Mistress of the Catacombs

8

The guards accompanying Sharina and Ilna couldn’t help marching in step. The clash of their boots on the flagstone walkway leading to Garric’s apartments sounded like construction work on a large scale. It was a harsh sound, and maybe for that reason Sharina felt nervous.

She took her friend’s hand, and said, “I wish Cashel were here.”

Ilna looked at her with her usual lack of expression. “I do too,” she said, “but I’ve never known my brother to start a job he didn’t finish. I expect he’ll do the same this time, whatever the job is.”

She squeezed Sharina’s hand firmly, then released it. Barely audible over the hobnails’ ringing hammer strokes she added, “Does Tenoctris think the same thing that made Cashel disappear is attacking Garric also?”

Does she know Garric is gone? Sharina wondered. She opened her mouth to explain, then choked off the words. That was for Carus to say if Chalcus hadn’t.

“I don’t know,” Sharina said. “I don’t think she does, but we don’t know very much at all.”

Then, because of the previous realization, she went on, “Does your friend Chalcus stay within the palace?”

The building Garric had chosen for his apartments was larger than most of the residences within the compound, though still smaller than the town houses of the city’s wealthy merchants. By now Valles had grown up to the south and southeast walls of the palace, but the two were still separate communities.

When the Dukes of Ornifal took the title of Kings of the Isles four hundred years ago, they sequestered a huge tract north of the city proper. They walled it and built therein scores of separate structures, ranging from open gazebos to barracks for the clerks, guards, and domestics of the palace staff.

“Generally he does, I believe,” Ilna said, her eyes straight ahead. The muscles were tight over her cheekbones, but you didn’t have to be a childhood friend like Sharina to know that Ilna was tense most of the time. “I don’t know precisely where, but I believe he’s found himself accommodations with the unmarried guards.”

She cleared her throat, and added, “Tonight, last night—”

Dawn was turning the east-facing upper façade of Garric’s residence pink.

“—he said he’d be going down to the port to find passage to Tisamur for the three of us.”

Turning to meet Sharina’s eyes, Ilna said, “I keep house for Merota and my brother. But not for Master Chalcus.”

Knee-high cypresses lined the walk to either side. During a generation of neglect the original plantings had evolved into a tangle of undergrowth. When Garric revived the monarchy, the newly enlarged staff of groundskeepers had cleared away the mass as their first priority, but it would be years before these replacements grew into landscaping fit for the majesty of the Kingdom of the Isles.

Sharina smiled wanly.

It would also be years before the Kingdom of the Isles grew back into something truly majestic.

The officer of their guard exchanged passwords with the colleague who commanded the detachment at the entrance to the residence. Sharina saw her friend’s lips tighten in something just short of a sneer for the workings of bureaucracy, whether military or civilian.

Ilna caught Sharina’s glance and met it with a wry smile. “I’m not very good at getting along with other people,” she said. “As you know. Fortunately, there are tasks that a person can do alone.”

Ilna smile hardened into something an enemy would find frightening. “And some that have to be done alone, I gather,” she said. Then, turning her face forward again, she asked, “Will the prince be here? When I go off to where Tenoctris sends me?”

Sharina licked her lips before answering, also looking toward the building. “I think it’ll be just you and me with Tenoctris,” she said, “but I really don’t know.”

She didn’t understand—had never understood—the way her friend’s mind worked, but she knew Ilna was in pain. She reached out to link hands again, briefly.

A palace servant could’ve brought Ilna to the prince’s residence, but it was more than for courtesy that Sharina had gone herself. Tenoctris didn’t need help with her preparations, and besides—Sharina had wanted to get out of the building for a time. Even after Carus woke and the chill dissipated, a feeling, a touch of something slimy, had seemed to remain.

After Sharina left to fetch her friend, someone had opened the mullioned windows of the upper story. Carus looked out, waved a formal salute, and then went back inside. Quite aside from how the king felt about a woman who’d looked like, been like Ilna, Sharina supposed his distaste for wizardry would keep him from joining the three women during the planned incantation.

“I believe they’ll let us in now,” Ilna said as though she hadn’t noticed the man at the window above them. “Back in, so far as you’re concerned.”

“I was daydreaming,” Sharina apologized as she started forward. But what had happened to Hordred wasn’t a dream.

