Drinker of Souls

The children moved away from her, their small fine hands sliding from flesh and silk. Yaril shimmered a moment and was again a brindle bitch lying beside her. Jaril went to squat beside Taguiloa.

Tari’s face flushed then paled. She sat up, moved one foot then the other, moved her wrists, bent one leg at the knee, straightened it, bent the other leg, straightened it. Her hands were shaking. Her breath came sharp and fast. She opened her mouth, shut it, couldn’t speak, closed her eyes, pressed her hands against her ribs, sucked in a long breath, let it out. “And the poppymilk?”

“You’re free of that too.”

“There’s not gold enough in the world…”

Brann shrugged. “Oh well, gold.” She got to her feet, stretched, yawned. “This isn’t what I’m going to feed the farmers, no and no, tell them what they want to hear and make them shiver just enough.” She grinned. “And scare the bones out of any hillwolves stupid enough to attack.”

Taguiloa looked around. Harra was gazing at Brann with an expression of lively interest, her full lips pursed for a whistle, but not whistling. Ladji was sliding his ancient flute between thumb and forefinger, smiling at nothing much, his body gone rubbery with his private relief. He was apparently the only one who’d known of Tari’s growing pain. Linjijan was gazing dreamily at nothing, his fingers moving on his thighs as if he practiced modes of fingering for music he heard inside his head.

Jaril touched Taguiloa’s ann. He looked down. “What is it?”

“You wanted a boy to play the drums.”

“You volunteering?”

Jaril shook his head. “Too boring. But I found a boy. He doesn’t have to be Hina?”

Taguiloa looked around the room. Mage’s daughter from so far west he’d never heard of her people. Linjijan, comfortably Hina. Brann the changeling witch, once of Arth Slya now of nowhere. Yaril and Jaril, who knew what they were? “One more foreigner, who’d notice.” He laughed. “How long will it take to get him here…?” He turned to Tari, spread his hands. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be so free with your house.”

Tari Blackthorn waved a slim hand. “I won’t say I owe you, but you may bring all the world in here and I won’t complain.”

“He’s waiting outside.” Jaril darted for the door.

Taguiloa strolled across to the divan, knelt beside Tari, took her hand in his. “There was a time when I thought I was running this thing.” He lifted her hand, touched his lips to the wrist, cradled the hand against his cheek. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I wasn’t telling myself.” She eased her hand free. “Taga my tinti,” her voice was a whisper that reached only him, “don’t you see how odd it is, all this? This collection of mage-touched strangers? Why are they being pulled together? And who is doing it?” She bent a finger, touched the knuckle to his chin. “She worries me, your patron, I don’t understand her. I shouldn’t say it after what she did for me, but be careful of her, summerfly. Why is she doing this?”

“She has her reasons.”

“And you know them. Why am I even more worried for you? No, don’t fidget so, little love. I won’t ask more questions.” She ran her forefinger around the curve of his ear and down his neck. “Your drummer comes, Taga.” Laughter shook in her voice.

Taguiloa swung round. A m’darjin boy stood uncertainly in the doorway clutching drums half as big as he was, ten, maybe twelve, blue-black skin, hair a skim of springs coiled close to his skull, huge brown eyes. His hands and feet were borrowed from a bigger body, his arms thin as twigs with bumpy knobs where the joints were.

“His name is Negomas,” Jaril said. “His father was a m’raj shaman and he did something, Negomas doesn’t know what but it was bad and it killed him and the rest of the m’darjin won’t have anything to do with Negomas now, it’s like he caught something from his father and could infect them with it, but that’s not true, I checked him out and you know I’m good at that.” He tugged the boy forward.

Negomas grinned nervously. His body was taut, quivering with eagerness and hope.

“Your drums?” Taguiloa said.

“My drums.” He grinned wider and mischief brightened the huge brown eyes. “I grow into them.” He waggled one of his large bony hands. “With a bit of time,” he finished, winced as Jaril kicked him in the ankle. “Saхm,” he added politely.

“Play them for me. Something I can move to.” He stepped out of his sandals, moved to the center of the mat and stood waiting, shaking himself, a long ripple from ankles to head, wrists to shoulders. He smiled toward the boy, then unfocused his eyes and concentrated on listening with ears and body both.

He heard a blurred shiver of sound, then some tentative staccato taps that had unusual overtones, a sonority similar to the deeper notes of Harra’s daroud. The drums began speaking with more authority. He kept up his loosening moves, listening until the sound slid under his skin and throbbed in his blood; he flexed his arms, twisted his body from side to side, then let the music lift him into a handless backflip that developed into a series of bending stretching kinetic movements, alternating high and low; he reveled in the drumsong beating in blood, bone and muscle, was unsurprised when two flutes joined in, singing in none of the usual modes, producing a strong harsh music, then the daroud came in, picking up its own version of the melodic line, adding a greater tension to the blend by tugging at the beat of the drums. The dance went on and on until Taguiloa collapsed to the mat, sweating and laughing, exhausted but flying high, his panting laughter mingling with the applause and laughter from Tari and Brann, whoops from Jaril and the sweating m’darjin boy. Then silence, filled with the sound of Taguiloa’s breathing.

He fell back till he lay flat on the straw. His hands burned, his bones ached and he’d collected bruises and sore muscles from moving in ways he hadn’t tried before. He turned his head, lifted a heavy hand to push sweat-sticky hair off his face. “You’ll do, Negomas.” He yawned, swallowed. “Anyone I need to talk to about you?”

The boy shook his head, moved his fingers on the drumheads.

Taguiloa looked at Jaril, raised his brows.

Jaril shook his head.

Taguiloa pushed up until he was sitting with his arms draped over his knees. “You understand you won’t be my student but only part of the troupe?” When the boy nodded, he went on, “I’m sorry but that’s the way the world says things have to be; I need a Hina boy. If ever I can find the right one. Jaril, fetch whatever the boy’s got, move him into my house and make sure Yarm doesn’t try anything.”

Jaril snorted, looked pointedly at Brann.

Brann sighed. “Taguiloa is master of this motley group, my friend. We don’t argue with the boss, at least not in public even if he’s being more than usually foolish.” She chuckled, then sobered. “You know what Yarm is like. For the good of our purpose, get Negomas settled, then take him out for something to eat.” She smiled. “I know you could fry Taga’s liver if you chose, he knows it by now or he’s a lot stupider than he looks, we all know it. And we know you’re going to do nothing of the kind.”

Jaril walked over to Negomas, jerked his head at the door, then strolled out with an air of going where he chose at the speed he chose to go. Negomas picked up his drums, winked over his shoulder at Taguiloa, then followed the blond boy out.

Brann got to her feet, stood looking around. “I’m glad it’s you who’s got to pull this mix of geniuses together.” She nodded to Blackthorn, smiled a general farewell and swept out the door.

YARM LOOKED UP as Taguiloa stepped through the door. “Where you been? And what’s that dirty m’darjin doing here?”

“None of your business. And speaking of dirty, this house is a garbage dump.”

“If you want neat, hire a girl. You can afford it,” Yarm said sullenly. “I’m not your servant.”

“You’re not my wife either, which is just as well because you’d be fit only for drowning if you were a woman. Not a servant? Boils on your ass, you’re what I say you are. As of now, that’s nothing. Get.” He jerked a thumb at the door.

“Now?” Yarm’s voice cracked with surprise and rage. “You’re putting that foreigner in my place?”

“Get out. Now. Tomorrow morning you can collect your gear, but I’ve had all I’m going to take from you.”

“Fist will…”

“Out.” He leaped at the boy, caught the collar of his shirt, half shoved, half lifted him across the room and out of the house, set his foot on the boy’s backside and sent him in a stumbling sprawl down the leaf-littered path.

Yarm lay dazed for a moment or so, then scrambled to his feet and came screaming at Taguiloa. Who slapped his face vigorously several times, swept his feet from under him with a leg scythe, caught an arm in a punish hold and ran him down the path and out into the street. He stood watching as Yarm slunk off, even his back full of threat though he didn’t dare turn and voice his thoughts.

“He still doesn’t quite believe you’re serious.”

Taguiloa looked down. Jaril stood beside him, his blond hair shining in the sunlight.

“I’m like to have company tonight.”

“Uh-huh. We’ll be there too. Yaril’s been getting bored, she says I have all the fun.”

TAGUILOA STOOD in the center of the bedroom and looked about him. He’d finished packing up Yarm’s things and a ratty lot they were, the boy had no pride. Blackthorn was right, he thought, as she always is. Yarm had a beautiful slim body, limber as a sea snake’s, and the face of a young immortal which the women in the audiences sighed over. He also had a good sense of timing, he learned quickly everything Taguiloa taught him, but he was spoiled, lazy, whining, dishonest about small things and large unless he thought he would be caught, jealous of Taguiloa’s time and attention to a degree that had soon become unbearable. Not a sexual jealousy, that would have been far easier to handle, but something else Taga couldn’t understand or explain.

He put the packets outside with a feeling of relief. This house used to be the place where he rested, practiced, meditated. It was filled with memories of his loved teacher, memories of peace and contentment after the turmoil in the streets. Gerontai had taught him much besides tumbling and juggling. He’d been hoping for much the same relationship with Yarm but was quickly disillusioned. He’d let Yarm move in with him, not seeing the speculative gleam in Yarm’s black eyes. A measuring cold calculation powered by malice and spite and a like for hurting. A passionate need to hold and own. Fire and ice and neither of them comfortable to live with. Taguila stood in his doorway rubbing his back across the edge of the jamb, feeling relaxed and clean for the first time in the three years Yarm had lived here.

The Wounded Moon was a ragged crescent rising in the east, its lowest horn just touching the Temple roof. I’m not going to wait here staring at the wall like a fool. Negomas was spending the night with Brann: no need to worry about him. “Jaril,” Taga yelled.

An owl circled above, hooted what sounded like laughter, came swooping down, landing beside Taguiloa as the blond boy. A moment later a nighthawk screeched, came slipping down and landed as the silverbright small girl. “What’s the fuss?” Her voice was water clear, melodious.

Taguiloa bowed. “Welcome, damasaхr.”

“Hm. Well?”

Feeling as if he faced the ghost of his great-aunt who was mamasaхr to the whole family and by repute tougher than a Temueng pimush, Taguiloa cleared his throat. “I was going to visit some friends, thought your brother might like to come along.”

She snorted (though Jaril had informed Taguiloa that his kind didn’t actually breathe and therefore couldn’t play the flute). “And let Fist burn you out?”

Taguiloa laughed before he thought, then expected her to scold him for disrespect, but she seemed unperturbed, just stood waiting for him to explain himself. “Fist has better sense,” he said. “Even on a foggy night, start a fire here and half of Silili would go. Bad enough to have Hina on his tail when some ghost or other named him as the fire-starter, something that big would bring in Temueng enforcers and maybe even an Imperial Censor. He’d be skinned alive and hung to rot. His family too and everyone who helped him and their families.” Taga flung his arms out. “And even when he was dead, the ghosts he made would torment the ghost he was. I’m not worth all that. No way. Not even for dearest Yarm the family hope.” He smiled at the little girl. “Want to come along?”

She gazed a moment at her brother, then nodded. “Why not. This ghost business is weird.”

Taguiloa stared at her. “Your kind don’t die?”

“Oh they die all right. And stay dead. Ghosts? No way.”

“They don’t have souls?”

“That’s something they’ve been arguing about since eldest ancestor learned to talk.” She shrugged. “A waste of time and breath far as I can see.” She watched as Jaril blurred then changed into a Hina boy. “This is the first reality we’ve seen where there are ghosts you can actually talk to.” She shimmered and changed to a small golden lemur, then hopped up to ride her brother’s shoulder.

“Well,” Jaril said, “she couldn’t come as a little girl, that’d make your friends uncomfortable.”

Taguiloa pulled the door shut, turned the key in the lock and dropped the metal bit into a pocket, then started walking toward the gate through the rustling foliage of bushes he reminded himself he’d have to water in the morning. “You change your shapes so why couldn’t she be another boy?”

The lemur gave a chittering sound that sounded indignant. Jaril grinned and patted her paw. “But Yaril’s a female,” he said. “She couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” Curiosity driving him, Taguiloa persisted. “It’s only appearance after all. If I dressed myself in woman’s robes, painted my face, wore a wig and practiced a bit, I could make a fairly convincing appearance as a woman, though my real nature wouldn’t change at all.”

The boy turned those strange crystal eyes on him; when Taguiloa was sure he wasn’t going to answer, he did. “The inner and outer are one with us. If we try to change the nature of the outer, we deny and warp the inner. So-” he grinned, an impudent urchin grin that acknowledged and mocked Taguiloa’s voice-“that we seem children should tell you we are children.”

“How old are you?”

“Hard to say. Time is funny. Six or seven hundreds of your years. Something like that.”

“Children?”

“We grow slowly.”

“Seems like.” He tapped a finger on Jaril’s head, relieved to find it solid, warm and a little oily. “Talking about weird, I find you changechildren stranger than any ghost I’ve ever seen.”

THEY WANDERED THROUGH the night quarter, sharing jugs of wine, the lemur a popular little beast with her smooth soft fur and dainty manners; they got evicted from a few places when some weak-stomached drinkers refused to tolerate an animal drinking from men’s wine bowls and others who liked the beast somewhat more than they liked the objectors jumped the objectors and started breaking the furniture; they visited a joyhouse, Jaril pouting and Yaril sulking when Taguiloa wouldn’t let them go upstairs with him; they settled for entertaining the joygirls, Jaril clapping his hands and dancing, Yaril dancing with him, a small and elegant figure, bowing and swaying with the most wonderful grace, golden fur glimmering in the lamplight. The lemur even played a simple tune on a gittern abandoned in a corner. They stayed there quite a while even after Taguiloa rejoined them, but eventually wandered on to watch a fight in the middle of the street, throw the bones with a circle of men on the sidewalk, losing and winning with equal enthusiasm, all three savoring the noise and activity about them, loud, raucous, mostly illegal and immoral, but full of vigor and the beat of life. Now and then Taguiloa got a jolt when he looked at Jaril’s eager young face, then he’d tell himself, seven hundred years, Tungjii’s tits and tool, and forget worrying about corrupting the boy.

Sometime after midnight, he doused his head with ice-water, looked blearily about, collected the children and started threading through the narrow streets heading toward the Players Quarter.

They left the lamplit streets behind, left the noise and warmth and good feeling. Taguiloa shivered, the water in his hair making him cooler though it didn’t do much to clear the fog out of his head. “I shouldn’t have had that last jug.”

Jaril shook himself like a large wet dog. Yaril-lemur leaped off his shoulder, shimmered and was a large owl beating upward at a steep angle. “Yaril’s going to keep an eye on our backs.”

“Someone’s following us?”

“Not yet. Probably waiting for us. Tell me about Fist. What scares him?”

“Not much. Hanging. Temueng torturers. Dragons. He swears he won’t hang, the enforcers will have to kill him to take him.” His footsteps sounded like gongs in his ears. Jaril’s feet made no sound at all. “He’s cunning, knows when to back off, runs strings of smugglers, snatchthieves, thugs, I don’t know what all.”

“He figures he can handle you, a little pain and fear and you do what he says?”

“Yeah. I’d figure the same, were it not for you change-children. Why else would I put up with Yarm for so long?”

“And he’s afraid of dragons?”

“A few years back, or so I’m told, Fist had a diviner read the gada sticks for him. The man told him to watch out for dragon fire.”

“Ah. Maybe Yaril and me, we can make that reading come true.” Jaril blurred and a twin to Yaril’s owl went sailing up, narrowly avoiding tangling itself in the branches of pomegranate growing out over a wall.

Taguiloa stood blinking after him. “I’ll never get used to that.” As he prowled along through the shadows of the narrow lane, he wondered what had got into the changechild. Too much wine, for one thing. He thought about that and was more confused than before. They didn’t have innards like normal folk, you could see that when they were smears of light. But Jaril had picked up a taste for wine rambling the night with Taguiloa and disposed of it somehow, managing to get nicely elevated on it, maybe it was like ghosts drinking the fragrance of wine and tea and cooked foods. What did changechildren eat? Jaril never said anything about that. Doesn’t matter, he’s a friend, can eat whatever he wants, doesn’t bother me; good kid, Jaril, even if sometimes he scares the shit outta me.

Slowly sobering, he kept to the shadows and moved as silently as he could toward his own gate. Fist wasn’t going to kill him, just break an arm or leg or both and tromp on him a lot and repeat the tromping as soon as he healed unless he gave in and took Yarm hack. Taga cursed the emperor’s boils or whatever it was that stirred him up and made him grab at everything in sight. With the usual number of enforcers about and the Tekora’s guard up to strength, Fist would have settled for a minor beating. Tungjii and Jah’takash alone knew what he’d get up to these days.

A horned owl came swooping down and changed to a blond child. Yaril. She came close to him, whispered, “Some men in the garden waiting for you. Yarm is there, two-legged elephant beside him, a couple others with clubs.”

“Fist himself.” Taga swore under his breath. “That’s bad.”

“I thought so. Mind if Jaril and me, we burn up a little of your garden?”

“What?”

“I remember what you said about fire. We won’t let it get away.”

Taga stared at her, then grinned. “Dragons.”

“Well?”

“In a good cause, why not.” He scowled and swore again. “Fist. Seshtrango gift him with staggers and a horde of rabid fleas.”

Yaril giggled, looked up, giggled again, shimmered and was a replica in green and silver of the small crimson and gold dragon undulating past over Taga’s head.

Jaril-dragon flipped his streamered tail in airy greeting.

Taga grinned up at the baby dragons. “You’re drunk both of you.” Silent laughter bubbled in his blood. The serpentine shapes waved laughter at him, wove laughter-knots about each other, exulting in a form that made them drunker than any amount of wine would. They settled down before the enchantment of their beauty wore off him (he was wine drunk too, far more than he should be) and started off toward his house.

He gave them a few moments then followed after, thinking they were going to impress the shit out of those thugs waiting like innocent babes in his shrubbery. The dragons moved swiftly ahead of him, darting in swift undulations toward his garden. He strolled along the lane between the high wood-and-stone walls that shut in the house-and-garden compounds of those players and artists wealthy enough to buy and maintain a place here. He had inherited his. There’d been some uncertain years after his master died when he was afraid he would lose the tiny house and garden, when he had to swallow his pride and borrow money from Blackthorn which he knew she wasn’t expecting him to repay. He did it-and repaid it-because Gerontai had taught him to love tending that garden; he knew every plant in there, every inch of the soil, even the worms and beetles that lived in it, he knew it by taste and feel and smell, he knew every miniature carp in the small pool, every bird that nested in his trees and bushes. It was his place of retreat and meditation and more necessary to him than anything or anyone else, even Blackthorn. Yarm had disrupted that peace, but once this nonsense was over, he’d have his retreat back. Negomas was proving a quiet, happy companion with a love of growing things and a gentle sureness in those outsize hands that were so clumsy othertimes. He had the wrong sort of body and no talent at all for tumbling or the new kind of movement Taguiloa was exploring, but Taguiloa was beginning to feel that he’d found someone to whom he could pass on the other things Gerontai had taught him. And maybe the changechildren could find him a Hina boy to learn the movements, a boy that would fit into the household and appreciate the peace. Taguiloa ambled along the curving lane dreaming of times to come, chuckling as he heard shouts, curses and screams ahead of him, cracks, cracklings, shrieks, a scream. Baby dragons getting busy.

When he stopped by the gate, a red and gold dragon head popped over the wall, a gold crystal dragon eye winked at him, then the head vanished. He pushed on the leaves of the gate and they swung inward without a sound. Busy Yarm, there’d been a squeak in one of the left side hinges yesterday. He strolled into his garden, hands clasped behind him, stopped after a few steps and grinned at the tableau before him.

Yarm in a half crouch, fists clenched, his face twisted with helpless rage, his shirt and trousers slashed with thin charred lines and speckled with black spots still red-edged and smoking.

Fist on his knees howling with pain, the side of his face burned, his left shoulder and arm bubbling raw meat.

Two other men on their faces in the gravel of the path, twitching a little, speechless with terror.

Yaril dragon and Jaril dragon drifted down and hovered by Taguiloa, one on the left, the other on his right, both a little behind him like proper bodyguards.

