There were no seasons in Pangolais.
Days melted into weeks, into months, into years, and life in the Dusk Hall never changed. Under the gaze of its unliving statues and half-living Joyful Things, children prayed, practiced spells, and—somewhere along the way—learned to leave childhood behind.
Over a hundred students came to the Dusk Hall that year. Several failed the Joyful Things’ test; those remained wrapped in the cripples’ tongues until their struggles stopped and they collapsed for lack of air. Then the shadowcallers carried them away, dragging them down to the lightless cells in the Dusk Hall’s depths.
Sometimes, in the silences of the nights that followed, Isiem could hear their screams. More often he could not.
The survivors needed no further reminders of failure’s price. They kept to the south side of the Dusk Hall, where their classes and living quarters overlooked three small courtyards, each one a jewel-like garden of night-blooming white flowers and exotic plants with dark dappled leaves. The north side, separated by a larger courtyard paved in squares of silver-streaked marble, was reserved for shadowcallers and students of Zon-Kuthon’s faith. Other than the library and the cathedral where Kuthite services were held, those rooms were forbidden to the new arrivals—as were the dungeons hidden under the Dusk Hall’s solemn grandeur.
Few were tempted to test that prohibition, and none had time. The newcomers threw themselves into their studies, spending hours bent over the long, low tables in the Dusk Hall’s perpetually twilit libraries. They spent hours more in circled lecture halls, attending lessons on everything from the history of the horselords who were their honored ancestors to the rites of propitiation for Zon-Kuthon’s heralds.
They studied the Shadow Plane, a warped reflection of the real world where all was drawn in shades of gray and nothing was substantial. There, distances stretched long and snapped close unpredictably. Landmarks dissolved like dunes of black sand in the wind, only to rise again in new places. Things lived on the Plane of Shadow that did not, could not, exist in the daylight world. It was a strange and surreal realm, largely indifferent to puny human toils. And it was the source of many shadowcallers’ spells, so the pupils of the Dusk Hall devoted months to the study of its workings.
Above all, however, their lessons concerned magic.
The spells they learned were more innocuous than Isiem had expected. They called no shadowbeasts to hunt innocents in the night. They didn’t even offer sacrifices of their own blood over fire, as evil wizards did in the dimly remembered stories of his childhood. Instead they practiced minor ward spells, imbuing themselves with thin weaves of energy that could be used to deflect other magical attacks. They learned to conjure ghostly lights and imagined sounds, to manipulate small objects at a distance, to create sparks of flame and bursts of wintry cold. The only necromancy their teachers showed them was defensive: a method of unraveling the spells that bound undead to this world, weakening their hold on false life.
Isiem was not, however, reassured by the seemingly benign forms that their lessons took. He understood that these spells were but a prelude: a necessary foundation so that when they did attempt the darker and more dangerous forms of magic, they would not immediately be destroyed.
He almost didn’t care.
Isiem was good at magic. He had a gift for it. Spells came easily to him, and once learned, were not forgotten. Often he could intuit more advanced forms from the simplified shapes of cantrips, enabling him to leap ahead of the other students and impressing the senior wizards.
His skill bought him respect, approval, and a certain measure of safety. The teachers of the Dusk Hall did not tolerate failure. Clumsy students were subject to discipline, and discipline in Zon-Kuthon’s house was no light matter. Isiem took pride in his talent and cultivated it for its own sake … but he was also acutely aware that same talent sheltered him from the lash.
Not all his fellows were so fortunate. Of the three who had come from Crosspine, only Helis matched him. Ascaros struggled. Some things the younger boy learned almost instantly, faster than Isiem himself did, as though the knowledge was already in him and needed only a reminder. Other things he could not learn at all, no matter how furiously he sweated over his books or how many times he repeated the words.
As the months passed, Ascaros became surly and withdrawn, often sinking into black sulks that forced Isiem to physically drag him out of bed, lest his friend be punished for failing to attend his lessons. Ascaros’s nails grew long and hooked; his curly brown hair became a wild tangle that fell over his eyes, isolating him from the world. The lack of discipline shown in his appearance earned the shadowcallers’ ire, and so the boy would shear his hair and cut his nails and, for a while, maintain their standards of seemliness. But the weight of his anger and depression always pulled him back down, and within weeks he slipped back into disarray.
Yet even Ascaros fared better than Loran did.
