The Cheldean college at Mt. Clero was a large village huddled against a sheer cliff. A tall stone wall worthy of a fortress enclosed it and quite a bit of open ground used as parks and farmland by the college. Despite facilities for them, no humans guarded the wall. Instead, fierce stone statues lined the ramparts, keeping their unblinking gazes looking out over the valley below. Rumor claimed they could do more than watch in times of war, but no force had dared to lay siege to the college with the memory of the oldest grandmother. Still, to the farmers scattered throughout the valley beyond the college’s walls, the grotesque visages of the statues were a comforting reminder of the power of their protectors.

            Personally, Celeres found them unsettling and had said so when he got a good look at them. Sanura teased him about his reaction, while Arva listened in amusement. Celeres had come to appreciate the Cheldean on the journey here. Despite the gap between their stations, Arva treated them with the easy manner of equals. Considering his far greater knowledge of the world, the Cheldean listened to his fellow travelers with an active interest, asking insightful questions to draw more details from them. When Celeres commented on that, the older man pointed out that gathering information was his job and that experience had delivered to him many details from unusual sources.

            Sanura was more interested in those experiences than sharing her own tales. She interrogated him ruthlessly about places he had been and things he had done. Arva fielded her questions with good humor, even admitting to some less than flattering moments when his plans went awry. The only subject he avoided discussing was the details of how proxies actually worked. Even describing the not-colors she had seen while dealing with the prellung flyer drew only a raised eyebrow from him.

            Celeres had not seen the colors and prompted his love to tell him about it. He had been enthralled by the Cheldean’s singing but had not experienced any unusual visions. He wondered about that aloud, but Arva again declined to make any comments.

            Otherwise, the rest of their trip to Mt. Clero has been blissfully uneventful. No gold masks loomed nearby to report them to Prince Emhyr. No monsters appeared for them to fend off. No Firstborn crossed their path, intent on playing obscure games with them. The worst thing that happens was Chadder’s amusing demand for food and cosseting in the evenings as he flitted from person to person.

            Once they were within the walls of the college, Arva sent Chadder ahead to warn his colleagues of their arrival. They left their mounts at a large stable on the edge of the village, then marched into town. Arva ordered them to leave their bags with the antelopes, telling them that servants would see to it that their things followed them to the Golden Quill, an inn maintained to serve supplicants seeking help from the college. Arva himself carried only a single satchel taken from the packs of one of his baggage antelopes.

            They were intercepted on their way to the inn by a roly-poly woman of middle years following the returning Chadder. Her brown hair nested wildly about her head, stained with black where she had brushed it away from her face with fingers damp with ink.

            “Hand them over,” the woman said bluntly.

            “Hello, Chojustu,” Arva said, grinning. “It was a good trip, and I’m doing well, thanks for asking. And how have you been?”

            Chadder tittered.

            “Fine. Fine,” Chojustu said absently. She opened his satchel and started rifling through the papers within without waiting for him to disentangle himself from it.

            “Sanura, Celeres-this is Chojustu, underdean of library resources at Mt. Clero,” Arva said cheerfully.

            “Pleased to met you,” the woman grunted. She pulled out bundle after bundle of papers tied with ribbons, briefly checked the first few pages, then jammed them back into the satchel. She examined one bundle and tucked it under her arm. After checking several other ones, she found a second that caught her attention. “Two? Two! Why didn’t you send one of these ahead?” she asked, outraged.

            “By the time I finished the pile with the red ribbon,” Arva shrugged, “I was already on my way back. Seemed silly to copy it and pay a messenger to bring it here when I would make it just as quickly myself. I ran into some interesting things on the way, so I ended up with more notes than I thought I was going to have.”

            “And if those ‘interesting things’ had killed you?” she asked sternly.

            “Then you’d be out two piles of field notes instead of the usual one. It’s not like the list needs to be completed tomorrow. The work will continue long after we’re both gone, and all the notes I made during my life will only be a page in its volumes.”

