Arnoll lay on a low bier amidst the herbs and flowers of the hospital’s courtyard garden. The spiky purple blooms of thistle nodded on their long stems beside the smith’s left cheek, while the yellow petals of buttercups tapped the toes of his boots. The drone of contented bees murmured in the sunlit space, and the green scent of crushed sage threaded the warm air. The physicians had tidied him, but Gael had insisted he retain his smith’s garb. Arnoll’s rank of opteon entitled him to ornate robes, such as those the castellanum wore, or even a warrior’s equipage.

Gael had declined such flourishes for his friend. A smith’s calling bore more honor by far than the legionaries who killed on the field of battle, the officers who commanded them, or the elite who ruled them.

Gael stood alone by the bier under the noontide sun, grateful for the moment of solitude.

He’d seen all tidy in the smithy, stationed the guard Uwen beside the still-cooling gong, and followed the hospital scullions carrying Arnoll on their litter.

Looking down at his friend—clothed in fresh tunic, trews, and apron; gray hair combed and rebraided; features composed—Gael perceived the same dignity and nobility of character he’d noted in the smithy. There was no better troll in all Belzetarn. No, in all the north. No, Gael would venture farther even than that. There was no better man.

“I should be lying there,” Gael muttered. He’d not believed Nathiar’s assessment in the smithy, but he believed it now. If he’d beaten Arnoll to the strike that defanged the gong’s curse, it would have been him lying on this bier in the hospital herb garden. It should have been. Arnoll had preserved Gael’s life upon Gael’s entrance into Belzetarn. Now he’d done so again. Gael wished it were the other way round—that he’d saved Arnoll. Arnoll was the better of them.

But Arnoll was dead.

And Gael was alive.

He hated that. And hated almost as much that Arnoll’s legacy would be utterly forgotten. If only he could be buried with all honor in the crypts of Hadorgol, the story of the unswerving protection he granted to those he perceived as vulnerable engraved on a tablet beside the niche where his sarcophagus lay. But it was neither possible nor the way of trolls. Arnoll would receive a funeral pyre, honor enough in Belzetarn. Gael lay the bouquet of white roses the physicians had allowed him to pluck from their gardens on Arnoll’s breast.

Unlike Gael, Arnoll had found a way to an unbroken loyalty, perhaps because he assumed the mantle of protector, but accepted that some would lie outside his ability to protect. Arnoll had committed fully to the well-being of his immediate neighbors—the scullions and decanens under him in his smithy, his fellow opteons at the other forges and their underlings, then spiraling outward to include the denizens of Belzetarn and all the trolls under Carbraes—but no further.

Gael doubted he could ever achieve the integrity of his friend, but surely he could spend the rest of his life trying to. It remained the only real way—beyond funerary rites and empty ritual—to honor Arnoll, the only true way to continue his legacy.

“Whenever I must choose between the lesser of two evils, I will think of you, and seek a third way,” he vowed.

He bent to kiss Arnoll’s brow, and turned away.

Passing through the hospital, he thanked Medicus Piar for the opportunity to make his farewell to Arnoll in private.

Traversing the artisans’ yard, on his way to the bailey gatehouse and the brig—to Keir—he was snagged by one of the regenen’s many messenger boys.

“My lord Secretarius,” panted the boy. “The lord Regenen requires you to attend upon him instantly!”

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Nathiar came and knelt beside Gael as he sat on the smithy floor at Arnoll’s side.

The magus had doffed his smith’s apron and left the gong on the curved surface of the massive stone block to finish its slow air cooling after its swift water quenching. The dying glow from the forge spilled over the scene, far less fierce than when fed by the bellows, although its coals still exuded a gentle heat.

Nathiar brushed Arnoll’s staring eyes closed and let his hand rest on Gael’s shoulder.

Gael straightened his friend’s body, shifting him from his side onto his back, placing his arms crossed on his chest. A certain dignity lay on Arnoll’s face, as though he confronted . . . what? A magistrate’s final assessment? His god’s judgment? Something like that.

A stab of pain twinged in Gael’s breast.

