The western face of the tower had been built for sunsets.
Whether its first master had intended that effect, Corvyn did not know. He knew very little about the first master, which was one reason he had taken the place.
The window rose from waist height nearly to the vaulted ceiling, three narrow panes of ancient glass set between ribs of black stone. Beyond them, the Pillars fell away into wilderness. Immediately below the tower, a forest of dark fir and twisted oak descended the mountainside in successive black-green folds, already filling with evening. Northward, beyond the trees, the land climbed again into an immense barren tableland, rust-red beneath the setting sun, scarred by gullies and enormous shelves of naked stone.
Two stone giants stood on that distant plateau.
At this range they were scarcely more than moving uprights against the red earth. One stooped, lifted something from the ground and hurled it. Several heartbeats later the other raised both hands and caught the boulder against its chest.
The second giant threw it back.
Corvyn watched without interest.
He was looking for a raven.
Behind him the laboratory breathed.
Water dripped through a copper tube into one of the aquaria. Something pale moved beneath duckweed. A bank of terraria occupied an entire wall, each enclosure holding its own small and private world. One contained only a deep layer of loamy earth, its surface unbroken except for a dark hole descending into the soil. Another held a blue lizard with six legs and eyes that never blinked.
Shelves bowed beneath bottles, bones, books, jars of preserved organs, pinned insects and trays of fungi. Several cultures emitted a weak green light. In a brass cage hanging from a chain near the ceiling, a small mammalian thing with translucent ears slept curled around itself.
At the far end of the room stood a black wooden door.
It had no handle on this side.
Beside it, on the floor, was a porcelain saucer on which lay three pieces of raw meat.
Corvyn never looked at the door.
Faelyn did.
He stood near one of the fungus tables, his head slightly inclined, listening.
Not to Corvyn.
Not, apparently, to anything in the room.
His long dark hair hung loose around his face. One hand hovered a few inches above a culture of white fungus that opened and closed in slow pulses.
“You'll poison yourself,” Corvyn said.
Faelyn continued staring at the fungus.
“You always say that.”
“I have never said that.”
“You will.”
Corvyn sighed and returned his attention to the sky.
Nocturnis was late.
The sun had reached the final notch between two western peaks. Its light entered the laboratory almost horizontally, staining the black stone red. Bottles glowed amber. The water in the aquaria became molten copper.
Corvyn's reflection appeared faintly in the glass.
He studied it.
“My mother was frightened of me when I was a boy.”
Faelyn said nothing.
Corvyn smiled slightly.
“She concealed it very well.”
Still nothing.
“I don't think Whistler ever frightened her.”
That earned the smallest movement from Faelyn. His eyes shifted toward Corvyn, but only briefly.
“Fergus certainly didn't. Even as an infant he had the look of someone quietly studying a trail the rest of us had failed to notice.”
A faint sound came from Faelyn.
It might have been amusement.
Corvyn folded his hands behind his back.
“I was different.”
* * *
The owl had been sitting on the branch above him.
Corvyn was eight.
Perhaps nine.
He remembered the color of the afternoon better than anything else: wet green leaves after rain, little drops of water flashing in sunlight, the rich smell of mud beneath the trees.
The owl stared down at him.
Corvyn stared back.
He had been experimenting all morning.
There was a sensation he had discovered behind his fingers—not in them exactly, but somewhere beyond them, as though his hands possessed joints invisible to everyone else.
He raised one finger.
Turned something.
Pressed.
The owl became fire.
There was no thunderclap. No dramatic burst.
One moment there was a living bird.
The next there was orange flame, feathers curling inward, wings opening once in reflex.
It fell.
Corvyn stared at the smoking thing on the ground.
Then he laughed.
Not because the owl had died.
Because it had worked.
He dropped to his knees beside it, delighted beyond language.
Behind an elm twenty paces away, Magda stood very still.
Her son did not know she was there.
For perhaps half a minute she watched him poke carefully at what remained of the owl with a stick.