“Greet you, Yarm,” Taguiloa said. “Come for your things? I see you met my friends.” He grimaced at the howling Fist, turned to Jaril. “Could you do something about that noise?”

Golden eye winked at him, dragon dissolved. In his light ray form Jaril zipped through Fist, wheeled about him, went through him again, then returned to dragon shape and took his place at Taguiloa’s shoulder. The howling stopped. Not a full cure, the man’s flesh was still ragged and raw, but at least it wasn’t oozing anymore. Fist got to his feet. He opened and shut his left hand. The muscles in his arm shifted stiffly, but the pain was no longer unbearable.

“They’ve promised to keep an eye on me and mine.” Taguiloa said. “They must have thought you had hostile intentions, waiting here in the dark like this. You don’t have hostile intentions, do you Fist?”

The big man was staring fascinated at the serpentine shapes, turning his head from one side to the other until Taguiloa began to get dizzy watching. Eyes glazed, fear-sweat dripping down his face, Fist coughed, said, “Uh no, sure not.” He turned away from Yaril and Jaril, reached over to touch his burned side. “Like you said, we come to get Yarm’s stuff. Meant nothing by it.” He kicked the nearest of his men in the ribs. “Isn’t that so, Fidge? On your feet, goat turd.”

Silent laughter from the dragons. Taguiloa glanced at Yaril, blinked as she began smoking about the nostrils and produced a small gout of bright blue fire. Fidge started shivering and had difficulty getting to his feet. Fist went so pale he looked leprous in that brief blue glow.

“Then Yarn might as well collect his belongings. Everything he owns is in those packs by the door. He’ll need some help hauling it, but then you’re here, aren’t you, so generous with your time and muscle.” He turned his head to Jaril dragon. “Light their way, my friend. If you feel like it, of course.”

More silent laughter then Jaril dragon went coiling after Fist and Yarm, prodding them to move faster.

When they were back Taguiloa said, “Good. There’s no reason for any of you to return, is there? My friends here might be a bit nastier if they saw you again. They were mild tonight, but their tempers get a bit tetchy when they’re hungry. I wouldn’t show my face inside these walls again if I were you.”

Silently, heavily the four intruders trudged through the gate and into the lane. Taguiloa pushed the two sections of gate shut and dropped the bar home with intense satisfaction. He strolled toward the house, laughter bubbling up in him, his own and that from the dragonets.

Yaril and Jaril dissolved and retbrmed into ehildshapes, giggling helplessly, leaning against the housewall beside the door holding their middles. “You should… you shoulda…” Yaril gasped. “You should’ve seen Jaril chasing them through the hushes. You should’ve seen us herding them off the grass, giving them hotfoots until they were hopping like… oh oh oooh, I think I’m gonna bust.”

Jaril calmed a little, asked hopefully, “You think they’ll come back?”

“Not this summer.” He looked around at the garden but couldn’t see much. The crescent moon was low in the west and the starlight dimmed by fog rolling in. He couldn’t see any smoldering glows, turned to the children. “Fire?”

“All out. We made sure.”

“If you’re wrong and I burn to death, I’ll come back and haunt you.”

“We know,” they said in chorus. “We know.”

EARLY IN THAT long summer in Silili, Jaril went with Taguiloa to the Shaggil horsefair on the Mainland.

Loud, hot, dusty, filled with the shrill challenges of resty stallions, the higher bleating whinnies of colts and fillies, the snap of auctioneer’s chant, the wham-tap of closing rods, the smell of urine, sweat, hay dust, clay dust, horse and man, cheap wine and hot sauce, boiling noodles and vinegar, cinnamon, musk, frangipani, sandalwood, cumin, hot iron, leather, oils. Islands of decorum about Jamar Lords. Islands of chaos about wrestlers, tumblers, jugglers of the more common sort, sword swallowers, fire-eaters, sleight-of-hand men doing tricks to fool children, shell and pea men fooling adults, gamblers of all degree. Hina farmers there with their whole families, the infants riding mother and father in back-cradles, the older children clinging close, somewhat intimidated by the crowd. Foreigners there for the famous Shaggil mares whose speed and stamina passed into any strain they were bred to. Speculators there on the hope they alone could dig out the merits in colts neglected enough to keep their price low. Courtesans there for good-looking easy mounts to show themselves off in wider realms than the streets of Silili. Temung horse-beliks there to buy war mounts and Takhill Drays to pull supply wagons and siege engines.

Taguiloa strolled through the heat, noise and dust, enjoying it all, enjoying most of all the knowledge he could buy any handful of those about them with the gold in his moneybelt. He stopped a moment by a clutch of tumblers, watching them with a master’s eye, sighing at the lack of imagination in the rigidly traditional runs and flips. They performed the patterns with ease and even grace, and they gathered applause and coin for their efforts, but he’d done that well when he was twelve.

Jaril wouldn’t let him linger but tugged on his sleeve and led him from one shed to another, pointing out a bay cob they should get to pull the travel wagon, a lanky gray gelding that would do for Harra who admitted she was out of practice but had once been rather a good rider. The changechild wouldn’t let Taga stop to haggle for the beasts, but urged him on until they were out at the fringes where weanlings and yearlings were offered for sale. He stopped outside a small enclosure with a single colt inside.

Taguiloa looked at the wild-eyed demon tethered to a post, looked down at Jaril. “Even I know you don’t ride a horse less than two. Especially that one.”

“Yaril and me, we’ll fix that later, the age, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“Wait here and don’t look much interested in any of these.” He waved at the enclosures around them. “I’m not and suck your own eggs, imp.”

Trailing laughter, Jaril shimmered into a pale amorphous glow, tenuous in that dusty air as a fragment of dream. It drifted in a slow circle above the corrals, flashing through the colts and fillies in them, finishing the survey with the beast in the nearest enclosure. It melted through his yellow-mud coat and seemed to nestle down inside the colt. That made Taga itchy, reminding him of antfeet walking across his brain, skittering about under his skin. He reached inside his shirt and scratched at his ribs, looked about for anything that might offer relief from the beating of the sun. He was sweating rivers, his heavy black shirt was streaky with sweat mud, powdered with pale dust, the moneybelt a furnace against his belly. Nothing close, not a shed about. These were the scrubs of the Fair, interesting only to the marginal speculators and a few farmers_, without the money to buy a mature beast, but with land and fodder enough to justify raising a weanling. He pulled his sleeve across his face, grimaced at the slimy feel, the heavy silk being no use as a swab. When he let his arm fall, Jaril was standing beside him.

“We want him,” the changechild said, and pointed to the dun colt moving irritably at his tether, jerking his head up and down, blotched with sweat, caught in an unremitting temper tantrum.

“Why?” The colt was a hand or two taller than the yearlings about them, with a snaky neck, an ugly, boney head, ragged ears that he kept laid back even when he stood fairly quiet, a wicked plotting eye. Whoever brought that one to the Fair had more hope than good sense. “You can’t be serious.”

“Sure,” Jaril said. “Tough, smart and kill anyone tries to steal him. And fast.” He reached up, tugged at Taguiloa’s sleeve. “Come on. Once the breeder knows we really want him, he’ll try to screw up the price. He expects to make enough to pay for the colt’s feed, selling him for tiger meat to some Temueng collector. Don’t believe anything he tries to tell you about the dun’s breeding. The mare was too old for bearing and on her way to the butcher when she got out at the wrong time and got crossed by a maneater they had to track down and kill. Took them almost six months to trap him. Colt’s been mistreated from the day he was foaled and even if he wanted to behave he wasn’t let. Offer the breeder three silver and settle for a half-gold, no more. Don’t act like you know it all, that’s what breeders like him love to see. He’ll peel your hide and draw your back teeth before you notice. Just say you want the colt and will pay a silver for him, let the breeder rant all he wants, then say it again.” He gave Taguiloa a minatory glance, then a cheeky grin and trotted away, his small sandaled feet kicking up new gouts of dust

Annoyed and amused, Taguiloa followed him, knowing Jaril was getting back at him for the times he’d ordered the changechild about. He was a tiny Hina boy today with bowl-cut black hair and dark gold skin, except for his eyes indistinguishable from any of a thousand homeless urchins infesting the streets of Silili, dressed in dusty cotton trousers and a wrapabout shirt that hung open over a narrow torso and fluttered when there was any breeze. He rounded a haystack and stopped beside three men squatting about a small fire drinking large bowls of acid black tea. He waited for Taguiloa, then nodded at a fox-faced man, lean and wiry, with a small hard pot belly that strained the worn fabric of his shirt.

Taguiloa came up to him. “Salim,” he said, “you own the dun colt tethered by himself, back there a ways?”

“I have a fine dun yearling, Salim. Indeed, one whose blood lines trace back on both sides to the great mare Kashantuea and her finest stud the Moonleaper. Alas, the times are hard, Saom, that a man must be forced to part with his heart’s delight.”

“Bloodlines, ah. Then you’ve turned up the man-eater’s origins?”

A flicker of sour disgust, then admiration. “That a sothron islander should know so much! Oh knowing one, come, let us gaze on the noble lines, the matchless spirit of this pearl among horses. A pearl without price as such a wise one as you are must see at a single glance.”

“I know nothing of horseflesh,” Taguiloa said, glad enough to take Jaril’s advice. “One silver for your dun.”

“One silver?” The breeder’s face went red and his eyes bulged. “One silver for such speed and endurance. Of course, a jest at my expense. Ha-Ha. Twenty gold.”

“I noticed the spirit. He was doing his best to eat the plank in front of him. No doubt he’d prefer man-flesh like his sire. Two silvers, though I’m a fool to say it.”

“Never! Though I starve and my children starve and my house fall down. Fifteen gold.”

“Eating your house too, is he? Think what you’ll save on repairs by getting rid of him. Three silver and that’s my limit.”

“His mother was Hooves-that-sing, renowned through the world. Twelve gold, only twelve gold, though it hurts my heart to say it.”

“No doubt it was because of her great age that she died in the birthing.” Taguiloa wiped at his face and looked at his hand. “I’m hot and tired, my wife waits with a bath and tea, let us finish this. Three silver for the beast and five copper for his rope and halter. My boy can find a new fancy if he has to. Well?”

“You’re jesting again, noble skim, such a miserable sum…”

“So be it. Come,” he wheeled and started off, knowing jaril was coming reluctantly to his feet and pouting with disappointment. Might work, might not, he didn’t really care, he didn’t want anything to do with that piece of malevolence in the corral.

The breeder let him get three strides away, then called out, “Wait. Oh noble Sen, why didn’t you say you bought for this divine child, this god among boys? That my heart’s delight should find a home with such a young lion, ah that tempts me, yes, I can give my prize into such hands, though if you could bring yourself, noble Satim, a half-gold…” He sighed as Taguiloa took another step away. “You are a hard man, noble Satim. Agreed then, three silver and a copper hand. You pay the tag fee?”

Satisfied with his bargaining, Taguiloa nevertheless glanced first at Jaril, got his nod, then waved a hand in airy agreement.

They stopped at the pavilion of records, paid the transfer fee and the small bribes necessary to get the clerks to record the sale and hand over the tin ear tag, a larger bribe to get a tagger to set the tag in the dun colt’s ear.

As soon as he identified the proper beast, the breeder’s job was done but he lingered, relishing the dismay on the face of the tagman when he heard the yearling scream, saw him lash out with each hoof in turn, saw his wild wicked eye, his long yellow teeth. The tagman started to refuse and retreat, but Taguiloa got a good grip on his arm. “The boy’ll get him calmed down. Watch.”

Jaril, climbed the rails and stood balanced on the top one, looking down at the the dun who went crazy trying to get at him. Somewhere deep in his soul the breeder found a limit and opened his mouth to protest, shut it when Taguiloa laughed at him and repeated, “Watch.”

The boy found the moment he wanted and launched himself from the rail, twisting somehow in mid-air so he came down astride the colt. The yearling squealed with rage, gathered himself…

And snorted mildly, did a few fancy steps, then stood quite still, twisting his limber neck around so he could nose gently at Jaril’s knee. Again the breeder started to shout a warning, again he held-his peace as the dun swung his head back round and stared at him. Breeder stared at beast, beast at breeder and the man looked away first, convinced the beast was snickering at him. Fuming, he stalked off, aware he’d been fooled into selling a valuable beast for almost nothing.

After they bought the bay cob and the gray gelding, they left the Fair, Taguiloa on the gelding, leading the cob, Jaril riding the yearling. They left the three horses with a widow who had a shed and pasture she rented. In the days that followed Jaril and Yaril flew across frequently to train and grow the dun from a yearling to a lean fit three-year-old. Those same days Taguiloa planned the performances and rehearsed his troupe.

THEY WALKED OUT of Silili, Taguiloa, Brann, Harra, Negomas, Linjijan, Jaril as Hina boy and Yaril as brindle hound. Taguiloa and Linjijan put their shoulders to the man-yokes of a tilt cart that carried their props, costumes, camping gear, food, and a miscellany of other useful objects. Brann and Harra slipped straps over their shoulders and added their weight to the task of towing that clumsy vehicle. Jaril ran ahead of them with Negomas, both boys chattering excitedly about what they expected to happen, a sharing of ignorance and pleasurable speculation. Yaril trotted about, her nose to the ground, enjoying the smells of the morning.

They left the last huts of the indigent behind before the sun was fully up, negotiated the waste, cursing ruts and briars, then rocked onto a country lane where the going was a bit easier. There was dew on the grass and low bushes, the morning was cool and bright, the smell of damp earth and soft wet grass almost strong enough to overcome the pungency of cow dung and dog droppings. They hauled the cart through long crisp shadows cast by fruit trees, nut trees, spice trees and an occasional cedar or sea-pine. All the bearing trees were heavy with ripe fruit or nuts or pods of spice. As the heat of the sun increased and licked up the dew, it also woke the heavy sweet perfume of the fruits and spices, the tang of the cedars. Bees and wasps hummed about, nibbling at late peaches and apricots, nectarines and apples, cherries and pears. The air was filled with their noises, with bird song, with the whisper of needles and leaves-and with the squeals, groans and rattles from the cart as it lurched in and out of ruts, one of the not so small irritations of being Hina or foreign in a Temueng-ruled world. If they could have used the paved Imperial Way, they’d have cut in half the effort and time it took to reach the causeway between Selt and Utar, but bored Temueng guards harassed even the wealthiest of Hina merchants using that road; what they’d do to a band of players didn’t bear thinking about.

FIVE HOURS AFTER they left Taguiloa’s house, they came out of a lane onto the rocky cliffs where a few skinny long-legged pigs rooted among the grass and weeds, trotting sure-footed on the edge of cliffs rotten and precipitous. Jaril eyed them warily, looked up at his soaring sister who had long since decided that she preferred wings to feet, made a face at her then shimmered into a tall fierce boar-hound and went back to trot beside the sweating straining adults; the small wild pigs were the only nonworking livestock on the island and had tempers worse than hungover Tern ueng tax-collectors.

The causeway towers were visible ahead, a barrier that had to be passed no matter how unpleasant or malicious the guards were; they needed to get their credeens there, the metal tags they had to have to show in every village or to any Temueng who stopped and required them. Taguiloa had travel permits for all of them, but the credeens were more important. It meant more bribes, it meant enduring whatever the guards wanted to do to them. These Temuengs were the scrapings of the army, left here while the better soldiers were off fighting the Emperor’s wars of conquest. Taguiloa saw them every time he looked up, saw them watching the clumsy progress of the tilt cart, talking together; the closer he got, the worse they looked. He began to worry for the women’s sake. The guards had to let them by eventually, but they knew and he knew that nothing they did to him or Brann or Harra or Linjijan or the children would bring them any punishment. His stomach churning, he kept his eyes down, his shoulders bent, hoping to ride out whatever happened, knowing he had no choice but to accept their tormenting. Resistance would only make things worse.

THE EMPUSH TURNED the papers over and over, inspecting every mark and seal on them, asking the same stupid questions again and again, jabbing a meaty forefinger into Taguiloa’s chest, hitting the same spot each time until Taga had to grit his teeth to keep from wincing. Only two of his four-command were visible, the others probably even drunker than their fellows and asleep inside the tower.

Brann endured the comments and catcalls, the ugly handling, though she was strongly tempted to suck a little of the life out of the Temuengs; might be doing the world a big favor if she drained them dry. She watched Harm and Taguiloa both stoically enduring their hazing and kept a precarious hold on her temper, but when the guards left their tormenting of the women and began leading Negomas and jaril toward the tower, she’d had enough. She went after them, covering the ground with long tiger strides. Harra bit her lip, then started whistling a strident tune that brought a large dust-devil whirling up the dirt lane and onto the Way where it slapped into the empush, distracting him so he wouldn’t see what was happening. Brann slapped her hand against a guard’s neck. He dropped as if she’d knocked him on the head. A breath later and the second guard followed him. Shooing the boys ahead of her, green eyes flashing scorn, she stalked back to Taguiloa and the empush.

Before he could object or question her, she caught hold of his hand and held it for a long long moment. By the time she released him, his face had gone slack, his eyes glazed. “Give us our credeens,” she said crisply.

Moving dreamily, the empush fumbled in his pouch and drew out a handful of the metal tags. She counted the proper number and tipped the rest into his hand. “Put these away.” She waited until he pulled the drawstring tight. “Give me the travel papers. Good. You’re going to forget all this, aren’t you. Answer me. Good. Now you can go into the tower with your drunken men and get some sleep. When you wake, you’ll remember having some fun with a troupe of players, but letting them go on their way after a while. The usual thing. You hear? Good. Never mind the men on the ground. They’ll wake when they’re ready. Go into the tower and crawl into bed. That’s right.” She watched tensely as he turned and stumbled into the tower, stepping over his men without seeing them.

Taguiloa raised a brow. “They dead?”

“Just very tired. Take them a couple days to get back to their usual nastiness.”

“Thought you wanted out with no trouble.”

“Comes a time, Taga, comes a time.” She gave him the travel permits and passed the credeens around.

“As long as he really forgets.” Taguiloa ducked under the shafts and got himself settled once more against the yoke. Linjijan looked mildly at him, then away again; he’d ignored most of what had gone before, looking at the guards with such calm surprise when they poked at him that they left off in disgust.

Brann drew her hand across her sweaty, dirty face, grimaced at the streaks of mud on her palm. “It’s worked before. In Tavisteen, well, you wouldn’t know about that. Let’s get moving. I feel naked standing around like this.”

THEY WERE STOPPED at the Utar end of the causeway, but that empush was only interested in his bribe and let them pass without much difficulty. He had a sour spiteful look, but his men were out of sight, perhaps even out of call and he wasn’t going to start trouble, not on Utar with his commander a sneeze away.

They curved around the edge of the terraced mountain that took up the greater part of Utar, keeping to the broad Way on the lowest level where the haughty Temueng lordlings wouldn’t have to look at them, passed a third empushad of guards, and were finally freed of hindrances, rumbling along the causeway that linked Utar to the mainland.

At the widow’s farm where they’d pastured the horses, they transferred the gear and supplies from the cart to the gaudy box-wagon Taguiloa had purchased from a disbanding troupe whose internal dissensions had reached the point of explosion in spite of their success on tour. They left the tilt cart in the care of the widow and after a hasty meal, started on the two-day journey through the coastal marshes. Taguiloa drove, Linjijan sat beside him coaxing songs out of his practice flute. Negomas rode on the roof with his smallest drum; he liked it up there with the erratic wind pushing into his stiff springy hair and blowing debris away from him. He played with the drum, fitting his beat to Linjijan’s wanderings or playing his own folk music, singing in the clicking sonorous tongue of his fathers. Brann and Harra rode ahead of the wagon, Harra on the gray gelding, Brann on the dun colt forcegrown by the children, a well-mannered beast as long as she or one of the children were around and an ill-tempered demon when they weren’t. Brann was working on that, but it would take time.

They rolled along the stone road raised on arches above the mud and water through the misty gloom of the wetlands into heavy stifling air that blew sluggishly off the water and along the raised road, carrying with it clouds of biters. The dun’s temper deteriorated until even Brann had trouble controlling him; even the placid cob grew restless and broke his steady plod as he twitched and snorted and shook his head.

