The capital of the kingdom lay sprawled in a river valley, and to its east opened up a wide, fertile plain of farmlands. Lanes crisscrossed the area linking farmhouses to their fields, each other, and the small towns where crops were gathered for sale and the locations of basic services performed for the farmers, from minor Sorcerers practicing veterinary medicine to blacksmiths, were situated. The gently rolling plains were the peaceful breadbasket of the kingdom, nestled safely in its innermost regions, and ringed on all sides by the border regions and their strong defenses. These farmlands were the heart of the kingdom. To their north lay the Morranreach, which stretched across the northern mountains. In the northeastern corner of the kingdom was the mining region, where dirty men extracted iron from the depths of the earth. South was the sea, with South Port and the other bastion cities. South Port was the main point of entry for trade coming up into the kingdom from the south, and trade flowed up and down the river to the capital as well as along the eastern overland trading routes. Those eastern roads ran along a line of trading settlements and fortified cities which acted as hubs for goods flowing in and out of the bazaars and mercantile centers to the east. These hubs staged caravans which would cross the high eastern mountain passes, going to and from lands hardly known to the inhabitants of the kingdom.

The people of the midlands were solid, conservative folk who prospered under the king’s firm but fair hand, and who in turn grew the abundance of food which assured the kingdom’s prosperity. The kingdom exported staples: food, lumber, iron, and other raw materials. Other kingdoms, especially those to the south which had no access to hardwoods, traded their luxuries and exotics for the materials they needed. Prosperity had allowed learning to flourish in the kingdom, and the Colleges made the kingdom stronger still with the Knights and Sorcerers they turned out. Nowhere in the known world was such a highly trained, disciplined elite to be found, and the mere rumor of the might the kingdom had at its disposal kept the peace.

These midlanders had little use for the pretenses of nobility and held Sorcerers at a respectful arm’s length. Those whose hands worked the earth saw little need to read books. Those few lonely souls born among them who yearned for knowledge would drift west to the capital, and likely end up in the College of Sorcery. What small magic this land possessed was the magic of calf birthing, crop harvesting, and weather prediction.

Palia felt both oddly out of place, as well as comforted, as she moved through these regions. She had lived her whole life in cities, both South Port and then the capital. She was used to large stone buildings, and bustling crowds, and keenly felt her isolation here. Being lonely in a big city wasn’t so difficult, since there was always something to do or somewhere to go that allowed her to pretend she was a part of the city. Most curiously, she realized, what she missed most was the easy access to food: out in the countryside, she could not go down the street to find a hot meal. At the same time, the slow, rolling hills mesmerized her with their lush, verdant cover and small stands of trees. The beaten dirt track on which they rode seemed solid, and she found herself studying the stones in the low rock walls that marked the limits of the fields which abutted the road.

Anror, who had been born on a large landholding, and had grown up among farmers and the livestock they husbanded, found himself comfortable. He passed the time telling Palia about his home, and how he had left there to make his way in life in the big capital city. He was the third son of the holding’s laird, and his prospects for being anything more than a glorified sheriff of the holding did not exist. So he had found a way to gain admission into the College of Swords, by means he did not feel comfortable revealing in any detail to Palia, and there rose to what he described his current lofty situation, a remark punctuated by the bleating of a sheep in a nearby field. The sheep, as it watched them pass, did not seem impressed in the least. Anror found himself liking that: out on his own.

If only, Palia reminded him, their situation were not so dire. “My spirits would be much higher,” she said with a note of sadness, “if our mission wasn’t so dire. I would gladly welcome a there-and-back adventure, a romp, a Quest to retrieve some meaningless token. At least, meaningless compared to the gravity of our own Quest. The Book of Whatever, or the Amulet of Some Sort Of Magic, or the Lost Cup, or the sun and moon and all the stars. No matter the object, just finding it would entitle us to return in triumph and settle down securely in the Gray Tower. Think about it: even my predecessor, Gath, had a simple adventure, despite his unknowingly unleashing the wight that has become our Quest on the kingdom. He and his Protector.”

“That did not have a happy ending,” Anror reminded her, “so I hardly suggest it as a model for our own Quest. Without any doubt, I hope we have a better time of it.”

They rode on until the plain began to rise into rolling moors. The mountains loomed somewhat closer in the distance. The farms disappeared, replaced by grazing herds and hilltop mansions of nobles, dimly glimpsed in the distance from the road they traveled along. Occasionally an ornate gate stood off to the side of the road, the entry to a manor.