The child wasn’t stupid. He was afraid. He was too young, had grown up too isolated. The Dusk Hall overwhelmed him. His sister, struggling with her own studies, had little time to coddle him. Ascaros and Isiem had still less, although they did what they could. The other students, sensing Loran’s weakness, avoided him, and month by month, his loneliness exacerbated his fear.
One evening, as the students gathered around a nightglass, Loran’s terror came to a head.
The mirror—which Isiem now knew went by many names, of which “nightglass” and “nightmirror” were the most common—was a small one, scarcely larger than Isiem’s palm. It was the first time any of them had been allowed to gaze into a nightglass since they had been tested, and Isiem felt a thrill of fear when their instructor—Dirakah, the one-armed woman who had shown them her ring their first night, and who had proved no softer since—lifted the black velvet that veiled it.
He was not the only one to react that way. A disquieted murmur rose from the other students, but it soon died out: they were Nidalese, aspiring wizards of the Dusk Hall, and well accustomed to subduing their fear. If Dirakah thought them ready to face the nightglass, then they would be ready—whether or not they themselves believed it.
One by one, the thirteen students in the chamber came forward. Each took a saucer of cold clotted blood that had been collected from the kitchen chickens slaughtered that morning, then returned to his or her place in the semicircle facing the glass.
“It has been two years since you came to the Dusk Hall,” Dirakah told them. “In those two years, you have learned the beginnings of magic. It is time for you to move beyond trivial things and prepare yourselves for true power.
“Each of you has gazed into a nightglass once before, and each of you has felt the vastness that lies beyond. All that can be imagined can be wrought from the Midnight Lord’s shadows … if you have the strength to bend them to your will, and the gift to bind them.” She beckoned Isiem forward. “Come. Try. Call the shadow from the glass, and offer it your sacrifice. The blood it tastes will shape it—not always, not perfectly, but sufficiently for tonight.”
Isiem bowed his head to her, rose, and approached the nightglass. The black mirror stared back at him, waiting, from its pedestal of worked iron.
Drawing a measured breath, Isiem focused on it as he had that night in Crosspine, willing himself to look beyond the nightglass and into the pooled darkness at its heart. Starlight swirled across its polished surface, although there were no stars in the sky above Pangolais and no windows in the chamber through which they might shine.
He let the vortex of impossible light carry him into the nightmirror … and, as he had before, felt the world fall away.
The gate of shadows greeted him. It was different in this mirror—like standing at the brink of a forest pool and gazing down, rather than standing before an onyx archway. Dark, elusive shapes stirred in the depths, swirling the cold black water without creating so much as a ripple on its surface. Some of them felt peaceful as they slid past his awareness, most uncaring, a few dangerous.
Isiem singled out one of those shapes and concentrated his will upon it, alternately coaxing and compelling. What he did was not like any spell he knew, precisely; it felt less like entangling a living creature in his magic than like spinning sound and light into illusion. There was something real in the nightmirror’s pool—he felt it twisting and writhing in his grasp, reshaping itself to fit the contours of what he imagined—but it had no substance. It was ephemeral as a ghost, and when it finally drew near, lured up to the surface, he felt nothing from it but hunger and sucking cold.
His physical body felt sluggish and numb, but he still had control. Isiem raised his dish of chicken blood to the nightmirror in offering.
This is a poor cold meal. The shadow-thing’s voice was more akin to the touch of a frigid wind than any sound. Yet it stretched to take the blood despite its complaint, sending a tendril of darkness out of the nightmirror into the practice chamber.
A second murmur rose from the assembled students as the shadow-creature manifested before their eyes. Isiem ignored them, keeping his focus entirely on the shade he had summoned. The instant that it touched the blood, a physical shock rolled through him: the ghostly thing he had called suddenly solidified, became real, in a way it had not before. He fought to keep it in the shape he had envisioned. It felt like trying to hold up a collapsing roof with bare hands … but bit by bit he succeeded, and the shadow poured into the form he chose.
It was a vulpine thing, its face lean and clever and cruel, its teeth white as winter stars. Lidless, slanted eyes shone between a pointed nose and pointed ears. A ruff of melting darkness, somewhere between spikes and fur, wreathed its too-long neck. Its shoulders, and whatever else might exist of its body, remained within the mirror.
“Impressive,” Dirakah said. “Now send it back.”
Isiem nodded, scarcely feeling the gesture. He withdrew from the nightglass, simultaneously releasing the shadow-creature’s imagined form and pulling it apart at the edges. It unraveled like an unfinished garment, dissolving back into formless darkness with a mute howl of frustration.
