“You are evenly matched.”
Wearily, Vandibar sat down on the marble bench beside the pool. “I see that I can’t go back, only forward. Very well. Tell me more.”
And the other within Sekenre discoursed, in a dry, stern voice, on the nature of sorcery and its relation to time, repeating much that had been said before, about swimming outside of the normal flow of events, or perhaps beneath it, only surfacing into the lives of ordinary men at chosen intervals. Vandibar understood very little, at least right away. But there was another image, which made more sense.
othertime,beneathSekenre worked a few tiles loose from the edge of the pool, and held them in his hand, arranged in a line, a single black tile second in the sequence among the white.
The black tile was the day of suffering, of the