Whatever else their quest portended for the pair, navigating to Arrei was not going to be a challenge. The city, around which famed bazaars had located, lay due east of the capital, and navigating there was merely an exercise in following the rising sun as it topped the mountains each morning, along a well-traveled road linking the two cities. Arrei was a border fortress on a hill, an ancient and crumbling pile of rocks which had once been a castle but had now settled into an inhabited cairn in constant need of repair. Many years before, beyond living memory, on the slopes below the castle where the eastern road met the great northern road, traveling merchants had set up a stall or two for the caravans at the waymeeting. Slowly, more and more dealers with their wares spread out there until a lively bazaar had filled up the small river valley which Arrei overlooked. Almost anything which could be traded found its way there, and what had started out as a few stalls had become a permanent tent city strung among the few original buildings to be found in that valley.

The bazaar mainly sold items needed by caravans. The needs of traveling teams were met, including hard tack, beans, unleavened bread, and other non-perishable food; wagon parts, spare wheels and spokes, wood and canvas for repairs, and rope; and all of the equipment a team of horses could possibly need. Rumor numbered the blacksmiths at Arrei in greater density than anywhere else in the kingdom. Almost inevitably, entertainment for the rough teamsters began to flourish, as the money made from that sort of activity proved much easier to come by than that of the honest work of the canvas weavers and blacksmiths. Arrei had developed a reputation that was somewhat unwarranted, because it wasn’t a particularly rough or loose town by most standards. Still, the name of the town was sometimes used as a byword for having a good time, and young nobles from the eastern part of the kingdom, wanting to stretch their wings and see the world, often planned pilgrimages to the bazaars to see what they had to offer. The proliferation of entertainment and its accompanying license with hard spirits caused the ranks of the constabulary at Arrei to swell enormously as the peace sometimes had to be kept. The Duke of Arrei maintained that prevention was the key, and outfitted a mass of gendarmes in bright red livery to stand out in the crowds as they patrolled their beats in the tent-lined streets, so any given person had a good chance of being reminded of law and order at least once every quarter of an hour. The amount of money the Duke raised for himself was demonstrably higher when the peace was kept and the wheels of commerce stayed greased.

In addition to supplies and entertainment for caravan stopovers, the bazaars had attracted a sort of permanent dealers in unique and strange items. Almost anything antique or curious found its way into one of the small tents run by a proprietor and his family. Usually anything unusual could be found somewhere in Arrei’s bazaars. Chief among the unusual items were the booksellers. At no place other than Arrei were so many books to be found for sale, from all over the known world. Nowhere in the kingdom, other than the Great Library, were so many books found to be concentrated in one place.

Anror had trouble drawing Palia into conversation. She mostly sat in her saddle and brooded. The farther they traveled to the east, the gloomier the cloud over Palia became. He had the most success in getting her to talk about the wight. She would talk as if to herself, rehearsing all that she had learned about that ghastly abomination. Anror learned a great deal from these times, but they also raised as many questions as they answered, because he was unfamiliar with the principles of magic in general, and most especially unfamiliar with the magic of making a wight. But then, of course, even the Sorcerers were. Whatever magic created a wight came from a time before the College of Sorcery was founded, and the knowledge of their creation, and, of course, dissolution, had never been recorded by the scholars laboring to assemble the Great Library.

What was known is that a wight came from the entrapment of a dying person’s life force. As a person died, the soul departed the body, and whatever spark of animation that separated a warm, living, laughing, moving person from a cold, lifeless corpse dissipated back into the universe. This life force could be captured using magic and imbued into a wight. What had never really worked, even in the most advanced stages of wight creation, was giving the wight any sort of real intelligence. The wights, barely able to keep their existence, projected their life force with destructive vigor at everything in their path. They could be contained up to a point and for a limited time, but were little better than animate time bombs, waiting to explode.

Wights became destructive weapons which were created and unleashed on a particular place. Most wights were not particularly strong, and the magic would dissipate some weeks after creation. This was more than enough time for them to cause untold havoc against conventional armies. The mere presence of the unnatural abomination would cause a pallor of sick fear to permeate the humans near it. It was said that one castle with several wizards defeated an entire army fielded by a confederation of local landholders by unleashing wights in their midst until half the army was destroyed and the other half dissolved in terror so strong the army was completely broken. The line of speculation went that the wight which had escaped from the cellars of Morran must have been a particularly strong and powerful one, perhaps created as a permanent guardian of a wizard’s lair situated there. Palia had found nothing to confirm or contradict this theory.