The porch was a semicircle whose tiled roof was supported by four simple pillars. The double doors were wood. Royhas had wanted to replace them with bronze. Garric had refused, but the chancellor had gotten his way in part by attaching a bronze appliqué of linked rings, the symbol of the royal house of Haft during the Old Kingdom, in the center of both leaves.

And now King Carus, the last member of that house, ruled here in fact…. Aloud, more to herself than to her friend, Sharina said, “I’m going to have to watch myself. Everything seems like an omen to me now!”

“That must be very uncomfortable,” Ilna said with a minuscule smile. “I’ve found the present to provide more than enough difficulty by itself.”

The anteroom was meant for show. The coffered ceiling was the full height of the building, with the curving staircase to the private suites a seeming afterthought along the right side.

The walls had been recently redecorated. The fanciful painted arches and porticos of the earlier style were reduced to red lines on a cream background, framing a winged messenger to one side and a sea nymph on the other. To Sharina the design looked skimpy, but she noticed Ilna eye it with obvious appreciation.

“They’ll be upstairs, ladies,” said one of the guards stationed here. He looked uncomfortable.

Sharina’s sturdy sandals—her feet weren’t hardened to the city’s stone pavements, and she didn’t limit her walking to carpets where court slippers were appropriate—slapped on the stair treads. Attaper had insisted there be soldiers around Prince Garric during every moment. They hadn’t saved Garric from the Intercessor’s attack, nor were they any present help to the man now wearing Garric’s flesh.

“Tasks for each of us,” Ilna repeated with grim pleasure. She must have been thinking the same thing as Sharina.

A passage skirting the anteroom connected the north and south corridors; the occupant could choose a room to suit the season and personal taste. Garric’s quarters were to the right, where the windows of the main bedroom looked east.

Sharina smiled faintly. It was as close as one could come in a palace to the garret room of the inn where her brother had slept until everything changed.

“Your highness, Lady Tenoctris is inside!” called the leader of the squad outside the open door. He and most of his men flattened against the corridor wall as the women passed.

One fellow, middle-aged and bearing the scars of hard service, tapped his helmet visor to Ilna in salute, and said, “You going to sort ’em out, ma’am?”

“I’ll do what I can, Osnan,” Ilna said. Her tone was noncommittal, but the glance she gave the soldier was—for her—affectionate.

“Then they don’t have a chance!” the guard said, stepping past his squad leader to close the door behind the women. Through the panel Sharina heard him say to his fellows, “Mistress Ilna won’t leave enough to bury, boys. You’ll see!”

As they walked through to the master bedroom, Ilna said in an undertone, “Osnan was a guard at my bungalow for a few weeks. I think he’s as much afraid of wizards as the rest of them, but he appears to trust me.”

Sharina laughed and hugged her friend. “So does everyone who knows you, Ilna,” she said.

The heavy bronze headboard of Garric’s bed was chased with scenes illustrating the courtship of the Lady by the Shepherd and—on the footboard—the Lady’s descent into the Underworld. It’d been pulled out from the wall, and the canopy had been removed. The room looked much larger though it still contained clothes chests, a table, chairs, and several lampstands—an unusual amount of furniture.

A lighted brazier stood between the eastern windows. It’d been brought in since Sharina left.

A section of fresco had fallen away sometime in the past. The plaster had been patched but merely distempered instead of being fully repainted.

Garric had sketched a votive figure in charcoal on the plain surface. A stranger would have thought it was a drawing of the Shepherd, but Sharina recognized her brother’s much simpler intent: this was Duzi, the little God of shepherds like Garric, who tended flocks around Barca’s Hamlet. The bed-curtains would have concealed it until now.

Tenoctris stood and gave the younger women a bright smile. “Your timing’s perfect,” she said. “I’ve just finished with the preparations.”

She beamed down at the floor. She’d drawn a circle around the bed—that was why it’d been moved out—with powdered lime, then used the pot of vermilion to draw around it in the Old Script.

Tenoctris stoppered the vermilion and set it on the circular table with the rest of her paraphernalia. There couldn’t be much left, even though she’d written the characters too small to be read from any distance.

The flames of the multiple lamps paled as dawn came through the windows. The rosy softness still hid as much as it displayed.

“Ilna, Sharina’s told you what I’d like you to do?” Tenoctris said. As she spoke, her eyes traced her preparations in quick motions. Another person would have seemed nervous, but the old wizard was simply showing her normal, sparrowlike intensity.