Nathiar spoke. “He saved your life, you know.”

Gael shook his head, said lowly, “No. I forfeited his. If I’d just discussed the ‘why’ of our proceedings more—” His voice cracked on that ‘why.’ He shook his head again. “He’d picked up so much in the course of dealing with trolls, I tended to forget he wasn’t a magus trained, had never had the basic grounding you and I received.”

“Gael—” Was there a trace of exasperation in Nathiar’s voice? “This was no undertaking in which a basic understanding might have helped. You’ve said you were operating beyond your own knowledge and expertise. I assure you I was far beyond mine.”

“If he’d known to pull from the thymus node or above, or even from the root node, to avoid the heart node—”

“No,” interrupted Nathiar. His hand on Gael’s shoulder pressed harder. “Were you able to see the path of the energea within the final explosive conflagration?”

He hadn’t. If he had—if he’d been quicker, more alert, would he have been able to get there first? To save his friend?

Nathiar continued. “The outward explosion masked it, but there was an inward explosion as well, compressing in as violently as it exploded out. That inward blast swallowed down the gong’s heart node, swallowed down Arnoll’s heart node—and, Gael—”

Gael looked up to see Nathiar’s eyes narrowing.

The magus’ nostrils flared. “The implosion dragged the entirety of Arnoll’s energetic lattice down into it. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d aimed his energetic strike with the crown node itself”—an advanced technique barely within Gael’s purview—“his energea would have been ripped from him nonetheless.”

Gael became aware that his fists were clenched in his lap. He unclenched them, started to reach for Arnoll—as though he still might drag him back from death—and then let his arms fall.

Arnoll had passed far beyond his reach.

“What happened with that pulsed violet energea of yours, there at the end?” asked Nathiar. “Were you able to subdivide the node before it exploded?”

Gael sighed heavily. “No,” he said dully, not caring. If he’d not taken time for that, if he’d been poised for the thymic strike against the gong’s node, he might have beaten Arnoll to it. Would it really be his own corpse lying on the smithy floor, if he had? He wasn’t sure he believed Nathiar.

The magus grunted and heaved to his feet. “I believe—” he bent to pluck something small from the layer of sand covering the flagstones “—I believe the node was subdivided, although not by you.” He handed a smooth teardrop of iron, about the size of a thumbnail, to Gael. “There are smaller splatters,” said the magus, “but this one alone holds an energetic lattice.”

Gael studied the metal teardrop bleakly. It remained very warm and strangely shiny, like polished silver. Gael found he didn’t really care whether it possessed a node or not. He just wished he’d done something different—anything different—whatever might have saved Arnoll. But Nathiar clearly expected Gael to care, so he opened his inner sight.

The node within the iron glowed gold and displayed the same open scrolls of gold that Gael had observed within the changed node now inhabiting the gong’s central boss.

Gael frowned. “It’s a troll node, isn’t it?” he said.

Over his years in Belzetarn, when Gael checked the energea of prisoners brought to the citadel, he didn’t bother to examine the fine structures within the nodes. A simple note of their location was enough to declare the captive human or troll. But the deep structures were different in the afflicted and the unafflicted. Human nodes possessed the tightly packed octohedrons that the gong’s node had possessed until a short time ago. Troll nodes, created when their moorings were ripped, adopted a more open configuration.

Gael glanced up at Nathiar. “I see it,” he said, his voice still leaden.

“Do you want it?” asked Nathiar. “Because if you do not, I do.”

Gael started to shake his head and hand the teardrop back to the magus, then checked himself. He didn’t want the damn thing. But Keir would. He knew she would. And Keir . . . still mattered. Even in the wake of Arnoll’s death.

He wanted to say nothing mattered. He felt nothing mattered. But the same inner knowing that told him to get a fresh sheet of parchment when his tallying grew cramped at the bottom margin, that insisted he get a good night’s sleep before he tackled a ticklish calculation, told him now that his choices would yet yield consequences—poor or good, depending on his decisions. He could not abdicate responsibility, no matter how powerfully his grief urged it.

“I do want it,” he told Nathiar.