            Chojustu glowered at Arva, prompting him to change the subject. “I’m going to be here for a bit longer this time than I usually am. I have some research that needs to be done before I head out again.”

            “What about?” she asked.

            “Hirudin.”

            The disheveled woman pursed her lips. “That’s an obscure subject,” she said.

            “You doubt my resourcefulness?” he asked with a wide grin.

            “This about them?” she asked, casting a glance at the lovers.

            “Yes.”

            “I’ll assign a couple of research assistants to you. Will you need anything else?”

            “I’ll let you know as it comes up,” Arva said.

            “Are you hiding any more notes from me?” she growled.

            “Would I do that?” he asked innocently.

            She frowned but let that one pass. Instead, she bade them all a good afternoon and stalked off back to her office.

            “She’s actually quite sweet,” Arva told the lovers. “She puts on the wild woman act to scare the apprentices. It’s fairly important they don’t damage the books, and they tend to respect them more if they’re afraid of at least one of the librarians. Her assistant makes himself friendly and accessible to them so when they do damage a book, they hurry to bring it to him so she won’t find out.”

            “Sneaky,” Sanura observed.

            “Yes. Although you’d be amazed how many full scholars haven’t figured out what she’s doing. They’re as afraid of her as the apprentices.”

            Chadder snickered.

            Arva left them after arranging for their food and lodging with the proprietor of the Golden Quill. The inn was not as luxuriant as the one in Woodcraft but was better than the others they had stayed in between there and Mt. Clero. The building was plain but sturdy; the rooms were small but clean. It was not fancy, but Celeres decided it was quite comfortable if they ended up staying here for any length of time. After finding a second brown square on his arm while in the bathing house, he hoped the wait here as a supplicant would not be long.

            Arva stopped by in the morning just long enough to tell them that he would send Chadder for them in the afternoon. That left the lovers to wander around the college for the rest of the morning. The streets were paved with stones that were damp from the morning dew. The many, many buildings were three or four stories tall, built from stone that wore lightly the weather of centuries. Everywhere, carefully maintained trees and lawns gave the campus the feel of one large garden, rather than the more chaotic feel of most villages.

            Chadder tracked them down just after lunch, where they had picnicked under the shelter of a tree in a particularly park-like section of the college. The bug led them to one of the largest buildings on campus, a three story monstrosity that sprawled over far too large an area to have been built all at once. Indeed, Celeres could spot where newer wings had been added to a central building. Another section connected the mess to what had to have been a completely separate building at one time.

            Chadder led them into the maze of corridors within the building, directing his charges from his perch on Sanura’s shoulder. His chirped commands of “left” and “right” mixed with the shuffle of movement echoing through the hallways and the murmur of distant lectures.

            The bug brought them to a nondescript room in the bowels of the building, then abandoned them to fly inside to Arva. In size, the room was about midway between the offices and classrooms they had glimpsed through other doors in the building. This room was largely empty except for a few benches and a couple of intricate displays Celeres could not understand. There was a second doorway across from the entrance and a staircase to the right.

            On the benches sat Arva and three other people, deep in discussion. All four wore robes blazoned with a repeating pattern of maze-filled squares resting on a chaotic background. Both women and the young man were dressed in white; the older Arva was in a deep green. When Chadder landed on his shoulder, he turned to greet them.

            “Welcome. I dealt with the Council of Deans this morning, presenting your problem to them. None of them could offer an immediate answer, so they acquiesced to my request to head up the search. Is that acceptable?”

            “The price?” Celeres asked diffidently.

            “Will depend on how long it takes to discover it and how hard it is to implement. If the knowledge is not known by the Cheldeans, then our search and our delivery of the answer will be free. Do you agree to these terms?”

            “Yes,” Celeres said, his lips pursed tight.

            “Witnessed,” murmured the Cheldeans in white.

            “Excellent,” Arva smiled. “Celeres, if you’ll please accompany these three, they’ll find out what you’re made of. If nothing else, it’ll give use a baseline for you if you get sick as the hirudin claimed.”

