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The city Bromjunaar, bright crown of old Keizaal, has sat abandoned for a thousand years. The wind scratches like a rat through its maze of crumbling walls, skittering through rubble, gnawing the nose of the mage struggling up its frozen steps. He scrunches it.
Then he leans heavily on his staff, breathing hard, and stares. The ruin is dotted with tents. Unless he is seeing double—and he won’t, he thinks wearily, rule it out—he counts several figures, cloaked and cowled, poring over a fallen bas-relief.
They must not, the mage thinks, know the meaning of the word abandoned. Or dangerous. He cups a hand around his mouth. “Hello?”
The figures jump. A young man with the patchy beginnings of a beard spots him, starts, then scrambles down to him over the scree—looking for all the world, the mage thinks, like a disgruntled goat. The fuzz on his chin has frozen into a point.
“Who goes there?” the boy demands, scowling. His voice cracks, bless him. “Stop where you are. You’re—you’re intruding on College business.”
Baa-siness, thinks the mage, then chides himself. They had warned him in the village that the mountain air would make him thick. He’d only half-believed them; now he can’t get his breath, and his vision is starting to swim, and he’s making goat puns. “College business?”
The young man folds his arms. “College business.”
Surely not, thinks the mage. Bright spots dance like witchfires across his eyes. He squeezes them shut, then opens them again, half-worried that the boy might vanish with the lights; surely Mirabelle had not sent a pack of prentices to undergo the most perilous trial known to wizardry, no matter how dire the circumstances—
“My friends—my colleagues and I,” the boy continues, blushing at the slip, “are conducting field research. The Archmage knows all about it. Um.” The points of his ears flush red. “This site is full of ancient tr—uh, artifacts of, of historical interest, and we—are you all right?”
The mage, with scholarly eloquence, says, “Nuh.”
He sways like a metronome. Then there is a steadying hand at his elbow, and another at his back, and a startled little laugh—strangely familiar, the mage thinks, and less like a bleat than he had expected—easing him down, all together, on a jut of stone.
“Altitude,” the boy says sagely. “Or you’re timesick. Here, sera, sip this.”
He thrusts a flask at the mage, who takes it in numb hands. Mirabelle, he thinks, did not send these students. They must have set out on their expedition—unsanctioned, the mage does not doubt—long before things on campus went bad. Savos Aren’s amulet, cold as the man who once wore it, hangs heavy as a millstone from his neck.
He clutches the flask. He stares at this boy too young to grow his beard, who doesn’t know about the Archmage, or Ancano, or the Eye.
“—can’t hurt to tell you what we’re up to, I suppose,” the boy is saying, oblivious. “In a few weeks, we’ll all be famous. Well, go on.” He straightens, dusting the snow from his breeks, and crunches backwards through the rising drifts. “Ask me why we’re here.”
The mage stares at him. The boy, or perhaps the mountain, rocks gently to one side.
“Why,” he rasps, the words thick and slow, “are you—”
The boy, with a grin and a grand flourish, throws out his arms as if to embrace the rubble. “This is the site”—he raises his voice over the frigid howl of wind and snow—“of a temporal singularity!”
The mage’s ears are ringing. He tries to look interested. “A temp—ah, temporal—”
“Years ago,” says the boy, bright-eyed, “a dragon-priest of Bromjunaar meddled with chronology, hoping to create a space outside of time in which to stash his treasures. There’s no record of whether he succeeded. Maybe he did. Maybe his pocket-realm can still be unlocked, if you have the key—not that anyone, to my knowledge, does.” He crunches back and forth like a scholar pacing behind a lectern. “Though we were supposed to meet a Breton fellow here, a scholar, who was excited about a sonaak mask he bought from some antiquary. But he’s a week late. We won’t wait much longer for him before going in.”
The mage’s face sharpens. He sits up straighter, ignoring the nausea that rolls in his stomach like a stone. “Going—”
“In any case,” the young man continues, unheeding, “time was broken here, once, and the cracks remain. Things slip through. It’s not unprecedented. You’ve surely heard of the Second Numidian Effect—”
He stops. An odd look crosses his face.
He’s staring, the mage realizes with strange unease, at Savos’s amulet.
“Things slip through,” the boy murmurs again, half to himself. “Um.”
And he draws, from the folds of his scarf, the same amulet.
The mage stares at it. He fumbles a hand to his own talisman, cold and heavy and there—around his neck, yes, but around the boy’s neck, too—
“Are you from the future?” The boy’s voice is soft. His eyes, red and watery with the cold, are wide as coals. “Are you—are you me?”
Not real, thinks the mage. Not real. But the boy, he remembers, had touched him.
He swallows a hysterical laugh. “I’m not you.”
“Oh.” The boy’s face falls. Then it fills again with wonder, hesitant and trembling, like a half-tame animal. “Are we—friends?”
The mage stares at him. He thinks, as the wind cuts their faces, of the man that this boy will become—twisted in the snow, blank-eyed, beard bloody.
“You saved—” His throat closes. He clears it. Smiles, somehow. “Saved my life.”
The boy’s eyes gleam. “Really?”
“Savos!” One of the other apprentices, little more than a speck on a high wall, waves down at them. Her dark curls fly in the wind. “Sav! Hurry up!”
Savos Aren jumps. Turns around.
“Atmah,” he calls back, his face wild with delight, “you’re not going to believe—”
He vanishes. The girl vanishes.
The mage stares, unblinking, as the snow whirls through the space where they had stood.
“Not real,” he says to the wind, the ice, the frozen stones.
Then he blinks down at the flask, capped with a cork, still clutched in his cold hand.