What was also known is that the only way to capture this life force was to operate the appropriate magic at the time of death. Usually, the evidence seemed to show, this death was a murder accomplished at the time the wight was created. No example of a natural death giving rise to a wight had ever been recorded. That this Morran wight had survived hundreds of years spoke to a deeper horror: most wights which lasted a few weeks or a month were imbued with the life force of one or two dead people. This wight, to have survived so long, must have been imbued with that of hundreds. The longevity of this particular wight spoke to a fact, that whoever had created it had developed some new, deeper secret as to how to keep the wight from dissolving itself. This made the formulation of a plan to destroy the wight all the more difficult since whatever secret had gone into making the wight was totally unknown.

The horrors of these sorts of magical exercises were what had caused a group of five Sorcerers to gather together and form the College of Swords, with its original five Towers, to lay down guidelines and develop ethical boundaries for magic. They used their own power to coerce other people with magical ability into following these guidelines, and were ruthless with those who would not. Their combined power and diligence had soon restored order. The wars that destroyed places like Morran had fairly well wiped out most of the power-mad wizards of the old times, leaving only lesser magical ability, largely undeveloped, in humans.

The unfortunate aspect of all this knowledge about wights was that it remained theoretical. On one level, they knew the mechanics of wight-making, but had no real experience with it. Dissolving a wight created with an unknown procedure which imbued the wight with more magical energy than any living sorcerer could withstand or overcome made the proposition of defeating it difficult. The only known way to destroy a wight the College had found was to make a more powerful wight, and that was not an option.

“Every work of magic has some weakness, that’s basic,” Palia explained to Anror. “So this wight must have one. Somewhere. But the thing was constructed out of magic that has been lost to us. No one is powerful enough to defeat something like that now. We must either find a weakness, or rediscover how it was made so we can unmake it. I have largely lost hope in the second alternative, although I have kept that hidden from Master Aeral as much as I could, since he considered it the best alternative open to us. Unfortunately, the same zeal that went into stopping those who did abominable acts like creating wights caused us to lose the knowledge of how they were made. The first alternative, finding a weakness, is all we have. Perhaps this place, Loriad’s Stall, will have some lost history or story about a wight being defeated through some clever trick.”

The road crested a small hill, and the two gazed down upon a sea of motley. In the many years of the bazaar, tents of all colors and patterns from all over the world had been staked out. Some were solid swatches of new and bright color, some had once been so but their age was betrayed by how they had faded in the elements. Some had bold stripes of color, some more subtle decorations. They submerged themselves in this sea, and both wondered how they would ever find a single bookseller. High above, the rock pile of Arrei stood sentinel over the waves of tents, the setting sun reflecting off of its high windows.

Getting lost among the tents of the bazaar would have been easy. The bazaar had not been planned in any way, especially at first, so the closer to the castle on the hill, the less sense the passages between the tents made. On the outskirts, some semblance of streets between tents had been forced by the Duke when the chaos closer to the castle proved to be untenable. The measures were instigated too late for the original tents, and among them lay a labyrinth of dead end streets and twisting passages.

Somewhere near the epicenter of the swirl of tents lay a collection of solid stone buildings which lined the original caravan route. That route had been supplemented by a wider, paved road which ran east of the bazaar, in a sort of bypass that created a ten-mile long loop, giving the caravans more room to pass through the area.

Anror suggested they navigate towards the buildings, figuring they could find an inn there. Which was easier said than done, because to go in a general direction they had to dodge countless milling people and backtrack from dead ends. The most direct route to the buildings was most always turned out to lead in an unexpected direction.

Before even entering the city, Anror explained whatever accommodations they would find would cost more than they wanted to pay, but they had agreed to spend whatever it took to get a nice inn where the owner or his hired hands would give them good information about the city. Finding one little bookstall in the endless maze of tents would take some doing. Palia, tired and in a sort of daze from the colors and sounds of the tent-lined streets, felt the task impossible, and was eager to sleep on it. She had let Anror take the lead for the entire time they were wandering among the tents, trusting him completely to figure out a way to where they were going, and she wasn’t completely sure of that. She thought it was strange how they automatically traded off whatever roles each was better for, without even discussing it. She wondered if Anror had noticed.

