Wilm woke Llian after an hour. They changed horses and continued north at a fast pace, leading the spares.

“Where’s Thandiwe?” said Llian.

“She rode ahead.” Wilm glanced sideways at Llian. “Why is she so angry? I thought she was your friend.”

“I thought so too, until I found out that she’s been blocking me for years, refusing to agree to my ban being overturned.”

Wilm was outraged. “Why would she do that?”

“Perhaps she got sick of doing the right thing and getting nowhere.”

“What kind of a person would betray a friend!”

“I suppose she saw me as a threat. But that’s not why she’s angry.”

He told Wilm about the election for Wistan’s replacement, and how he, Llian, had made the disastrous decision to give his vote to Norp instead of Thandiwe.

“How could you have done otherwise?” said Wilm. “You could never vote for someone you knew to be corrupt.”

He saw things in black and white, but it wasn’t that simple. If only Llian had voted for Thandiwe… But it was no use following that train of thought.

They rode on.

“What’s at these megaliths?” Wilm asked after they had gone several more miles. Then, hastily, “Sorry, you don’t have to tell me.”

“You saved my life,” said Llian. “I’m happy to tell you. Though I’d prefer you didn’t say anything to Thandiwe.”

“Not even if she tortures me.”

“I think Mendark might have known about the summon stone.”

“Known what?”

“Where it is. Where it came from. How the drumming works.”

“I’d like to learn mancery,” said Wilm.

Llian looked at him in surprise. “I thought you wanted to study at the college?”

“I haven’t got the heart for it any more. Dajaes so wanted to be a teller, and she would have been a good one.” He rubbed his eyes. “But if I became a mancer…”

Wilm was flailing around, trying to find his place in the world, but mancery wasn’t it. “You’ve got to have the gift,” Llian said kindly, “and a gift for mancery isn’t common. Have you ever done anything strange or inexplicable?”

“No. My life was very boring until I met you.”

“Does your mother have a gift?”

“I wouldn’t think so. She’s had a very hard life, and surely if she had —”

“What about your father?”

“I don’t know anything about him,” Wilm snapped. “And I don’t want to. He never gave us so much as a holey grint!”

“Does he know he has a son?” Llian said mildly.

Wilm didn’t answer. Llian did not pursue the topic.

“Do you think there could be a magical talisman in Mendark’s cache?” Wilm said later.

“I don’t know what he kept in his caches, apart from bags of gold.”

“Bags of gold!” Wilm sighed. “In my entire life I’ve never seen a gold tell.”

“Don’t expect too much. Not all caches are full of treasure.”

They rode on across a tussocky brown plain. A chilly wind came up, blowing from the south. Llian pulled his collar up over the back of his neck. Wilm was practising moves with the broken sabre again. Llian did not see the point.

Yet the lad had to make his way in the world, and it would help with his grief if he were actively doing something to protect the people he cared about. A lesson he, Llian, would do well to emulate. He had to find the summon stone, fast.

“Wow!” said Wilm.

The diamond-shaped standing stones, three times the height of a tall man, had been cut from red and black ironstone, presumably from the low range of hills called the Ironstones further on. They were arranged in the shape of a figure eight about three hundred yards long and half as wide, with the tallest stones being where the lines crossed. Each loop of the eight contained two smaller concentric loops. Some of the stones had fallen and a number of the others were tilted.

At the centre of the figure eight the ground dipped down into a stone-lined reservoir sixty feet across and shaped like a saucer, presumably so stock could water at it safely even when the level was low, as now. The stones ran down through the water. They led the horses down to drink and filled their water bottles.

The country was dry, the vegetation restricted to scattered tussocks of grey grass and the occasional stunted multi-trunked tree with small blue-grey leaves. Between the stones and the hills the westering sun struck dazzles off a thumb-shaped salt lake a couple of miles long.

“Do you want me to unsaddle the horses?” said Wilm.

Llian looked back, wondering why there was no sign of pursuit. And where had Thandiwe gone? She had been remarkably quiet since Dajaes’s burial. She was up to something.

“No, we might need to leave in a hurry.”

“Who built the megaliths?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Why not?”

“We know they’re more than eight thousand years old because they’re mentioned in the oldest written records from Meldorin. But how old, no one can tell.”

“There’s an awful lot of them. How are you going to find the cache?”

“Tallia said it’s at the inner base of the tall squared-off stone in the outer line of stones.”

They walked around the figure eight. There were dozens of squared-off standing stones among hundreds that were unfinished. However only two stones in the outer line had been squared off, and one was stumpy, the top having broken off long ago.

Llian headed for the other, which was shaped like an obelisk. The stone was two yards across at the base. Using his knife, he gouged at the grey earth, which was littered with flat pieces of ironstone. He worked his knife a foot into the ground, almost to the hilt, and struck something hard. Llian thumped the hilt with the heel of his hand. The knife went no further.

“Looks like the place.”

He began to dig. Wilm attacked the ground with his broken sabre and within a few minutes they uncovered a long rusty iron box. They had just heaved it out of the ground when Thandiwe rode up, her hair streaming out behind her in the wind. A greedy gleam came and went in her brown eyes.

“I don’t think you’ll find anything in this to help you with Mendark’s Tale,” said Llian.

“He might have secreted anything in so ancient a hoard.”