Her face was full of sorrow.
Then she stepped from behind the tree.
“Corvyn.”
The boy spun.
His expression changed immediately.
“Mother.”
Magda approached him.
She looked down at the owl.
Then at her son.
She did not raise her voice.
She never raised her voice.
“What did you do?”
Corvyn's excitement returned.
“I found it.”
“What did you find?”
“The way.”
He held up both hands eagerly.
“There's something here. I can turn it.”
Magda looked at his fingers.
Then she crouched beside him.
“And did the owl wish to burn?”
His smile faltered.
He looked at the body.
“No.”
“Then remember this, my love,” Magda said gently. “Being able to do a thing is not the same as having the right to do it.”
She brushed damp hair from his forehead.
Corvyn leaned into the touch.
Behind her tenderness, something in Magda's eyes remained afraid.
* * *
“The owl knew first,” Faelyn said.
Corvyn blinked.
The laboratory returned around him.
“What?”
Faelyn had turned away from the fungus. He was staring at the ceiling now.
“The owl.”
“Yes. I gathered that part.”
“It knew before she did.”
Corvyn waited.
Faelyn's eyes moved as though following something crawling across the stone overhead.
“Knew what?”
“That you were coming.”
Corvyn considered this.
“No.”
Faelyn shrugged.
“The owl disagrees.”
“The owl has been dead for thirty years.”
“That doesn't prevent disagreement.”
Corvyn turned back to the window.
This was not among the ten strangest conversations he had ever had with Faelyn.
“Mother never understood what to do with me,” he said.
“She loved you.”
“Yes.”
There was no bitterness in the answer.
Corvyn's voice softened.
“She did.”
A long pause.
“She still does.”
Faelyn began pressing one fingertip rhythmically against the glass of a terrarium.
Corvyn watched the forest darken.
“Fergus was still an infant when I left.”
He remembered Magda holding the child wrapped against her breast. Fergus had possessed an absurd quantity of red hair even then.
Corvyn had been young, ambitious and certain that Lex Regnum contained every answer worth knowing.
Magda had kissed him before he left.
Twice.
Once on each cheek.
Then a third time on the forehead when she thought he was no longer paying attention.
She had cried only after he was gone.
Corvyn knew because he had doubled back for a book.
He had never told her.
“Lex Regnum,” he said.
The name lingered pleasantly in his mouth.
Even now.
“The first time I saw it, I thought I had finally found civilization.”
Faelyn snorted.
“Compared with the Enchanters.”
“That is not a demanding comparison.”
“You had plumbing.”
“We had libraries.”
“You had plumbing.”
“We had both.”
Faelyn conceded this with a slight tilt of his head.
Corvyn smiled.
“And then Whistler arrived.”
The smile faded.
Not entirely.
“He was nineteen years behind me in wisdom and approximately three centuries ahead of me in his estimation of himself.”
“He was young.”
“So was I.”
“You weren't.”
Corvyn looked over his shoulder.
Faelyn was now watching one of the aquaria from approximately an inch away.
“I was twenty.”
“You were born forty-seven.”
“That may be true.”
Corvyn looked outward again.
“When Whistler came to Lex Regnum, Mother asked me to look after him.”
Faelyn said nothing.
“I did.”
There was an edge now beneath Corvyn's low, beautiful voice.
“I did rather more than he ever knew.”
* * *
The boy from the Bard College had waited outside Whistler's lodging with three friends and two lengths of chain.
Corvyn had known about it two days beforehand.
Whistler had never known anything at all.
The following morning, three of the young men awoke naked in a fountain on the Forum of the Seven Virtues.
The fourth did not wake for another day.
None remembered how they had gotten there.
Corvyn attended lectures as usual.
Whistler complained over supper that his rival had inexplicably withdrawn from the competition.
Corvyn buttered his bread.
* * *
There had been Professor Marcellian.
Marcellian had cultivated promising students.
Especially attractive ones.
Especially those without important Imperial families.