The inn they chose at Anror’s suggestion was the least seedy looking of a collection of run-down places which were perhaps good enough to stay a night or two if one was sufficiently intoxicated in the process, or didn’t care much about the quality of accommodations. After the homey, peaceful midland inns where the two were treated as long-lost, visiting relatives by the welcoming families who ran them, the establishments along Caravan Street proved to be a shock.

Anror saw Palia, who had obviously not been used to staying at such places, wrinkle her nose in disgust, so he put on a brave face. He claimed he had stayed at worse, and spun a slightly exaggerated tale of a place he had stayed long ago before coming to the college, the gist of which involved walking up with a rat in his room. He ended his speech with something about as long as there weren’t big rats, they would be fine. Yet Palia seemed not to have been much reassured by the look she gave him. Bravely, he took the lead and selected one among the rest and saw to getting them a room.

This particular inn was not as bad as the others. It wasn’t as run down, and while it lacked the homey look of many inns they had seen, it also lacked the greasy look of many of the others on the street. The people coming in and out seemed to be made up of a slightly higher class than the teamsters whose only real concern was obliterating their consciousness, and pay, with alcohol. This inn seemed to cater to families traveling with the caravans, and foremen. As far as their possible accommodations in Arrei would go, this place was probably the best they were going to be able to find.

Unless they could have, Anror thought, convinced the Headmaster or Master Aeral to pull some strings and get them a royal invitation to stay with the Duke of Arrei in the castle. How powerful was Master Aeral, anyway? Anror considered the rumpled old man for a moment, and had to dismiss his connections to royalty. The bookstall which they sought was more the limit of his connections. Too late now, anyway, to have seen to a royal welcome.

The innkeeper did not have much available, and they had to take what they could get. He treated them with a perfunctory indifference of someone used to a transient flow of people in and out. They were just two more nameless people he would not remember a week later, no matter what their purpose was. In some small way, their Quest would help trade to the north, and somehow indirectly affected the innkeeper. But he could not have seen beyond the night’s tally of his profits, even if he had known.

Anror noticed Palia start visibly at the curses and yells of the teamsters. This, he supposed, was why she had a Protector, to take the lead and guide her through occasions like this where strength and solidity were needed. He felt oddly touched by her vulnerability, and the way she walked almost brushing against him with a hand gripping his upper arm. He wanted to give her another hug like the one after graduation, but it wasn’t the proper place, and she would likely not appreciate it. He settled on looking as protective as he could, so no one would bother Palia.

The food surprised them by being plain but hearty, and after their long day they were happy to sit down and eat. The common room was a noisy place, and they did not linger over their meal. Palia wolfed hers down, and tapped the wooden floor with the toe of her boot, waiting for Anror to finish.

They went up to their room, and regarded it with little enthusiasm. All of the furniture, other than the bed, was unfinished wood without cushions or any other comforts. A small window in the corner by the bed overlooked a few large tents below. A table with a couple of chairs sprawled in the corner. Neither felt much like getting comfortable in the room, and they decided to stay dressed in their traveling clothes rather than wear their nightclothes in the bed. From the looks of the mattress, an extra layer of padding for the night would not be unwelcome.

“Some day,” Anror said in a detached voice as Palia arranged herself on the bed beside him, “we’re going to be safe and secure in the Gray Tower in our old age, telling some apprentices about the wonderful adventure we had at the bazaar, and we’ll look back at this time with fond memories.” After seeing the look she gave him, he decided against trying to give her a good-night kiss. She turned over with her back to him, and at least pretended to be asleep.

Neither slept well. The inn, despite appearing to be one of the more reputable ones they could find, was little more than a hostel for teamsters. All through the night, a steady roar of noise kept up in the background, punctuated by shouts of surprise, pain, and inebriation. From time to time a loud and totally inexplicable sound would bombard the inn. Neither could make out what could be the source of these sounds. Their room was near the stairs, and periodically the heavy thump of a teamster’s hobnailed boots would resound, louder and louder as the top was mounted, and then down the corridor in front of their door. Palia thumped her lumpy pillow in futility, and tossed and turned. She wanted to open the door and see what the sounds were outside, but did not want to break the tenuous seal of their private room. Sometime near midnight she finally dozed off, using Anror’s shoulder as a much less lumpy alternative to the pillow.

