The Hidden City

so quickly that something’s wrong?’
    ‘Pain,’ Khalad replied wryly. ‘I don’t really want to spend several days taking this beast apart and putting it back together again with the spray freezing on me, so I’m paying very close attention to the things my body’s telling me. You can feel things change in your legs and the soles of your feet. When one of the hawsers goes slack, it changes the feel of how the boom moves.’
    ‘Is there anything you don’t know how to do?’
    ‘I don’t dance very well.’ Khalad squinted up into the first stinging pellets of another sleet-squall. ‘It’s time to feed and water the horses,’ he said. ‘Let’s go tell the novices to stop sitting around admiring their title and get to work.’
    ‘You really dislike the aristocracy, don’t you?’ Berit asked as they started forward along the edge of the corral toward the wind-whipped tents of the apprentice knights.
    ‘No, I don’t dislike them. I just don’t have any patience with them, and I can’t understand how they can be so blind to what’s going on around them. A title must be a very heavy thing to carry if the weight makes you ignore everything else.’
    ‘You’re going to be a knight yourself, you know.’
    ‘It wasn’t my idea. Sparhawk gets silly sometimes. He thinks that making knights of my brothers and me is a way of honoring our father. I’m sure that Father’s laughing at him right now.’
    They reached the tents, and Khalad raised his voice. ‘All right, gentlemen!’ he shouted, ‘It’s time to feed and water the animals. Let’s get at it!’ Then he critically surveyed the corral. Five thousand horses leave a great deal of evidence that they have been present. ‘I think it’s time for another lesson in the virtue of humility for our novices,’ he said quietly to Berit. Then he raised his voice again. ‘And after you’ve finished with that, you’d better break out the scoop-shovels and wheel-barrows again. We wouldn’t want to let the work pile up on us, would we, gentlemen?’
    Berit was not yet fully adept at some of the subtler forms of magic. That part of the Pandion training was the study of a lifetime. He was far enough along, however, to recognize ‘tampering’ when he encountered it. The log-boom seemed to be lumbering southward at a crawl, but the turning of the seasons was giving some things away. It should have taken them much longer to escape the bitter cold of the far north, for one thing, and the days should not have become so much longer in such a short time for another.
    However it was managed, and whoever managed it, they arrived at a sandy beach a few miles north of Matherion late one golden autumn afternoon long before they should have and began wading the horses ashore from the wobbly collection of rafts.
    ‘Short trip,’ Khalad observed laconically as the two watched the novices unloading the horses.
    ‘You noticed,’ Berit laughed.
    ‘They weren’t particularly subtle about it. When the spray stopped freezing in my beard between one minute and the next, I started having suspicions.’ He paused. ‘Is magic very hard to learn?’ he asked.
    ‘The magic itself isn’t too hard. The hard part is learning the Styric language. Styric doesn’t have any regular verbs. They’re all irregular—and there are nine tenses.’
    ‘Berit, please speak plain Elenic.’
    ‘You know what a verb is, don’t you?’
    ‘Sort of, but what’s a tense?’
    Somehow that made Berit feel better. Khalad did not know everything. ‘We’ll work on it,’ he assured his friend. ‘Maybe Sephrenia can make some suggestions.’
    The sun was going down in a blaze of color when they rode through the opalescent gates into fire-domed Matherion, and it was dusk when they reached the imperial compound.
    ‘What’s wrong with everybody?’ Khalad muttered as they rode through the gate.
    ‘I didn’t follow that,’ Berit confessed.
    ‘Use your eyes, man. Those gate-guards were looking at Sparhawk as if they expected him to explode—or maybe turn into a dragon. Something’s going on, Berit.’
    The Church Knights rode off across the twilight-dim lawn to their barracks while the rest of them clattered across the drawbridge into Ehlana’s castle. They dismounted in the torch-lit courtyard and trooped inside.
    ‘It’s even worse here,’ Khalad murmured. ‘Let’s stay close to Sparhawk in case we have to restrain him. The knights at the drawbridge seemed to be actually