Prologue
The Old Singer closed her papery eyelids and concentrated. A web of wrinkles etched her pale face like cracks in the Great Glacier. On her filhata she played a melody in the second mode, Aiodu, as she reached far, far away with the thread of her thought, lengthening, narrowing, stretching it beyond all known limits. Past the thick stone walls of Conservatory, across the great ironwood forests of the Marik Mountains she reached. She followed events by listening to the mind of Sira, her protégée, who was in the gravest possible danger.
The old Singer’s psi, so often used to speed the motion of the tiniest parts of air around her, to stir it into giving off heat and light, now carried her many days’ ride away, to a lonely campsite where Sira, the youngest of Nevyan Singers, lay wounded, bleeding into the snow that covered her. The old Singer had followed the shadowed patterns leading to this, had sensed the evil that pursued Sira from the safety of the great Houses out into the deadly climate of the Continent. She felt in her mind how the cold that all Nevyans feared began to seep into Sira’s body as night fell and the warmth of the quiru above the campsite waned. Around Sira was death and more death, and the old Singer sensed her shock and grief, and her fear.
Then, as she listened with all her mind, the echo that was Sira’s thought faded from her hearing. The Singer struggled to find it again. She cast about in the darkness, her filhata flung aside on her narrow cot. But try as she might, she could hear no more from Sira. In desperation, the old Singer prayed into the night for the Spirit of Stars to help her beloved student. As always, the unknowable Spirit sent no answer.