The directions offered by the innkeeper, who claimed to know the whereabouts of Coaa Street, bewildered both of them, but left to themselves afterwards they pieced together enough by comparing their memories of what the man said to have a general plan. They decided to leave their horses at the inn, and walk. The place they wanted was actually not far from Caravan Street, and in the oldest part of the bazaar where the stone buildings anchored the sprawling tents. As they walked, they could not help but take in some of the sights. Palia found someone selling light pastries in the South Port style, and bought a couple. Anror found them to be delicious, for all that there wasn’t much to them. Palia saw a multi-colored scarf which she expressed delight over, and Anror insisted she purchase it, but Anror himself found nothing to purchase. Haggling over the scarf was as much fun as anything he could buy, and he used his rusty horse-trading skills from the homestead to get the price down to something less than outrageously extortionate. Yet in all this looking and wondering, Anror kept steering them back to their mission, which was to find the bookstall.

When it came to the exciting sights, sounds, and smells of the bazaar, with all of its exotic food and wares to tempt the eyes and empty the wallets, Coaa Street was not the place. They finally found it, after many failed inquiries about its location, thanks to an old grandmother who had lived in the bazaar so long that she was a trove of cartographical information, knowing places that few others knew anymore. The bazaar had, Palia guessed, doubled or tripled in size since Master Aeral had been there. At least that was the impression Palia got from comparing her Master’s descriptions to the sights she had seen.

Coaa Street was in an old section of the bazaar, where low, single-story buildings mostly of a sooty gray brick stood rather than the tents and booths of the outlying areas. The streets here were dirt, light brown and hard since it had not rained in some weeks. Palia imagined the mush they would become if it did rain, and she hoped their business would be complete and they would be gone before she had to walk firsthand through it. The street was a short cul-de-sac, that dead-ended in the back of another, larger building which fronted some other part of the bazaar’s labyrinth, which meant that finding an establishment along it was not difficult.

Loriad’s Stall was still there. In fact, it had likely not changed since Master Aeral was a young man, exploring the twists and turns of the bazaar for the first time, as he was infatuated by the huge amount of untapped knowledge and lost in a giddy feeling of euphoria at what he could learn. Nor, likely, had it changed since many generations before. Truly, secrets before the founding of the Great Library itself had been left in the dark back corners to rot. Perhaps the books were what kept the stall, which was actually a small brick building with a lean-to awning in front, together, because in several places they were stacked together from floor to ceiling. Some scheme of categorization had existed at a time in the past to give a general order to the mounds of books, but the time had long since passed when that was sufficient to impose order. Now, the catalogue was in the proprietor’s head. A customer had merely to offer the hint of a suggestion of the title desired, and said book would appear as if conjured by magic.

Or, proprietress. Loriad had died five years ago, the two on their Quest found, and his daughter Lorian ran the business now. She was a small, intense woman who fidgeted a lot. She did not stand still for more than a few seconds, always picking things up and moving them around even as she talked. She constantly straightened her stringy hair, tucking a strand behind her ear which escaped seconds later as she twitched her head in another direction, and pulling her sleeves up into a more comfortable position for them only to fall back down moments later. She had mousy eyes, and squinted. But her busyminded demeanor changed into a serious one as Palia explained who they were and what they were looking for.

Lorian shocked them both by mentioning the “dashing young man” of the Gray Tower her father talked about often to her, the Journeyman who had arisen to be a Master and had come back to spend untold hours and coins at the Stall. To imagine Old Aeral as a dashing young Master took quite a leap of the imagination. But Aeral was apparently well known to the father, and also the daughter, and anyone associated with him or the Gray Tower would be assured the best of care and attention as they shopped. Anything they needed, Lorian would provide. Lorian went on about the beautiful young Protector who had accompanied the Master, and compared Anror favorably to that figure out of the limitless depths of remote legend. Palia turned and gave Anror a lopsided smile which the proprietress did not see and which Anror did not know exactly how to take.

After catching up, and a little small talk about the state of Arrei and its sprawling tents, the conversation turned to books. With this shift, Palia and Lorian began to act like long-lost friends reunited. Palia mentioned some author Anror had never before heard of, and Lorian almost completed her sentence. They exchanged mentions of favorites, and obscure volumes they had come across or wished to find, for a while. Soon the talk turned closer to the Quest, and frequently Lorian would disappear back into a corner someplace and produce a dusty, worn book or crumbling scroll. A mound began to appear around Palia as she skimmed the proffered possibilities. Many of these elicited wide eyes, and a stack began to form of what Anror guessed would be the ones they’d carry out with them.