Whistler had found the professor “charming.”
Corvyn found the man's private correspondence.
Three days later Marcellian resigned from the Bard College and departed Lex Regnum before dawn.
Whistler remarked that academics were an unstable breed.
Corvyn agreed.
* * *
“There were others,” Corvyn said.
Faelyn had wandered to the black door.
He stood with his ear almost touching it.
“People disliked Whistler?”
“Of course people disliked Whistler.”
“Why?”
Corvyn looked at him.
“Have you met Whistler?”
Faelyn considered that seriously.
“Yes.”
“There you are.”
Something bumped softly against the other side of the black door.
Faelyn moved away.
Corvyn continued.
“He thought Lex Regnum loved him.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.”
That answer came quickly.
Corvyn's jaw tightened.
“Mostly.”
A pause.
“He never noticed the things that hated him.”
Faelyn's attention returned abruptly to Corvyn.
“You noticed.”
Corvyn looked again toward the west.
“Someone had to.”
The last edge of the sun touched the horizon.
For several seconds neither spoke.
Then Corvyn laughed softly.
“The ridiculous thing is that I was proud of him.”
Faelyn said, “That isn't ridiculous.”
“At the time it seemed so.”
“You were proud of him.”
“Yes.”
“And jealous.”
“Yes.”
“And angry.”
“Yes.”
“And you loved him.”
Corvyn's eyes shifted toward Faelyn.
Faelyn was no longer looking at him.
“I didn't say that.”
“No.”
Silence.
“You usually don't.”
Corvyn's mouth tightened.
Then relaxed.
“There was an experiment.”
Faelyn smiled.
It was not a pleasant smile.
“Ah.”
“Yes. Ah.”
* * *
The lecture chamber at the Imperial Arcane College was full enough to matter: masters, senior students, visiting scholars, and rivals who had come partly to learn and partly to watch Corvyn fail.
He had spent nearly a year developing the method. The principle was displacement—not transportation and certainly not summoning, which Corvyn regarded as vulgar words for vulgar arts. His aim was to prove that matter could be shifted briefly outside ordinary space and recalled without loss of structure.
Three nested rings of engraved electrum surrounded a waist-high platform. Six calibrated mirrors stood at exact angles, and silver filaments ran from the apparatus to glass vessels suspended overhead. A student named Lucan served as Corvyn's assistant: clever, eager, a little frightened of him, and therefore unusually attentive. Corvyn liked him.
The demonstration began precisely as planned. For twelve seconds the rings turned in perfect relation and the suspended vessels brightened with a pale interior glow.
On the thirteenth second, the inner ring stopped while the outer two continued moving.
Corvyn heard the failure before he understood it—a wrong note in the field, almost below hearing.
“Stop,” he said.
Lucan turned toward him just as the platform flashed.
For an instant the young man seemed to blur. Then everything above his hips ceased to occupy the room.
There was no explosion and almost no blood. That made it worse. Lucan's legs remained upright for one impossible moment before collapsing onto the platform.
The chamber erupted. Someone screamed; a professor shouted for a healer; another rushed toward the apparatus and reached for one of the turning rings.
Corvyn struck the man across the face hard enough to send him backward. “Touch that again and you'll kill him.”
The room went still.
From somewhere inside the apparatus came a faint voice.
“Master?”
Corvyn froze. The voice was Lucan's, but it seemed to come from behind the mirrors, inside the metal, and from every corner of the chamber at once.
“Lucan.”
“Master? I can't see.”
Corvyn moved to the controls. His hands worked through angles and correspondences no one else could perceive, feeling along the invisible joints of the field and trying to find where it had folded in on itself.
Lucan began to sob. “I don't know where I am.”
“Do not move,” Corvyn said, forcing steadiness into his voice. “Whatever you think you feel, do not move.”
“Please.”
Corvyn's fingers trembled once. He hid it by changing his grip.
Then another voice entered the room, calm and warm enough that everyone turned toward it.
“Lucan?”
