Departure

Ryel slept little and badly after that day. Even though the voice did not torment him again, it had destroyed his powers of concentration and his desire for study. The wysard found himself wasting that most precious of his possessions, time. He would sit for hours at his great window that opened onto the Aqqar, watching mist succeed mist, waiting for he knew not what, anxious in his heart for reasons he could not explain. No human form came out of the mist during his watching, nor did he expect it; during the twelve years since his admittance into Markul only three aspirants had emerged from the fog and approached the eastern gates to petition for entry. One of them had been turned away for a madwoman and another for a fool, and the third had lived only months after entering the gates.

Our numbers were ever few, Ryel thought as he looked down at the ground just outside the walls, at the scattered clusters of garments and belongings, most of them wonderfully rich, left behind by those who had been taken into the city. Some hundreds of souls; never more than two hundred at any time. And save for myself, all old, old—Lord Katen the oldest since Lord Srinnoul's death, with his century and a half, or two hundred years if one counts by the reckoning of the World. In Markulit reckoning I am but twelve, not much less than the age I'd attained in the World when I came to this place; and now I feel as if I have lived both lives in a void.

His impenetrable eyes rested on the humblest of the garment-heaps, one made up of the common gear of a Steppes horseman—a side-fastened shirt of heavy undyed linen, embroidered in Rismai designs at the cuffs and collar and hem by his mother's hands; a long fawn-colored coat belted at the waist, the skirts vented deep for riding; soft leather leggings, and supple riding-boots that might be drawn up above the knee or downgathered in folds around the calf. Next to these garments were Jinn's saddlebags, containing things Ryel had cherished or thought needful. Such was the Mastery girding Markul that despite the eternal damp, each of these objects was as whole and unweathered as the day he had flung it from him, as indeed was everything left by others.