Anror felt right out of place among the swirling talk of authors and books he had never heard of. He had to wonder if Master Aeral’s Protector had felt as out of depth and had been as bored. He supposed there was some remote chance something misadventurous might befall Palia in this ancient bookstore, but for the life of him he could not imagine what, save for a stack of books collapsing on her. He rather imagined she would enjoy that, if she survived the collapse, digging out from the bottom of such a book-pile and rediscovering many lost masterpieces in the process. After a few hours of being bored and trying not to act bored, and failing miserably, Anror yawned and mentioned he ought to have a look around the area. Palia absentmindedly gave him permission to explore, not really diverting her attention from the stack of tomes she and Lorian were discussing.

Freed from the bookstore, Anror looked at the quiet street outside. Only a few other shops were to be found in the dumpy little backwater street, and none of them anything he would find interesting. An apothecary sold herbs, roots, medicines, and other ingredients, but from a shabby building that would cast doubts on their quality or potency. A parchment shop sold paper, pens, and other necessities for the bookish. Anror walked around, but for all the bustle and business, this end of the bazaar offered the visitor very little to do. He found a small inn and drank a weak flagon of what passed as refreshment, and wandered some more. While he was certain that being a Protector had its moments of action and adventure, he had seen precious little of them. Conscious of his duty, he decided not to avail himself of the opportunity that idle time on his hands afforded him to create his own adventure. No sense in spending the night in the local lockup, which from all accounts was an unpleasant experience thanks to the ever-vigilant crimson constabulary whose long arm tolerated little trouble.

Anror, as bored as he was when he left, came back to find his Journeywoman still poring over an incredible array of books of all different sizes and shapes. When she saw him come back into the Stall, she gave him a huge smile. Palia actually trembled with excitement, something Anror could not recall ever seeing her do before, and which took him aback for a moment. Palia reassured him: “We’re finally making some progress! I’m finding a lot of new information here.” He thought she seemed jittery, as if she was overwhelmed with too much information and unable to process it all. He could not remember her losing her reserved calm like this. He couldn’t decide at the moment if he liked the change or not.

Lorian was excited by the amount of money they spent, and was all but fainting in anticipation of the gold coins which changed hands, although she tried to appear sanguine as if this were merely another routine sale, and not what was probably her entire profits for the next five years. The Gray Tower, acting on behalf of the College of Sorcery, had allocated for them what was by any measure a generous stipend. As the severe necessity of the Quest warranted, it was true. If even a scrap of paper could give them a clue to defeating the wight, that scrap would be worth a thousand times its weight in pure gold. Old Aeral, if he were truly the man of legend this woman remembered so vividly, might have contributed some of his own personal fortune in order to keep the bookstall of his youth in business, so it would always be there, as a comforting and reassuring thought in the back of the Master’s mind if not a destination he would revisit again in his life. No one knew the personal worth of the Gray Tower’s Master, or any Tower’s. No matter where it came from, Anror knew this money was well spent, if it helped them achieve the object of their Quest, which to him was most strongly stated as avenging the murder of his best friend, but also included stopping the wight. Still, the amount was a staggering fortune, and he boggled himself in consideration of what the same sum would buy him elsewhere in the bazaar. The proprietress lost some of her restraint and showered them with profuse thanks, gratitude towards the Gray Tower, effulgent words of greeting and remembrance to shine on its Master upon their return there, and a lifelong invitation to come back to the bookstall at any time in their future should they find themselves back in the bazaar. Anror regarded this gushing with an amused look, but Palia answered it with dignity and sincerity, promising to give Master Aeral the regards, and promising to return again some day. Anror was not sure if this last bit was on behalf of the proprietress’ feelings, or on behalf of the still-jerky Palia’s own wish to come back some time when she would be afforded more time to browse. Palia did, Anror saw, give the stacks of books an undisguised, last fond look as they made their way back out onto the street.

They left the bookstall, content with their treasures. Anror hefted the large box of volumes Palia had purchased, and carried them for her. The glories of the Protector, he through wryly, having been reduced to a porter. Palia would not let Anror carry one small bag of books, but clutched them in her hands as if she feared losing them. They made their way back to the inn where they had stationed themselves. “I really hate to use the Quest to indulge myself,” Palia said more to herself than to Anror, “but I don’t know when I’ll ever get back here again. And I couldn’t pass up The Complete Poems of Walle Morrannash, since the Great Library only has a selection of his works. At least that I’ve found. And I’ve never read Qallac’s Adventures, although several people quote passages from his work.” She babbled on like this for some time, in a pitiful attempt to justify her expenditures. Not that she needed to. Anror smiled to himself. She would soon be the Master of the Gray Tower, and could buy the entire stall and have it delivered to the Tower if she wanted, but he knew very well that she, just like Master Aeral, was more in love with the idea of such a place existing somewhere far off, which they could only visit occasionally, and whose wonders would be fresh and new with every appearance. Any book bought from such a magical place would be worth ten times one brought to the doorstep of the Gray Tower.