“Good.” With that curt note of approval, Dirakah dismissed him, turning her attention to the next student in the circle. “Perahni.”
It took her twice as long, and what she finally coaxed from the mirror was little more than a shapeless mass of coils ending in disjointed spiders’ legs, but ultimately Perahni called a shadow-creature to drink her offering too. Other students followed, with greater and lesser success, until it came Loran’s turn.
The boy stood hesitantly, edging toward the nightglass with sidelong steps. Fear radiated from him. He held his dish of chicken blood steady, and he did not shrink from gazing into the curved black glass … but he held himself closed to the shadows in its depths. Whether because of something that had happened during his test in Crosspine, or because of all the misshapen monsters he’d seen the other students call forth, Loran was unwilling to open his own soul to the mirror. And, being unwilling to use his own mind and spirit as the lure, he could conjure nothing from the glass.
Isiem saw it clearly. If he saw it, Dirakah could hardly fail to do the same—and, indeed, her lips thinned in displeasure and her hand twitched toward the thin black rod she kept tucked in her belt. She did not take it out, however, and Isiem’s trepidation grew. If she wasn’t going to beat Loran with the rod, it only meant she had something worse in mind.
“Step away,” she told the boy.
“Yes, mistress.” Loran bowed over his untouched bowl of blood and backed away from the glass. Shivers wracked his skinny shoulders, and he set the bowl down rather than let it fall from his trembling hands. Making a mess would only have worsened whatever was coming.
“You are afraid.” Dirakah stood, walking toward her student with icy implacability. Her heels clicked on the floor’s polished stone. “Your fear makes you fail.”
Loran watched her come, too frightened or emotionally exhausted to do anything but stare at her with the huge frozen eyes of a mouse pinned under a serpent’s gaze. “Yes, mistress.”
“There are worse things to fear than the nightglass’s shadows. Perhaps you require a reminder.”
“If—if you deem it so, mistress.”
“If?” Blinding-fast, her rod sliced through the air, striking Loran’s cheek. He crashed to the ground and lay there without protest, not even reaching toward his wounded face. A broad pale swath striped his cheek; as Isiem watched, the white flesh turned a mottled red, and a line of blood welled in its center. “You do not say ‘if’ to me, worm. ‘Yes.’ All you may ever say to me is ‘yes.’ Do you understand?”
“Yes, mistress,” Loran mumbled. He did not blink as blood trickled from his wound toward his eye. Neither did any of the other students. They watched his punishment with practiced stillness, unmoved as gray-robed statues.
“Dirakah.” The door eased open, and a dark-haired man in shadowcaller’s robes stepped in. It took a moment for Isiem to recognize him as Lamion, one of the trio that had taken him from Crosspine; the man was not one of the Dusk Hall’s instructors, and Isiem had not seen him in the years since. He looked much the same, apart from a few threads of gray in his hair and a new series of scars across his right hand.
“What?” Dirakah snapped without turning around.
“The Chelaxians are here with a new string of slaves. Good ones. They will go quickly. You’d best hurry if you want to secure any for your students.”
“These half-wits don’t deserve good slaves. I should make them feed the shadows from their own wrists for their idiocy.” But she drew back from Loran, breathing hard as she looked over the gathered students. After a moment she pointed to Isiem. “Take that one. Have him choose. He’s the least stupid of today’s lot, for what little that’s worth.”
Lamion glanced at Loran prostrate on the floor, curled his lip in a sneer, and nodded. “How many do you want?”
“One, and only if that one can be had for something approaching a reasonable price. I’ll not waste the Dusk Hall’s gold for the benefit of these fools.”
“As you will.” Lamion bent a knee briefly and retreated from the doorway. “You. Come.”
Immediately Isiem left the circle and followed Lamion into the hall. He fell in quietly behind the shadowcaller, walking one step to the side and three behind, as he had been taught. The older man did not address him, or give him so much as a glance, until they were out of the Dusk Hall and walking along the wide, curved streets of Pangolais.
“Have you been to the markets?” he inquired as they passed beneath a pair of towering iron lampposts that resembled the trees overshadowing the city. Pallid globes of light hung among the trees’ thorned black branches, drawing a constant swirl of gray moths.
“No, master,” Isiem replied.
“They are a spectacle.”
It did not take long for Isiem to see what he meant. The city’s market square was a vast expanse of flat gray stone. Gargoyles and contorted statues, wearing crowns and needled gorgets pierced through their stony skin, overlooked the bustle from freestanding plinths and the grand buildings that hemmed the square.