“Vataraparastullakosakavilajusakh!” Harra slapped at her neck, wiggled her arms, began whistling a high screeching monotonous air that seemed to gather the biters in a thick black cloud and blow them off into the gloom under the trees. She kept it up for about twenty minutes, then broke off, coughed, spat and took a long long drink from her waterskin.

Negomas giggled and began beating a rapid ripple on his drum, chanting up a wind that came from behind and blew steadily past them, keeping them relatively clear of biters until they came up to the campsite the Emperor kept cleared and maintained for travelers, a large shed with wattle walls and a tile roof, a stone floor tilted so rain-would run out, and a stack of reasonably dry wood in a bin at one side. It was very early in the trading season so everything was clean and all the supplies were topped off, the steeping well was cleaned out, with a new base of sand and charcoal, the water in it fairly clean and clear. There was a second shed for the wagon and stock, this one with high stone walls and a heavy gate with loopholes in it where a spearman or bowman could hold off a crowd. With Yaril and Jaril to stand guard it would take a wolf hardier than any of the loners living in the swamps to make off with their goods.

THE NEXT DAY they showed their credeens at the gates of Hamardan, the first of the river cities clear of the marshes, and rode through the streets, Negomas playing a calling song on his drums, Linjijan making witcheries on his flute,

Harra riding the gray with her knees and plucking cascades of cheerful noise from her daroud. It wasn’t market day but the bright noise of the music was pulling folk, Hina and Temueng alike, out of their houses and shops, and drawing boisterous children after them.

They made a wide circle about the city and then in the center of the flurry they’d created they rolled, trolled, caracoled to the largest Inn in Hamardan. It was a hollow square with few windows in the thick outside wall and a red-tile roof with demon-averts scattered along the eaves, a place where the richest merchant would feel safe with his goods locked in the Inn’s fortress godons, and he himself locked into the comfort and security of the Inn proper. This was early in the season, few merchants traveling yet. End of summer, not yet harvest time, no festivals coming up, none in the recent past. Folk were ripe for anything that promised entertainment. Though they were players and low on anyone’s scale of respectability, though half the troupe was foreign and worth even less than players, still Taguiloa knew the value of what he was bringing to the Inn and made a point of assuming his welcome. He drove the wagon into the central court and leaped down from the driver’s seat with an easy flip, landed lightly on the pavingstones to the applause of the swarming children, bowed, laughing to them, then went to negotiate for rooms and the use of the court for a perfbrmance on the next night after the market shut down and the crowds it brought were still in town.

BRANN SET UP a small bright tent in the market and put Negomas beating drums outside it, Jaril doing some tumbling and calling out to the passersby to come and hear past and future from a seer come from the ends of the earth to tell it. Though she carefully used nothing painful from the bits Yaril gave to her, she gave the maidens and matrons a good show and it was not long before word flew along the wind that the foreign woman was a wonder who could look into the heart and tell you your deepest secrets.

Twice male seekers thought to take more than she wanted to give-a woman alone, a foreigner, was fair game for the predatory-but a low growl from a very large brindle hound that came from the shadows behind the table was enough to discourage the most amorous. And she got twice her fee from these men, smiling fiercely at them and mentioning things they didn’t want exposed, and a calm threat to show to the world their poverty or stinginess, whichever it might be. They left, growling of cheat and fake and fraud, but no one bothered to listen.

That night the Inn was jammed with people, anyone who could come up with the price of entry-city folk and those from the farms and fisheries around, the jamar and his household. The poorest sat in thick clumps on the paving stones of the court, the shopkeepers and their families packed the third-floor balcony, the jamar and his family had the choice seats on the end section of the second-floor balcony, the side sections of that balcony given over to town officials and the jamarak Temuengs. The wagon was pushed against the inside end of the court, its sides let down on sturdy props to make a flat stage triple the wagon’s width. The bed and sides were covered by layers of cork, the cork by a down quilt carefully tied so it wouldn’t shift about. The first balcony above the wagonstage was blocked off for the use of the players; a ladder went from this to the wagon bed, giving them two levels for performing.

It was a good crowd and a good-natured one. Brann and Harm took coin at the archway entrance to the court, the Inn servants escorted the balcony folk to the stairs and glared down street urchins who tried to sneak in for free. The Host stood on the second balcony watching all this with suppressed glee, since he got a percentage of the take for allowing Taguiloa to use his court. There were very few clients in the Inn and fewer expected for the rest of the month, so it was no hardship to accommodate the players, something Taguiloa had counted on for he’d made enough tours with Gerontai to know the value of an innkeeper’s favor.

The noise in the court rose to a peak then hushed as the drums began to sound, wild exotic music most of these folk had never heard before, a little disturbing, but it crawled into the blood until they were breathing with it. On the second-floor balcony Taguiloa looked at Brann. “Ready?” he mouthed to her. She nodded. He put his hand on Negomas’s shoulder. The boy looked up, smiled then changed the beat of his music, lending to the throb of the drums a singing sonorous quality; Linjijan came in with his flute, giving the music a more traditional feel, blending M’darjin and Hina in a way that was more comfortable for the listeners. Then the daroud added its metallic cadences and the crowd hushed, sensing something about to happen. Taguiloa leaped onto the balcony rail and stood balanced there, arms folded across his chest, the soft glow of the lampions picking out the rich gold and silver couching of his embroidered robe.

“People of Hamardan.”

The drum quieted to a soft mutter behind him; flute and daroud went silent.

“In the western lands beyond the edge of the world, maidens dance with fire to please their king and calm their strange and hungry gods. At great expense and effort I bring you FIRE…” As he gestured, blue, crimson and gold flames danced above the quilting (Yaril and jail spreading themselves thin) “… and the MAIDEN.”

A loose white silk gown fluttering about her, Brann swung over the rail and went down the ladder in a controlled fall, using hands and feet to check her plunge. Then she was in among the flames, standing with hands raised above her head while she swayed and the flames swayed about her. The drum went on alone for a while until the beat was so strong they who watched were trapped

2.38 Jo Clayton in it, then the flute came in and finally the daroud, playing music from Arth Slya, the betrothal dance when a maid announced to the world that she and her life’s companion had found each other, a sinuous wheeling dance that showed off the suppleness of the body and the sensuality of the dancer. In Arth Slya there were no flames, the girl would dance with her lover. Brann danced it that night with what pleasure she could and more sadness than she’d expected to feel, danced it in memory of Sammang Schimli who had salvaged her pleasure in her body,

The flames vanished, the music stopped, the dance stopped. Brann stood very still in the center of the wagonstage, breathing rapidly, then flung out her arms and bowed to the audience. She ran up the ladder and vanished into the shadows to a burst of whistles and applause.

The drum began again, a quick insistent beat. Taguiloa leaped onto the railing. “People of Hamardan, see my dance.” He flung the broidered robe away with a gesture as impressive as it seemed careless for he capered high above the wagon and the court’s rough stone on a rail the width of a small man’s hand. He wore a knitted bodysuit of white silk flexible as chainmail, fitting like a second skin; a wide crimson sash was tied about his waist, its dangling ends swinging and flaring with the shifts of his body in that impossible dance. Behind him, flute and drums blended in familiar music, Hina tunes though the drum sound was more sonorous and melodic than the flat tinny sound of tradition. At first the flute sang in a traditional mode then changed as the dance changed, beginning to tease and pull at the tunes. Harra tossed Taguiloa’s shimmer spheres to him, one by one. They caught the light of the lampions and multiplied so it was as if a dozen tiny lamps were trapped in each crystal sphere, shimmering crimson, gold and silver as he put one, two, three and finally four into the air and kept them circling as he did a shuffle dance on that rail moving on the knife edge of disaster until he built an almost unbearable tension in the workers, who gave a soft whisper of a sigh as he capered then tossed the spheres one by one into the darkness behind him.

The drum hushed, the flute took up a two-faced tune; it had two sets of words, one set a child’s counting rhyme, the other a comically obscene version the rivermen used for rowing. With that as background he did a fast, sliding, stumbling comic dance on that railing, swaying precariously and constantly seeming about to fall from his perch. Each time he recovered with some extravagant bit of business that drew gasps of laughter from the crowd. He ended that bit as secure, it seemed, on his narrow railing as his audience were on their paving stones. With the flute laughing behind him, he flung out his arms and bent his body in an extravagant bow. The flute soared to a shriek. He overbalanced to a concerted gasp from the watchers that changed to stomping, shouting applause as he landed lightly on his feet and flipped immediately into a tumbling run. Above, the flute, drums, daroud began to weave together a music that was part familiar and part a borrowing from three other cultures, music that captured the senses and was all the stranger for the touch of familiarity in it. Taguiloa flung his body about in a dance that melded tumbling, movement from a dozen cultures and his own fertile imagination. The music and the man’s twisting, wheeling body wove a thing under the starshimmer and lampion glow that earth and sky had never seen before. And when the movement ended, when the music died and Taguiloa stood panting, there was for one moment a profound silence in the court, then that was broken with whistles, shouts, stomping feet, hands beating on sides, thighs, the backs of others. And it went on and on, a celebration of this new thing without a name that had taken them and shaken them out of themselves.

WHEN THEY COULD get away from the exulting Host and the mostly silent but leechlike attentions of the jamar and his jamika, they met in the inn’s bathhouse.

Steam rose and swirled about lamps burning perfumed oil, casting ghost shadows on the wet tiles; the condensation on the walls was bright and dark in random patterns like the beaded pattern on a snakeskin. Brann swam slowly through the hot water, her changed black hair streaming in a fan about her shoulders. Yaril and Jaril swam energetically about like pale fish, half the time under the water, bumping into the others, sharing their soaring spirits. Negomas paddled after them, almost, as much at home in the water as they were, his only handicap his need to breathe. Taguiloa lolled in the warm water, his head in a resthollow, his eyes half shut,a dreamy smile twitching at his lips. Now and then he straightened his face, but his enforced gravity always dissolved into a smile of sleepy satisfaction. Harm kicked lazily about, her long dark brown hair kinking into tight curls about her pointed face.

The first time the troupe had gone from a long hard rehearsal into Blackthorn’s bathhouse, Harra had been startled, even shocked, as the others stripped down to the skin and plunged with groans of pleasure into the water and let its heat leach away soreness from weary muscles. Communal bathing was an ancient Hina custom, one whose origins were somewhere in the mythtime before men learned to write. A bathhouse was rigidly unstratified, the one place where Hina of all castes mingled freely, the one place where the strictures of ordinary manners could be dropped and men and women could relax. After the Temueng conquest, the bathhouses were suppressed for a few years, Temuengs seeing them as places of rampant immorality, unable to believe that sexual contact between all those naked people was something that simply did not happen, that anyone who broke the houses’ only rule would be thrown out immediately and ostracized as barbarian. Harm’s wagon-dwelling people lived much like those early Ternuengs, with little physical privacy and many rules to determine the behavior of both sexes, rules born out of necessity and cramped quarters, though her life had been different from that of the ordinary girlchild of the Rukka-nag. She had no older brothers or sisters. Her mother died in childbirth when she was four, and the infant girl died with her. After that her mage father spent little time with his people, traveling for months, years, apart from the clan, taking Harra with him. Absorbed in his studies, absently assuming she’d somehow learn the female strictures her mother would have taught her, he treated her as much like a son as a daughter, especially when she grew old enough for him to notice her quick intelligence, though he did engage a maid to help her keep herself tidy and sew new clothing for her when she needed or wanted it. He began teaching her his craft when she was eight, training her in music and shaping, the two things being close to the same thing for him and her; they were much alike in their interests and very close; he talked to her more often than not as if she were another magus of his own age and learning. But there were times when he was shut up with his researches or visiting other mages in the many many cities they visited or stopping at one of the rude hermitages where nothing female was permitted; then he settled her into one of the local homes. She learned how to adapt herself quickly to local custom, how to become immediately aware of the dangers to a young girl and how to protect herself from those while making such friends as she could to lessen her loneliness a bit. Sometimes-though this was rare-her father stayed as long as two years in one place, other times she’d begin to take in the flavor of a city, to learn its smells and sounds and other delights, then he’d be going again. It was a strange, sometimes troubling, usually uncertain existence, and the burden of maintaining their various households fell mainly on her slender shoulders once she reached her twelfth birthday, but it was excellent preparation for survival when her father died between one breath and the next from an aneurism neither of them knew he had. And it let her assess at a glance the proper manners in a bathhouse and overcome her early training. Unable to control her embarrassment, she contrived to hide it, stripped with the rest and got very quickly into water she found a lot too clear for her comfort. She paddled about with her back turned to the others hoping the heat of the water would explain the redness in her face, but ended relaxed and sighing with pleasure as the heat soothed her soreness.

Now she was as much at ease as the others, as she watched Taguiloa’s smiles and savored her own delight. Rehearsals were one thing but putting on a finished performance with that storm of audience approval-well, it was no wonder he was still a little drunk with the pleasure of it She felt decidedly giddy and giggly herself.

“It could get addicting,” she said aloud.

Taguiloa opened one eye, grinned at her.

The door to the bathhouse opened and several serving maids came in. They set up a long table in one corner and covered it with trays of fingerfood, several large stoneware teapots, more wine jugs, drinking bowls, hot napkins. The roundfaced old woman who supervised this bowed to Taguiloa. “With the jamar’s compliments, sai5m-y-saiir.”

Taguiloa lifted a heavy arm from the water. “The Godalau bless his generosity.”

The old woman bowed again. “Saiim, the Host does not wish to intrude on your rest, but he desires you to know that the jamar has requested you perform at his house the coming night.”

Taguiloa lay silent for a breath or two, then finally said, “Inform the host that we will be pleased to perform for the jamar provided we can arrange a suitable fee and proper quarters for ourselves and our horses.”

The woman bowed a third time and left, shooing the curious and excited maidservants before her.

Taguiloa batted at the water and said nothing for a few moments, then he sighed and rose to sit crosslegged on the tiles. “A fee is probably a lost cause, I’m afraid. We’ll be lucky if we get a meal and shelter. I’d hoped to get farther along betbre I ran into this sort of complication. Still, it could be worth the irritation. These Temueng jamars keep in close touch by pigeon mail and courier, so word of us will be passed on and reach Andurya Durat before we do.” He studied Brann a long minute. “You will be careful?”

“I’ll try, Taga. Slya knows, I’ll try.”

Harra got out of the water, wrapped a toweling robe about her and went to inspect the food, suddenly very hungry. She poured some tea and began trying the different things set out on the trays. “Come on, all of you. Leave the heavy worrying for some other times, this is heaven. If you’re as hungry as me.”

THE JAMAR WAS a big man. Even as tall as, she was, Brann’s head came only to his middle ribs. His shoulders were broad enough to make three Hina, his belly big and hard as a beer tun, his legs tree trunks, arms, feet and hands built on a similar heroic scale. He should have been ugly, but wasn’t. He should have seemed fierce and intimidating as an angry storm dragon, but didn’t. He gave them a mild, beaming welcome. “Hamardan House is honored by your presence,” he boomed.

Taguiloa bowed. “We are the honored ones,” he murmured, feeling a bit battered.

Jamar Hamardan escorted the troupe to the rooms within the House he had set aside for them, something Taguiloa hadn’t expected, nor had he expected the luxury of those rooms. He didn’t quite know how to deal with all this effusiveness. It made him uneasy. Temuengs simply did not treat Hina and foreigners like this.

The jamar hovered about them as they tried to settle themselves, silent and diffident but impossible to ignore.

His bulging eyes slipped again and again to Brann, Harra and the others; again and again he licked his lips, opened his mouth to speak, shut it without saying anything. Taguiloa tried to edge him out the door and away from the troupe so he would say what was on his mind, but he seemed impervious to hints and unlikely to respond well to being hustled out in spite of his apparent amiability. Taguiloa knew enough to be extremely wary at this moment, though the tension of keeping up the required courtesies wracked his nerves. He caught Harra’s eye. Tungjii bless her quick wits, she gathered the rest of the troupe and hustled them out of the room. The Yaril hound settled in the corner of the room, her crystal eyes half-closed but fixed on the Temueng, a powerful defender if there was trouble.

Jamar Hamardan waited while the room emptied out completely, listening absently as Taguiloa continued his inane chatter. Abruptly the huge Temueng cleared his throat, shutting off Taguiloa in mid-sentence. “How many days can you stay here…?” He fumbled for some way to address the player. He wouldn’t use the Hina saх though he obviously wished to be polite, and he wouldn’t give the player any Temueng honorific-no Temueng could do that and keep his self-respect. He avoided the difficulty by falling silent and waiting with twitchy impatience for Taguiloa’s answer.

“Ah…” Taguiloa scrambled for some way to escape what he saw coming. “Ahh… jamar Hamardan, saх jura, we have to be in Durat before the storms^,blow down from the high plains.” He was deferential but determined, used his most careful formal speech and hoped for the best. If this Temueng decided he wanted his own troupe of entertainers, there was almost nothing they could do. Running meant giving up everything and he wouldn’t do that as long as there was the smallest chance he could work himself free. “Stay here,” the jamar said. “You won’t lose by it.”

“A generous offer, jamar Hamardan saх jura.” Taguiloa spoke slowly, still hunting for a way out. “If I may, we need more than a place to keep the rain off and food in our bellies…” He risked the touch of commonspeech after a sidelong glance at the Temueng. “We are at our best this year, saх jura. If I may, we have dreams… but that is nothing to you, saх jura. I waste your time with my babbling, your pardon, saх jura.” He lowered his eyes, bowed his head and waited.

The Temueng cleared his throat. “No, no,” he said. “No bother.” Silence.

Taguiloa glanced quickly at the Temueng. The big man looked troubled. He turned his head suddenly, caught Taguiloa watching him. “One week,” he said. “My jamika grieves.” He half-swallowed the words. “Our eldest son is with the forces in Croaldhu, our youngest was called to Andurya Durat.” He looked past Taguiloa as if he no longer was aware of him. “He is her heart, the breath in her throat. A good lad for all that, rides like he’s part of his horse, open-handed with his friends, spirited and impatient. Maybe a little heedless, but he’s young.” He cleared his throat again. “You…” Again he searched for a word but settled for the slightly derogatory term used by temuengs for Hina females. “Your ketchin, they should keep the jam ika distracted. She was pleased by you last night. She smiled when you did that thing on the rail and the rest of it… well, she slept without…” He broke off, frowned. “Give her some time away from grieving, showman, and you can ask what you will.”

Taguiloa looked away from the huge man stumbling over his love for his cow of a wife and for that calf who sounded like most young male Temuengs, arrogant, thoughtless and as unpleasant to his own kind as he was to those who had the misfortune to be in his power. Never mind that, he told himself, a week’s better than I hoped. He swept into a low bow. “Of your kindness; saх jura, certainly a week.”

The jamar Hamardan turned to leave, turned back. “One of the ketchin, she’s a seer?”

“One can sometimes see past a day, past a night, saх jura.”

“My jamika will ask the ketcha to read for her. I do not inquire how the ketcha reads or if she knows more than how to judge a face, whether she lies or speaks what truth she sees. I do not care, showman. Tell your seer to make my jamika contented. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, saх jura.”

The jamar hesitated another minute in the doorway, then stumped out.

Taguiloa stood rubbing at the back of his neck with fingers that trembled. Relief, apprehension, anger churned in him. A week. And who said it would end then? One week, then another, then another. It had to end there. Had to. He touched the shoulder where he’d felt his double-natured patron riding and wondered if this was one of Tungjii’s dubious gifts. He scanned his immediate past to see where he’d forgot and invoked his god. Nothing but ordinary chaos and the usual curses quickly forgotten. He forced himself to relax and went searching for the others to tell them what had happened.

TAGUILOA PULLED on a knitted black silk body suit like the white one he used in his act, then he slipped from his room and began his nightly prowl about the jarnar’s House, listening for whatever he could pick up, driven as much by survival needs as by curiosity. The week was winding to a finish, the testing of jamar Hamardan’s good will was closer. He might let them go, or he could insist they stay yet another short while and then another, nibbling their time away, never letting them go.