Whistler stood at the back of the lecture chamber. He had come to watch his brother's triumph and found instead a room full of terror.
Lucan heard him. “Who's that?”
“My name is Whistler.”
“I can't see you.”
“That is probably for the best. I am dressed terribly.”
A few frightened laughs escaped the room before anyone could stop them.
Corvyn glared at his brother. Whistler ignored him.
“Can you hear me clearly, Lucan?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then listen to me. Nothing else.”
Whistler came closer but stopped well outside the apparatus. While Corvyn worked, Whistler talked to Lucan about anything that required no courage to discuss: the weather, an appalling breakfast, a soprano at the Bard College who believed volume could substitute for talent. Once, Lucan managed a weak laugh. A moment later he gasped in pain.
“Stay with me,” Whistler said.
Corvyn found the break at last. The displacement field had folded inward on itself like fabric caught in a hinge. It could be repaired, but only if he reopened the line without widening it.
“Lucan,” Whistler said softly, “I'm going to sing.”
“Don't,” Corvyn said.
Whistler looked at him. “Why?”
“I need to hear the field.”
Whistler understood at once. Instead of singing, he lowered his voice into a slow, rhythmic cadence—not quite music, but steady enough to give Lucan something to follow while Corvyn worked.
Corvyn turned an invisible mechanism with both hands.
The apparatus screamed. Lucan screamed with it. Then the field snapped back into alignment and returned him all at once.
He struck the platform hard. His body was whole again, but his right arm bent backward below the elbow, one eye had clouded white, and his skin had taken on the gray cast of someone pulled too quickly from deep water.
He was alive.
Corvyn dropped beside him. “Lucan.”
The boy looked first at Corvyn, then past him toward Whistler.
Whistler knelt on the other side. “You're here.”
Lucan began to cry.
The healers later said he would live. His arm would never work properly again, and the eye was lost.
By the next morning the story had spread through Lex Regnum. People did not remember Corvyn's calculations, the complexity of the reversal, or the fact that he had pulled Lucan back from a place none of the assembled masters could even define. They remembered Whistler's voice and the terrified student answering him from nowhere.
Three days later a senior magister stopped Corvyn beneath the eastern colonnade.
“You were fortunate,” the man said, nodding toward Whistler as he crossed the courtyard with two Bard College students. “To have your brother there.”
Corvyn said nothing.
When Whistler later heard about the remark, he became furious on Corvyn's behalf. “My brother brought Lucan back,” he said. “I merely kept him company.”
That defense was sincere. Somehow, that made the humiliation worse.
* * *
“I nearly killed the magister,” Corvyn said.
Faelyn frowned.
“The student?”
“No. The magister.”
“Why?”
“I have just explained why.”
“No. You've explained why you wanted to.”
Corvyn turned.
Faelyn was staring directly at him now.
For once entirely present.
“Whistler defended you.”
“Yes.”
“He gave you the credit.”
“Yes.”
“And you hated him for it.”
Corvyn's eyes hardened.
“I hated that he could afford to.”
Faelyn considered this.
Then nodded.
“That is better.”
“Better?”
“More honest.”
Corvyn turned back toward the window.
The sun had disappeared.
Only the afterglow remained, turning the northern highlands the color of dried blood.
“And then came the concert.”
He did not need to explain which one.
Whistler's graduation.
The great auditorium of the Bard College.
Ten years of study compressed into a single night.
Corvyn had sat among graduates and scholars in formal robes while his brother walked alone onto the stage.
Whistler had not been perfect.
That would have been easier.
He had been alive.
The whole hall seemed to move with him.
He sang.
He played.
He joked with the audience.
He became solemn and made them solemn.
He made strangers cry.
Then laugh.
Then hold their breath.
And at the end, when Whistler lowered his instrument, there had been one heartbeat of impossible silence.
Then the auditorium rose.
Thousands of people.
Standing.
Shouting.
Whistler looked almost embarrassed.
Almost.
He bowed.
