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By Root 624 0

some hundred years earlier, that he’d been working on a particularly difficult problem for the dark guild, a question of whether or not to assassinate a certain archon. As spies brought him information about the archon and the political situation in his city-state, Tondalo had stored them in a memory room, because they were far too scandalous to write down. At one point he returned to that room to find that certain of the objects had changed. A statue of a naked young boy (representing the archon’s true love in life) was holding a bowl that the Old One hadn’t placed there, and next to the boy stood a weeping woman. Spurred by the change, Tondalo saw the solution to their problem: the boy was holding poison in a bowl; the woman was his mother. One of the dark guild’s more presentable members had worked on the mother’s mind until she was furious enough to denounce the archon publicly for his vices. After the mob got through with him, the dark guild had no need to send an assassin to the archon’s door.

That particular set of symbols had changed only out of intuition; the Old One had seen that clearly, that, just as in a dream, one part of his mind had solved a problem while his consciousness was looking another way. But it had given him an idea. What if he made a special room—a temple, even—and filled it with dweomer-charged symbols? Would they perhaps change as tides from the future touched them and tell the secrets of time to come? Although it had taken him years, in the end the Old One had made the idea work.

That afternoon he sat in his chair and called up his temple of Time. Since this working was a purely mental one, he was fully awake, merely concentrating with an intensity beyond the reach of an untrained mind. The first building was a tall, square tower, made of white stone, that stood on a hill; one side of the hill was in full sunlight, the other, in moonlight. He walked round to the moonlit side and went in one of the four doors that opened into the first of twelve stories. Each wall had seven windows, and in the center was a circular staircase of fifty-two steps. He went up, barely glancing at the collection of objects that filled each room, until he reached the twelfth floor.

Standing where he’d placed them round the staircase were the statues of four elves, two male, two female, all with their backs to the stairs as if they were staring out the windows. Beyond them was a statue of Rhodry, as close to the descriptions he’d heard as the Old One could make it, except that he’d dressed the statue all in red. At Rhodry’s feet lay the silver-and-blue dragon of Aberwyn. Nearby was a stylized statue meant to represent Jill, a pretty blond with a sword in her hand. Just beyond her was—nothing. The Old One felt a shudder run down his back when he realized that Alastyr’s image had utterly vanished. He should have expected that, he supposed; it showed that the temple was firmly linked to higher forces. All around were various other symbols and objects, a statue of Nevyn, a broken elven longbow, various Wildfolk holding things that had associations in the Old One’s mind, but he ignored them at first and crossed to one of the windows.

Outside a mist swirled, and he steadied his nerves before he peered into it. Strange creatures sometimes came there, because even though the temple had started out as a mental construct only, over the many years he’d worked in it, it had started to acquire an astral reality as well, as any image will if ensouled with enough force. Yet that particular day he saw only moonlight swirling through the mist rather than cryptic images of future events. He went round to all the moon-side windows, but always he was disappointed. As he turned back to the stairs, something caught his eye, and he stopped to examine the statue of Rhodry. There was a difference, some tiny thing—he looked it over until at last he found the change. There were tiny roses growing around the index finger of Rhodry’s left hand, dead-white roses so perfectly formed that their thorns had raised a drop of blood on the statue’s