The House Of Gaian

was how he recognized men who had the Inquisitor’s Gift. He trained those men, honing them into weapons. The ignorant might call the Inquisitor’s Gift a kind of magic, but he wouldn’t permit such blasphemy to be spoken out loud.
    He didn’t like his Inquisitors wondering about magic, except as a thing to be destroyed.
    “Master?”
    “The rain stinks of magic,” Adolfo said heavily, half turning to watch the raindrops roll down the outside of the window. “Do you know what this rain will do, Ubel?”
    “I—I’m not sure, Master Adolfo.”
    Ubel wasn’t sure of much lately. His fault? Perhaps he should have been gentler when his Assistant Inquisitor had returned from the west, even though he had failed to destroy Baron Padrick’s family and had lost the other five Inquisitors who had gone with him. Yes, perhaps Ubel had heard too much of the reprimand in his voice.
    “What does rain do, Ubel?” Adolfo asked gently.

    Ubel watched him warily for a moment, then licked his dry lips. “It falls from the sky to the ground.”
    Adolfo nodded encouragingly. “And then?” He sighed before Ubel could answer, not out of impatience but out of the dread that had begun filling him as soon as he realized what this storm could do. “It soaks into the ground, Ubel. It soaks deep into the soil, into the fields and forests. It fills the brooks and streams and rivers.”
    “Yes, Master. I suppose it does.”
    “This storm ... this rain stinks of magic.”
    Adolfo waited patiently, watching as understanding paled Ubel’s fair skin and filled the blue eyes with horror.
    “Yes,” Adolfo said heavily.
    “But— But the magic in Wolfram’s Old Places is dead . We destroyed it when we destroyed the witches.
    ”
    He shook his head. “As long as there is any left, magic never fully dies. You can bleed it out of a place so that the place feels dead, but it’s like creatures that bury themselves deep in the mud when a brook dries up. You think they’re gone, destroyed. Then the rain comes and renews the brook—and they come back with it to live and breed again.”
    “No,” Ubel whispered.
    “Yes. A puddle of magic, hidden so deep even the Small Folk can’t feel it... This rain will feed it... and it will rise again. A small piece of woods will suddenly have enough magic for the Small Folk to live in it.
    And once they return and take root, no man will be able to set foot there and hope to come out again.
    This rain will make a few women forget their proper place in the world, and they will remember things they hadn’t known they’d forgotten ... and men will no longer rule the land. How can men rule when a female can flood the fields, or hold back the rain so that crops wither and die, or command the land itself to remain barren? How can a man’s toil fight against that?”
    “Then we have to stay here and fight,” Ubel said. “We have to stay and protect our own country.”
    “How do we protect it from rain, Ubel? How do we protect Wolfram when every storm that crosses the Una River from Sylvalan is filthy with magic?”
    “We have to do something ,” Ubel insisted.
    “We will. And we are.” Adolfo walked over to the table and looked at the papers filled with Ubel’s neat handwriting, scattered over a map of Sylvalan. “The only way to keep Wolfram clean is to wade through the muck of Sylvalan until it, too, is clean.”
    “Within the next phase of the moon, we’ll have most of our—”
    “We can’t wait.” Adolfo took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Don’t remind him of his failures.
    He needs to believe nothing can stand against him. Afterward... Afterward I will have to consider carefully whether or not Ubel has been too mired in Sylvalan’s filth to be trusted . “We must strike now. We must strike fiercely ... and without mercy. Any Sylvalan baron who does not support us in our fight against the Evil One and its servants must be destroyed. We must bring the battle into Sylvalan before those creatures, those witches , can do more harm to Wolfram.”

    “What do you want me to do, Master Adolfo?”
    Ubel still looked pale, but there was a fire in his eyes now. He wouldn’t run away from the fight this time, not when his homeland was at risk of being contaminated by the magic spawned by their enemies.
    Adolfo pushed the papers aside until he uncovered the western part of the map of Sylvalan. “You will take our ten largest warships and fill them with Wolfram warriors. Those