“Then it is yours,” said Nathiar. The magus reached down a hand to Gael. “Up with you, my dear Gael.” His voice was kind, despite his resumption of his usual cadences.

Gael allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.

“I hope you know how to put the smithy to bed, my dear fellow,” said Nathiar, “because I do not!”

Gael hunched his shoulders.

Nathiar was right, of course. There was work to be done. And Gael would do it. But it felt wrong. It felt like everything should just stop.

“You’ll go for a physician?” he asked the magus.

Nathiar nodded, met Gael’s gaze for a long moment, and turned away.

He took a step, then turned back. “I am so very sorry for your loss,” he said. “For our loss. Arnoll was the best of all of us.”

Gael swallowed down the tightness in his throat. “He was my friend.”

“Yes,” said the magus, and then strode away toward the Regenen Stair.

Gael picked up one of the long-handled rakes beside the forge and began scattering the coals within it, dismantling the mound that concentrated the heat.

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The Tally Master, Chapter 20 (scene 95)

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He found Arnoll—and no one else—awaiting him in the blade smithy, as planned. Thank Tiamar that no curious spectators had come to watch. Or if they had, Arnoll had ushered them out.

Shadow dimmed the unpeopled vaults, and the charcoal within the forge glowed redly, illuminating the large cedar tub full of water standing before it, as well as a massive stone block with a smooth convex top and a thick layer of sand protecting the flagstone floor. The eastern wall of the smithies possessed no arrowslits through which the sun could slip its morning rays.

The silence of the space, broken only by the subdued hiss of the single forge, seemed wrong to Gael, but the familiar scent of burning charcoal reassured him.

He eased the gong from his back onto the stone, noting that the curve of the one matched the curve of the other. He’d chosen to transport the gong himself, tying a leather thong through the two holes pierced in the gong’s furled edge and slipping a leather strap through the thongs. That had given him sufficient grip to manage the thing. It was heavy, heavier even than an oxhide ingot, and had pressed uncomfortably into his shoulders, but was not so unwieldy as to require two to carry. He preferred to involve as few others in this business as possible.

He greeted Arnoll and gestured to the gong resting on the massive stone. “You do remember that Nathiar will suspend the gong midair with his magery, do you not?” he asked.

“Of course,” answered the smith. “But I deemed it wise to have a support available in case the magus slips. The swords he’s manipulated are considerably lighter than this gong.”

Gael nodded. “Good point.” He scanned the area. Arnoll had laid tongs and hammers ready to hand on a counter, along with two leather aprons and three pairs of smith’s gauntlets. The smith’s own apron already covered his tunic and trews.

“What of those questions you promised to have ready for me?” asked Gael.

They went over the procedure they planned to follow together. When Nathiar joined them in mid-discussion, Gael explained that he wished to pull a small droplet out at the earliest moment possible, with its lattice unchanged, before they proceeded with the steps that would quell the gong forever. That change in plan required a few adjustments, but nothing substantive.

Arnoll proved to have fewer queries than did Nathiar. It was not the magery that concerned the magus, but the interface between it and the rude physical implements of smithwork, especially since Arnoll’s suggestions—made after Gael’s initial consultation with Nathiar in the cherry glade—had all involved the forge and the timing and duration of its use.

Arnoll and Nathiar argued vociferously about how the gong would be removed from the forge, the smith asserting that he and Gael should lift it with tongs, while Nathiar insisted that manipulating the energea would be smoother if he took the gong from a steady bed of coals rather than from tongs held by potentially wobbling troll arms. Arnoll objected to the idea that his arms might wobble, but Gael interceded that his own probably would.

“Is the forge hot enough for us to begin?” Gael asked. He could feel the heat rolling from its glowing maw.

Arnoll narrowed his eyes, measuring the color of the light cast. Then he studied his companions. “The forge is ready, but you are not,” he said, jerking his head at the aprons and gloves.

Nathiar was wearing his usual long robes. Arnoll sniffed disapprovingly. Even Gael could see that a smith’s apron would reach merely to Nathiar’s knees, but at least the suede of his robes would protect his legs from any stray sparks or splashing metal. Not that they expected to be dealing with molten metal.