            Celeres nodded and followed the white robed Cheldeans through the far door. Arva made his way to the stairs, gesturing for Sanura to follow him.

            “I would like for them to examine you next,” he said to her.

            “Why? I’m not the one that’s been marked,” she said.

            “True, but no matter what the problem was that brought you here, we would have asked to inspect you both. We ask everyone who visits our college for the same favor. Cheldar has asked us to gather every last true name we can for the universe, so we ask to check our visitors to make sure we haven’t overlooked anything.”

            The two stepped from the stairs onto a balcony that circled the room below. Benches lined the balcony, so visitors could sit and observe the activities in the lower level. Sanura could see the white robes fussing with Celeres near the center of the floor.

            “Wait, wouldn’t that mean you would have to check everyone on Tiran to get their true names?” Sanura asked.

            “No, although that’s a common misconception. Every object in the universe is a compilation of attributes. To put it another way, many different true names combine to make things. How those names are put together create the object. It’s sometimes a concept that is hard for non-Cheldeans to grasp. To them, an object is itself. Cheldeans learn how to see it as something more. Or hear it, actually.”

            Down below, Celeres sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting patiently. Ten paces away, the Cheldeans stood at three corners of a six-pointed star carved into the floor, meditating on the proxy they were about to cast. Alternating with the casters were three glass boxes sitting on the other points of the star. The boxes were six feet tall and filled at the bottom with an inch of black powder. The Cheldeans each faced the box on the opposite side so that Celeres stood between them.

            As if cued by something unseen, the three Cheldeans began to chant in unison. The chanting was slow and stately, like the regal march of an imperial precession. As Arva’s had while removing the prellung from the boy, their voices split once and again, until nine voices emerged from the three singers. The voices soared and sunk, each fighting to impose their own patterns on top of the others. Some of them devolved into strange ditties of crashing ocean waves and duets sung by lovesick swine.

            “Watch the receptacles,” Arva whispered, pointing at the glass boxes.

            Sanura shifted her gaze to the boxes, trying to figure out what he wanted her to see. After a few frustrating moments, she finally saw a stirring in the black dust at the bottom of it. The dust was not just shaking, but moving, crawling over itself to build peaks and carve valleys. The peaks slowly swelled into coarse towers and coal black trees. The dust kept climbing up, branching into swirling lines that caught each other in mid-air. A delicate web of strings and blobs emerged, pulling every last speck of dust from the floor of the box. A quick glance at the other boxes showed similar growths that had taken on different patterns to fill their space.

            The process of shaping the dust took almost fifteen minutes. When it was completed, the Cheldeans brought their songs back into unison, burning the dust with the notes of power. The music faded, leaving behind dust transmuted into gleaming silver threads.

            “The receptacles capture the fine details of the subject’s true names,” Arva explained. “Now, experts can go over them at their leisure. Before the technique was discovered, it used to take months of proxy casting to examine even the simplest object.”

            Down on the floor, one of the Cheldeans helped Celeres stand while a second pulled a cord. In the distance, a bell could be heard ringing in response.

            Arva directed Sanura back downstairs to rejoin the others.

            “How was it?” Sanura asked Celeres as they met in the outer chamber.

            “Fine. Sat around while they sang at me. Pretty wild display in the boxes, huh?”

            “Yeah. Arva said they want to do me next. They like to examine all their visitors,” the soldier said.

            Three servants entered them room, each pushing a cart with fresh receptacles on them. They went into the examination room, efficiently exchanged the used boxes with the new ones, and made their way out again.

            Arva gathered up Celeres, and the older of the two women came up to Sanura. “You saw how this was done?” she asked the soldier.

            “Yes.”

            “I should warn you that you may experience a bit more than your fiancé did,” the Cheldean said as she lead Sanura into the examination room. “Arva has warned us that you displayed some sensitivity to cast proxies. It’s nothing to worry about. The examination proxies are perfectly safe.”

            “Colors,” Sanura said. “I saw colors while Arva was singing.”

            The woman nodded absently at the comment and said, “We’ll need you to remove any metal items and anything that could possible be enchanted.”