Corvyn applauded with everyone else.
And somewhere within him something small and ugly finally broke.
Faelyn said:
“You sent for me the next morning.”
“Yes.”
“You had not slept.”
“No.”
“You said you wanted him gone.”
Corvyn's voice became quiet.
“I wanted the world to stop carrying him.”
Faelyn considered that.
“For how long?”
Corvyn did not answer.
Faelyn smiled faintly.
“You never said.”
“No.”
“I found the men.”
Corvyn's eyes remained on the darkening sky.
“Yes.”
“Two intermediaries. Then the traders. Then the drow.”
“The drow were not part of my original preference.”
“No.”
“You appeared delighted by them.”
“I was.”
“I remember.”
“They were efficient.”
“They were slavers.”
Faelyn shrugged.
“They were efficient slavers.”
Corvyn closed his eyes briefly.
Faelyn continued, almost conversationally.
“You said they were not to kill him.”
“Yes.”
“Not to cripple him.”
“Yes.”
“Not to damage his hands.”
Corvyn looked back.
“I was very specific about that.”
“You were.”
“Or his voice.”
“You were especially specific about that.”
Corvyn turned once more toward the window.
“And then they took him.”
“Yes.”
Faelyn's voice changed.
Just slightly.
“You sold your brother to drow.”
Corvyn gave a low laugh.
“Don't become moral at this late hour, Faelyn. It doesn't suit you.”
“What did you think would happen?”
“I knew exactly what would happen.”
Faelyn waited.
Corvyn smiled.
“I imagined Whistler trudging miserably through the Underdark, talking.”
Faelyn frowned.
“Talking.”
“Ceaselessly.”
The smile widened.
“To guards. To prisoners. To mushrooms, if no one else was available.”
Faelyn's mouth twitched.
“Within three days one captor would like him. Within five another would hate that captor for liking him. Within a week Whistler would know everyone's grievances, ambitions, secret lovers and preferred songs.”
Corvyn turned from the window.
His eyes were bright.
“Eventually someone would make the mistake of giving him an instrument.”
Faelyn laughed.
Corvyn laughed with him.
For several seconds they were simply two souls remembering something terrible.
Then the laughter thinned.
Corvyn said quietly:
“I knew no one could silence that voice for long.”
Something passed across his face.
Not quite guilt.
Not quite grief.
“I do gain some measure of satisfaction, imagining him wandering along in the darkness, his confidence failing. ‘What do I do now?’” Corvyn smiled briefly, but then frowned. ‘I've since heard he's back. Singing his way home from the Empire.”
“He has someone with him.”
“So I've heard.”
“A dwarf.”
“A strange companion.”
“Very strange.”
Corvyn looked at Faelyn.
“Do you know him?”
Faelyn shook his head.
“No.”
A shadow crossed the window.
Corvyn froze.
Faelyn did too.
There came one hard strike against the glass.
Then another.
A raven clung to the outer sill.
“Nocturnis.”
Corvyn opened the window.
Cold mountain air entered the laboratory.
The raven hopped inside.
Faelyn immediately stepped backward.
Nocturnis looked at him.
Faelyn took another step.
The raven cocked its head.
“No,” Faelyn said.
Nocturnis hopped toward him.
“Don't.”
Another hop.
Faelyn backed into the wall.
Both hands pressed flat against the stone.
Nocturnis opened his beak.
In Faelyn's own voice, perfectly reproduced, he said:
“Mother!”
Faelyn went pale.
Corvyn laughed.
“Nocturnis.”
The raven gave a satisfied croak and flew to Corvyn.
He did not land on Corvyn's shoulder.
He landed on his ear.
Tiny claws gripped carefully against hair and flesh.
The raven leaned forward.
Its beak touched Corvyn's cheek.
And whispered.
Faelyn watched.
Corvyn did not move.
Nocturnis whispered for perhaps half a minute.
Once Corvyn's eyes narrowed.
Once he looked toward the north.