Gael had chosen the same shabby trews and short tunic that he’d donned to search Martell’s smithy for a misplaced ingot, twenty-five days ago. One of the leathers grooms had cleaned the soot from its worn suede far more effectively than Gael had deemed possible.

Nathiar permitted Arnoll to help him with an apron, but he declined the gauntlets, saying in an exasperated tone, “I’ll need the finest control of my fingers for this, and I have no intention of touching the heated gong with anything but magery, my dear Arnoll.”

Gael accepted both apron and gloves. Aside from the subdivision of the node, his part in this would be anything but delicate, and the bulky leather enclosing his hands would not impede him in the slightest.

Arnoll checked the forge again, and then took up one set of tongs, nodding for Gael to grab the others.

They positioned themselves on each side of the gong.

Gael scrutinized the artifact a moment. It looked just as it had when he first set eyes upon it, the wide and shallow curve of the bronze—a rosy golden shade under the frost of the arsenic—with its deep furled lip and the protruding central boss of black iron. The phoenix etched in the metal curled its wings around that boss, from which scrolling rays emanated, arcing outward like energea from a node, hinting at the energetic structure within.

Gael’s reason regretted what he was about to do, but a more primal instinct, remembering the weakness that shivered in his bones when the gong sounded, hungered for the artifact’s destruction.

Well, he would not be truly destroying it—turning it into a puddle of molten metal, as the word destruction implied to him—but his actions would diminish its present caliber.

With both hands, he maneuvered his tongs over the deep-furled lip and clamped them closed. Arnoll mirrored him and nodded. Together, they raised the convex disk from the stone where Gael had laid it.

It was far heavier held thusly, pinched between the business end of the tongs and secured there only by the strength of Gael’s double grip, the length of the tongs acting as an unfavorable lever. Gael clenched his fists harder and moved in sync with Arnoll toward the forge. The heat grew fierce at its maw, baking the unprotected skin of his face and drying his eyes.

He and Arnoll eased their burden through the slot of the forge’s opening—barely wide enough to accommodate it—and then released the grip of the tongs to push the gong into the heart of the glowing coals.

Gael backed away, eager to escape the inferno, but Arnoll lingered, apparently untroubled, rearranging the scattered charcoal with a shovel, restoring the disturbed pieces to a smooth mound. When he got it to his liking, the smith moved to the bellows at the side of the forge and began pumping. Shuff, shuff, shuff, whispered the bags of leather. Flames leaped up around the gong, and the roar of the furnace intensified.

Arnoll glanced over his shoulder to where Nathiar stood watching, quietly intent.

“Be ready,” the smith warned. “The bronze will heat much more quickly than the iron.”

Nathiar nodded, his face saturnine, lit from below by the glow from the forge.

Gael peered into the flames. The bronze was acquiring a deep red hue as it heated, but the central boss of iron remained black. He looked down to check that his leather apron hung straight and that his gauntlets fully covered his forearms. He would not be handling metal going forward, but he would need to come close to play his part, and he must stand ready to step in, should Nathiar falter.

As the heating bronze grew amber in hue, the black of the iron boss began to display a dark red tint. Nathiar would heat the iron to full pliancy, but using the forge to do the first stage of the work would allow the magus to reserve his strength for the demands of the critical later stages.

The amber glow of the bronze grew golden, while the iron’s dark red moved toward orange.

“Now,” said Arnoll.

Nathiar raised his arms, curling his fingers and straightening them.

The gong rose to hover above the burning coals amidst a shower of sparks, then slid from the forge’s throat when Nathiar beckoned. His arms pulsed, pulsed again, and went abruptly still while his fingers wove patterns. The gong stopped in midair, directly above the curved stone from which Arnoll and Gael had lifted it.

Gael allowed his inner sight to open, and his vision became much more complex.

Beams of green energea shot from Nathiar’s palms, mingling, and then widening to form a pillow beneath the gong. Intermittent needles of blue energea sparkled from the fingers of his left hand, jabbing into the gong’s central boss, while more languid curls of silver energea emerged from the fingers of his right hand to caress the bronze surrounding the iron boss.