Palia was not much of a conversationalist, normally, Anror had become fully aware, but she disappeared into The Complete Poems of Walle Morrannash at dinner that night and he didn’t get a word out of her. Just as well, Anror supposed, considering that, at least, he had found one thing that seemed to make Palia happy to the point that she would abandon her guarded reserve that she still put up even around him, as well as he thought they knew each other by now.

The next couple of days were spent by Anror trying to relieve his boredom, and by Palia deeply involved in figuring out what information about the wight could be gleaned from the mountain of scrolls and books which their box contained. Palia spent some time carefully organizing what she had found. Three or four of the books had been her personal purchases, and they were tucked safely aside. The rest all had some perceived bearing on the wight. She began reading, and making carefully annotations on a page of a notebook about what she read. Anror glanced over her shoulder at these once, but whatever notation she used was some sort of code.

Anror occasionally went out, but that wasn’t much fun. He saw things he wanted to show Palia, and the flirtatious attention of the girls he encountered meant nothing to him anymore. He bought her a few little things he hoped she would like, but she did not pay that much attention to them, being so engrossed in her work. His feelings were not particularly hurt, because he realized the purchases were more from a want of anything to do than any real desire to give her a gift. He mostly missed having her around. Was this getting old? He had to wonder. Without her company, he couldn’t find anything to do, and eventually stayed around the inn, learning as much news as he could from the travelers in the common room. This news was not much. The wight had caused the market for armed guards and mercenaries to blossom, and the bazaar had taken on a certain roughness it had not had before. Besides the wight which, for all of its terror, could only be in one place at a time and did not cause wide scale panic, nothing much was going on. The traveling folk had much the same problems they always had: drunkenness, late pay, petty thievery, perceived wrongs inflicted upon them by their masters, and the like. Each person considered their circumstances to be of the utmost importance, and related their woes with an almost theatrical vividness, but Anror had heard the stories before and could not bring himself to weigh the stories with the gravity their owners felt was necessary. Vaguely, he felt he should be more sympathetic to these people, but he also felt they were caught up in the way of the world and his concern would make little difference in their lives. He wondered if such resignation was appropriate, or if he were becoming too jaded. The constant stream of problems coming from almost any conversation he struck up began to wash over him like a sort of chanted liturgy in which he was not fully engaged.

If only he had come here a year ago! Now that he had found the one person in the world he wanted to settle down and order his entire life around, girls swarmed him. This had little to do, he quickly realized, with any merits he possessed, but just because he looked so much better in comparison to the rough thugs, dirty teamsters, and grimy inhabitants of the bazaar. Compared to them, a man like him must have dazzled the local girls. Also, he was leaving soon, as he always quickly intimated in any conversation to get information about the roads and conditions around, varying exactly where he was going to get wider information, and the girls knew he was not going with a caravan. They must have been powerfully drawn to the young man who could take them out of the bazaar to a different place.

Anror had never considered himself a real catch, at least in other people’s eyes, although he played the games with girls wearing a certain air of self-confidence and bravado. He knew it was just a game, and had played along with his various affairs. He knew he wasn’t serious, and he knew the girls were not serious. He had always had fun, but also had had a longing feeling that there ought to be more. Now he had that more he had longed for, upstairs reading old scrolls, but that did not stop the girls. He began to feel sorry for them. They tried to make themselves pretty, but most were tired and their eyes looked old, like their hope for the future had long since abandoned them.

The bazaar, once a beacon of exotic delights, began to get on Anror’s nerves. He did not want to go out, and he did not want to stay in the room. He wanted to leave. He sat on the edge of the bed the morning that marked one week since they arrived, looking at Palia’s back as she bent over the table. Both their nerves had been strained over the past couple of days, and with their frustration mounting they were beginning to get on each others nerves when they were together. Palia didn’t want to be distracted from the studies she had buried herself in, even to eat, and Anror was in a generally bad mood. He found it easier to go out and leave Palia alone, but knew that was wrong. She would stay in here a month, or a year, or longer looking at the books. He had to get her to come up for air, somehow, and rethink what they were doing.