He moved through the maze of halls in the wing where the troupe was housed, heading to the storage alcove he’d found the first night he’d prowled the House. A pair of late rambling servants forced him to duck into the shadowy doorless recess, only to discover they were bound for that same alcove. He cursed the libidinous pair and searched for some place to hide. They probably wouldn’t raise a row if they saw him, just take off to find another place to scratch their itch, but there’d be gossip later that would work around to someone in authority and make trouble for the troupe. There were narrow shelves set from the bottom of one wall. He went up them and tried to fold himself into invisibility. The shelves were far too narrow for that, but over him he saw a recessed square in the ceiling of the closet. He pushed against one side of the square and it tipped silently upward, He was through the opening and easing the trap into place as the pair came in whispering, laughing. Afraid to move, he listened to the sounds coming from below, but after a few moments of creeping boredom and stiffening limbs, he eased into a squat and looked about him; enough of the Wounded Moon’s light came through airholes in the eaves to show him a maze of beams with ceiling boards between them. The roof was high over the place where he crouched, slanting steeply to the eaves. It was just like a Temueng to waste such a vast cavernous space on dust and squirrels, spiders and mice. The place was filled with noises once he let himself listen, gnawing, the patter of clawed feet, chittering from squirrels, shrieks from mice as housecats stalked and killed them, yowls as the cats fought and mated. His fears of being heard faded, he got to his feet, oriented himself and began prowling along the beams listening for voices in the rooms below.

In the days since that first prowl, he’d picked up enough to make him increasingly uneasy. Now he went swiftly along the ceiling beams, heading for the jamar’s quarters without stopping at his other posts.

The office. Silent now. He spent a moment standing over the crack that funnelled sound up from below. Last night Hamardan was there talking with his overseer, one of his uncles, a shrewd old man who’d lost all but the youngest of his grandsons to the army. They were discussing the increase in the Emperor’s portion of the harvest, speculating cautiously about what it meant, both men not-saying far more than they put in words, their silences saying much more than those words about their curiosity and unease about what was going on in Andurya Durat. The old man had a letter from one of his grandsons anouncing the death of another of them; the others were well enough, but not especially pleased with their lot. The letter included news about the jamar’s eldest son; he was alive, unhurt but bored with life, despising the Croaldhese, loathing the food, the smells, the women, everything about that cursed island, including (very much between the lines) his fellow officers and the men he commanded.

Neither the jamar nor his uncle had any idea why the Emperor had suddenly decided to start sending his armies out to conquer the world; for two hundred years the Temueng Emperors had been content with the rich land of Tigarezun. They didn’t like it. Tigarezun was important to them; they didn’t consider the Hina had any connection with it, it was theirs; their ancestors’ bones were buried in that soil (Hina burned their dead, the heedless creatures, how could they have any right to land if they didn’t claim and consecrate it with ancestral flesh and bone?) but this coveting of foreign lands was foolishness, especially an island over a week’s sail away. Especially any island. Temuengs did not like sea travel and felt uneasy on a bit of land that you could ride, side to side, in a day or two. And this warring was taking and wasting their sons. The two men spent an hour yesternight grousing and speculating about the Emperor’s mental state; he’d just taken a new young wife, maybe he was a crazy old man trying to feel young again.

Taguiloa padded along the beams checking out the rooms in the private quarter of the big House, day room, bathroom, conservatory and so on, only silence-until he reached the jamar’s bedroom.

Wife weeping, husband trying to comfort her. Sobs diminishing after a while. Silence for a few breaths. Heavy steps, quicker lighter ones, noise of complaining chair, the continued patter of the woman’s feet as she paced restlessly about. Taguiloa stretched out on the beam and prepared to wait.

“She says Empi’s enjoying himself in Durat; he’s got a new horse and hasn’t lost too much money at gaming and has a chance to catch the eye of someone important at court.” The woman stopped walking, sighed.

“It’s what he wanted, Tjena.”

“I know. But I miss him so, Ingklio.” Steps, couch creaking. “Why don’t we go to the capital for the winter?”

“Too much to do. And the Ular-drah have been raiding close by. You know what happened last month to the Tjatajan jamarak. House burned, granaries looted, what the drah couldn’t carry off they fouled.”

“Uncle Perkerdj could see our land safe.”

Hamardan grunted. “Not this year,” he said with a heavy finality that silenced the jamika.

More creaking as she got back on her feet and started dragging about again, making querulous comments about her maidservants and their defects, the insults from some of the cousins and kin-wives, the disrespect of one of the male servants. The jamar said nothing, perhaps he didn’t bother listening to her, being so familiar with her diatribes they were like the winds blowing past, a part of the sounds of the day no one notices. Taguiloa lay on his beam, half-asleep, telling himself he might as well leave them to their well-worn grooves, because the last four nights this by-play had ended in their going to bed. He yawned and grinned into the darkness. Had to be one monster of a bed and a sturdy one at that. The jamika was built to match the jamar, massive arms and thighs, breasts like muskmelons, only a head shorter than him. Maybe that’s why he never took a second wife, she’s the only woman in the world big enough he wouldn’t crush her with that weight or look absurd standing beside her, an oliphaunt mated with a gazelle. The thought wiped away his amusement. If that was true, the jamar would do just about anything to keep his wife content. He certainly had no concubines, and was awkward around Brann and Harra, seeming almost frightened of normal sized women. Taguiloa nearly forgot himself and swore at old Tungjii. He held back. Bad enough to be in this bind without irritating the unpredictable Tungjii. Hisser favors were bad enough, but hisser’s curses were hell on dragonback. He bruised his nose against the splintery beam and promised Tungjii a dozen incense sticks when he got back to Silili.

“What about the players?” Hamardan said suddenly. “Shall I let them go or would you like to keep them?” Taguiloa bit down hard on his lip, sucked in a long breath. “Oh Ingklio, would you keep them? That one comforts me so, she’s a true seer, I know it, she’s told me things no one else… well, things, and if she’s here, she can keep telling me what Empi’s doing. He never writes.” Heavy creaking again as she flung herself down beside Harardan. “Just think. Our own players. Can we afford it?”

“Hina and foreigners, how much can they cost?”

Fuming, Taguiloa listened as the discussion below him altered to an oliphauntine cooing. Enough of this; listen to them much longer, and I’ll be sick. He got to his feet and ran the beams to the distant trap, let himself down and loped along the dark quiet hall to his bedroom. He stripped off the black bodysuit, sponged away sweat and dust, wrapped a soft old robe about himself and went down the hall to rap at Brann’s door.

She let him in after a brief wait. The lamps were still lit, Jaril and Yaril sat cross-legged on the bed, their small faces serious, their crystal eyes reflecting light from the lamps.

“Jaril thought you’d be along soon,” Brann said. She sat on the bed beside Yard. “Bad news.” It wasn’t a question.

“We’re a little gift he’s wrapping up for his wife.” Taguiloa said. “You’ve been a bit too convincing. That great cow wants daily news of her wretched calf.”

She said a few words in a language he did not know, but they needed no translation as they crackled through the air.

“And she’s charmed with the idea of having her own company of players. Something to raise her status with the neighbors; she was a little worried about the cost but he wasn’t, we’re only Hina and a few foreigners, how much could scum like that cost? Throw a little food at us, a jar or two of wine and we’re bought.”

“Mmm. Yaril, fetch Harra. We’ve got to talk. Don’t frighten her but let her know its urgent.” She looked thoughtfully at Taguiloa. “We won’t bother waking Linji and Negomas.” She looked at the door. “Harra knows a lot more about things like this than I do.” She blinked uncertainly. “There’s so much…”

A tap on the door. Taguiloa got up, let Harra in, resumed his seat on the bench. “We’re about to be offered a permanent home,” he said. “Right here.”

Harra wrinkled her nose at Brann. “I told you to tone those sessions down.”

“Easy for you to say, not so easy for me to do. You didn’t have that cow hanging over you sucking every word you said.” She sighed. “I know. I got a little carried away, but I have to tell you, my behavior doesn’t make much difference. The jamika wants to believe in me and she twists everything I say into something she wants to hear. Even if I don’t say a word, she interprets the way I breathe.” She moved impatiently, the bed squeaking tinder her. “Anything helpful in what your father taught you?”

“Well, he wasn’t very organized about anything besides his own studies, just taught me whatever interested him at the time. Mmmm.” Harm frowned at the wall, sorting through the inside of her head. Suddenly she grinned. “I

have it. There’s an herb and a spell that will set a geas on that man. Thing is, one can’t work without the other. I’ve got a pinch or two of lixsil in my father’s herb bag, but it doesn’t need much. The maid that brings my meals chatters a lot, she tells me Hamardan eats his breakfast alone in his private garden when the weather’s good. She says he’s a sore-foot bear mornings and no one stays around him if they can help it. The weather’s going to be dry and sunny the next three days, Negomas swears he knows and I think I believe him. So. You see where I’m heading. One of the changechildren drops the lixsil in his tea, I don’t have to be that close, I can lay the spell on him when we’re with the jamika. Brann, you handled those guards on the causeway, can you do the same with her? She’s bound to kick up the kind of fuss we don’t want when we roll out.”

“Mmm. Brann looked wistful. “I wish I had magic. What I do best is kill people and awful as she is, Tjena doesn’t deserve killing.” Her eyes shifted from Taguiloa to Harra and back, then she moved her shoulders and visibly pulled herself together. “I can drain her so she’s tottery and suggestible, then tell her that what she does the next few days will affect her son… I’ll have to think about it some more.” She smiled and relaxed, yawned. “Anybody got anything to add? Well, lets get some sleep.”

HINA SERVANTS set out the table and covered it with a huge stoneware teapot and a drinking bowl, a mountain of sweetrolls, a bowl of pickled vegetables, a platter of sausages and deep-fried chicken bits, a bowl of sweetened fruit slices, citrons and peaches, apricots and berries, a platter of fried rice with eggs mixed in. As soon as the meal was set out the servants left, moving with an alacrity that underlined Harra’s maid’s report of Hamardan’s morning moods. When the garden was empty, a small gray-plush monkey dropped from one of the trees and scurried to the table. He leaped up on it and picked through the dishes, lifted the lid of the teapot and shook a bit of paper over the tea. He peered into the pot and watched the gray bits of herb circling on the steaming water. The bits turned translucent and sank. He put the lid back on and scampered away, diving into the bushes just as Hamardan stomped out, glared at the sky, then stumped to the table, pushed back the sleeves of his robe, splashed out a bowlful of tea and gulped it down. The small gray monkey showed his teeth in a predator’s grin, then blurred into a long serpent and began slithering through a hole in the wall.

JARIL SLIPPED INTO the room where Harra was playing a muted accompaniment as Brann chatted with the jamika about her children, listening more than she spoke. He squatted beside Harm. “He’s guzzling it down,” he whispered.

Harra nodded. She began simplifying the music until her fingers wandered idly over the daroud’s strings; she closed her eyes and began a soft whistling that twisted round and round and incorporated the play of her fingers. An intense look of concentration on her face, she wove the spell, the magic in it itching at Jaril, it made his outlines shiver and blur and started eddies, in his substance that acted on him like a powerful euphoric. Her cold nose nudged at his hand. Yaril as hound bitch had crawled over to him and was pressing against him, quivering a little, her outlines shimmering, the same eddies in her substance. She was as uncertain as he about this feeling as a longterm experience, but she was enjoying the sensation, being a measure more hedonistic than her brother, willing to live in the pleasures of the moment, while he tended to fuss more about abstracts and what-will-be than what-was in the point present.

Harra stopped whistling. “It’s done,” she murmured. “Go back to him and whisper what you want in his ear.” Jaril jumped to his feet and went out.

Brann turned to watch him go, missing something the jamika was saying. When the querulous voice snapped a reprimand at her, she swung back slowly and sat staring at the Temueng woman, her back very straight, waiting in silence until Tjena ran down. “If you’re finished?” she said with an icy hauteur that quelled the woman, then she looked down at her own palms. “We are at a change time,” she said, bringing each word out slowly, heavily as if she dropped over-ripe plums on the table and watched them mash. When she heard herself, she lightened up a bit, reminding herself that the woman might be thick but she wasn’t totally stupid. “Forces converge,” she said, “weaving strange patterns. It is a time to walk warily, every act will resonate far beyond the point of action. It is time that those tied to you experience a like courtesy. Give me your hands.”

She held the jamika’s larger hands between her own, tilted her head back, closed her eyes. “The change is begun,” she said. “The threads are spun out and out, fine threads wound about one, about and about, the links are made, son to mother, mother to son. What the mother does to those about her will be done unto the son.” As she chanted the nonsense in a soft compelling voice, she tapped into the Temueng woman’s life force, draining her slowly, carefully, until the woman was in a deeply suggestible daze. Softly, softly, Brann whispered, “Anything you do to us will be done to you, prison us here and your son will be a prisoner, send bad report about us to the other jamars and jamikas and your son will suffer slander, hurt us in any way and you hurt your son, hear me Tjena Hamardan jamika, you will not remember my words, but you will feel them in your soul. Any harm you do to us, that same harm will come to your son. Hear my blessing, Tjena Hamardan jamika, the benign side of the change coin. What good you do to man and maid in your power, Hina, Temueng or other, that good will bless you and your son, praise will perfume his days and nights. Good will come to you in proportion to the good you give, a quiet soul, a contented life, sweet sleep at night and harmony by day. Hear me, Tjena Hamardan jamika, forget my words but feel them in your soul, forget my words, but find contentment in your life, forget my words.” She set the jamika’s hands on the table and heard a soft unassertive whistle die behind her and knew Han-a had reinforced her words with one of her whistle spells. “Sleep now, Tjena Hamardan jamika. Sleep now and wake to goodness at your high noon tea. Lie back on your couch and sleep. Wake with the nooning, knowing what you must do. Sleep, sleep, sleep…”

With Harra’s help she straightened out the huge woman on the daycouch, smoothing out her robes and crossing her large but shapely hands below her breasts, smoothing her hair, fixing her so she would wake with as few as possible of those debilitating irritations that came from sleeping in day clothing. Brann frowned at her a moment, then trickled some of the life back in her, doing it carefully enough she didn’t disturb her sleep; she moved away from the couch, going to the door of the sitting room. Several maids were in the smaller room beyond, talking in whispers, working on embroideries and repairs while they waited to be summoned. She beckoned to the senior maidservant, showed her the sleeping form of the jamika. “Your mistress will sleep until time for tea; her night was disturbed and she was fretful.”

An older Hina woman with a weary meekness from years of hectoring, the maid’s mouth pinched into a thin line; she knew all too well what, fretfulness in the jamika meant for her and the other maids.

Brann smiled at her. “If she finishes her sleep without being disturbed, the jamika will wake in a sweeter temper and make your life easier for a while, at least until the moon turn’s again.”

The maid nodded, understanding what was not said. “Godalau’s blessing on you if it be so, Sator,” she murmired, then went quickly away from Brann, appreciative but uneasy with the stranger’s powers.

Brann, Harra and the Yaril-hound went back to their rooms to pack, having done everything they could to ensure good report and an uneventful departure on the morrow.

THEY RUMBLED FROM the House early the next morning, leaving behind much good feeling among the Hina servants and a pair of contented but rather confused Temuengs. Linjijan, who’d grown restless and unhappy closed within those walls, was delighted to stretch his spirit and body-long thin legs propped up on the splash-board, neck propped on his blanket roll, he played his flute, the music ebullient and joy-filled, waking little devils in the horses who’d also grown bored in their sumptuous stables and were inclined to work off their excess energy in bursts of mischievous behavior. Brann’s dun shied at his own shadow, kicked up his heels, tried to rear, and gave his rider some energetic moments until she managed to settle him down a little. When they passed from sight of the House, she let him run a short while but pulled him back to an easy canter before he could blow himself and tire her more.

Harra laughed and let her gray dance a bit, then quieted him and added the plink of her daroud to the wanderings of the flute and the dark music Negomas was stroking from his smallest drum.

At midday they reached Hamardan again and stopped at the inn for a hearty lunch with hot tea and pleas from the Host to play again that night. Anxious to make up time Taguiloa shook his head to that but promised to stop there when the troupe returned to Silili.

CERTAINLY TUNJII rode Taguiloa’s shoulder those next four weeks as they followed the river road north. The weather was perfect for traveling and for outdoor performances. In villages without an inn, they played to cheering crowds in the market square and more than once spent several nights in a jamar’s House, though there was no more trouble about leaving when they pleased. Word flew ahead of them; it seemed that every village and inland city was waiting and ready for them, folk swarming about the show wagon, following in shouting cheerful crowds as they drove through city streets or village lanes. The hiding places in the cart’s bottom grew heavy with coin and the mood of Temueng and Hina alike was as genially golden as the weather. Whether it was his timing, the long summer having worked up a mighty thirst in them for diversion, whether it was the strong leavening of Ternuengs in each audience, for whatever reason, the troupe met little of the resistance Taguiloa had expected to the strange and sometimes difficult music and the improvisational and wholly non-traditional dance and tumbling he was introducing. He began to worry. They were a tempting target for the Ular-drah, the hillwolves through whose territory they would have to pass, a small party of players coming of a phenomenally successful tour fat with gold, on their own, no soldiers, two of them women, two of them children, only the dog to worry about and they wouldn’t worry that much about her. He could hope Tungjii would stick around, but he knew only too well the fickleness of his patron and the quicksilver quality of such fortune as that they bathed in these golden glowing days, these warm dry silver nights.

They left the city Kamanarcha early in a bright cool morning. There was a touch of frost on the earth, glittering in the long slant of the morning light. The guard at the city gate was yawning and stiff, more than half asleep as he operated the windlass that opened the gate. Taguiloa tossed him a small silver and got a shouted blessing from him along with a hearty request to come back soon. As an afterthought, the guard added, “Watch out for the drah, showman, word is they’re prowling.”

On top of the wagon’s roof Negomas grinned and rattled his drum defiantly. Linjijan was stretched out more than half asleep, lost in the dreams he never spoke aloud. Of them all he’d changed the least during the tour, no closer now to the others than he’d been before, an amiable companion who did everything he was asked to do without skimping or complaint and nothing at all he was not asked to do. He was no burden and no help, irritating each of the others in turn until they learned to accept him as he was for he certainly wasn’t going to change. His flute was a blessing and a joy; that had to be enough.

Negomas and Harra were much together, studying each other’s bits of magic. As Taguiloa had taken dance and tumbling and juggling and melded them into an exciting whole, had brought Harra and Negomas and Linjijan together and almost coerced them into producing the musical equivalent of his dance, so these orphan children of different traditions were blending their knowledge to make an odd, effective magic that belonged only to them and magnified their own power, the whole they made being greatly more than either apart.

Brann was as isolated from the others as Linjijan though more aware of it; she was simply too different now from human folk and her purposes were too much apart from theirs. She was fascinated by the illusions Harra and Negomas created for their own entertainment and by the intimate connection magic had with music as if the patterning of sounds by drum, daroud, and Harra’s whistling somehow patterned the invisible in ways that allowed the boy and the young woman to control and manipulate it. After leaving Hamardan, Brann had tried to learn from Harra, but she could not. It was as if she were tone-deaf and trying to learn to sing. There was something in her or about her that would not tolerate magic. Han-a found this fascinating and tried a number of experiments and found that any spells or even unshaped power that she aimed at Brann was simply shunted aside. Magic would not touch her, refused to abide near her. Harra and Negomas both could do whatever they wanted in her presence as long as whatever they did wasn’t aimed at her. She wasn’t a quencher, therefore, not a sink where magic entered and was lost; she simply wasn’t present to it. At least, not any longer. She told Harra about the Marish shaman who’d netted her and the changechildren so neatly. Harra decided eventually that this had somehow immunized her and the children against any further vulnerability. Brann listened, sighed, nodded. “Slya’s work,” she said. “She doesn’t want me controlled by anyone but her.”

The countryside was brown and turning stubbly, the harvest coming in. The pastures were taking on a yellow look with sparse patches where little grass grew and fewer weeds. They were coming to the barrens where the soil was hard and cracked, laced with salt and alkali so that only the hardiest plants grew there and those only sparsely. Even along the river where there was plenty of water there was little vegetation and the trees had a stunted look.

For some hours they passed long straight lines of panja brush, low-growing bushes with smooth hard purplish bark, crooked branches and little round leaves hard as boiled leather. These lines were windbreaks against the winter storms that swept down off the northern plains, those flat gray grasslands that spawned the Temuengs. They left the last of the windbreaks behind a little after noon and were out of the Kamanarcha jamarak and into the barrens.