The energetic structures within the gong itself shone amidst Nathiar’s working—the glowing green heart node and the silver arcs scrolling into and out of that heart.

The complexity of Nathiar’s magery was impressive. Gael would not have been able to manage the conflicting forces, but he understood what the magus achieved with his skill: support for the gong with the energea pouring from his palms, while increasing the friction—and thus the heat—in the iron with his left fingers, and drawing excess heat from the adjacent bronze with his right.

As the iron grew hotter yet, its orange glow brightening to amber and then fierce yellow, Nathiar added yet another gambit to his manipulation of the energea. Index and middle fingers on both hands continued to feed heat into the iron, while drawing it out of the bronze, but the other two fingers wove a horn-shaped funnel of green and aqua sparkles. This was the energetic shunt that would safeguard them at the moment of greatest danger.

Gael removed his attention from Nathiar’s superlative mastery, focusing instead on the gong’s heart node. There glowed its soft green corona; there shone its more intense green mantle; and there blazed its dense green core. Within the core, the octahedral lines of force grew brighter as Nathiar poured more and more heat-producing energea into them.

But Gael’s full focus rested on neither Nathiar nor the metal growing ever more pliable within the crucible of magery. It was the slow transformation of the octahedral lattice that would tell Gael when he must act. First the edges of the octohedrons grew thicker, brighter. Then those edges developed a curve, and the vertices—each formed where three edges came together in a point—extruded a needle-like projection.

Gael shivered, despite the heat rolling off the gong.

The spiky configuration of the node’s lattice depicted by Olluvarde’s murals had seemed beautiful in the delicacy of its stone traceries. Hovering before Gael’s riveted gaze as energea, the lattice emanated menace. It almost sizzled, fierce with power. Gael had not been wrong in assessing this proceeding as perilous. Every aspect of it held danger. Should Nathiar drop the gong, the softened metal would splash under the impact, burning all it touched. Should Nathiar loose control of his magery, Belzetarn itself might melt down, as had that outpost under the death throes of the old magus Fuwan.

But now that Gael confronted the enkindled lattice of the gong’s heart node, he knew that it posed a greater risk than any other facet of this business. And Nathiar’s shunt for excess energea, still in its formative stages, was nowhere near complete yet.

Gael became aware of hoarse breathing nearby. Was he panting in terror?

No, he stood poised, ready to bombard the node’s lattice with precisely measured pulses of his own energea, drawn from the violet of his crown node, modulated through the blue of his throat node and the aqua of his thymus node, channeled down his arms—deliberately avoiding his own heart node—and out through his fingers.

It was Arnoll who stood beside him, on Gael’s left, breathing heavily, no doubt observing the gong’s heart node through his own inner sight, and rightfully alarmed by what he saw.

Gael could spare none of his attention to reassure the smith. His moment approached rapidly.

The octahedral lines of force thickened and brightened. The spikes growing from the vertices elongated. The entire configuration flashed searing gold.

Now!

Gael pulled from his crown node, pulsing the pull in smooth undulations, creating the perfect flow of oscillating violet energea along the arc from crown to throat, from throat to thymus, and down the arms.

Just as the violet sparks jumped from his fingertips, the golden spikes of the lodestone’s octahedron thrust outward as though they were pikes wielded by heavy infantry, aimed at the hearts of their enemies.

Gael yanked his concentration from his crown node, dropping unregarded the delicate cascade of violet sparks—intended to tease out a hazelnut-sized sphere of iron, with its energea lattice intact.

He grabbed frantically for his thymic energy instead.

No matter that he’d not harvested his droplet, no matter that the energetic shunt was yet unready. He had to act now, or they were all dead.

He was not fast enough.

A gout of flaring green erupted from somewhere to Gael’s left.

Traveling ahead of Gael’s blaze of aqua and blue, the glaring emerald torrent slammed into the aching gold at the heart of the gong, ripping it asunder in an engulfing explosion of black-edged lightning.

Gael cursed.