Then Nocturnis stopped.
Corvyn's face remained absolutely still.
The raven stepped down onto his shoulder.
“Well?” Faelyn asked.
Nothing.
“What did he see?”
Corvyn continued looking toward the northern highlands.
At last he said:
“Three travelers.”
Faelyn waited.
“Drow?”
“Two. The third was human.”
“Where?”
Corvyn raised one hand and pointed through the glass.
“Beyond the red plateau. North by northeast. There is an escarpment below a split ridge.”
Faelyn's expression changed.
“There is nothing there.”
“So everyone believes.”
Nocturnis gave a small croak.
Corvyn smiled.
“They reached the cliff at dusk. One of them touched five points in the stone.”
He demonstrated with his fingertips against the window.
“Then?”
“The rock opened.”
Faelyn's eyes sharpened.
“A gate?”
“A passage.”
“To where?”
Corvyn glanced at the raven.
“Down.”
“How far did he follow?”
“Far enough to see stairs.”
“Drow stairs?”
“Worked black stone. Old.”
Faelyn was silent.
Corvyn continued.
“There were markings above the descent.”
“What markings?”
“Nocturnis does not read.”
The raven pecked Corvyn's ear.
“Apparently this offends him.”
Faelyn almost smiled.
“But he listens,” Corvyn said.
Now his voice had changed.
The amusement was gone.
“They spoke before entering.”
Faelyn stepped away from the wall.
“What did they say?”
“Not much. One complained that the route should have been abandoned.”
“And the other?”
“Said it remained safe so long as they kept clear of the lower galleries.”
Faelyn waited.
Corvyn turned.
“The galleries of the Unmade Prince.”
For once Faelyn's face became entirely blank.
“Vheldrin.”
Corvyn said nothing.
Nocturnis shifted on his shoulder.
Faelyn looked toward the northern highlands.
“You don't know that.”
“No.”
“It could mean someone else.”
“Yes.”
“It could be nothing.”
“Yes.”
Faelyn watched him.
Corvyn's expression had become almost serene.
“That is why I am going.”
“To the entrance.”
“To what lies beyond it.”
Faelyn's eyes moved once toward the black door.
Then back.
“What if you find nothing?”
Corvyn gave him a tired glance.
“What if the moon is an egg and dragons are real?”
Faelyn stopped moving.
His eyes shifted toward some point behind Corvyn.
Corvyn immediately regretted the sentence.
“What?”
Faelyn whispered:
“They didn't crawl out.”
Corvyn stared at him.
“What didn't?”
“The dragons.”
A long silence.
Faelyn's face had become distant again.
“They were called.”
Corvyn waited.
Nothing more came.
He exhaled through his nose.
“Of course they were.”
He looked toward Nocturnis.
The raven blinked.
Then Corvyn smiled.
“Well.”
Faelyn's attention returned.
“Well what?”
Corvyn adjusted one cuff.
“I'm going to tell Mother.”
Faelyn frowned.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“I don't want to.”
“I didn't ask.”
Corvyn raised both hands.
His fingers moved.
Not like a sorcerer weaving a spell.
Like a machinist operating controls only he could see.
He turned something between thumb and forefinger.
Pressed an invisible switch.
Reached to his left and drew down a lever that did not exist.
Faelyn immediately pushed himself harder against the wall.
“Oh, no.”
Corvyn rotated his wrist.
Some unseen mechanism clicked.
Light appeared beneath his fingertips.
Nocturnis settled comfortably against his neck.
Faelyn pointed at him.
“Don't you dare.”
Corvyn pulled another invisible control.
The edges of his body began to shimmer.
Faelyn's did too.
“I hate when you—”
The laboratory flashed white.
They vanished.
Silence returned.
Water dripped into the aquarium.
A translucent-eared animal stirred in its cage.
Behind the black door, something dragged the porcelain saucer slowly across the floor.
Outside, beneath the first stars, one stone giant caught the boulder.
It staggered backward.
Then threw it home.