The road began to rise and the trees thinned and fell away. There was a little yellowish grass on the slopes but it didn’t look healthy. The river sank farther below them into the great gorge that cut through the Matigunns; the road followed the lip of the gorge and the towpath continued far below them, the stone pilings that marked the edge of the canal jutting like gray fingers from cold pure water glinting bluer than blue in the late summer sun. The canal was part of the river here, the stone of the mountain heart too stubbornly resistant for anything else; the towpath was a massive project in itself, old tales said it was burned out of the stone by dragons breath in the mythtime before Popokanjo shot the moon. There were no barges on the river yet, floating down or being towed up. In a few weeks, when the harvest up and down the river was complete, the trading season would begin and the huge imperial dapplegrays that towed the barges from Hamardan to Lake Biraryry would be plodding northward in teams of eight or ten, escorted by the Emperor’s Horse Guards. The dapples were bred and reared only in imperial stables; anyone else found with one would be fed to them piece by piece because the dapples ate flesh as well as corn, human flesh by choice, though they’d make do with dog or cow or the flesh of other horses if there was no one in the Emperor’s prisons healthy enough to be fed to them. The tow master for each team was raised with them from their foaling; he slept with them, ate with them, arranged their matings, tended them in every way, shod them, plaited mane and tail, washed and combed the feathering at their hocks, polished their hooves, repaired their harness, kept it oiled and shining. He did all that from pride and affection for his charges and also because they’d kill and eat anyone else who tried to come near theth-. Even the fiercest of the Ular-drah bands left them alone. Barge travel was safe-but very expensive.

High overhead a mountain eagle soared in wide graceful loops, Yaril keeping watch over the road and the surrounding hills. She’d spot any ambushes long before they ripened into danger. Hana and Taguiloa were joking together, both of them relaxed and unworried for the moment; Yaril’s presence was a guarantee that there was no present danger to the troupe. Brann rode ahead of the wagon, brooding over a problem that was becoming increasingly urgent. The children were hungry. The performing used up their strength far faster than she’d expected. She’d walked the alleys of Silili for a fortnight, taking the life force of every man who came after her intending to steal or rape or both, feeding the children until they were so sated they couldn’t take another draft of that energy they needed for their strange life, storing more of the stolen life in her own body until her flesh glowed with it. Since then she’d fed them from herself and from what animal life she could trap, dogs and cats that roamed the streets of the cities and villages they played in, careful to take no human life. She didn’t want anyone connecting mysterious deaths with the troupe. She cursed the Hamardan jamar, he was the source of the trouble now; if it hadn’t been for him, they’d have reached Andurya Durat already, the drain from the dregs of the city. A day or two more and she’d have to go hunting, anything she could find in these barren mountains, wolves two-legged or otherwise, deer, wildcats, anything the children could run to her. The children were patient, but need would begin to drive them and they would drive her.

By nightfall they were deep in the barrens. Yaril had found one of the corrals the dapples used when they walked the road to Hamardan, returning to pick up another barge. It was a stone circle with a heavy plank gate and three-sided stalls, locked grain bins and a stone watering trough. At the roadside there was a tripod of huge beams that jutted out over the river, a bucket and a coil of rope; there’d be no problem about bringing water up for them and for the horses. They set up their night camp inside the circle, filled the trough with water, emptied half a sack of grain in the manger (they didn’t touch the grain bins, though the children could have opened them; that was dapple food and they’d be stealing directly from the Emperor. Not a good idea). The night promised to be cold and drear though Tungjii was still hanging about since the sky was clear and no rain threatened. The children went prowling about the hills and came back with lumps of coal for a fire, reporting a surface seam about a mile back from the road. Leaving Brann and the children to watch over the camp, Taguiloa, Linjijan and Harra took empty feed sacks and fetched back as much as they could carry, more of Tungjii’s blessing, Taguiloa thought, for there was no wood to make a fine and wouldn’t be as long as they were in the barrens. And the nights were not going to get warmer.

Leaving Han-a and Taguiloa making a stew from the store of dried meat and vegetables, arguing cheerfully over proportions and how much rice to put in the other pot, Negomas and Linjijan rubbing down the horses and going over them with stiff brushes, combing out manes and tails, cleaning their hooves, Brann went with the children to stand beside the tripod where they couldn’t be seen from those inside the corral. She held out her hands and the children pulled life from her she could feel them struggling to control the need that grew each night and she suffered with them. When they broke from her, she sighed. “You want to go hunting tonight?”

Yaril kicked a pebble over the edge and watched it leap down the nearly vertical cliff and plop into the water. “Might not have to.”

“Ular-drah?”

“Uh-huh. A man’s been watching us since late afternoon.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Gone. He left before we found the coal. Left as soon as it was obvious we were settling for the night.”

“Ah. You could be right.”

Yaril nodded, her silver-gilt hair shining in the light of the Wounded Moon. She giggled. “Our meat coming to us.

“How soon, do you think?”

“Not before they think everyone’s asleep. They think we’ll be trapped inside that.” She nodded her head at the corral. “I say we turn the trap on them.” She looked at Jaril. He nodded. “Me out at long-scout, night-owling it. Jaro staying with you to carry reports. What about numbers? I think four or five of them is all right, we’re sure hungry enough to handle them. Ten or more we’d, better scare off, we could cut some out, two or three maybe, hamstring them so they can’t run, what do you think, Bramble?”

Brann felt a twinge of distaste, but that didn’t last long. The Ular-drah were a particularly unpleasant bunch with no pretensions to virtue of any sort, the best of them with the gentle charm of cannibal sharks. She nodded at the corral. “Tell them?”

“I vote no,” Yaril said.

Jaril nodded. “Let ‘em sleep. They’ll just get in the way.

Brann sighed, then she smiled. “Just us again.” Her smile broadened into a grin. “Look out, you wolves.”

JARIL LOOKED UP. ^“Six of ‘em. On their way.” He blurred into a wolf form and went trotting into the dark.

Brann pulled her fingers through her hair, the black stripping away_, until it was white again, blowing wildly in the strong cold wind. She pulled off her tunic, tossed it to the ground beside the stone wall, stepped out of her trousers, kicked them onto the tunic. The air was very cold against her skin but she’d learned enough from the children to suck a surprising amount of warmth from the stone under her feet and bring it flowing up through her body. Comfortable again, she still hesitated, then she heard the yipping of the wolf and set off in that dii action running easily through the darkness, her eyes adapting to the dark as her body had adapted to the cold. She reached a small, steep, walled bowl with the meander of a dry stream through the middle of it, a few tufts of withered grass and a number of large boulders rolled from the slopes above the bowl. A horned owl came fluttering down, transforming as it touched the earth into Yaril. “You might as well wait here. They’re a couple breaths behind me.” Then she was a large gray wolf vanishing among the boulders.

Brann looked about, shrugged and settled herself on a convenient boulder, crossed her legs, rested her hands on her thighs, and cultivated a casual, relaxed attitude.

The Ular-drah came out of the dark, a lean hairy man walking with the wary lightness of a hunting cat. The rest of the drah were shadows behind him, lingering among the boulders. He stopped in front of her. “What you playing at?”

She got slowly to her feet, moving with a swaying dance lift, smiled at him and took a step toward him.

He looked uncertain but held his ground.

She reached toward him.

He caught her arm in a hard grip. “What you think you doin, woman?”

“Hunting a real man,” she crooned to him. She stroked her fingers along his hard sinewy arm, then flattened her hand out on his bare flesh and sucked the life out of him.

As he fell, she leaped back wrenching her arm free. In the boulders a man screamed: others came rushing at her, knives and swords in hand. She danced and dodged, felt a burn against her thigh as a sword sliced shallowly, slapped her hand against the first bit of bare flesh she could reach, pulled the life out of that one, More pain. She avoided some of the edges, took a knife in the side, touched and killed, touched and killed. Twin silver wolves slashed at legs, bringing some of the men down, blurring as steel flashed through them, wolves again as swiftly. Three men drained, two men down, crawling away. Touch and drain. Man on one leg lunging at her, knife searing into her side. Touch and drain. Touch and drain. All six dead.

Gritting her teeth against the pain, she jerked the knife free and tossed it away, the wound healing before the knife struck stone and went bounding off. She straightened, felt the tingle of the life filling her. The wolves changed. Yaril and Jaril stood before her, held out pale translucent hands. They had expended themselves recklessly in this chase and the drain of it had brought them dangerously close to quenching. She held out her hands, let the stolen life flow out of her into them, smiling with pleasure as the mountain’s children firmed up and lost their pallor.

When the feeding was complete she looked around at the scattered bodies, felt sick again. I’ve saved Slya knows how many lives by taking theirs… She shook her head, the sickness in her stomach undiminished. Shivering, she strode back to the stone circle, Yaril and Jaril trotting beside her, looking plumper and contented with the world. She pulled her hands back over her hair, darkening the shining silver to an equally shining black. She stepped back into the trousers, pulled the laces tight and tied them off, wriggled into the tunic and smoothed it down. Suddenly exhausted, she leaned against the stone wall. “I’m going to sleep like someone hit me over the head. Any chance we’ll get more visitors?”

“Not for a while,” Yaril said. “I didn’t see any more bands close enough to reach us before morning, but I’ll have another look to make sure.”

Brann nodded and stood watching as two large owls took heavily to the air. She watched them vanish into the darkness, hating them that moment for what they’d done to her, for what they made her do. A lifetime of draining men to feed them and Slya knew what that word lifetime meant when it applied to her. The flare-up died almost as quickly as it arose. There was no point in hating the children; they’d followed nature and need. And as for living with the consequences of that need, well, she’d learned a lot the past months about how malleable the human body and spirit was and how strong her own will-tolive was. Like the children, she’d do what she had to and try to minimize the damage to her soul. Like them too she was in the grip of the god, swept along by Slya’s will, struggling to maintain what control she could over her actions. She followed the high stone wall around to the gate and went in.

Taguiloa sat by the fire, breaking up chunks of coal with the hilt of his knife, throwing the bits in lazy arcs to land amid the flames. He looked up as she came into the light, then went back to what he was doing. She hesitated, then walked across to stand beside him.

“How many of them?” he said.

“Six. How did you know?”

“Figured. Got them all?”

“Yes.”

He tossed a handful of black bits at the fire, wiped his hand on the stone flagging. After a moment he said, “The three of you were looking washed out.”

“We wouldn’t hurt you or any of the others.”

“Hurt. I wonder what you mean by that.” He began chunking the hilt against another lump of coal, not looking at her. “What happens when we get to Durat?”

“I don’t know. How could I? My father, my brothers, my folk, I have to find them and break them loose. You knew that before you took up with me. I don’t want to have to choose between you… and the others… and my people, Taga, keep you clear if I can. I’ll leave you once we get to Durat, I’ll change the way I look.” She shrugged. “What more can I do? You knew it was a gamble when you agreed to bring me to Durat. You know what I was. You want to back, out now?”

“You could destroy me.”

“Yes.”

“Make it impossible for me to work where there are Tem uengs. “

“Yes.”

“You knew that in Silili.”

“Yes.”

“You know us now. We’re friends, if not friends, then colleagues. And still, if you have to, you’ll destroy us.”

“Yes.”

“All right. As long as it’s clear.” He smiled suddenly, a wry self-mocking twist of his lips. “You’re right. I gambled and I knew it. Your gold to finance a tour and a chance for the Emperor’s Sigil against the chance you’d get us chopped.” He touched his shoulder. “Tungjii’s tough on fainthearts. I go on. As for your leaving us, could cause more talk than if you stayed. You’re part of the troupe the Duratteese are waiting to see. Until we perform at the Emperor’s Court, if we ever do, you’re part of the troupe, remember that and be careful.”

She lifted her hands, looked at them, let them fall. “As careful as I’m let, Taga.”

5. Brann’s Ouest-Andurya Durat: The Rescue and Attendant Wonders

TAGUILOA STOPPED the wagon at the top of a stiff grade, sat looking down a winding road to the oasis of Andurya Durat. Dry brown barren mountains, ancient earth’s bones sucked clean of life and left to wither, two files of them blocking east and west winds, funnelling south the ice winds of the northern plains. Andurya Durat, doubly green and fecund when set against those mountains, steamy damp dark green, lush, born from the hot springs at the roots of Cynamacamal, the highest of the hills, its angular symmetry hidden by a belt of clouds, its cone-peak visible this day, splashed thick with blue-white snow.

Absently stroking and patting the neck of her fractious mount, Brann stared at the mountain, feeling immensely and irrationally cheered. It was a barebones replica of Tincreal; she felt the presence of Slya warm and comforting. She would win her people free, she didn’t know how yet, but that was only a detail.

Taguiloa watched her gaze at the mountain and wondered what she saw to make her smile like that, with a gentleness and quiet happiness he hadn’t seen in her before. He turned back to the road, frowned down at the dark blotch on the shores of the glittering lake, sucked in a breath and put his foot on the brake as he slapped the reins on the cob’s back, starting him down the long steep slope, wishing he could put a brake on Brann. Godalau grant she didn’t run wild through those Temuengs down there.

ANDURYA DURAT. Stuffed with Temuengs of all ranks. Glittering white marble meslaks like uneven teeth built on the shores of the largest lake, snuggling close to the monumental pile still unfinished that housed the Emperor and his servants, vari-sized compounds where the Meslar overlords lived and drew taxes from the Jamars in the south, the Basshar nomad chiefs in the north. Along the rivers and on the banks of the cluster of smaller lakes, there were Inns and Guesthouses that held Jamars from the south come up to seek an audience from the Emperor so they could boast of it to their neighbors, to seek legal judgments from the High Magistrate, come up to the capital for a thousand other reasons, and there were tent grounds and corrals that held the Basshars and their horse breeders down from the Grass with pampered pets from their tents to sell for Imperial gold, with herds of kounax for butchering, with leatherwork, with cloth woven from the long strong kounax hair, with yarn, rope, glues, carved bones and other products of the nomad life. Scattered among the Farms that fed the city were riding grounds for the horse and mallet games played with bloody kounax heads, a noisy brutal cherished reminder of the old days when the Durat Temuengs were nomad herders on the Sea of Grass, ambling behind their blatting herds, fighting little wars over water and wood. Times the old men among the Meslars spoke of with nostalgia, celebrating the ancient strengths of the People. Times even the most fervid of these celebrators hadn’t the slightest inclination to recreate for themselves.

There was another Andurya Durat tucked away behind massive walls, the Strangers’ Quarter, a vigorous vulgar swarm of non-Ternuengs. Shipmasters and merchants from the wind’s four quarters, drawn to the wealth of the ancient kingdom. Players of many sorts, hoping for an Imperial summons and the right to display the Imperial sigil. Artisans of all persuasions, many of them working under contract to build and maintain the gilded glory of the vast city outside the walls. Inn and tavern keepers, farmers (mostly Bina) in from the local farms with meat and produce, scribes, poets, painters, mages and priests, beggars, thieves, whores. And children, herds and hordes of children filling every crack and corner. Winding streets, crowded multi-storied tenements with shops on the ground floor and a maze of rooms above, taverns, godons, the market strip, all these existing in barely contained confusion and non-stop noise, shouts, quarrels, music clashing with music, raucous songs, barrowmen and women shouting their wares, yammer of gulls, bubbling coos from pigeons, twitters and snatches of song from sparrins and chevinks, harsh caws from assorted scavenger-birds, screams from falcons soaring high like headsmen’s double-bitted axes, sharp-edged and cleanly in their flight.

Taguiloa inserted himself and his company into this noisy multicolor polyglot community, just one more bit of brightness in a harlequinade as subtle and as blatant as frost-dyed leaves in a whirlwind, taking his troupe to the Inn where he and Gerontai stayed the time they came seeking to perform for the Emperor.

Papa Jao sat outside his inn on a throne of sorts raised higher than a Temueng’s head, his platform built of broken brick, rubble arranged at random, set in a mortar of his own making that hardened and darkened with the years so the stages of the throne’s rise were as clearly evident as the rings on a clamshell. On top of the pillar he’d built himself a chair with arms and a back and covered it with ancient leather pillows. It was his boast that he never forgot a face, something likely true because he wrapped his hands around the chair arms, leaned out and cried. “Taga. Come to make your fortune?”

“You know it, Papa Jao. How’s it going?”

“Sour and slim, Taga, sour and slim.” Bright black eyes moved with a never-dying curiosity over the wagon and the rest of the troupe. “Ah ah,” he chortled, “it’s you been tickling gold out of Jamar purses.” The chortle fruited into a wheezy laughter that shook every loose flap of flesh inside and outside his clothing. He was a pear-shaped little man with a pear-shaped head, heavy jowls, a fringe of, spiky white hair he drew back and tied in a tail as wild as a mountain pony’s brush after it’d been chased through a stand of stoneburrs. “How many rooms you want? Four? Yah, we got ‘em, second floor, good rooms, a silver a week each, right with you? Well, well, rumor say truth for once.” He leaned round, yelled, “Jassi! Jass-ssii, get your tail out here,” swung back. “You want stable room for the horses and a bit of the back court for your wagon? Silver a week for the horses, we provide the grain, three coppers for the wagon, oh all right, I throw in the court space.” Leaned round once more. “Angait! Anga-ait! Get over here and show saii Taguiloa where to go.”

THE NEXT DAY Taguiloa busied himself burrowing into the complicated and frustrating process of getting the troupe certified for performing in Durat, working his way up the world of clerks and functionaries, parting as frugally as possible with Brann’s coin, returning to the inn that night, exhausted, angry and triumphant, the permit, a square of stamped paper, waving from a fist sweeping in circles over his head. Harra laughing. Brann clapping. Negomas slapping a rhythm on a tabletop. Linjijan wandering in with the practice flute he was almost never without.

Taguiloa’s return metamorphosed into an impromptu performance for the patrons of Jao’s Inn, Taguiloa dancing counterpoint to Brann, Han-a whistling, Linjijan producing a breathy laughing sound from his flute, Negomas playing the tabletop and a pair of spoons-the whole ending in laughter and wine and weariness. Taguiloa went up the stairs relaxed, mind drifting, frustration dissipated; rubbing against his own kind he had rubbed away the stink of Temuengs and their stupid arrogance.

WHILE TAGUILOA was swimming against the stream of Temueng indifference and stupidity, while Negomas and Harm were out exploring the market, watching street conjurers and assessing the competition, Brann set out to do some exploring of her own, hunting without too much urgency for a niche where she could make changes without interested observers; she wanted no connection between Sammang-if he had come to Durat-and Taguiloa’s black-haired seer. The Strangers’ Quarter swarmed with people. Not a corner, a doorway, a rubble heap, a roof nook empty of children, beggars, women and men watching the ebb and flow in the street. She worked her way to the wharves, finding more space among the godons as long as she avoided the guards the merchants hired to keep the light-fingers of the Quarter away from their goods. Yaril found a broken plank in one of the scruffier godons, flowed inside and kicked it loose while Jaril-hawk flew in circles overhead watching for guards.

Brann crept inside, stripped off the skirt and coins, stripped the black from her hair, altered her face to the one Sammang knew. She straightened, smiling, feeling more herself than she had in weeks, as if somehow she’d taken off a cramping shell. A sound. She wheeled, hands reaching, straightened again. Jaril stood looking up at her.

stay.” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m tired.”

“I should hunt tonight?”

“Uh-huh.” He looked around at the dusty darkness. “Who knows what’s hived in here. You’ll want the skirt and things when you’re ready to go back to the inn. Be nice if they were still here.”

She frowned at him. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Don’t fuss, Bramble, I gave Yaril a bit extra, that’s all. In case something goes bad round you.” He blurred into a black malouch and curled up on the skirt, his chin on the pile of linked coins, his eyes closed, running away as he always did when she tried to probe his thoughts and feelings. As Yaril always did. She shook her head impatiently, ran her hands through her hair, dropped to her knees and crawled out into the street.