Some of those statues were not carved of marble or limestone. They were living bodies that had been flayed and broken, drained of blood, then pinned into oddly beautiful configurations with lengths of sharpened steel. Those enormous needles were enchanted to keep their prisoners alive and suffering beyond all mortal endurance. High above the teeming crowds they hung, with only their feeble gasps and the occasional twitch of a finger to show that they were anything other than pure ornament.
Few in the crowds seemed to notice their torment. The market’s wares held more interest for them—and for Isiem, too. He saw barrow-carts piled high with long white radishes and dark furled mushrooms dug up from the depths of the Uskwood; he walked past jewelers’ stands draped with filigree necklaces, earrings, bracelets—all in silver, all set with glowing gemstones in white or gray or black. Anything he could imagine, ordinary or rare, seemed to be displayed on a table somewhere.
Slender noblewomen picked through trays of cosmetics that promised to accentuate the whiteness of their skin, darken their lips, or lend the shimmer of crushed nightmoths’ wings to their eyelids. Scarred Kuthite priests tested razors and studded lashes on themselves or on the tongueless slaves staked by the merchants’ tables for that purpose. Shadowcallers in flowing gray brushed past peasants and artisans, ignoring the mumbled obeisances that the latter were always quick to offer.
And then they came to the slave market, and Isiem was truly overwhelmed. Elsewhere he had seen things strange and wondrous … but here, for the first time, he saw people who were utterly foreign to his understanding of the world.
Some of the slaves on the rope were huge. Some were tiny. Many were inhuman. Their skin was ruddy or golden or a deep rich brown that amazed him; none had the ghost-pale complexion of a Nidalese. Their hair was not only ash or white, but flame or brass or brilliant sun. One small, large-mouthed creature, barely half the height of a human, had extraordinary blue eyes and wild spikes of purple hair. Next to it was a hulking female with bronze-capped tusks and callused gray-green hide that, over the creature’s slabs of muscle, gave her the look of a walking statue. Isiem gaped at them openly, too astonished to hide it.
“Congratulations, novice, you’ll pay double the price now,” Lamion muttered, although he seemed more amused than irritated by Isiem’s reaction. “Let me do the bargaining.”
“What are we looking for?” Isiem asked. As his initial surprise dissipated, he realized with some puzzlement that many of the slaves appeared to be old, very young, or sickly—not what he would have expected a slaver to choose for the long and arduous journey into Pangolais.
“Emotion,” Lamion said, walking down the line. “Emotion and experience.”
“Emotion?” Isiem repeated, uncomprehending.
“Others buy slaves for their deft hands or strong backs. We seek sacrifices for our art. I saw that Dirakah had you practicing with the nightglass. Surely you must have noticed that its shadows demand to be fed—and that they come into the world stronger and surer once they have eaten.”
“Yes,” Isiem said, remembering the foxlike creature he’d drawn out of the mirror, and how abruptly the feel of the thing had changed once it tasted his offering of blood.
“Those shadows need us. They need life. They have none of their own. Warm blood—the taste of life—is precious to them, but more precious still are the dreams and emotions that living people possess. The memories. It doesn’t seem to matter much what the memories are, only that they’re strong ones. Vivid. Fear, hate, love, it’s all the same to them. The intensity is all they care about. It makes things easier for us, and more profitable for our friends from Cheliax.”
Isiem felt lost again. “Easier?”
Lamion gestured contemptuously at an old man in the line. Like all the other slaves, he was bound with a loop of enchanted rope around his wrists and ankles. The soft gray strand flexed perfectly around its prisoners, avoiding any abrasion while keeping them confined in bonds stronger than steel. Yet even that seemingly fragile restraint looked absurd on the old man’s liver-spotted wrists. He could hardly stand upright; any fight in him had died decades ago.
“Who would buy that one?” Lamion asked. “Look at him. The necromancers of Geb might pay a few coppers for his bones, but he’s worthless to anyone else. Except us.”
And him, and his family, Isiem thought, but he held his tongue. Lamion clearly thought nothing of that; it did not matter a whit to him that all these slaves could hear every word he said. In the shadowcaller’s eyes, these creatures were not people.
“His memories are what matter,” Lamion continued. “His pain. If he can suffer, he has worth—to the shadows, and so to us.”
“Do we need him?” Isiem asked hesitantly. The shadowcaller gave him a curious look, but he did not seem angry, so Isiem pressed onward. “Can we not feed the shadows ourselves, instead of relying on these poor creatures?”