Palia never exactly told him point-blank that she was frustrated, and even her usual answers to his questions tended to be short and taciturn, with only the most occasional flourish of conversation that let him deeper into her mind and under her guard. So other than the slight frown and tighter forehead, she was externally the same. But one of the most telling signs of how uncomfortable and frustrated she was betrayed her. He had never seen Palia wear her boots a second longer than she had to once they were indoors somewhere, since having lived her whole life in balmy South Port she had never completely gotten comfortable with them, but she left them on constantly now other than when she slept. She was goading herself to work harder by being uncomfortable, and the severe chair at the table certainly cooperated.

Anror’s patience with letting Palia set her own pace had broken. He confronted Palia with the question he had been trying as hard as he could not to constantly badger her with: whether she was making any progress at all or not.

“I need more information,” Palia said. She listlessly rearranged a few scrolls. She crossed and uncrossed her ankles under the table, and then set her booted feet flat before her. She did not turn around to look at him as she spoke. He knew she had read everything she had to read, and was merely moving things around to look like she was working.

Something in him changed, as if he had unconsciously made a decision. He stood up, and moved directly behind her. “I have been trying to give you as much space as you needed,” Anror said, “and as much time as you need. That would be much easier if you could convince me that you’re getting somewhere.”

“Research doesn’t work that way,” Palia told him, more sharply than she would have liked her voice to sound. For all that she was on a Quest, and as much as she would like to have savored the research and enjoyed it, lives were at stake. The burden had gotten heavier on her as she read the material she had collected without finding the answers she had been counting on to be there. She felt like time was running out, but she also felt like Anror was pushing her. She could easily miss something important, and it was worth a few extra days to be sure she hadn’t!

“I don’t believe,” Anror said as evenly and reasonably as he could, not wanting to provoke her into withdrawing from him, “we can spend too much more time studying the wight,” Anror protested, “because innocent, helpless people are being killed. I talked to someone yesterday who had ridden in with a wagon train from the north, and five people had been killed by it.”

“I know what is at stake,” Palia said with a cold look over her shoulder. “I know.” Was he reading her thoughts? Of course not, there was no need when things were that obvious. She did not meet his eyes. She wished she could tell him exactly what the next step was, but she could not.

“There must be something in all this,” he gestured hopelessly at the mound of books and scrolls surrounding her, “that gives you some clue as to a weakness.”

Palia folded her arms, and put her head down on the table. She said nothing for so long that Anror began to worry.

Finally, he said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere. We are past the point of diminishing returns in studying these,” he waved his hands hopelessly at all the arcane writing spread out, “whatever you are studying. We haven’t learned anything new here in Arrei that we didn’t already know. I think it’s time for us to start planning a course of action. Or, more than one. At least list our alternatives at this point.”

“If we could learn a little bit more about how the wight was formed, we might be able to do that. I’m looking at the clues about how the wight was formed, to try to see if there isn’t some way to begin undoing it, even if it just starts some kind of chain reaction.” She shuffled the papers around, looking for something. She did glance at one buried sheet, but not for long, as if what she found there wasn’t as hopeful as she’d like for supporting her line of thought.

“All I’m saying,” he said as evenly as he could, “is that we don’t have any real hope of gaining any new information, so let’s take stock of what we have and make some plans. What we’re doing now isn’t accomplishing anything, and it’s time to rethink the overall strategy.”

She turned around and looked up at him, with a strained expression. “I’m doing the best I can!” Palia said with exasperation. “This is my Quest, and I’m handling it in the only way I know how.” Her hand gripped the back of the chair until it was white.

“This is our Quest,” Anror reminded her hotly, “and you need someone to tell you when enough study is enough!”

Palia gave him a withering look. “Don’t you ever tell me when I’ve studied enough! You don’t know the first thing about magic or how it is used.” She pushed herself up from the table, turned her back on him, and went to stare out of the window.

Anror walked over behind her. “Maybe not, but I know you, and you’d spend the rest of your life tracking down these ancient books and obscure nothings that aren’t telling us anything. We know everything that can be known at this point. We need to plan our action, or this Quest will never end.”

Palia turned around, regarding him with a wide-eyed look he couldn’t fathom, and then brushed past him. She slammed the door, and he could hear her tromping down the steps. Anror sat down on the bed, his head cradled in his hands. The confrontation had not gone the way he wanted it to, but no better than he expected. He could only hope he had pushed her hard enough to turn her in a new direction.

On to ... Chapter Seventeen: Progress