Yaril walking beside her, a frail fair girlchild again, Brann began searching along the wharves for Sammang or one of his crew. Ebullient Tik-rat who’d be whistling and jigging about, center of a noisy crowd. Hairy Jimm who’d tower over everyone by a head at least, a wild woolly head. Staro the Stub, wide as he was tall with big brown cow eyes that got even milder when he was pounding on someone who’d commented on his lack of inches. Turrope, lean and brown and silent, Tik-rat’s shadow. Leymas. Dereech. Rudar. Gaoez. Uasuf. Small brown men like a thousand others off a hundred ships, but she’d know them all the moment she saw them. And Sammang. There was a flutter at the base of her stomach when she thought of meeting Sammang again. She wove in and out of the godons, went up and down the piers jutting into the river, looking and looking, her face a mask, never stopping, fending off hands that groped at her, sucking enough life out of men who refused to back off to send them wandering away in a daze. From the west wall to the east she went, searching and finding none of those she searched for, stood with her hand on the east wall, tears prickling behind her eyes, a lump in her throat-until she convinced herself that Sammang would keep his men out of trouble while he waited for her and the best way to do that would be to keep them off the wharves. She rubbed at her forehead, trying to think. Where would he be? If he was here. How could he make himself visible but not conspicuous? Hunh. Phrased like that the answer was obvious. If he was here, he’d be sitting in a wharfside tavern waiting for her to walk in.

She began working her way west again, drifting in and out of taverns as the afternoon latened, ignoring shouted offers from traders, shipmasters, sailors, and others who mistook her purpose, ignoring caustic comments from several tavernkeepers who objected to her presence or the presence of Yaril in their taprooms. As shadows crept across the streets and out onto the river, she came to a quiet rather shabby structure near the western wall. Her feet were starting to give out, her knees were tired of bending and she was about ready to quit. How easy once she was out of sight and touch for Sam mang to change his mind, call himself a fool, head for pleasanter waters.

Without much hope she pushed through the door, stood looking around, squinting against the gloom, trying to make out the faces of the dark forms seated at tables about the room. The man behind the bar came round it and crossed the room, a little rotund man without much force to him.

“We don’t want children in here. You should be ashamed of yourself, woman, using a baby like that in the business. Go on, get out of here, go on, go go go.” He waved pudgy hands at her like a farmwife shooing chickens out of the kitchengarden.

She glared down at him, her patience pushed beyond its limit. “You calling me a whore, little man?”

He winced. “No need for hard words, what do I care what you do? Just don’t do it here.”

“What I’m going to do here is sit myself down and have a bowl of wine and my young friend is going to do likewise.” She pushed past him and went to one of the stools at the bar, swung up on it and sat massaging her knees. Yaril climbed up beside her, sat with her small chin propped on her palms, her elbows braced against the aged dark wood.

A chuckle came from one of the darker corners. Brann’s stomach turned over and she felt breathless as she recognized the voice. Sammang came into the light, stopped beside her. “I greet you, witch. So you made it.”

The little man started, opened his eyes wide, set a winebowl in front of her, one in front of Yaril, shoved the jug at her and backed hastily away without waiting for payment. She slanted a glance at Sammang, filled the bowls and sipped at the wine, sighing with pleasure as the warmth spread though her. “So I did.”

He reached round her, caught the jug by its neck, went back to the table. Yaril giggled. Brann scowled at her. “Finish that and go stand guard, if you don’t mind.”

Yaril nodded, gulped down the rest of the wine. Ignoring the goggling eyes of the barman, she wriggled off the stool and trotted out.

Brann squared her shoulders, slipped off the stool and marched with her bowl to the table in the corner where Sammang sat waiting for her. She set the bowl down with a loud click, pulled out a chair, dropped into it and scraped it close enough to the table so she could lean on crossed arms and look past him or at him as she chose. “Who’s with you?”

“All of ‘em; said they’d swim the whole damn river if I tried leaving them behind.” He filled the bowl, pushed it toward her. “Relax, Bramble, I’m not going to jump your bones out here.”

“Hunk! What about the Girl?” She sipped at the wine, her elbows braced on the wood to keep her hands from shaking, avoiding his eyes except for quick glances.

“I circled round by Perando, picked up a cousin of mine and his crew. He’s got her tucked away up the coast a bit. When did you get in?”

“Yesterday. You?”

“A week ago; been doing some trading, lucked into a few things that should pay expenses. Yesterday, mmm. Haven’t located your folk yet?”

“The children are going out again tonight. Tell Jimm to knock his totoom for me and stir up some luck; sooner this is done, the easier I’ll be.” She rubbed at the nape of her neck, frowned at the tabletop. There was a stirring in her that had nothing to do with the way Sammang made her feel, a sense of tidal forces moving that frightened her for herself, for her kin, for Sammang and the troupe, for everyone and everything she valued. She reached for the bowl, gulped more of the wine down and forced herself to ignore that fear.

“We’re ready to go when you are.”

She glanced at him, looked away. “I could know more tomorrow. Maybe we could meet here to make plans?” She had to fight to keep her voice steady. “If you’re staying here?”

He reached out, closed his hand around hers. “Finish your wine and come upstairs.”

“You sure?”

“I’ve decided face value’s good value. I missed you.”

“I… I hoped…” She emptied the bowl and stood, swaying as the rush of the wine made her dizzy. Sammang reached out to steady her. His touch was fire, more disrupting than the wine. The first time they’d come together in the cabin of his ship, it’d been easy and natural as breathing, this was more deliberate, colder… no not cold, far from cold… but planned, not a sweet happening, but a deliberate step taken in full understanding of what she was doing. She was nervous and uncertain, afraid she couldn’t please him this time. “The barman?” Her voice was a silly squeak; she flushed with embarrassment.

“None of his business, Bramble-without-thorns.” Sammang touched her cheek. “Relax, little witch, we’ve plenty of time.”

FED UP TO FULL strength from the rats and snakes of the Quarter (Brann didn’t want angry ghosts shouting her presence to the night winds and maybe Temueng-ears), Yaril and Jaril flew out her window and swept on wide owl wings across the lake to the great pile resting on the roots of fire-hearted Cynamacamal. Brann hitched a hip on the windowsill and watched them vanish among the cloud shreds, staying where she was a while longer, enjoying the damp cool wind blowing up from the river. A long day. It was full dark before she could wrench herself from Sammang’s side, getting back to the inn just in time to celebrate Taguiloa’s success. Then she had to go out again on the feeding hunt. Now she sat in the window, her thin silk robe open to the nudge of the soft wind, remembering the feel of the solid powerful body next to hers, the smell of him, the hard smoothness of his skin, the spring of his hair. She watched the Wounded Moon rise over the Wall, up thin and late, dawn only a few hours away, feeling within herself a deep-down purring that was not a part of her, a little angry at it, unhappy that it was there, hoping Sammang wasn’t aware that he’d pleasured Slya perhaps as much as he’d pleasured her. She stretched and yawned, slid off the windowsill, padded across to the bed, dropping the robe to the floor as she moved, sinking into the flock mattress, sinking deep deep into a dreamless sleep.

Yaril and Jaril circled over the main pile of the palace, wheeled away as something wary and malevolent down there smelled them out and reached for them, long invisible fingers combing the air. They spiraled higher and stopped thinking, only-owls for a while, until they felt the fingers coil back down, felt the palace folding in on itself like a blood lily come the dawn. They drifted a while longer through the clouds, then went back to their swoops over the grounds, locating the guard barracks, the crowded warrens where the servants lived, the far more spacious and luxurious quarters of the Imperial dapples and the carefully tended fields where those monsters ran, the workshops and greenhouses, the foundry, the glass-making furnaces, the kitchen gardens, working their way out and out until they came to a new structure tucked into the folds of the mountain, an isolated compound still stinking of green cement and raw lumber. High walls, a guard tower overlooking a heavy barred gate. Torches burning low to light the space about the gate, lamps inside the tower, guards drowsing there but ready enough to come awake at a sound. The owls sailed across the wall and fluttered down onto a rooftree, then melted into light shimmers and slipped inside through the rooftiles.

Workshops. Spacious. Well-equipped, though there were no steel tools about. Locked up or carried away for the night, or for times when the tool users were sufficiently tamed that the tools wouldn’t be a danger to them or the guards. The light smears zipped through the shops and passed into the living quarters. Room after empty room, then a sleeper, another, then more empty rooms. In all that vast place there were only twelve, of the twoscore gone to the Fair there was only a bare dozen left. Despite what the pimush had said-perhaps had said to escape a drawn-out dying-the Temueng soldiers had not been tender with the Arth Slya slaves. The changechildren wondered briefly if the Emperor still expected his double-hundred slaves from the Valley, wondered if the sribush in charge of the invasion forces had gotten tired of waiting and sent Noses prowling to find out what happened to the pimush and his captives.

When they’d probed the whole of the compound and made sure there were no others tucked away into the odd corner, they drifted back through the occupied rooms, naming the sleepers so they could tell Brann just who was there, knowing each because they knew what Brann knew.

Callim. Brann’s father. He’d been beaten, probably because he declined to work. He was recovering, the beating must have been several days before, stretched out on the room’s single bed, snoring, twitching as flies walked his back, the weals there sticky with salve. Cathar, Brann’s oldest brother; slept curled up on a pallet in one corner, Duran her younger brother sat dozing in a chair beside the bed, waking now and then to fan the flies away.

In the next room over a man sat, dull-eyed, slack-faced, fingers plucking steadily at nothing, Uncle Idadro the etcher and inlayer, a finicky precise little man, never too adept at handling outsiders; his wife Glynis had gone to the Fair most years befere but she died suddenly of a weakness in the heart and left him drifting, his eldest son Trithin, his only anchor against the world, he was wholly unable to cope with. This year he’d taken that son to the Grannsha Fair, the boy blessed with his mother’s bubbling good humor and ease with people. Little friend of all the world they called him when he was a baskling then a trotling. No sign of Trithin anywhere within the compound; perhaps he was alive elsewhere, but neither of the changechildren believed it, more likely that the Wounded Moon, rose whole than that they’d find Trithin walking earthface again.

This is the roll of the living they call out to Brann later: Callim, Cathar, Duran, Trayan, Garrag, Reanna, Theras, Camm, Finn, Farra, Farm and Idadro. Eight men, four women.

This is the roll of the dead: Trithin, Sintra, Warra, Wayim, Lotta, Doronynn, Imath, Lethra, lannos and Rossha.

At the end of this final sweep the two light smears hovered in the middle of an empty room and sang to each other the questions that had occurred to them. What was that thing in the palace, that thing with the groping fingers? How powerful was it that it not only caused the Emperor to commit genocide, but made Slya herself act deviously, wrenching them from their home space and sending them to Brann to change her so she could be a vessel for Slya, bringing Slya here disguised to fight her attackers? They circled each other and sang their uncertainty. Should they tell Brann what they thought about it? She knew some of it already, knew Slya slept within her and simultaneously slept within Tincreal, knew Slya drove her as she drove the stone of Tincreal, with utter disregard for her and those she cared for. The changechildren contemplated that disregard with a chill in their firebodies that paled the light and almost sent them into their hibernating crystals, the form their people took when all energy was drained from them and no more would be available for some considerable time, the dormant form that was not death but a state for which their folk had little fondness and exercised their ingenuity to avoid unless the alternative was the dispersal of real death, like burnt-out stars choked to ash and nothing. The children hovered and shivered and were more afraid than they’d been since they woke on the slopes of Tincreal and found themselves starving in sunlight. “She might send us back when she’s finished with us,” Yaril sang.

“No…” It was a long long sigh of a sound, filled with a not-quite despair; after all there was much to be said for this world and for the companionship they shared with Brann.

“We could talk to her,” Yaril sang, “when this is over. Brann too. If Slya returns us, she’ll have to change Brann back.”

“Brann,” Jaril sang, “is a brown leaf falling, not ignored but not restored. Why should Slya bother, after she gets the Arth Slyans free again and the vengeance she wanted for the slaughter? I think the great are the same in all realities, they use and discard, use and discard, this one and that, for what they consider the greater good. Their good. Poor Brann.”

“Poor us.”

“That too.”

Two small light smears, very young for their kind with much of the long slow learning of that kind yet ahead of them, swooped anger-driven through the roof tiles, melted into twin owls and went powering back to Brann, uncertain what they should or would say to her, hoping with every atom of their impossible bodies that she slept and dreamed of the bite of pleasure she’d worried from the chaos of her life. They didn’t know what to do, how the Slyans could be rescued without harming folk who were their friends, what to say to Brann if she asked their advice.

They glided through the open window, blurred into their childforms and tiptoed to the bed. Brann was deep asleep, her eyes moving under the lids, a small smile twitching her lips. Yaril looked at Jaril; he nodded and the two of them retreated into a corner and sank into the catalepsy that took the place of sleep.

JASSI STUCK HER head in the door, knocked against the wall.

Taguiloa looked up from the glitter sphere he was polishing.

“Someone to see you.” She winked at him. “Tightass highnose creep with Maratullik’s brand on him. Imperial Hand, eh man. You musta connect some good coming up.

Taguiloa set the sphere carefully into its velvet niche, got to his feet and began pacing about the room. This was an astonishingly early response to his permit; he’d expected several days of rest before the Temuengs took note of his presence, if they ever did. He stopped at the window, stared at the court without seeing any of it. I’m not ready… He snapped thumb against finger, swung round. “That I did. Uh-huh.” He smiled at Jassi. “Tell your creep friend I’m busy but if he wants to wait, I’ll be down in a little while. If he decides he wants to hang around, offer him a bowl of your best wine so he won’t be too-too annoyed.”

“You could land up to your neck, Taga.” She eyed him uncertainly, but with more respect than before. “You that sure of yourself?”

“Jassi, lady of my heart and elsewhere, I’m not, no I’m not, but if you scratch every time a Temueng itches, you’ll wear your fingers down to nubs. Now go and do what I said.” He wrinkled his nose. “If he walks, come tell me.” She shrugged and left.

Taguiloa closed his hands over the window sill, squeezed his eyes shut, breathed deeply. This was make or break. He knew as well as Jassi that he was taking a big chance. If the slave walked out chances were he or another like him would not be back. Chance. He touched his left shoulder. Tungjii, up to you, keep your eye on us.

He pushed away from the window, hunted out the travel papers and the metal credeens he was holding for all but Brann. He stood looking at them a moment, then tossed them on the bed, kicked off his sandals, stripped. Moving quickly about the room, he washed, brushed his long black hair, smoothed it down, tied it at the nape of his neck with a thin black silk ribbon, making a small neat bow over the knot. He dressed quickly in the dark cotton tunic and trousers, the low topped black boots that he thought of as his humble suit. When he was finished, he inspected himself carefully, brushed a hair off his sleeve, smoothed the front of the tunic. Neat but not gaudy. Smiling, he collected the papers and creedens, left his room and went down the hall to Harra’s.

She let him in, went back to the skirt she was embroidering, using this bit of handiwork to calm her nerves and pass the time. He looked around. Except for them the room was empty. “Seen Brann?”

“She went out with the changekids this morning early. Excited about something.” Harra narrowed her eyes. “That’s your go-see-the-massa outfit.”

“The Imperial Hand sent a slave to fetch me.” His eye twitched, he put his hands behind him, not as calm as he wanted to appear. “I’m letting him stew awhile.”

“Don’t let it go too long. But you don’t need me telling you that. Think it could maybe be about Brann?”

“I don’t know. He asked for me, Jassi says.”

“Ah. Then it’s either very good news and we’re on our way to the Court or it’s very bad news and the Hand’s going to be asking you questions you don’t want to answer.” She paused a moment. “Last doesn’t seem likely. If he was going to be asking nasty questions, he’d send an empush and his squad to fetch you, not some slave.”

“Right. Here. You keep these.” He gave her the troupe’s papers and the credeens after separating out his own. “In case.” A wry smile, a flip of his hand. “In case the Hand is sneakier or crazier than we know. Get Negomas and Linjijan back to Silili.”

“And Brann?”

“If I donTeome back, be better if you keep as far from her as you can. You know why she’s here.” He moved his thumb over his own credeen, slipped it into his sleeve. “Well, I’ve killed enough time. I’d better get downstairs.”

“Keep your cool, dancer.”

“I’ll try, mage-daughter, I shall try.”

TAGUILOA FOLLOWED the silent slave through the West

Gate onto the broad marble-paved avenue fronting the lake, thinking about the year he and Gerontai had come here. They’d got to the lower levels of the Temuengs, the merchants and magistrates and minor functionaries, but the powerful had ignored them and they made their way back to Silili without getting near the Emperor’s halls. Meslar Maratullik was the Emperor’s Left Hand, running the Censors and the Noses, head of security about the Emperor’s person. Hope and fear, hope and fear, alternating like right foot, left foot creaking on the gritty marble. Following the silent sneering slave, he walked along that lakeside boulevard, past walls on one side, high smooth white walls with few breaks in them, only the massive gates and the narrow alleys between the meslaks; The lakeside was planted with low shrubs and occasional trees, stubby piers jutted into the lake, with pleasure boats, sail and paddle, tied to them. The lake itself was quiet and dull, the water reflecting the gray of the clouds gathering thickly overhead. No rain, just the grayed-down light of the afternoon and a steamy heat that made walking a punishment even in these white stone ways as clean and shining and lifeless as the shells on an ancient beach. Now and then bands of young male Temuengs came racing down that broad avenue on their high-bred warhorses, not caring who they trampled, whooping and yelling, sometimes even chasing down unhappy slaves, leaving them in crumpled heaps bleeding their plebian blood into the noble stone. Taguiloa’s escort had a staff with Maratullik’s sign:on a placard prominently displayed so they escaped the attention of the riders.

Maratullik’s meslak was a broad rolling estate on the lakeshore with a riding ground, a complex of workshops and servant housing, extensive gardens, self-sufficient within the outerwalls should some disaster turn the meslak into a fortress. Taguiloa followed the slave through the gates into the spacious formal gardens with their fountains and banks of bright flowers, the exquisitely manicured stretches of grass; he looked around remembering the noisy rat-ridden Quarter and knew if he was absolutely forced to choose between the two, he’d take the rat-home not this emptiness, but such a choice was most unlikely; what he was determined to ensure was a less radical choice, staying out of the slums, keeping himself and Blackthorn (if it came to that) in reasonable comfort after his legs went and his body would no longer do what his mind desired. What he had now suited him very well, the silence, meditation, comfort of his small house on the hillside, the noise and excitement of Silili nights.

It took twenty minutes to work through the gardens and corridors to a small glassed-in garden with a gently plashing fountain in the center, falls and sprays of miniature orchids, some rare kinds Taguiloa had never seen before, one huge tree encased within the bubble, fans worked by ropes and pulleys from outside by slaves who never saw the beauty they maintained. There were wicker chairs scattered about, singly and in small clusters, but he was not tempted to sit despite the two-hour walk and his aching feet. He moved his shoulders, tightened and loosened his muscles to calm himself. There was no point getting angry at the Temueng and there were a lot of reasons he shouldn’t. He knew he had to control his irritation. He didn’t take easily to groveling, had lost the habit of it the past five years, but all that he’d won for himself in Silili meant nothing here.

The Meslar Maratullik Left Hand Counsellor to the Emperor came into the garden with a feline grace and the silent step of a skilled hunter. He was short for a Temueng, though he was more than a head taller than Taguiloa; his face was rounder, less bony, the features more delicate than most Temuengs’. He wore a narrow robe of heavy dark gray silk, finely cut, arrogant in its simplicity. As Taguiloa bent in the prescribed deep obeisance, he went cold with the thought that perhaps there was Hina blood somewhere in the Hand’s ancestry. If that was true, he was in a doubly perilous position; he’s seen too often what happened if a Hina in an important family was born with Woda-an characteristics, how that man made himself rigidly Hina, rejecting everything that would dilute the ancient Hina culture, how that man overtly and in secret tormented any Woda-an unfortunate to fall into his hands. And how often such a man ended up in a position like the Hand’s where he had a great deal of power over the lives of others, especially those he hated so virulently. Taguiloa could trip himself up here without ever knowing precisely what he’d done to bring the mountain down on his head. Care, take care, he cautioned himself. Don’t relax till you’re out of here and maybe not even then.