The tumult of energea coruscated blindingly and then subsided, revealing the heart node of the gong to be entirely transformed. An open lattice of scrolling gold had replaced the tightly packed octohedrons, and the light glowing from the new lattice shone gold, not green. The silver arcs radiating from the node quivered slightly, adjusting their points of attachment.

It was done. The gong had been subdued.

But not by Gael.

He heard a pattering, as of raindrops falling on a beach, and then the thud of something heavy, meaty. His inner sight closed as his eyelids sprang open.

Arnoll lay crumpled at Gael’s feet, skin gray and eyes starting.

Gael fell to his knees, reaching for Arnoll’s neck to check his pulse, pressing his palm to Arnoll’s chest, desperate for a heartbeat, then cupping Arnoll’s face between his hands, patting his cheek.

“Arnoll! Arnoll!”

There was no response, no heartbeat, no pulse, no life.

“Dear gods!” Gael choked.

He’d lost his friend. His closest friend. His dearest friend. The friend he trusted the most.

He pressed his ear to Arnoll’s unmoving chest, praying he was wrong, praying to hear a flutter of breath, the renewed rhythm of a beating heart.

Nothing.

He crouched there, head resting on Arnoll’s chest, the aching spear of loss piercing his own heart. The vague sense that Nathiar still suspended the gong above him, still continued the magery needed to finish the operation they’d begun, barely brushed Gael’s awareness as the gong moved away, the radiance it shed dimming and then quenched utterly as the hissing roar of steam arose from the cedar tub of water.

Gael ignored it all, embracing the dead body of one he could not bear to let go.

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The Tally Master, Chapter 20 (scene 94)

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Gael emerged from sleep stunned and confused, still half under the influence of his dream.

Sunlight sifted through the inner shutters covering the glass-paned casements, sprinkling dots of gold across the deep sills, the flagstone floor with its hide rugs, and the backless chairs. The angle of the light was long and low. Dawn could not be too far past.

Gael sat up, swinging his legs around to rest his feet on the sheepskin beside his sleeping couch. He paused there, scrubbing a hand across his face and attempting to come more fully into the waking world.

His dream—it was a dream, was it not?—had made no sense.

Keir was no thief; that was Theron. And Arnoll, and Nathiar, and Barris, and Halko. Nor was she a boy. Nor had Gael delayed in the matter of the disguised ingots, withholding dangerous knowledge from those who needed it most. He’d been clueless with all the rest until last night. Nor had he given Keir up for execution.

Nearly every detail of his ‘confession’ failed to match the truth.

Save one thing. His guilt.

In his heart of hearts, he believed that his service to Carbraes, the ruler of Belzetarn’s troll-horde, was wrong. He wished no harm to the Ghriana foe they fought. And yet, at one and the same time, he believed that any failure of his to support the warlord who gave him and all the afflicted shelter and a home was wrong. He possessed no avenue toward a clear conscience.

Unable to heal the divide in his loyalty, he’d chosen the side that permitted him life. And so might he have continued to choose, had Keir never come to Belzetarn. Keir might be a traitor in deed, but Gael was one at heart. And today he would have to decide between Keir and Carbraes. There was no way to choose both.

Last night, before he slept, before he’d realized Keir’s treason, he’d planned to negotiate with Carbraes for her release. But she was guilty of exactly what Theron had accused her of. She’d disguised tin as copper and fed it to the blade smithy, making Belzetarn’s swords brittle. And she’d disguised copper as tin, so that the tallies would balance, feeding that disguised copper through the hands of the artistic privy smith.

Gael would not traduce her to Carbraes himself, of course. Not before he’d confronted her face to face. He still hoped, in some irrational backwater of his mind, that she was innocent. But he hadn’t the fortitude to petition on her behalf when he believed in her guilt.

It meant letting one opportunity to obtain Keir’s freedom go. Gael shook his head. So be it. He would just have to find another one. Or make one.

He rose. His body felt strong and rested, ready for action, ready for the day.

His mind and heart felt disquieted and vulnerable. He dreaded what might come.

