch, the problem with employing the supernatural in a
natural milieu. Things got confused. With so many spells at work, the fabric of
causality was overly strained. Add the gods, and Evil and Good faced each other
across a board game whose extent was the phenomenal world. He wished the gods
would stay in their heavens and the sorcerers in their hells.
Oh, he had heard endless persiflage about simultaneity; iteration – the constant
redefining of the now by checking it against the future-; alchemical laws of
consonance. When he had been a student of philosophy and Cime had been a maiden,