Stalking Darkness

cried, her voice carrying clear and harsh as if across a field of battle.
    “Aye!” came the response from a thousand throats, thundering in the stone confines of the precinct. From the corner of his eye, Alec saw Micum and Seregil drop their hands to their sword hilts, as did many around them. Without a word, he did the same.
    “To whom do you swear?”
    “To the throne of Skala and the Queen who rules!” returned the initiate soldiers.
    “By what do you swear?”
    “By the Four, by the Flame, by our honor, and our arms!”
    “Swear then to uphold the, honor of your land and Queen!”
    “Aye!”
    “Swear then to give no quarter to the adversary.”
    “Aye!”
    “Swear then to spare the supplicant.”
    “Aye!”
    “Foreswear all that brings dishonor upon your comrades.”
    “Aye!”
    Idrilain paused, letting a moment pass in stillness. Then, in a voice that would have done credit to any sergeant, she barked out, “Display arms!”
    With a ringing of steel, the various regiments brandished their weapons: swords and sabers glinted in the sunlight; small forests of lances sprang to attention; archers beat arrow shafts against longbows, producing a strange clacking sound; artillery soldiers held catapult stones aloft. Standards unfurled on cue to snap brightly over the throng.
    “Then so are you all sworn together!” cried Idrilain, raising her sword overhead. “By the Four and the Flame, by land and Queen, by honor and arms. Warriors of Skala, sound your cries!”
    A deafening roar filled the square as each regiment shouted its own battle cry, vying with the others to make their voices heard.
    “The Queen’s honor!”
    “Sakor’s Fire!”
    “Honor and steel!”
    “The Flame on the Sea!”
    “True aim and well sped!”
    “The White Hawk!”
    Drummers and pipers stepped from behind the temple pillars, setting up a martial tattoo. Great horns as long as the men that sounded them blared and bellowed on the rooftops as the ranks turned and began to march out of the square.
    “It all makes you want to join in with it, doesn’t it?” Alec grinned, pulse quickening with the beat of the drums.
    Laughing, Seregil threw an arm around Alec’s shoulders and drew him away, shouting over the din, “That’s the whole idea.”
    The clamor at dawn went unheard by Nysander. Seated cross-legged on the floor of the casting room, a long dead candle guttered out before him, he floated in the dim oblivion of meditation. Images came and went, yet nothing substantial came into his grasp.
    After seeing Magyana to her tower door the previous night, he’d made his usual tour of the vaults beneath the Orëska, then found himself leaving first the House, then the sheltered gardens, to stalk alone through the windy streets.
    Hands clasped behind his back, he walked aimlessly, as if trying to escape the anger that had been building slowly inside him from the moment he’d found Ylinestra hovering over Alec in her chamber.
    Much of this anger was directed at himself. Ylinestra had meant no more to him than a voluptuous diversion possessed of a mind of uncommon ability. Yet he had allowed his carnal desires to blind him to the true depths of her cupidity. Her sudden dalliance with Thero had reawakened his lulled sense of prudence. What he’d witnessed this night strengthened his suspicions.
    He let out an exasperated growl. The Black Time was coming, he knew, coming in the course of his own Guardianship. Was he prepared?
    Hardly.
    He had an assistant he could not completely trust and yet hardly dared release. A sorceress twenty decades his junior had him passion-blind. And Seregil!
    Nysander clenched his hands, digging the nails into his palms. Seregil, whom he loved as a son and a friend, had very nearly condemned himself to death through his own obstinate inquisitiveness. Alec would prove no different in time—that much was already clear.
    For the first time in years, he found himself wondering what his own master would have to say about all this. Arkoniel’s craggy face came to him as readily as if he’d seen him only the day before.
    He’d been old when Nysander had first met him and never seemed to change. How fervently the young Nysander—that desperate, quick-tempered urchin of the streets, plucked starving from the squalor of the lower city—had tried to emulate the old man’s patience and wisdom.
    But from Arkoniel he’d also inherited the burden of the Guardianship, that dark thread of knowledge that