            Sanura had dressed that day in an extra set of clothes she had picked up with the caravan, so had far less to remove than she usually would have. The Cheldean took her sword belt, money pouch, and engagement bracelet and placed them on a stand against the wall of the room.

            Pointing to a spot in the center of the room, the white robed Cheldean said, “Please, go stand over there. You may sit or stand as you prefer, although you’ve already seen how long the examination takes. You may shift however you need to, but please don’t wander too far from the center. We’ll have to start over from the beginning if you do.”

            Sanura nodded and sat as she had seen Celeres do. The stone was cool against her bottom, but the solider felt she could live with the discomfort for the brief time of the proxy.

            The Cheldeans took their positions and began the chant again. This time, Sanura could see those not-colors shifting again. The solider wondered if that was because the proxy was mostly being directed at her. That would explain why she had not noticed them during Celeres’ examination. Now, she could see the not-colors pulsing in time with the singing. Not-blue puffs of smoke drifted from their mouths, passing through Sanura to strike the boxes beyond, driving the dust through its motions. Sparks of not-red and not-yellow danced in the smoke, zipping through patterns too complex for Sanura to follow. Oddly, Sanura felt nothing as the objects of not-color passed through her. It was if they existed only on a level that was disconnected from what she considered real.

            She noticed the change about three minutes into the Cheldean’s song. From where she sat, she could see that the numbers of sparks reaching the boxes was rapidly dropping off. Instead of passing through her, the sparks were starting to bounce back in those bursts of not-purple. She checked the eyes of the older woman in front of her and realized the Cheldean had not expected for that to happen. The singing shifted and now whole batches of sparks emerged from the mouths of the Cheldeans. The not-red and not-yellow motes were drifting more slowly through the smoke, clustering together in weighty clumps that bore down inexorably on her. Sanura braced herself for the impact, realized the absurdity of fighting something she could not feel, and tried to relax.

            The first clump of sparks hit her and exploded with a burst of light that Sanura felt. The three streams detonated against her body and transfixed her. Helplessly, she watched the burst crawl up the streams of smoke and sparks, forging them into an evil not-purple beam heading back to the Cheldeans.

            The singers desperately changed the song, shifting to harsh, guttural sounds that they barked out against the approaching light. As it pulled within an arm’s-length of the older woman, she screamed in three voices of dissonance and gestured grandly to the left. The light slowed, fighting the proxy, then drifted to the left. Sanura could feel the pressure on the beams, pushing them clockwise around her. The light strained and held for an excruciating moment, throbbing with thwarted energy. Then they broke, dissolving into a hurricane of smoke and sparks that tore around the room, battering everything around except in the eye of calm surrounding Sanura.

            It was over in moments, but that was still too long for the solider. The not-colors were already fading from the room, revealing a cloud of black dust drifting through the air. The older woman was on the ground, panting with exhaustion. The younger one had managed to stand her ground but was caked with black dust whipped into her by the storm. The man was down and cursing. He had been knocked into the shattered remains of a box and had cut his hand badly on the shards.

            From the balcony, she could hear Arva pounding for the stairs. Celeres used skills refined from late night excursions to reach over the balcony and drop himself to the floor. Sanura was moving for the cursing Cheldean, when she heard Celeres call out, “Brave, are you okay?”

            “I’m fine. Check the others,” she answered.

            The Cheldean was picking the glass from his hand with a steady stream of swear words. “Injury kit. Shelf under the stand,” he instructed tersely when she approached. Sanura nodded and rushed to get the kit.

            Celeres checked the younger Cheldean, who was unharmed except for the dust in her eyes, then went to the older. After she explained that she too was fine, just winded, he helped her to sit up. By then, Arva had arrived with Chadder trailing behind.

            “What happened?” he demanded.

            “She defended herself,” the older woman said simply.

            “Impossible,” Arva argued. “She’s completely untrained. She wasn’t singing, she isn’t carrying any unusual proxies, and she didn’t even twitch while you were working. If she isn’t carrying anything, and she didn’t do anything, how could she have defended herself?”