Maratullik acknowledged Taguiloa’s presence with a stiff short nod, crossed to the fountain, settled himself in one of the wicker chairs and spent some moments smoothing out the heavy silk of his robe. He lifted his head, his dark eyes as dull and flat as the silk, beckoned Taguiloa forward, stopped him with an open palm when he was close enough.

Taguiloa bowed again, then waited in silence, eyes lowered. A game, that’s all it was, a game with bloody stakes. Yielding just enough to propitiate this Temueng that rumor made a monster, yet not enough to lose his self-respect, walking the hair-fine ridge between capitulation and catastrophe. He waited, his hands clasped behind him so they wouldn’t betray his tension.

Maratullik was silent for a long time, perhaps testing the quality of Taguiloa’s submission, more likely taking a bit of pleasure in making him sweat. “We have heard good things of you, Hina.” The monster’s voice was a high thin tenor.

“I am honored, saх jura Meslar,” Taguiloa murmured. He could feel sweat damping the cloth under his arms; he fought to keep his grasp on himself, telling himself the Hand expected such signs of nervousness and would he suspicious if he failed to see them. The two silences stretched on. Taguiloa’s head started to ache. There was no way he could get anything like respect from this Temueng, but making a doormat of himself would only incite the man to stomp him into the ground.

“You have foreigners in your troupe.”

“Yes, saх jura Meslar.” Taguiloa lifted his eyes just enough to catch glimpses of Maratullik’s hands. At the word foreigner, the fingers twitched toward closing, opening again slowly and reluctantly. At Taguiloa’s mild and noncommittal answer the fingers stiffened into claws. Taguiloa sweated some more. Trying to play safe was less than safe in this game. Should he amplify his answer or would that further antagonize the Temueng? After a few moments of harried thought, he elected to wait for the next question and see how a more extended answer affected those hands, hoping all the time that Maratullik didn’t know how thoroughly his small and delicate fingers betrayed him.

“Why?”

Taguiloa shifted from foot to foot, let his nervousness show a hit more, disciplined his voice to a dull monotone. “Three reasons, saх jura Meslar.” He spoke softly, slowly, choosing his words with care, his eyes flicking, careful not to look at the hands too long. “First, saх jura Meslar, when I was younger, I made tours through the Tigarezun with my master Gerontai and I have taken notice of how eagerly the countryfolk greeted exotic acts and how well they reward those that please them.” He winced inside at the pompous greed in the speech but the fingers were relaxing; he was conforming to expectation. “Second, saх jura Meslar, making a tour such as this is very costly especially in the beginning; aside from their other talents the members of the troupe excepting the children have contributed to outfitting us and will have a share in whatever we take in, the foreigners of course taking a much smaller share than the Hina.” Glance at the hands. Almost flat out. Good. But don’t overdo the boring bit. Or the geed. “Third, saх jura Meslar, though this will be of little importance to you, it carries a high weight with me, there are my own aspirations. I seek to blend tumbling, juggling and dance into something no man has seen before. The music I found to accompany this new movement was also a blend, a music from M’darjin drums, Rukka-nag daroud, Hina flute, a music that is sufficiently different to be intriguing, sufficiently familiar for the comfort of the listeners. It is an exciting music, saх jura Meslar, all who have heard it agree.” He bowed again and fell silent. Watch what you say; he’s far from stupid or he wouldn’t be where he is.

“Tell me_, about your foreigners. The women first.”

“They are honored by your interest, saх jura Meslar.” Taguiloa cleared his throat. “I know only outlines, saх jura Meslar, I must confess it, I wasn’t interested in their life stories, only their coin and their skills. Harra Hazhani is Rukka-nag from far out in the west somewhere, you will of course know of them. She came to Silili with her father, he died and left her without protection or a place to go and a limited amount of coin so she needed a way to earn more. The customs and strictures of her people forbid her on pain of death to sell that which is a woman’s chief asset and besides she was a foreigner, only the perverse would pay for her. However she is an excellent dancer in her way and a musician of considerable talent. The other woman is called Brannish Tovah, she is Sujomann, out of the west too, from up in the far north somewhere, she says winter nights last half a year and the snow comes down until it’s high enough to drown mountains. I needed a seer who could also dance and she came well recommended. She’s bound to the wind by her god or so she said, goes where the wind blows, said she lost a husband and two children to ice and wolves, has a brindle boar hound she says is her familiar and a street child she picked up who has something to do with helping her in her rites and acts as crier to call clients so she can read for them. Like the Hazhani woman, she is forbidden by custom and her in-dwelling god to seek congress with men not her kind. Were she to be forced, she is bound by her god to castrate the man and kill herself. That tends to reduce the ardor of any who might find her interesting. To speak truly, saх jura Meslar, I was quite pleased when I learned these things. Having women in a troupe is always a tricky thing, can lead to complications with the countryfolk if they consider themselves free to supplement their incomes on their back. The M’darjin drummer is a boy about ten or so, hard to tell with those folk. He has no father or relatives willing to claim him, though how that happened is not clear to me. I did not bother to probe for answers, I was not interested in anything but the way he played the drums. Linjijan the flute player is Hina and the second best in all Silili, the first being his great uncle Ladjinatuai who plays for Blackthorn.” He bowed and waited tensely for the Hand’s response.

Hands still loose on his thighs, Maratullik was silent for some breaths, then he said, “Both women come from the west.”

“So they said, saх jura Meslar.”

The questioning went on for a short while longer, Maratullik’s hands relaxed, his voice gone remote and touched with distaste. He was no longer much interested in the answers and Taguiloa rapidly shortened them to the minimum required by courtesy. Short as they were, the Temueng interrupted the last. “You will perform here tomorrow night,” he said. “You will make the necessary arrangements with my house steward. Wait here.” He got to his feet and glided out, ignoring Taguiloa’s low bow, his attitude saying he had forgotten the matter completely, it was of that small an importance in his life. Taguiloa squeezed his hands together, froze his face into a mask, exultation bubbling in him; he struggled to keep his calm, but all he could think was, I’ve won, I’ve almost won.

HAIR A WHITE shimmer tied at the nape of her neck, clothes a black tunic and trousers, worn sandals on her feet, Brann walked through the busy market, making her way to Sammang’s tavern, in no hurry to get there, savoring the anticipation, enjoying the exuberant vitality of the scene around her. A face came out of the crowd, two more. She strangled a cry in her throat. Cathar. Camm. Theras. Her brother. A cousin by blood. A cousin by courtesy. Faces she knew as well as her own. She began following them, trying to stay inconspicuous, afraid of losing sight of them.

Cathar sauntered through the market, his eyes alive with pleasure in the jumbled colors and forms, stopping to bargain for fruit and herbs, a length of cloth, joking with the cousins, in no hurry, unaccompanied by any guard she could see, paying for his purchases with a metal tablet he showed the vender. She wanted desperately to talk to him, but didn’t dare approach him. After her first flush of emotion, her mind took over. What was he here for except as bait to draw her out? Otherwise, why would the Temuengs let him and the others beyond the compound walls, taking a chance they’d run? Not much of a chance with the hostages the Temuengs held, but how could they be sure? Had to be Noses about. She couldn’t see any but that meant very little in this crush. Anyway, how could she tell a Nose from the rest of the folk here? Couldn’t smell them. She choked back a hysterical giggle. Besides, what could she say to Cathar if she did go up to him? Hello, I’m your little sister. A foot taller, hair gone white, fifteen years too old, but I’m still Brann. Bramble-allthorns. No, I’m not a crazy woman. I really am your sister. Eleven years old, never mind my form. Ha! He’d believe her, like hell he would. She chewed on her lip as she eased after them, trying to think of some way she could talk with him without giving herself away to the Noses.

Yaril tugged on her arm. She let the changechild lead her into a side street, where there was a jog in a building that gave her a bit of privacy.

“House of assignation,” Yaril whispered. “There’s one the next street over. You put on a Hina face and go rent a room, I’ll bring Cathar to you.”

Brann grimaced. “Yaril…”

The changechild scratched at her head, made an impatient gesture with her other hand. “The door’s got twined serpents painted on it. You just go and knock and say you want a room for the afternoon and give the old woman three silver bits and tell her your servant will be bringing someone later and let the maid take you up. When the girl’s gone, you take your clothes off and put on the robe youll find in the room and sit down and wait.” She frowned. “Keep the Hina face. And you’d better make it a kind of wrinkled up face. Dirty old woman paying young men to service her. Just in case Cathar’s Nose decides to check you out.”

Brann wrinkled her nose. “Tchah! What a thing.”

“You don’t have to like it, just do it.”

– Don’t be too long. You sure you can convince him?”

Yaril giggled. “Cathar? You know your brother, never passed up a chance in his life. I’ll get him there, you be ready.”

SHE WAS SITTING at a table near the window when Cathar walked into the room, curiosity bright in his gray-green eyes, his dark brown hair blown into a tangle of small soft curls. She watched him with deep affection and nearly wept with joy to see him so much himself in spite of everything that had happened. He came and looked her over, a glint of amusement and interest in his eyes. He bowed. She felt a knot tighten in her stomach, she didn’t want her brother looking at her like that even if he didn’t know who she was and thought she was some rich Hina matron who got her thrills from picking up young men in the market.

She leaned forward, started to speak.

Yaril said hastily, “Wait.” She darted into the shadows of the bed curtains, emerged as a smear of light sweeping along the walls.

Cathar’s eyes widened, he looked from the light to Brann, began backing toward the door, his hand reaching for the latch.

“Cathar,” Brann whispered, “wait.”

“You know me?” He blinked, stood frozen with shock as Brann’s face rippled and changed_, to the one she woke up with on the flight from the valley. He licked his lips. “What… •’’

Brann glanced at Yaril who was a small blond girlehild again. The changechild nodded. “No one listening right now. I’ll keep an eye out downstairs just to make sure. He had a shadow.” She flicked a hand at Cathar. “Like you suspected.” She grinned up at him. “Relax, baby, no one’s going to hurt you.” She tugged on the latch, pulled the door open and went out.

Brann sighed. “I don’t quite know how to explain this. Cathar, sit down, will you? You make me nervous fidgeting like that.”

He narrowed his eyes, pulled out a chair and sat across the table from her. “I know you?”

“I’m glad it’s you not Duran, he’s so damn hardheaded he’d never believe me. I’m Brann. Your sister.”

He leaned forward, frowning as he scanned her face. “You’re very like Mum. Now. You weren’t a few minutes back.”

She pushed at her hair, still black, she hadn’t bothered changing that again. “And I’m a dozen years too old and I’m a long way from home. And a shapeshifter of sorts.”

“Well.”

“Slya woke, brother, she changed me. Did they tell you, those Temuengs, did they tell you they sent a pimush and his fifty to clean out the valley?”

“They told me.”

“Gingy and Shara are dead, Cathar. All the kids under eleven were killed. All the old ones too. Uncle Eornis. The Yongala. The rest…” She closed her eyes. “I’ve gone over it so often. I saw some of it, Cathar, what they did to Mum, saw Roan get killed, uncle Cynoc. They set the houses on fire too, but they didn’t burn too much, the houses I mean. I was up on Tincreal all day. You know. I found the children there. I came back and the soldiers were in the valley. I watched from Harrag’s Leap, then I went after them. Slya changed me. I told you that. And brought the children. Yaril has a brother.” She opened her eyes, tapped her breast. “She rides me. Slya. I don’t know what she’s going to do. I killed them, Cathar. The pimush and his men. The children helped. They make a poison. It kills between one breath and the next. The pimush told me what happened at Grannsha. He said no one was killed. Jaril tells me about half aren’t here, I suppose they were killed after all. Mum’s all right. Well, as all right as she can be after what happened. Her looms weren’t hurt. Tincreal blew about a week after that. Jaril flew back to see what happened. The hills are scrambled. You could only find your way back to the Valley if you knew where it was. But they’re all right, the ones left alive. I forgot. Marran’s dead, I found him killed. On the trail. Gave him fire. Didn’t do that for the Temuengs. We think you’re bait to catch me, you and the others they let out. The children and me, we think the sribush on Croaldhu knows his men are dead. Before I got off Croaldhu, I gave the Temuengs some sorrow. I expect they guessed I had something to do with Arth Slya. Which is why you and the others have Noses on your tail. How long have they been letting Slyans out?”

“About a month.” His voice was cool, he wasn’t committing himself to anything yet.

She sucked in a long breath. “You’re as hardheaded as Duran. All right, listen. You remember the time you and Trihan caught uncle Cynoc in your dammar trap? Remember what he made you do, bury the offal from the killing ground all that summer?” She made a sharp, impatient gesture. “Either you believe me or you don’t. Did they tell you why they’re letting some, of you out?”

He shrugged. “Said they don’t want their Hina waiting on us, we’re supposed to do for ourselves, they give us a credeen to show and keep track of what we buy. And just send out those with close kin here. They said they’d skin Duran first then Da if I run. Same with the others. First few days we had guards breathing down our necks, but they left us looser after that. I haven’t noticed anyone following us. Be easy enough to do.” He looked around the room. “This was clever, Bramble.” He grinned. “All right, I do believe you, though it’s not easy when I look at you. What have you got in mind? Breaking out won’t be that hard, but where do we go after we’re out?”

“The shipmaster who took me off Croaldhu and brought me to Silili, he’s here now, he’s going to take you down the Palachunt and back to the north end of our island. Where the smugglers come in. You know. Best not to wait, get it done fast, less chance of something disastrous happening. You get the others ready to move sometime the next five days. The children know where to find you, they can get in and out without anyone noticing them. How is Da? The children told me he’s been beaten.”

“Yeah, he wouldn’t work and he won’t take any kind of orders. He’s getting better, but not easier. Mum’s safe, alive, you’re surer’

“Uh-huh. Last time Jaril saw her, she was setting up her loom.” Brann smiled. “You know Mum; house half burned down around her, everything in a mess but as long as the roof is tight over the looms and she’s got the yarn she needs, the rest doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll tell Da that, might make him, bend a little if he has to. He can get about, if that what worries you.

“Do they ever check on you at night? Say after sundown and before dawn.”

“No. At least they haven’t up to now. They change the guards a little after sundown about the seventh hour, leave them on all night, change again about an hour after dawn. I’ve heard them grousing about the long dull duty they’re pulling.”

“Then the sooner we can get you out, the longer it’ll be before anyone notices you’re gone. Barring some ill chance.”

“Can’t leave too soon or…” He broke off as a large brown bird came swooping through the window, blurred and landed beside Brann as a slim blond child, blurred again into the Hina child who’d brought him here.

“Nose has decided he wants to be sure what you’re doing up here. He’s negotiating with the old woman now right now and in a breath or two he’ll be up peeping through the voyeur holes.” She darted to the bed and pulled the covers about, talking rapidly as she worked. “You, Cathar, get your shirt off, muss your hair, see if you can look however you look when you’ve had your ashes hauled. Brann, get that Hina face back on fast. And take those pins out of your hair. Look like you’ve been mauled about a bit, huh?” She scowled from one to the other, then marched to the table, caught up the bell, stomped to the door, leaned out and rang for the house maid. “She’ll bring tea, you should’ve rung before.”

Brann closed her eyes, sat back in the chair and concentrated. Her face and body rippled and flowed, the face and hands changing to those of a middle-aged Hina matron. She opened dark brown eyes, saw Cathar staring at her uncertainly. “I can answer any question you ask me, brother. In spite of what’s been done to me, I am Brann. You were courting Lionnis, I forgot to tell you, she’s one of the living too, remember the time Mouse and I spied on you?”

Yaril swung the door wide as the maid brought in a heavy tray with tea and cakes; she set the tray on the table, bowed, smiled at the silver bit Brann tossed to her. Yaril shut the door after her, came back to the table. “Eyes,” she murmured, “in the wall now.” She squatted by Brann’s feet, her eyes closed, a mask of indifference on her pointed face.

Cathar pulled his shirt over his head and began doing up the laces, making quite a production of it, a twinkle in his gray-green eyes. He was beginning to have fun with this business, the realization born in him that there was hope, there was a good chance he and the others would get back to the Valley, home to the slopes of Tincreal. That hope was bouncing in his walk and gleaming in his grin.

His spirits were winding up to an explosion which she hoped he would put off until he got back in the compound. She watched him scoop up the gold coin she set on the table, toss it up and catch it, grinning, then strut out of the room, watched him and wanted to run after him and hug him until he squealed. Impossible. Damn the Temuengs for making it impossible. She poured out a bowl of tea and sat staring out the window, sipping at the hot liquid, fighting an urge to cry, overwhelmed by the love she felt for her brother, realizing how lonely she’d been the past months. Even with Sammang and the crew, even with Taguiloa and Harra, even with the intimate association with the children, she felt alone; nothing could replace the feel of her folk around her, where she breathed in warmth and affection, where the space she took up was one she’d grown for herself, where she moved suspended in certainty. Not so long ago she’d been fretting about that closeness, feeling suffocated by it, now she was beginning to understand the dimensions of her loss. But she didn’t have time to brood over it. She emptied the bowl in a pair of gulps, patted her mouth delicately with the napkin from the tray, swung to face Yaril. “He was a good one, girl,” she said, making herself sound mincingly precise. “Go find me another such boy.” She reached into a box and took out another gold coin. “Hurry child, I grow… needy again.”

Silent and expressionless, Yaril took the coin and went out. Brann filled the tea bowl and sat staring out the window, sipping at the cooling liquid. Now that the room was silent and empty she thought she could hear tiny scraping sounds the spy made as he fidgeted behind the peepholes, could feel his eyes watching her.

The silence stretched out and out. The noise-in-the-wall sounds grew louder and more frequent. Then the sounds moved along the wall, very small noises that might almost be mistaken for shifts and creaks of the old house. Even when they were gone she sat without moving or changing the expression on her face, sat sipping at the tea as if she had all the time in the world. Yaril came back through the window again, a gold shimmer mixed with the gray light from outside. She flashed through the walls and came back to stand beside Brann. “He’s gone.”

“Think we convinced him?”

“Enough so he won’t probe further, not now anyway. Or he’d be outside waiting to follow you But just in case he left a friend behind, you better keep that form awhile.”

Brann grimaced.

Yaril patted her hand. “Poor baby Bramlet.”

“‘Jahr’ Brann striped off the robe, tossed it onto the bed, pulled on her tunic and trousers. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t like this place.”

THAT DAY PASSED and the night and in the late afternoon when the shadows would have been long and dark if the heavily overcast sky had let enough light trickle through, the troupe rolled out of the West Gate, their planning done, two plot lines converging, everyone nervous and wondering if the whole thing was going to come apart on them and sink them beyond recovery, on their way to Maratullik’s meslak, escorted by the slave who’d fetched Taguiloa before, this time on a lanky white mule of contrary temper whose notion of speedy travel was a slightly faster walk than usual. A pair of silent guards rode ahead of them, another pair rode behind.

Yaril was an owl circling over them, Jaril rode with Negomas on top the wagon, both boys quiet, Negomas because he was nervous and rather intimidated by the guards and the great houses white and silent and eerie in the pearly gray light, Jaril because he wanted to avoid drawing notice to himself.

Brann rode beside the bay cob, looking out over the ruffled gray water, the stubby docks with their pleasure boats covered with taut canvas to keep out the rain. The street was empty, even of slaves, as the threatened rain began to mist down and the wind to blow erratically, dropping and gusting, dropping and gusting, throwing sprays of rain into her face.

The wagon rolled on and on, rumbling over the pebbled marble, the sound echoing dully from the walls, the slow clop-clip of the ironshod hooves extra loud in each drop of the wind. Taguiloa drove and Linjijan rode beside him, his flute tucked carefully away to keep it out of the rain. Linjijan stretched out on the seat, practicing his fingering along his ribs, wholly unconcerned about what was happening around him. He was restful to be with right now; Taguiloa felt the calm radiating out from him and was grateful for it as his own pulses steadied, his breathing slowed, the tightness worked out of his muscles. He couldn’t keep his dreams from taking his mind-if they made a good enough showing, if they managed to interest the Hand, they were set. Set for the court performance, the chance he’d worked so long to get. He tried not to think of Brann and her plans for this night, expelled from his mind any thought of the changechildren and what they would be doing while he danced.

Up ahead, the slave kicked the mule into a faster gait as the rain started coming down harder.

