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of—well, she reckoned, though the rest of the Gate-mages begged to disagree. Her great-grandfather would keep him in hand. He would also, she hoped, learn what the boy could
do; useless idle thing that he was, it seemed he had a gift for Gates that was little less than Merian’s own.
    And there he was in her dream, this eve of Autumn Firstday, idling about in a garden of singing birds. He was as lovely as ever, with that face cast in bronze and those narrow uptilted dark eyes and that hair like new copper—mark of his lineage, and pride of his beauty, too. She had not troubled to notice the rest of him while she judged him, but her eyes had been marking every line. Under the soiled and ridiculous finery, he was not at all an ill figure of a man.
    She had understood long ago, when she was younger than this boy, that there was no room in her for both Gates and lovers. It was her duty to produce an heir; she was royal born, she had no choice in the matter. But unlike her mother, who had bred her as if she had been a senel, Merian could not bring herself to do the necessary.
    Maybe, she thought, she should let the dream lead her. The boy was as royally bred as she, and a famous beauty. He had magic in more than the usual measure—how much more, it might serve her well to discover. And he had a name for prowess in the bedchamber. The women of Han-Gilen, both noble and irretrievably common, had never an ill word to say of him, except that he could not choose just one of them. He had to have them all.
    She fled the dream and the thought. All Gate-mages who could come to the city of Endros Avaryan had gathered for the rite of Autumn Firstday: celebration in the temple and feasting after, and then, as night fell, a council.
    There were a dozen of them in Merian’s receiving room in the old palace, drinking wine or ale and nibbling festival cakes. Lamplight and magelight illumined faces of nearly every race that this world knew, from ivory-and-gold Asanian to night-dark northerner. But they were all mages of Gates, bound together by the same duty.
    â€œI still say,” said Urziad of Asanion, “that all worlds but ours are empty of human life.”

    â€œSomething builds gardens and palaces,” said Kalyi of the Isles. “Something sets rings of stones on headlands and leaves the wrecks of ships by alien seas.”
    â€œWe know that there were people once,” Urziad said. “But we’ve been standing guard over the worlds for close on fourscore years, and none of us has seen a living soul. The worlds are empty, all but ours.”
    â€œThe worlds around Gates are empty,” Ushallin said. “That doesn’t mean the worlds themselves are. Maybe the Gates are shunned as evil; maybe people are afraid of them. Maybe—”
    â€œMaybe all the people are gone,” said Urziad.
    â€œBut where? What would have happened to them?” Ushallin asked. She came from the Nine Cities; she was a skilled opener of Gates. She asked difficult questions, too, that none of the others could answer.
    Kalyi at least was willing to venture a guess. “They may be greater mages than we can ever dream of being. Or they decided long ago to dispense with Gates, and left them behind as useless remembrances.”
    â€œHardly useless if they can still be opened,” Ushallin said. “It seems that we’ve been left alone amid all the worlds of Gates. What if there is a reason for that? What if something comes to Gates sooner or later, and devours all thinking beings in the worlds beyond them?”
    A shudder ran round the circle. Urziad made a sign against evil—catching himself just too late. “Surely we have more to occupy us,” he said, “than fretting over children’s nightmares.”
    â€œBut are they?” Merian had been silent for so long that she startled them all. “Are they simple nightmares?” she asked them. “There are notes in the