The Rathen sat in the shade of a pear tree. He was an ancient black man with white curly hair. His fingers played deftly over a stringed instrument equally as old, and he hummed along to the haunting strains of the music he played. Sadness came out of it, accentuated by a moan or a pluck of this string or that. His bodyguards stood about just within earshot. Saddam Key stood there too, in the hot sun, just outside of the shade from the tree, sweating, while the old man played his music.
The call had come unexpectedly, a guard at his door at the first light of dawn. There was a certain excitement mixed with his fear, for few received a private audience with the Rathen. Fewer still met him here, at the monastery where the Brotherhood of Hyusio had hammered out the rigid tenets of the