“How do you know it’s ancient?”

She swung down. “The box is practically falling apart. It’d take decades to rust in this dry country.”

“Why are you here, anyway?”

Her eyes slid to the box.

“You’re broke,” said Llian, “and you need a lot of gold to stave off your creditors for the year it’ll take to write your tale.”

The box was locked with a padlock but a blow from Llian’s boot heel tore the hasp out. Wilm reached for the lid.

“No!” Llian said sharply.

“Sorry,” said Wilm, ducking his head.

“Mancers always protect their treasures.”

A little dead tree stood a hundred yards away. Llian snapped off a branch, worked it under the lid and heaved it up. Bang! The rusted base of the box slammed into the standing stone and crumbled, scattering its contents across the ground. The top howled through the gap between Llian and Thandiwe and struck the ground forty feet away.

Wilm had gone very pale. “You saved my life!”

“Turn and turn about.”

The contents included half a dozen little bags, one of which had burst releasing a double handful of gold tells, two knives in cracked leather sheaths and a sword in an embossed copper sheath, the like of which Llian had never seen before. The copper was mottled with verdigris and both the sword and sheath were marked with the letter M. There was also a small book written on what appeared to be papyrus reed.

Thandiwe dived for the book. Llian reached it first, shoved it into an inner pocket and buttoned the flap down. “You’ve got all you’re going to get from me.”

“One betrayal after another,” she said bitterly.

“You’re such a hypocrite. If you’d helped overturn my ban instead of blocking it, you’d have been master years ago.”

“I don’t bel — Why do you say that?”

“Wistan was going to make you master until your betrayal of me, your friend, convinced him that you weren’t of good character. A lovely irony, isn’t it?”

Thandiwe did not storm off, as he had expected. There was gold to be divided up, after all. Llian withdrew the sword from its sheath and a shiver crept up his arm – it had a definite presence. It was lighter than he would have expected, and the blade, of some black metal, was uncorroded. He tested the edge, which was still sharp, and sheathed it. Wilm was staring at it, his eyes wide with hopeless longing.

Llian handed it to him. “This is a fine sword. Take it and practise your strokes.”

Wilm shook his head. “I was brought up to not touch what isn’t mine.”

“Mendark is ten years dead,” said Llian, “and since he had no heir, this cache is treasure trove. Legally, it belongs to whoever finds it.”

“Are you sure?” said Wilm.

“Absolutely.”

Wilm had not even looked at the gold, but his thin hand was trembling as he took the sword. He stared at it for a moment as if he had felt something too, then removed the sabre scabbard from his belt and attached the copper sheath. He worked the sword up and down several times, walked away, checked Llian’s notes and began to practise the seven basic strokes again.

Llian counted the gold and divided it into three piles each containing two hundred and ten gold tells. “Yours,” he said to Thandiwe.

She put it in her pack. Llian was bagging his and Wilm’s shares when he noticed Thandiwe watching Wilm with a curiously yearning look. Despite all he had suffered recently he remained an innocent, and perhaps she longed for the days of her own innocence, long lost.

“He blames himself for not saving Dajaes from Unick,” said Llian.

She rubbed her face with her hands. “It’ll take more than a fancy sword to bring down that mongrel!”

“Did he have a go at you too?” said Llian.

She shuddered and closed her eyes, but not before he saw what she wanted never to reveal.

“It might be an idea to warn Wilm about that sword,” said Thandiwe.

“What about it?”

“A mancer’s weapon could be enchanted.”

“Why are you telling me this? You hate me.”

“Wilm has suffered enough. And life won’t be easy for him… with you as a friend.”

“Why don’t you take your gold and go?” said Llian.

“Because you want me to.”

Damn. She’d worked out why he’d given it to her. Thandiwe sat in the shade, took bread and cheese from her bag and ate, watching Wilm all the while. He worked on the first of the basic strokes for several minutes, repeatedly checking Llian’s notes and diagrams, before moving to the second, then the third.

“He looks like a ploughman trying to chop wood,” said Thandiwe.

“But he’s utterly determined to succeed,” said Llian.

She wandered down the slope towards the pool, a hundred yards away. Wilm made a particularly agricultural stroke and swore a miner’s oath he must have learned from Dajaes. He studied the instructions then rehearsed the stroke over and again in a rather more professional manner. Llian smiled. Not so hopeless after all.

He yawned, climbed a sloping stone and checked for signs of pursuit. On finding none he had a drink from his water bag and sat in the shade of the stone. He felt desperately tired. He thrust a hand in his pocket to make sure Mendark’s little book was safe, then closed his eyes…

Llian jerked awake, thinking that something was badly wrong. He scrambled to his feet and saw Wilm fifty yards away, still practising. The angle of the sun indicated that less than an hour had passed. Llian breathed a sigh, rubbed his eyes, checked for pursuit and saw a small dust cloud to the south.

“Wilm! Someone’s coming.”

Wilm sheathed his sword and came running.

“Bring the horses,” said Llian. “I’ll pack up.”

Wilm ran down towards the pool, then stopped. “Where are the other four horses?” he yelled.

It struck Llian like a punch in the mouth. The dust cloud wasn’t someone coming, it was Thandiwe going. He raced back to where he had left the bags, already knowing what he would find.

The gold was gone. Every last tell.