            “I don’t think she did it deliberately,” the younger woman chimed in. “I don’t think she could have. She didn’t block the proxy or retaliate. She transmuted it and fed power into it without taking any apparent actions.”

            “Don’t look at me,” Sanura said from where she was wrapping up the man’s hand. “I could see it going wrong, but I wasn’t trying to do anything to it.”

            Arva frowned thoughtfully. “Obviously, we’ll want to figure out what happened here. I’m going to seal off the room while we examine it. You three go get cleaned up and meet me back in the outer chamber. Sanura and Celeres, if you could stay for a few moments?”

            “Of course,” Sanura said.

            Back in the outer chamber, Arva cast a proxy to seal the entrance while the other Cheldeans left. When he finished, Arva politely interrogated Sanura about what she had experienced in the room. He also asked a few questions of Celeres but stopped when it became clear the young man had seen less than Arva had from the balcony.

            The Cheldean sighed. “Obviously, this has a lower priority that Celeres’ mark, but I’m going to make some inquiries about this as well. My assistants should be about done with a preliminary report about what information is here about the hirudin. If they don’t have a solution, we’ll send out messages tomorrow. In any case, I have things to attend to, so I’ll check in with you this evening. Chadder will show you out.”

            Chadder led them out of the building, and the lovers returned to their room to clean up. They spent the rest of the afternoon around the inn, practicing with their weapons and amusing themselves.

            Arva arrived at the inn after they had finished their evening meal and were listening to a musician playing in the main room. The Cheldean made his way over to them, stopping only long enough to order some food from a serving wench.

            “A fruitful day,” Arva said after exchanging greetings. “We didn’t find the information we wanted, but I can tell you quite a bit.

            “Generally speaking, the Cheldeans have been at odds with hirudin when we run across them, so we don’t have an exhaustive examination of their every attribute. Basically, we learned the true names unique to them and then dumped the subject. We don’t have a permanent solution to ridding you of the mark and the plagues it carries. The Hidden Library might have it, but I can tell you that it’s unlikely. It’s just not a subject anyone pursued beyond the minimum we need to fulfil our mission.”

            Celeres regarded him blackly. What came out of his mouth was actually better than Arva hoped under the circumstances. “No permanent solution. Is there a temporary way around it?” the young man asked.

            “Actually, yes. Some serious diseases wrap themselves so tightly into someone’s true names that they cannot be removed. We can use our strongest healing proxies to fend them off for a while. We could do the same for you, although you’d never be able to leave the college except in the company of a Cheldean. It would also seriously shorten your life span; sustained use of such proxies burns out their recipient. At most, we’d be able to give you six or seven years once the serious complications from the mark set in. On the other hand, when the end does come, it will be days of suffering, not months.

            “So, that’s it?” Celeres asked bleakly.

            “At the moment, yes. We haven’t used every arrow in the quiver yet, though. The Hidden Library or one of the other colleges may have a more recent hirudin encounter than we have records of. I also intend to talk to our colleagues in Tagerden, since the hirudin seem to have infiltrated the upper ranks of the empire. Cheldeans are only allowed so much leeway when dealing with the rulers of any land. It might be that they’ve had a chance to study the hirudin there without destroying them because of their rank.

            “And, of course, we’ve only just begun to study your pattern of true names, Celeres. We may find the mark is fairly easy to remove once we’ve had a chance to sort out how it interacts with the rest of you.”

            Celeres sighed. “Thank you, Arva,” he said gloomily.

            Arva shrugged. “As I said, not bad for the first day. Even worst case gives you years of health. We can certainly find a place for you and Sanura here, and we’ll keep working on a permanent solution.”

            Celeres nodded.

            “So, that’s that for the moment. Would you like to hear why we think your fiancée blew up the examination room?” Arva asked mischievously, trying to lighten the mood.

            “What happened?” Sanura asked seriously.

            “Well, we think you picked up a shard. It’s unusual, but not unheard of,” the Cheldean said.