BRANN DANCED with fire, a soaring, swaying shimmering column of braided blue red gold, Jaril flowing bright, the drums heavy and sensuous in the shadows behind her, the daroud deep and sonorous, singing with and against the song of the drums. The Hand sitting in shadow watched without any sign he was responding to the music or the dance, but the adolescent Temueng males filling the benches on either side of him were stamping and whistling. Both things bothered her, the meslarlings’ raucous callow behavior and the Hand’s silence, draining the energy she needed for the dance. She owed the troupe her best, so she reached deep and deep within and drove herself to increase the power and sensuality of the dance. Negomas and Harm seemed to sense her difficulty and threw themselves into the music, making the great room throb and the Hand move in spite of himself, leaning forward, letting himself respond. And then it was over and Brann was bowing, then running into the shadows behind the screens set up to serve the players.

Taguiloa touched her shoulder. “Never better,” he whispered.

She smiled nervously. “It’s a bad crowd,” she murmured. “Stupid and arrogant.”

He nodded, touched the chime that warned Linjijan and the others to begin the music. He caught up his clubs, began his breathing exercises, listened to the music, eyes shut, running through the moves in his mind. The dance was paradoxically easier on the high rail at the inns because he didn’t have to work so hard for the clown effect.

Everything forgotten but his body and the music, he caught the cue and went wheeling out with a calculated awkwardness where he seemed always on the verge of winding himself into impossible knots and losing control of the clubs and knocking himself on the head.

AS TACUILOA FLUNG himself and the clubs about, Jaril was a shadow-colored ferret darting through the lamplit halls until he reached the outside, then a mistcrane powering up through the rain to join Yaril who was circling through the clouds waiting for him, a mistcrane herself now that the rain had turned heavy. They cut through the clouds to the far end of the lake and circled around the great shapeless pile of the Palace to the slave compound at the back.

“Guard changed yet?”

“Should have, but we better check.”

They landed on the roof of the tower, blurred and oozed through the tiles into the rafters where they hung as mottled serpents lost among the shifting shadows from the smelly oil lamp sitting in the center of a worn table. The room was empty for a few breaths, then the guards came in, stomped about shaking off the wet, using their sodden cloaks to mop faces arms and legs, then a blanket off the cot in the corner, grumbling all the time about having to nursemaid a clutch of mudheads like that, not even able to have a little fun with the women, stuck out here the rest of this stinkin night to sit and shiver in case one of those know-nothing shits tried to run.

Yaril lifted her serpent head, looked at Jaril, nodded. She blurred into a beast rather like a winged marmoset with poison fangs, then moved silently along the rafters until she was in position above one of the guards. When she heard the click from Jaril that told her he was ready, she dropped on silent wings, gliding onto her target’s shoulder and back, sinking her fangs into his neck, shoving off before he could close his hands on her, fluttering up in a steep narrow spiral as he collapsed, twitched a little, went still, his mouth open, a trace of foam on his lips. Jaril struck a second later than she did, his guard fell over hers, dead before he hit the floor.

They blurred into light smears, oozed through the roof and flew down to the gate. With a little maneuvering, they swung the bar out of its hooks, but left the gate shut for the moment so the gap wouldn’t be noticed. They filtered through the planks, then were small blond children running unwet through the rain to the living quarters.

TAGUILOA KICKED the club into the air, then hopped about holding his foot with one hand while he kept that club circling in long loops with the other, a grimace of exaggerated anguish on his face. Throwing the club higher than before, he danced back and back while the club soared, hopped closer and closer to the club abandoned on the floor, the music rising to a screech. He bumped his heel into the floorclub, wheeled into a series of vigorous back flips, landed flat on his back and caught the descending club a second before it mashed his head, waved it in triumph then let his arm fall with a loud thump that cut the music off as if with a knife. He lay there a moment, then got to his feet with a quick curl of his body, bowed and ran off the padded part of the floor into the protection of the screens.

The Hand chuckled throughout the performance, apparently deciding he approved of these players. There was more stomping from the youths, a few whistles. Taguiloa went out, bowed again, then retreated behind the screens. Negomas and_. Linjijan began playing a lazy tune while Harra came behind the screen to collect her wrist hoops and finger bells. She nodded to Branco, then Taguiloa, flicked her fingers against his cheek, wriggled her shoulders, clinked her hells once to let Linjijan know she was ready, stood waiting until the music changed.

JARIL GRINNED UP at Cathar. ‘This is it. Time to go.”

“Right.” He looked over his shoulder. “Duran, go get the others,” Back to Jaril. “The guards?”

“Dead. Gate’s open. Downpour out, so there’s nobody much about. We have to get to the lake, but that shouldn’t be a problem; Yaril and me, we can take care of just about anything that pops up. All you and the rest need to do is follow us.”

“Good enough. Duran’s going to be handling one boat with me. Farra and Fann will take the other. Boats are ready?”

“Well, we wouldn’t be here now, if they weren’t.”

“Didn’t mean to insult you, just nerves.”

“Yeah. Get a good hold of ‘em, it’s a long hairy walk to the lake.”

With Uncle Idadro gagged and supported by Camm and Theras, Duran and Reanna giving their shoulders to Callim, the Arth Slyans followed Jaril out of the compound. Cathar closed the gates and put the bar in place with Garrag’s help, then joined with him to act as rear guard. Garrag was a woodcarver who’d puttered about in the workshop without doing much, telling himself he was doing it to fool the Censor who was in each day to check on them, but he was a man who couldn’t stand idleness, he had, to do something with his hands, even if it was only whittling. He’d found a short length of seasoned oak in the supply bin and shaped it into a long lethal cudgel. Though the chisels and other tools were counted and taken away every night, the Censor and his minions didn’t bother with the wood. He carried that cudgel now and walked grim-faced beside Cathar, short-sighted eyes straining through the gray sheets of rain.

They moved through the rain along a twisting service path toward the main gate, the only way out of the Palace grounds. Yaril flew ahead, scouting for them, Jaril walked point, leading them through the maze of paths and shrubbery, past the stables of the dapples, past the echelons of slave quarters, into the gardens before the gate, deserted gardens with gardener and guard alike inside out of the miserable weather; even the hunting cats loosed at night were snugged away out of the wet. They came close to one of these lairs where a malouch lay dozing. Cathar and Gan-ag spun around to face the charge of the large black beast, but light streaked between them and the malouch, wound in a firesnake about the beast, sent him in a spinning tumbling yowling struggle to rid himself of the length of burn searing his hide.

He went whining off into the darkness and the light streak was once more a blue gray mistcrane flying precariously through the rainy gusts, predator eyes searching the foliage for other dangers.

HARRA STOOD POSED, listening to the whistles and applause and shouted suggestions, trying to ignore most of it. Spoiled young brats, many of them the prime sons of the meslars and magistrates here in Audurya Durat. She broke her pose, bowed and ran into the relative quiet behind the screens. “Louts,” she muttered.

Taguiloa dropped a hand on her shoulder. “They like you and want you back.”

“Hah. They’d like anything in skirts, especially if she took them off.^-She grimaced, pasted a smile on her face, stepped into the light, bowed, retreated again. “You’re going to have a job getting them back, Taga; they haven’t the sense to know what they’re seeing. Godalau grant the Meslar has and does.” She stripped off the gold hoops and the finger hells, laid them on the table, stood rubbing her hands together.

Taguiloa listened to the whistles and shouts that showed little sign of tapering off, knowing all too well what he’d have to face. It was a gamble sending Harra out to dance before this herd of spoiled youth, but he needed the rest time after the comic dance. He moved away to the food table the Hand had set up for them, poured some water and drank a few sips, just enough to wet his mouth, watched as Harra drank more greedily then dipped her fingers in the water and sprinkled it across her face. Outside, Linjijan was playing a lyrical invention of his own with Negomas delicately fingering his drums to produce a soft singing accompaniment, their skill almost drowned by the noise of the watchers. Harra sighed, took up her daroud, frowned. “You want me to stay here so that won’t go on even more?”

“No. I can get ^gem. Go on out. I need you there.”

She nodded, wiped her hands on the cloth laid out by the house steward, threw the cloth down, went around the back end of the screen and settled herself as inconspicuously as she could beside Negomas, ignoring the flare-up of noise that only stopped at a sharp tap of the gong at Maratullik’s elbow. She picked up the beat and fit herself into the music, then helped it change into the sharp dissonances and throbbing hard beats of Taguiloa’s dance music.

Taguiloa shivered his arms, sipped at the air, closed his eyes and once again played over in his mind his first tumbling run and the dance moves immediately after; he’d be moving at speed, carried on the music, going faster and faster until he was at the edge of his ability to control his body. He tapped the small gong to let them know he was ready, shook himself again, then listened for the music that would lift him into his final dance.

JARIL CAME TROTTING back to the clump of trees where the Arth Slyans huddled in the cold soggy darkness. “We’ve eased the slave portal open. Yaril’s keeping watch on the guards, but they’ve got themselves some mulled cider and are more interested in that than what’s outside the windows. Keep quiet and move real slow. We don’t want to have to kill these guards, we don’t know when they’re going to be relieved or what would happen if the next set found them dead. Be better if the alarm doesn’t go up till the morning, better for Brann and better for you all. Follow me and keep in the shadows, I don’t want you even breathing hard, and when we get out stay hugging the wall until we’re far enough away from the guard towers it won’t matter if they see us. Got that? Good. Come on.

They followed the child through the shrubbery; the storm wind covering any noises they made, tension winding higher and higher in them all until Cathar wanted to shout and break things and knew the rest were feeling much the same. They had to cross a small open space before they reached the narrow gate set within the larger one. Jaril didn’t stop but went skimming across the gravel, his feet making almost no sound at all. Cathar watched the thin line of his folk move after the boy and winced at every crunch of their feet. He waited until the last were through then followed Garrag across the gravel, his back knotted with expectation of shouts or spears hurled at him. He was almost disappointed when nothing happened and he was through the portal and walking along the massive white wall fronting the palace grounds. Jail] brushed by him, passed back through the portal. Over his shoulder, Cathar watched the door swing shut, then saw a patch of light ooze through the wood, coalesce into the boy. Jaril ran past him, waving him on impatiently, no time to indulge curiosity now. Cathar moved his shoulders and grinned, then shifted into an easy lope to catch up with the others. Slya bless, what a pair they are. He looked at the nearly invisible mistcrane flying above them, the pale boy-form leading them. Slya bless.

A moment later Jaril led them across the avenue and along one of the stubby piers. Two sailboats were set up and ready at the far end. Working as quickly as they could, Cathar and his brother, Farra and her sister Fann got the others settled into the boats, the sails raised, the lines cast off. The water was choppy, the wind difficult and the rain didn’t help, but once they got away from the shore, that rain served to conceal them from anyone watching. Then the escape became a matter of enduring wet and cold and keeping the boats from capsizing. The mist-cranes flew with them guiding them until they were halfway across the lake, then one of them went ahead to take care of the guards at the outlet into the Palachunt.

When Cathar eased his boat into the outcurrent, the guard towers shone as brightly as usual with the huge lampions that spread their light out across the river-until there were no dark patches for smugglers or troublemakers to slip past. He chewed on his lip, but the mistcrane that guided them flew serenely on so he tried to relax and trust the children. A flicker of darkness sweeping past him, then there were two mistcranes sailing the clouds above them. No shouts from the towers, no stones catapulted at them. Slya bless, what a pair.

They circled a number of moored merchanters, tricky sailing in the dark and storm, with the river’s current both a help and a hindrance, then the cranes blurred into shimmering spheres of light hanging about the masts of a small ship moored away from the others.

When they came alongside that ship, a broad solid man, a panday with a clanking gold ornament dangling from one ear, leaned over the rail and tossed Cathar a rope. “Welcome friend,” he called down. “Tik-rat, get those nets overside.”

TACUILOA WHEELED ACROSS the matting, sprang off into a double twisting backflip, swung round and dropped onto his hands as he landed, used the slap of his hands on the mat to power him back onto his feet, then went on one knee in a low bow, the music behind him breaking as suddenly into silence.

Silence from the watchers, then a burst of applause, calls for more, more. But Taguiloa was exhausted, not even sure he could stand yet. He stayed in the bow, his arms outstretched at first then folded on his knee.

Maratullik touched the gong beside him and the applause faded to silence. He leaned forward. “A remarkable performance.” He watched as Taguiloa got heavily to his feet and bowed again from the waist, acknowledging the compliment. For him at that moment, the Meslar was little more than a paper figure, unreadable, a mask that might have anything behind it, something a smooth voice came from, saying pleasant things. “Most remarkable. My compliments, dancer. Come here, if you please.”

Taguiloa stumbled forward, exaggerating his weariness though not by much, wondering what was coming next.

“Accept this poor recompense for the pleasure you have given my young friends.” With a sweeping gesture, Maratullik brought round a heavy leather purse and held it out, smiling at the roars and applause from the benches.

Taguiloa dropped to one knee in a profound obeisance. “Godalau bless your generosity, saх jura Meslar.”

“Introduce your troupe, Hina, they too deserve our thanks.”

Was he preening himself before the sons of his peers or was he after something else. Paper figure making gestures? He was pleasing those louts if the noise was any measure of their feelings. Taguiloa stood slowly, holding the purse before him. “Linjijan. Hina, flute player, the second best in Silili, the first being his great-uncle the wondrous Ladjinatuai who plays for the dancer Blackthorn.”

Nod from the Hand. Desultory applause from the benches.

“Negomas. M’darjin and drummer.”

As before, a quiet nod from the Hand, a sprinkle of clapping from the youths.

“Harra Hazhani, Rukka-nag, dancer and daroudist.”

Nod from the Hand. He scanned her face with some care but said nothing. Whistles and shouts from the benches that quieted as soon as Maratullik touched his gong.

“Brannish Tovah. Sujomann, seer and dancer.

Again Maratullik scanned her face, saying nothing, again he stopped the noise from the meslarlings when he tired of it. “My steward tells me the rain is heavy. Rooms will be provided for you to take your night’s rest here. You may return to the Quarter come the morning.” Without waiting for a response from Taguiloa, he turned to Brann. “You will please us yet more, oh seer, if you stay to read for us.”

She lifted her head and stared at him coolly. Taguiloa held his breath. “Certainly, saO jura Meslar. If you will furnish a guard instructed to curb the enthusiasm of the overeager.” Taguiloa let his breath trickle slowly out; this response fit within the margins of proper behavior though barely so. Brann, oh Brann, oh Bramble-all-thorns, remember who this is and why you’re here.

“You suggest…”

“Nothing, Sao jura Meslar. I warn. My god is jealous of my person and prone to hasty acts.”

“Ah yes. I know something of the Sujomanni. Which of their gods is yours?”

“The Hag with no name, saх jura Meslar. She who spins the thread of fate.”

“Thus your calling. Most fitting.” He looked from bench to bench, quiet now except for some muttering, and moved his lips in a neat and mirthless smile. “We will forgo the readings, seer. This night. Perhaps another time would be more propitious.”

“Your will is mine, saх Jura Meslar.” She bowed and stood silent, waiting with the others for their dismissal.

“Would it were so, Sujomann.” He struck the gong and the steward came forward to lead them out.

WORKING SWIFTLY and with a vast good humor, the crew got the Arth Slyans stowed below deck. The flight through the palace grounds and across the lake had used up the better part of three hours and even the fittest among the escapees was cold, weary and soaked to the skin. Rubbed down and dressed in dry clothing, hoisted into hammocks, wrapped in blankets, swaying gently as the ship hoisted anchor and started downriver, all tension drained from them, warm and comfortable, most of them drifted into a deep sleep.

Cathar was too restless to sleep. He tumbled out of his hammock and made his way back on deck. The masts were bare except for a small triangle of sail; the shipmaster was taking her away from her mooring as silently and inconspicuously as he could. Trying to keep out of the way of sailors passing back and forth along the deck, uneasy about his footing, wind and rain beating against his back, Cathar groped along the rail to the bow where the Panday stood staring into the gloom. He touched the man’s arm. “Shipmaster?”

The Panday turned a stone-god face to him, a sternness in it that eased a little when he saw who it was. Even with that easing he didn’t look very welcoming, his words underlined his dislike for mudfeet wandering about his deck. “You’ll be more comfortable below. Brann’s brother. Cathar, is it? Right. Soon as, we’re around that bend ahead we’ll be racing. No place for passengers then.”

“Why isn’t Brann here?”

“Your sister has proper reasons for everything she does; leave her to them. She got you out, I’ll get you home, that’s enough. You’ll see her when she’s ready. Look, Cathar, it’s three days coming up the Palachunt and usually two days going down for a shipmaster who gives his ship the respect she deserves. Us, we’ll be racing the pigeon mail and taking chances that turn my hair white thinking of ‘em. If we can make the mouth by noon this coming day, there’s no way in this world the Temuengs can get word to the fort there in time to stop us. But, lad, one thing we don’t need is interference on, deck. You keep your folk below, you hear?”

“I hear. Why are you doing this?”

“She’s our witch as much as she’s your sister. Someday when I’m good and drunk maybe I’ll tell you the tale.”

“Witch?” Then he remembered Brann’s face changing and looked away, uneasy at the thought.

“Below with you. Now.” A strong hand closing on Cathar’s shoulder, turning him. “Get.”

BRANN STOOD at the glazed window seeing the gray curtains of the rain and the flicker of the single lamp cutting the darkness of the small room. A movement in the window mirror, the door opening. She stiffened then relaxed as Yaril •came in, small black-haired Hina urchin. He came across and leaned against her hip; neither of them spoke for a while then he began singing, his voice a burr that hardly stirred the air.

Mistcrane, mistcrane flying high

Through the gray and stormy sky,

Wounded moon sails high and white,

River races with the night.

Oh, the mistcrane’s ghostly flight

Flitting phantoms never missed

From their greedy master’s fist.

Mistcrane’s flight is finished now,

Shipman answers to his vow,

Phantoms waking from their fright,

Laughing in the face of might

As the sun soars shining bright.

Turn the key

Set us free

Blessed be we

When home we see.

Brann sighed, moved from the window. “Mistcrane’s flight might be finished but there’s a fistful of other threads to tie off. Watch while I sleep, my friend. I trust the latches on these doors about as much as I trust the walls.”

WITH A STRONG following wind augmenting the push of the current and a clear sky opening ahead of them as they left the storm behind, the little ship groaned and strained and flew.down the river, Sammang, jimm and Tik-rat watching the water as if it was a treacherous mount that would try to rub them from its back given half a chance. They raced from point to point, trusting memories from the trip upstream, taking impossible gambles and bringing them off as if Tungjii rode the bow scattering blessings before them.

They emerged with the dawn from the twisting chute through towering limestone cliffs into the broad triangle of wetlands sloping down to the coast. Sammang sent Tik-rat into the jib-boom stays to spot snags, took in sail until the ship’s speed was reduced by half, put Hairy Jimm at the wheel and kept the crew hopping as he went carefully down that treacherous stretch winding through half-drowned trees whose stale stench clung so closely to the soupy greenish-brown water that he felt as if he were eating, drinking, breathing it along with the swarms of pinhead midges blown from the trees on the heavy erratic wind.

They left the trees about mid-morning and picked up speed along the broad main channel of the delta, skimming along between stretches of saw grass and stunted brush. The air immediately seemed cleaner and many degrees cooler. Sammang sighed and moved his shoulders, rubbed his back against the foremast to get a little of the stiffness out of the muscles there. Tik-rat came off the ropes: rubbing at tired eyes, groaning and grousing but cheerful. Sammang laughed at him, then sent him below to tell the Arth Slyans they could come on deck if they wanted, get some sun and fresh air. He watched the youth go bouncing away and knew there was going to be a song about this race, one he’d enjoy but have to suppress for a while at least if he wanted to keep trading in Silili. He laced his fingers behind his head and pushed, exploding out a sigh of pleasure as he pulled against the resistance and worked his muscles. One last knot to unravel. The fort at the river’s mouth. He glanced up at the hot pallid sky thick with birds. None of them carrying mail, he was ready to swear that. A witch-summoned demon might beat them but he had strong doubts so powerful a magus could be found in time to make a difference; Temuengs tended to distrust and dispose of anyone with that much power. He yawned, nodded at Jimm and went to see if Leymas had fresh kaffeh in the pot.