But he had a lodestone to divide and a gong to quell. Hiding and quaking in his chambers would neither make his decisions nor fulfill his responsibilities. He must march upon his dilemma, for it would march upon him if he did not.

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Sleeping, Gael dreamed.

Dreaming, he spoke, making confession to a young acolyte in training under Tiamar’s priest, back home in Hadorgol. But he spoke not in good faith. He sought to awe the young man rather than to clear his own conscience.

Within the dimness of the confessional booth, the dark wood smelled musty, as though it had been immersed in deep water and then allowed to dry imperfectly. The bench under Gael’s haunches pressed his flesh uncomfortably against his bones.

On the other side of the carved screen shielding his confessor from sight, the acolyte’s robes rustled faintly. Was the youth nervous in his unaccustomed role?

“I bear the mark of Gaelan on my face, as do my brethren,” intoned Gael. “Great curved noses, line-bracketed eyes, and sallow skin mar our visages. But I alone, amongst all in the legions under my lord Carbraes, bear Gaelan’s name. It is fitting, for I betrayed them to their deaths.

“I am Gael.

“I am kin-slayer.

“There in the bowels of the mad tower I crouched, listening to the scratching of my own quill pen. I tallied ingots of copper, ingots of tin—tin so rare. Who would believe the record keeper could be more lethal than the warrior?

“The stone foundations around me echoed the metallic beating of swords, of shields, of helmets. My lord Carbraes was winning this war. His trolls mined copper ore from veins beneath the ancient hills and smelted it with precious tin arriving from afar. Every ingot in received its mark in my ledger scrolls. Every ingot out—tin and copper married to make bronze—I tallied likewise.

“Who was to know that the bronze was brittle? Not the one part of tin to nine of copper demanded by the smith’s recipe, but two tin for eight copper. The blades hammered from these ingots would shatter, and how would the warrior who bore one fare then?

“Channeled by the tower’s tunnels, the roar of the furnaces deafened my thoughts.

“Whom would I betray? My troll-kin who brought Lord Carbraes victory? The peculator defiling the bronze?

“Oh? Did you think it was I? Secreting nuggets away in some fastness?

“No, ’twas another. Should I betray him?

“Or must I betray our enemies, crushed beneath Carbraes’ might? Our enemies—the unafflicted—those with pure faces, the ones from whom we come, trailing glory, before Gaelan marks us as his own.

“But you know I betrayed someone, else I would not now speak this confession in your ear.

“In the end, I betrayed them all.

“For a time, I kept silence, protecting the traitor and letting my silence reap the troll-warriors on the bloody fields. Blade after blade shattered, piercing the disarmed ones with their fragments or merely leaving them defenseless before the adversary, who slew without remorse.

“Then my conscience misgave me, and I betrayed the traitor to his death.

“‘Behold him,’ I pronounced, ‘the author of your defeats, the one who stole your lives! He defiled the bronze of your blades, and they failed you.’

“I watched as the executioner severed his head, and I wept. For he was my friend. And he bore the courage and singleness of purpose I possessed not, fighting for the unafflicted even amidst his truldemagar.

“And then I watched as the unafflicted fell upon the battlefields, assailed by the fierce weapons of the troll-horde and a strange, deep throbbing on the air and in the earth that stole the strength from their straight limbs.

“I am guilty in every way that guilt may be measured.

“I betrayed my comrades. I betrayed my lord. I betrayed my friend. I betrayed the pure ones, undefiled by Gaelan’s mark and deserving of my protection. Can any penance you devise wash clean my sin? I think not.”

Gael’s auditor began an answer, but the young man’s voice was wrong: an elder’s baritone, not a youth’s tenor. No acolyte pronounced judgment on Gael’s crimes, nor yet the head priest. The depth and power beneath that voice belonged to no mere mortal. This was Tiamar himself, puissant and all-knowing.

He spoke soothingly, reassurance in his tone, but Gael could not discern the sense of his words. It mattered not. Nothing the god might say could shake Gael’s condemnation of himself.

Next scene:
The Tally Master, Chapter 20 (scene 92)

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The Tally Master, Chapter 19 (scene 90)

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