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“Thank you, ser.”

“Thank you…”

Yelena held back a moment when the other two turned their mounts. “We’d like to see you again, ser.” Then, the hardness returned to her face, as the discipline reasserted itself.

I watched the three until they were out of sight, checking to make sure no chaos waited for them, but I could detect none—not in that direction.

Toward the Westhorns—that was another question. Supposedly, the old road should cross the wizards’ road before too long. Supposedly…but things never quite turned out as they were supposed to. And when they did, I was finding that I wished they hadn’t.

A cold wind blew from nowhere, almost more in my mind than across that high slope where I began the last, solitary part of my quest—if quest were what it was. Why was I traveling a near-abandoned road toward a wizard who had swatted me aside like a fly the last time we had met? What did I think that I could possibly accomplish when Talryn or Justen had been able to do nothing?

Then again, had they really tried? Who was telling the truth? Or was anyone?

I shivered, but Gairloch lifted his head, as if to say we should get on with it.

LXIV

ANOTHER FIVE KAYS beyond the hill where I had helped bury the unnamed and unknown Kyphran outlier and where I had separated from my escort, barely into the edge of the foothills, the old road crossed the wizards’ road.

I didn’t even have to look for illusions. I did cast my perceptions around and found traces of older chaos, indicating that, at one time, some magic had been cast to cloak the road. That had been seasons, if not years, earlier. I shivered. That Antonin saw no reason to hide his road was chilling in itself.

The unnatural valley ran straight east and west, and the trace of coach wheels ran straight and true down the center of the road. Hoofprints, recent ones, flanked the wheel traces.

I took a deep breath. Suddenly, I had to ask myself what I was doing in the middle of a wilderness looking for a chaos-master. I didn’t have an answer.

Instead, still damning myself for a fool, I turned Gairloch onto that clay-covered and white-paved road and threw my senses ahead of me. Then, remembering what I had done earlier, I used the shield that reduced the ability of a chaos-master to discern the order I represented. That shield left us fully visible, but the greater danger was from white magicians, not from ordinary or even chaos-touched soldiers.

In the distance, actually into the Westhorns themselves, there was another lurking mass of chaos energy, but nothing nearby. Nothing—not wild pigs, not goats, and definitely not people. About what one would expect around an isolated wizards’ road. For now, that was fine with me.

Even on Gairloch, as opposed to a coach, riding on the even surface was considerably speedier than on the old road from Kyphrien. Despite what I recalled from my conversations with Justen, I found it hard to believe that the wizards’ road could have lasted so long. Then again, only the road and the heavy stone bridges had really endured, and Justen had said that the construction had been done by honest stonemasons reinforced with black order-masters, before…something had happened.

Once again, I hadn’t quite gotten the whole story.

By twilight, we had traveled nearly into the lower reaches of the Westhorns themselves, and those lower mountains loomed so high into the western sky that we had ridden the entire late afternoon in shadow. Their distant pinnacles glittered with reflected light, a cruel white that made the peaks a fitting home for chaos.

Not that I had wanted to ride poor Gairloch as long as I had, but it was twilight before there was a canyon away from the road that had water, and was passable enough for us to get well clear of the wizards’ way itself.

We struggled up a rock-and-grass slope, around a bend, and behind another boulder before I felt we were removed enough from casual scrutiny.

Whheeee…eeee…Gairloch was nuzzling at the saddlebags even before I had them off. His