“You do.” An auburn-haired woman stepped out from the canopied tent near the slave line. Turquoise-studded silver pins held her hair in an elaborate crown of braids. She was slim and pale, like a Nidalese, but she was not one of them. Her pallor tended toward gold, not white, and although her dress was black leather like a Kuthite’s, it was trimmed and slashed in red. The emblem of Cheliax was worked in crimson on her breast.
Lamion did not seem pleased to see her. “Suryan.”
“Lamion.” She gave him a radiant smile and raised her hands in mock-affectionate greeting. “Who is this charming child you’ve brought me?”
The woman’s effusion seemed to increase Lamion’s annoyance. The shadowcaller stepped back, withdrawing into a shell of unfriendliness. “Isiem. He’s new.”
“He must be. You haven’t crushed all the questions out of him yet.” She regarded Isiem with the same too-charming smile. Her eyes sparkled: now blue, now green, now somewhere in between. He wondered if she used some minor magic to change their hue. “New as you are, however, you must have seen that the people of Pangolais are … different. A lassitude envelops this city. Its people are wan, thin, silent. You might say they’re shadows of themselves. Or, perhaps, that they’ve fed shadows of themselves.”
“Suryan,” Lamion said again. This time it was a warning.
She ignored him. “You must have seen, too, that most of your fellow students do not come from the city, but from the little villages farther from Nidal’s heart. If they’ve started letting you out of the Dusk Hall, you may have noted that there are few children in Pangolais. I’ve been visiting this city for a decade, and I doubt I’ve seen twenty children in all that time here. Why is that, do you suppose?”
“Suryan,” Lamion snarled.
“Ah, the truth is prickly.” She turned to Isiem, encompassing the market around them with a wave of one hand. Her nails were painted blue-green, too. “The Nidalese do feed their shadows. Constantly. Every breath you take under the trees of Pangolais is taxed for their sustenance. And even so, all these people giving up their vitality can only sustain the gloom over Pangolais. To call beasts from the darkness, you need more—yet if you fed them with your own blood, drained as you are, it might kill you. Therefore you need our charges to pay the toll.”
“Which is why we’ve come,” Lamion said sharply. “If you could cease your fairy stories long enough to sell some.”
“I suppose, owing to our long friendship, I might do you the small favor of negotiating for one or two.” Suryan’s smile twinkled, although her eyes stayed cold. “Which would you like?”
Lamion nodded toward Isiem. “Choose.”
Choose. The immensity of the decision rooted Isiem to the ground. How did one choose who was worthy to live? If Lamion’s intimations were true, and the intensity of a sacrifice’s emotions strengthened the shadowbeast that fed on him, then it was likely—no, it was certain—that the sacrifice would be tortured first. No Kuthite would let an opportunity to inflict suffering pass.
Whoever he chose would be tortured and killed. And if he didn’t choose anyone, he invited that fate upon himself. Isiem had been in the Dusk Hall long enough to know that.
It was a briefly tempting thought—one way out of his dilemma—but as he faced that thought, and the finality of it, Isiem quailed away. He didn’t have it in him to choose death. Not the kind of death Zon-Kuthon’s adepts would give.
How, then, could he do the least harm?
“Tell me about that one,” he said, pointing to the little creature with the shock of purple hair. A whimsical pattern of colored dots, garishly out of place in Pangolais, had been tattooed up one shoulder and the right side of its neck. Three feet tall and bizarrely bright-eyed, the purple-haired creature looked the least human of the slaves in line. If it was a monster, as he hoped, his choice would be easier.
Suryan went back into the canopied tent and returned with a ledger held open on one hand. She flicked through a few pages, then read: “Quilli Brightburst. A gnome. Lost her tongue and freedom for preaching treason in Westcrown. Magically gifted, although she will need a new tongue before that’s of much use. The price is eleven platinum crowns.”
Lamion was staring at the gnome with naked hunger, but he shook his head reluctantly at mention of the price. “Too much. Gnomes are expensive.”
“Experience and emotion, wasn’t that what you wanted?” Suryan glanced up from her book. “Gnomes surpass all others for that. And then there is the matter of the Bleaching. Gnomes crave new experiences. Need them. Die without them. You can make them do so much in the name of novelty, and then deprive them of it entirely in the end…”
“I’m well aware,” Lamion snapped. “Eleven crowns is too much. Choose another.”