            “What, like the Shard War?” Celeres asked, startled.

            “Exactly,” Arva answered, pleased.

            “So, what? Am I going to starting flying, build a fortress under Tiran, and lay waste to entire continents?” Sanura asked.

            “Probably nothing quite that exciting,” Arva laughed. “Shards are a more common than most people realize. They’re little packets of true names left from the first universe. They didn’t dissolve properly into the second universe, instead lingering in weird little combinations that bounce around our world. Most are useless to mortals. Some graft themselves onto hosts and may grant them unusual powers. Yours seems to be one of the second kind. There have been problems with scanning them in the past. Explosive reactions, sometimes.”

            “So, how do you find out what true names they contain?” Celeres asked.

            “We don’t. Cheldar takes care of that himself,” Arva said.

            “So, what does mine do? I mean, besides attack people who try to examine it,” Sanura said.

            “Best guess? It probably lets you see those not-colors you were talking about. Most Cheldeans hear true names instead of seeing them. We’re trained that way. To spontaneously develop the ability to see them as colors suggests something odd, like a shard. Beyond that, I haven’t the foggiest.”

            “The Cheldeans have seen shards before, though. I mean, there were a whole bunch of them during the Shard War, right? Could it be one of those?” Celeres pressed.

            “Cheldar collected all the ones used during the Shard War and gave them to Gawlchmai for safekeeping. It probably isn’t one of them. Each one is unique, so unless it was the same shard someone already used, there’s no way to guess everything it can do. Probably not much. The ones from the Shard War were actually around for centuries before some were used to their full effect. Every known shard was tested pretty intensely during the war. The ones Cheldar took afterwards were the strongest. The weak ones are still around, largely ignored,” Arva said.

            The conversation tapered off as the lovers tried to absorb everything they had heard. Arva waited to see if they had any further questions, then excused himself, telling them he would update them tomorrow evening. The lovers talked a bit about what they had learned, trying to figure out the implications. Tired and bewildered, they went to bed, hoping tomorrow would make things clearer.

            Celeres brooded for the next few days. He had hoped there would be a quick solution to his problem. He had already anticipated returning to their families in Tagerden and starting his life with Sanura. The city guard probably would not rehire her considering her abrupt disappearance, but there was still plenty of work available for a soldier in a city like the capital. And the letter of approval On. Bunri had included in the money bag he had given them might help. He had intended it for the Yudoko, but it might help her secure a job in House Jujiro. Once the mark was removed, it would have been safe to return. Without it, Prince Emhyr would have never known what to look for in the teeming masses of the city. In his dreaming, he had forgotten that the Prince also knew their names and had probably distributed the wanted posters in Tagerden as well.

            Instead, he was stuck here, waiting hour after hour. Evenings brought a bit more information and regular reports of progress, but Celeres began to doubt they would ever find a permanent solution. Waiting, he decided, was the worst of it.

            Sanura did what she could to boost his spirits. She gave him his space in the morning but rounded him up around lunchtime to make sure he ate. Afterwards, she insisted he do his weapon’s work with her. She figured it was better for him to do something than it was to just sulk.

            As for her newly revealed shard, she could find nothing useful for it. She tried every effect she could think of: flying, lightning bolts, burst of flame, shapeshifting, and others. Nothing worked. She even tried using it to heal Celeres, but nothing happened. If the shard held any more secrets beyond the second-sight, she could not find it.

            By the end of the week, nothing really new had been discovered about the mark. The examination of the glass receptacles was proving difficult, and none of the messages sent to other Cheldeans had returned with anything useful. Sanura decided it was time to act on something she had been saving.

            When Celeres got up from breakfast to go wander the campus alone, she interrupted, “I was thinking I might get you to help me with something this morning.”

            That brought him up short. He frowned, not entirely pleased to have his self-absorption interrupted. “What’s that?” he asked distractedly.

            “Well, I’ve been busy with something while you were wandering around in the mornings. It really takes two, though.”

            “What is it?”

            “It’ll be easier to show it to you than explain it. Shall we go?”

