course if you tell anybody I said that, I’ll deny it.’
‘Naturally.’
‘All right, what should I do about it?’
Sparhawk remembered something then. ‘There’s a Vicar in a poor church in Borrata,’ he said. ‘He’s probably the closest thing to a saint I’ve ever seen, and I didn’t even get his name. Berit knows what it is though. Disguise some investigators as beggars and send them down to Cammoria to observe him. He’s exactly the kind of man you need.’
‘Why not just send for him?’
‘He’d be too tongue-tied to speak to you, Sarathi. He’s what they had in mind when they coined the word “humble”. Besides, he’d never leave his flock. If you order him to Chyrellos and then send him to Rendor, he’ll probably die within six months. He’s that kind of man.’
Dolmant’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. ‘You trouble me, Sparhawk,’ he said. ‘You trouble me. That’s the ideal we all had when we took holy orders.’ He sighed. ‘How did we all get so far away from it?’
‘You got too much involved in the world, Dolmant,’ Sparhawk told him gently. ‘The Church has to live in the world, but the world corrupts her much faster than she can redeem it.’
‘What’s the answer to that problem, Sparhawk?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Sarathi. Maybe there isn’t any.’
‘Sparhawk.’ It was his daughter’s voice, and it was somehow inside his head. He was passing through the nave of the Basilica, and he quickly knelt as if in prayer to cover what he was really doing.
‘What is it, Aphrael?’ he asked silently.
‘You don’t have to genuflect to me, Sparhawk.’ Her voice was amused.
‘I’m not. If they catch me walking through the corridors holding long conversations with somebody who isn’t there, they’ll lock me up in an asylum.’
‘You look very reverential in that position, though. I’m touched.’
‘Was there something significant, or are you just amusing yourself?’
‘Sephrenia wants to talk with you again.’
‘All right. I’m in the nave right now. Come down and meet me here. We’ll go up to the cupola again.’
‘I’ll meet you up there.’
‘There’s only one stairway leading up there, Aphrael. We have to climb it.’
‘You might have to, but I don’t. I don’t like going into the nave, Sparhawk. I always have to stop and talk with your God, and He’s so tedious most of the time.’
Sparhawk’s mind shuddered back from the implications of that.
The dried-out wooden stairs circling up to the top of the dome still shrieked their protest as Sparhawk mounted. It was a long climb, and he was winded when he reached the top.
‘What took you so long?’ Danae asked him. She wore a simple white smock. It was a little-girl sort of dress, so no one seemed to even notice that its cut was definitely Styric.
‘You enjoy saying things like that to me, don’t you?’ Sparhawk accused.
‘I’m only teasing, father,’ she laughed.
‘I hope no one saw you coming up here. I don’t think the world’s ready for a flying princess just yet.’
‘No one saw me, Sparhawk. I’ve done this before, you know. Trust me.’
‘Do I have any choice? Let’s get to work. I’ve still got a lot left to do today if we’re going to leave tomorrow morning.’
She nodded and sat cross-legged near one of the huge bells. She lifted her face again and raised that flute-like trill. Then her voice drifted off, and her face went blank.
‘Where have you been?’ Sephrenia asked, opening Danae’s eyes to stare at her pupil.
He sighed. ‘If you two don’t stop that, I’m going to go into another line of work.’
‘Has Aphrael been teasing you again?’ she asked.
‘Of course she has. Did you know that she can fly?’
‘I’ve never seen her do it, but I’d assumed she could.’
‘What did you want to see me about?’
‘I’ve been hearing disturbing rumours. The northern Atans have been seeing some very large, shaggy creatures in the forests near their north coast.’
‘So that’s where they went.’
‘Don’t be cryptic, dear one.’
‘Komier sent word to Ulath. It seems that the Trolls have all left Thalesia.’
‘The Trolls!’ she exclaimed. ‘They wouldn’t do that! Thalesia’s their ancestral home!’
‘Maybe you’d better go tell the Trolls about that. Komier swears that there’s not a single one of them left in Thalesia.’
‘Something very, very strange is going on here, Sparhawk.’
‘Ambassador Oscagne said more or less the same thing. Can the Styrics there at Sarsos make any sense out of it yet?’
‘No. Zalasta’s at his wits’ end.’
‘Have you come up with any idea at all of who’s behind it?’
‘Sparhawk, we don’t even know what’s behind it. We can’t even make a guess about the species of whatever it is.’
‘We sort of keep coming back to the idea that it’s the Troll-Gods again. Something had to have enough authority over the Trolls to command them to leave Thalesia, and that points directly at the Troll Gods. Are we absolutely sure that they haven’t managed to get loose?’
‘It’s not a good idea to discount any possibility when you’re dealing with Gods, Sparhawk. I don’t know the spell Ghwerig used when he put them inside the Bhelliom, so I don’t know if it can be broken.’
‘Then it is possible.’
‘That’s what I just said, dear one. Have you seen that shadow – or the cloud – lately?’
‘No.’
‘Has Aphrael ever seen it?’
‘No.’
‘She could tell you, but I’d rather not have her exposed to whatever it is. Perhaps we can come up with a way to lure it out when you get here so that I can take a look at it. When are you leaving?’
‘First thing tomorrow morning. Danae sort of told me that she can play with time the way she did when we were marching to Acie with Wargun’s army. That would get us there faster, but can she do it as undetectably now as she did when she was Flute?’
The bell behind the motionless form of his daughter gave a deep, soft-toned sound. ‘Why don’t you ask me, Sparhawk?’ Danae’s voice hummed in the bell-sound. ‘It’s not as if I weren’t here, you know.’
‘How was I supposed to know that?’ He waited. ‘Well?’ he asked the still-humming bell. ‘Can you?’
‘Well, of course I can, Sparhawk.’ The Child Goddess sounded irritated. ‘Don’t you know anything?’
‘That will do,’ Sephrenia chided.
‘He’s such a lump.’
‘Aphrael! I said that will do! You will not be disrespectful to your father.’ A faint smile touched the lips of the apparently somnolent little princess.