“What about that one?” Isiem indicated the tusked, heavily muscled woman. Her forehead was ridged with ritual scars, her eyes small and suspicious. She carried herself with a subtle tension, as if she expected danger to leap out from any direction and did not intend to be caught unawares. And yet, Isiem imagined, there seemed to be a certain fatalism to her as well, as if she had already accepted that her end would be bloody and viewed that as no great tragedy.
“Atan,” Suryan read aloud. “A half-orc. Formerly the property of House Henderthane. Offered on the open market after rebelling against her rightful masters and allowing a defeated foe to escape instead of bringing him to House Henderthane’s diabolists as commanded. Suspected of allowing others to escape on previous occasions. Exceptionally strong, but impulsive and defiant. Ideal for the gladiator’s ring.”
“Less so for beginning students.” Lamion crossed his arms. “That one is likely to be too much trouble for them. Still, with so much violence in her soul … what are they asking?”
“Sixty platinum crowns, or two good fighting slaves to House Henderthane in exchange.”
The shadowcaller snorted. “Half that would be an outrage.”
“Henderthane sets the price. We only ask it,” Suryan answered with a shrug. “According to the entry, she is quite accomplished in battle. Good at finishing her foes in a showy mess. Audiences like that.”
“The old man,” Isiem suggested, feeling a twinge of desperation. Lamion had discarded all his suggestions so far, giving him some reprieve, but the shadowcaller couldn’t reject every slave in the line.
“Edovan. Called Leadthumb for his heavy hand on the merchant’s scales.” Suryan closed the book. “I know the lictor who transferred this one. He said the man was suspected of arson and murder—it was rumored that he’d burned down a competitor’s shop, killing the family in their beds as they slept above the blaze—but only fraud and deceit could be proved. Leadthumb chose a term of slavery rather than paying off his fines. Too much of a miser to give up his gold, even at the cost of his freedom.”
Or too worried about his family’s penury, Isiem thought. He wanted to believe the lictor’s tale. His choice would be easier if he could believe this old man had murdered a whole family out of greed … but he wondered whether that was why Suryan had told the story. Maybe it was just a subtle way to push the sale by salving his conscience. Maybe there was no murder, no arson, only false accusations of fraud, and Edovan Leadthumb, unable to shake his accusers, had sacrificed himself so that his children wouldn’t have to starve.
He’d likely never know the truth. Did it matter?
Why not accept the comforting answer? What harm could it do?
It’s cowardice. Isiem looked away, not wanting to meet the slaves’ eyes. But they were everywhere, all around him. The only place he could look without seeing them was skyward, and there he found his gaze caught by three suffering bodies pinned together in an ornamental circle by gleaming silver needles. Their shattered arms and legs were arrayed in graceful whorls within the wheel, creating a filigree of flesh.
The nearest victim’s eyes were gone, pecked out by carrion birds or gouged as part of his torture, but the ragged black pits held Isiem fixed.
“How much is that one?” he heard himself ask.
“The original price was five crowns, but I’ll give him to you for four. We make no promises as to his soundness.”
“We’ll take him,” Isiem said.
* * *
He never saw Edovan Leadthumb again.
Lamion did not ask Isiem to choose any other slaves, perhaps because he was impatient with how long the boy had taken to pick the first. He made the rest of the selections himself, haggling viciously with Suryan over their prices and, when he was finally satisfied that the cost was cheap enough, signing a contract for their delivery. Then he led the boy back to the Dusk Hall, leaving the Chelaxians to bring their living wares later. The shadowcaller offered Isiem no hint of what the slaves’ fates might be, and Isiem didn’t ask, assuming that he would find out in due course, whether he wanted to or not.
But he never did.
He never saw the slaves come to the Dusk Hall’s subterranean dungeons, and none from that day’s purchase were ever used in his classes. Others came, and others died, but Isiem never learned what befell the old miser he had purchased from the Chelish line. He never had the chance to ask whether the lictor’s story was true, or why Leadthumb had chosen slavery instead of paying for his freedom.
And in that unknowing was another hard lesson: that he might never know the ramifications of his own choices, and that he still had to make them as best he could. Isiem might flounder in a sea of half-truths and uncertainties, and he might never learn whether he had chosen correctly, but he still had to act, to choose something without hesitation, when the opportunity to do so came.
Because that opportunity would be fleeting, and refusing it meant leaving the choice to shadowcallers—to Lamion, or Dirakah, or worse. And that, after his visit to the slave market, seemed an even greater cowardice than he could bear.