            Celeres grunted his acceptance, and they went. The directed walk actually improved his mood a bit, though he still felt disinclined to chat as they made their way through the streets of the college. Sanura led them to an intimidatingly large building whose stairs led to an entrance on what would have been the second floor on any reasonable building. Celeres stopped on the bottom step and frowned at the edifice looming over him.

            “This is the library. Come on,” Sanura said.

            “Why are we going to the library?” he asked.

            “Because, this is where the records are kept.”

            Celeres scowled at her non-answer but gamely followed her up the steps.

            Sanura led him through the entrance and the stacks of shelves within, past leather bound tomes and under large, stuffed creatures dangling from the ceiling. In an office in the back, they found a pleasant young man at a desk, guarding a door to another office further in. The young man’s office was stacked neatly with papers and books in various states of repair.

            He smiled as they entered. “Ah, so you’ve brought him,” he said.

            “Well, it is time, after all,” Sanura answered.

            “I’ll go see if Chojustu is ready for you,” he said and went into the inner office. The lovers could hear a brief exchange within, then Chojustu’s assistant stepped back into view and gestured for them to enter.

            Chojustu sat at a desk, looking a bit less wild than when she accosted Arva on the day they reached the college. Her room was as messy as her assistant’s was neat. Among the random stacks of books and papers were odd models and odd pieces that Celeres could not immediately identify. He though they might be art. The small paintings and carvings simply did not strike him as something that might be useful for casting a proxy.

            “Welcome, my dears,” the older woman smiled. “Are you ready?”

            “Almost, On. Chojustu,” Sanura said and turned to Celeres. “Firefall began a few days ago, beautiful.”

            Celeres nodded, not really understanding. Sanura drew one gold ring from her pocket and then a second. “I know we wanted our families here for this, love, but I don’t know when we’ll get back to see them again. Declaring myself part of your family is the only thing I can offer you right now.”

            Celeres answered with a slow smile.

            “This is nothing to be entered into lightly,” Chojustu said. “Empires have risen and fallen on the strength of a marriage. Some speculate that if the Destroyer of the Universe had been married, he would never agreed to destroying the first universe. Recognizing such a union puts a heavy weight on its members but grants each a strength beyond what they could raise alone. You will be family now, bound by oath to cherish one another and share your burdens. Is this acceptable?”

            “Until the end of the world,” Celeres said, sharing an intense joy he saw reflected on Sanura’s face.

            “And beyond,” she whispered.

            “Witnessed,” Chojustu’s assistant murmured from the back of the room as the lovers exchanged rings.

            “Then as a registrar recognized by the Zonne Empire, I bear witness to the declaration of union established between these two. Your signatures are needed to seal the union.”

            There were three copies of a declaration of the union lined up neatly on her desk, awaiting only their signatures. The four in the room quickly singed the papers, making it official. The assistant, after signing as the impartial witness, gathered up two of the copies and handed the third to Celeres.

            “Actually, can we get this copy to our families in Tagerden? It’ll probably be safer with them, and I’d like to let them know that it happened,” Celeres said.

            “Of course,” said the assistant, taking back the paper. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

            “Thank you, On. Chojustu,” Sanura said, inclining her head.

            The underdean half-bowed. “You’re welcome. Drop by if I can do anything more for you while you’re here.”

            The newlyweds took that for a dismissal and left, carrying the glow of their moment with them.

            Celeres’ mood was generally better after that, though he still had the occasional black morning. That was understandable, since several more weeks past with no real solutions.

            The lovers discussed finding a way to help around the college, if only to give him less time to brood. Unfortunately, the strange brown spots had continued their slow envelopment of his skin. The only thing he had really been interested in was working in a kitchen somewhere on campus, but he doubted anyone would want to eat anything he prepared, fearing they might catch his condition. The Cheldeans had tried a few proxies, but the marks had stubbornly resisted any attempt to remove them.

