Chapter 13

"Oh goat beards and blood!," the wizard spat, making a sign I didn't recognize. "Not another one!"

"Another one?" I asked, stunned. I wasn't the first person to come looking for the wizard Eliun?

"Another researcher seeking some arcane bit of knowledge lost to the rest of the world," The drama with which he spoke the words suggested it was something often said here in the hermitage. "We get one every century or so, and it hasn't even been that long since the last one. Five or six decades at the most."

"You don't like visitors then?" I asked, feeling somewhat put out.

"Visitors get people too riled up," the old wizard grumbled. "Gets them wanting news of the real world. Gets them missing what's out there."

"Well, I'm sorry to hear that," I offered after a moment of awkward silence. "I'll try to keep a low profile if that will help."

"If only it would," he sighed. "but coming through the wards does trigger a signal to anyone sensitive enough to hear..."

"and I suspect everyone here is more than sensitive enough, or they wouldn't be here in the first place?" I finished.

"Exactly correct, youngster. Its my turn for duty as a greeter, which is why I'm the one meeting you here today, but most everyone will already know someone has come through the pass."

"Do all the greeters keep their names to themselves?" I grinned when I asked it, so he knew I wasn't really upset, and I managed to see a man at least a dozen lifetimes older than me blush.

"I guess I am a bit rusty at this," he laughed back at me. "Fenthil of the Green Isles at your service. Formerly of the Green Isles, that is."

I returned the courtly bow I received then with one of my own and followed it by motioning towards the boys who still crouched alertly behind me. "Allow me to introduce my Vulkai wards, Kei and Labo."

"Wards?" Fenthil asked, doubt tinging his voice.

"Don't let our size fool you sir," Labo said smoothly, we're mere pups, barely more than a year old."

"And a pleasure meeting you, wizard Fenthil. Kei added. "Labo and I are both quite interested in the ways of you wizards."

"You are?" I asked, surprised. "You've never said anything about this to me!"

"Well, as Labo said," Kei added with a throaty Vulkai chuckle. "We're interested in the ways of wizards. The ways of apprentices? Not so much."

Fenthil grinned as he looked at me over the shoulders of the two Vulkai who'd walked past me over to him to greet him in the Vulkai manner. "These two must make life on the trail interesting."

"You've no idea," I shook my head, struggling to keep from laughing out loud.

"Well, if we're going to get anywhere, we need to get going, eh?" the old wizard motioned over his shoulder towards the valley behind him. "Perhaps we should take the hillside trail? Less houses to pass along that trail than the riverside one."

"I'm thinking we've had enough of hillside trails for a while," I said after a moments consideration. "We're in no hurry to get in and out, and I doubt I've got a lot of news to share. You know what its like for a wizard's apprentice."

"You'd be surprised to learn what is news to a bunch of wizards who've been put out to pasture," Fenthil corrected. "Anything that's happened within your lifetime will be news to us, and given your age, the events of your parent's lifetimes would be news as well."

I considered this as we walked. The Red Death, and the burning that followed would be news indeed. I would have to sort out what I knew of it and make it something presentable. It had resulted in a great deal of chaos, pain and strife beyond that caused by the plague itself. A great number of kingdoms had seen their power shift — kings fell and were raised up in large numbers across the face of Gaen.

The houses we'd seen from the heights of the valley's western gap were not houses as I knew them from the Vale, or even from what I'd seen during my travels through Montcross. They were all of a similar construction, made from a kind of adobe or smoothed stone of some kind, reddish and smooth looking. If they were bricks, the surfaces had been smoothed over with clay or something else which gave them a smooth, seamless appearance.

Each house had a chimney, door and a few windows spaced evenly above and to each side of the door. Some had fenced yards, with fences made of field stones, and some did not. Some had window gardens and others not. Here and there I could see larger gardens behind or to the sides of the houses. I counted a couple of dozen houses near the river, but not all of them had smoke above their chimneys.

"How many wizards are in residence?" I asked at one point, having returned the wave of a woman standing at the door of one of the houses.

"There are currently thirty one wizards here in the valley. They are divided pretty equally between the houses like those we've passed and the residences in the main hermitage at the other end of the valley."

"Which is where I presume we are headed?"

"Correct."

"Is there some sort of civic structure? Do you have a recognized leader or council of..." Fenthil caught my hesitation and laughed.

"You were about to say 'council of elders', weren't you?"