            So, the lovers wasted time in the mornings and spent their afternoons with their weapon practice. That is where they discovered there was something more wrong with Celeres than just the spots. The practice should have made him tougher, able to work longer and stronger. For a while, it did. Gradually, however, Sanura found his strikes coming in with less and less punch. Soon, he became winded during their sessions, having to take long rests before he was ready to continue.

            Alarmed, Sanura took her observations to Arva. As she hoped, the Cheldean took the symptoms far more seriously than Celeres did. He started healing session immediately. For a hour every morning, Cheldeans in blue robes chanted and sang over him. Unfortunately, they seemed to do little except slow Celeres’ encroaching weakness.

            There had been other occasions in the previous week that Celeres had been the focus of the Cheldeans’ songs and after another two weeks of the healer’s singing, he was pretty tired of it. His mood was almost as cranky as it had been dark during the first week of their arrival. This time, his bad mood was interrupted by Arva’s arrival at the Golden Quill in the afternoon instead of the evening when he usually brought his progress reports.

            The Cheldean found the lovers in the bare stone court where Sanura drilled Celeres on his weapon work. It was a few moments before they noticed Arva, sitting on a bench to the side and watching them with a pensive expression.

            “Did you find something?” Celeres asked, his excitement tempered by the look on Arva’s face.

            “Possibly. A suggestion arrived from the Hidden Library. It’s fairly exotic, and not one I would have come up with myself.”

            “Well, it can’t hurt to at least discuss it,” Celeres said reasonably. “At the rate I’m going, I’m certainly not going to live long enough to see my children grow even if I got Sanura pregnant today.”

            Arva sighed. “We’ve done several different readings through you, Celeres. You know we haven’t found a way to remove the true name of what the hirudin infected you with. It’s wound itself into your nature, twisting itself up in a way that we simply can’t remove. The problem is mostly a matter of technique. We simply don’t have anything subtle enough to sing it out without killing you. Nor are we likely to be able to refine our skills in time to save you.

            “The suggestion is to bring a completely different technique to bear, one outside of the skills the Cheldeans learn. Specifically, they recommend using the second-sight Sanura has shown.”

            “What?” Sanura asked, startled.

            “A problem that looks impossible with one set of tools is often easy with another. Your second-sight would give a radically different view of the problem than our-well, I suppose you could call it ‘second hearing.’

            “Obviously, teaching you to cast proxies by, say, painting would requiring a whole new discipline that would take even longer than refining our songs. However, my source made a suggestion that would allow you to remove the mark if you can see a simpler view of the true names than we can. There is an artifact we know of called the Nameless Sword. It can separate and even destroy true names. If wielded by someone who can see true names instead of hearing them, it should allow the user to pick and choose how they come apart.”

            “Why is it called the Nameless Sword?” Celeres asked.

            “Because it doesn’t have a true name. It isn’t blocking or hiding a name; it is literally nameless. We have no idea why or even how it maintains its shape. It’s an anomaly.”

            “Where is it?” Sanura asked.

            “That’s one of the problems. The last wielder was a dragonslayer that tried to kill Einian, grandmother to the dragons. She killed him instead and kept the sword. Unfortunately, she kills mortals who enter her caves without compunction, so we can’t just ask to borrow it. On the plus side, the caves are in Mt. Anguis, which is only a few months travel from here.

            “But that isn’t the biggest problem I have with the plan. If we pursue this option and something goes wrong, then one of you will have killed the other.”

            That earned a long silence.

            “Well, that isn’t an immediate problem, is it? We can make a final measurement of the risks after we get the sword,” Celeres said.

            “We?” Sanura asked.

            “Well, I’m certainly not going to stay here and die by inches,” Celeres said firmly. “Arva, can you work the healing proxies they’ve been working on me? I assume you’re coming with us.”

            Arva nodded solemnly. “I will lead you if that’s what you want.”

            “Then it’s settled. We’ll leave for Mt. Anguis in the morning.”

            Sanura nodded her acquiescence with a far greater calm than Arva had. Her love had already pledged his life to her. If he was willing to risk death at her hands to share it longer, she was willing to try her wings on that wind.