Ilna shrugged. “You’re to put me in a trance,” she said. “You’ll send my mind—”

“Your soul,” Tenoctris corrected.

“My soul, then, to a dreamworld,” Ilna said. “There I’m to follow a path of some sort and come back to tell you what I’ve found.”

“I didn’t know how to describe what she was to do,” Sharina said apologetically. “I don’t really understand about that part.”

Tenoctris flashed a smile. “Nor do I,” she admitted. “Amalgasis and Princess Querilon both described the process very clearly, but those are things I’ve read, not experienced. I hope—I trust—that the pattern will be clear to one of Ilna’s abilities.”

“A soldier named Osnan shares your confidence,” Ilna said, her tone too dry for even Sharina to be sure whether she was joking. “You want me on the bed?”

“Yes,” said Tenoctris. “And if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to chew some lettuce cake first. To help you relax.”

“I need all the help I can to do that,” Ilna said, this time with a faint smile. “Whatever you think is best.”

Sharina shaved the cake of narcotic with the great knife she wore under her cape tonight. It was the knife she’d gotten from Nonnus, the healer for Barca’s Hamlet and the surrounding borough; it was while helping him that Sharina had learned to judge a dose of lettuce cake and other basics of the healing art.

Ilna pinched up the drug and swallowed it, making a wry face. “Let’s get on with it, then,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed, then slid into the center and lay flat.

Sharina rarely thought of her friend as small, but Ilna looked tiny in the center of the pale blue coverlet. Her weight wasn’t enough to make the ropes supporting the mattress creak.

Sharina backed against the wall. Behind her was a scene of happy peasants shearing sheep in springtime. She pressed her shoulders against the plaster and thought of other times.

“Malaas athiaskirtho,” Tenoctris chanted. “Nuchie uellaphonta steseon….”

She tossed a pinch of powder onto the brazier. It flared white with a smokeless crackle.

“Kalak othi lampsoure…” the wizard continued.

The room was growing cold again. Sharina waited, her eyes turned toward the sunrise and her hands clasped on the hilt of the Pewle knife.

Eight sailors astern of Cashel worked an oar apiece, while he sat where the bow narrowed and rowed with two. He lifted his oarblades and carried the looms forward with his arms and whole torso to prepare for another stroke. The sun was low behind him and would set within half an hour.

“Land!” said Tilphosa, standing ahead of Cashel in the far bow. “Under that cloud on the horizon!”

“Yes, by the Lady!” cried Hook, rising to his feet in the stern beside the captain. As the ship’s only surviving officers, they’d been trading off with the tiller throughout the hot, windless day. “Real land this time, not another cursed reef!”

The oarsmen were at the thwarts to bow and stern. Stores and baggage saved from the wreck filled the middle of the pinnace; Metra and the off-duty crewmen perched on it however they might. The wizard can’t have been comfortable, but the sailors gave her plenty of room.

Tilphosa hadn’t wanted to risk how she’d have been treated in the close quarters of the ship’s belly. She’d chosen to place herself with Cashel sitting between her and all the others aboard. The pinnace had been under oars the whole way from the islet where they’d wrecked, so the bow never lifted high enough to smack spray over her. Even if they’d been spanking along on a strong wind, Cashel guessed the girl would’ve made the same choice—and been wise to.

A breeze—the first since dawn—ruffled the sea, then filled the limp sail. The pinnace heeled slightly to starboard. Sailors looked up with bare interest.

“Well, get it trimmed, damn you!” Captain Mounix shouted. “Posal and Kortin, tighten the lee brails! Don’t you have eyes?”

Two sailors grabbed lines and began to shorten them, obedient but not enthusiastic. The men seemed cowed, but whether by the wreck itself or events on the islet Cashel couldn’t say; he hadn’t known them before the trouble. Cashel wasn’t the sort to think ill of folks he didn’t really know, but he was pretty sure his sister Ilna would’ve said they weren’t any great shakes ever in their lives.

Cashel pulled his oars aboard through the rowlocks twisted from cordage and crossed the shafts before him. He rubbed his palms together, then checked them. He didn’t row often even when he lived in Barca’s Hamlet, but the calluses he’d developed from other tasks had protected him today.

“Hey you!” Hook called. “Farmer! Nobody told you to ship your oars!”

“No,” Cashel said. “You didn’t.”

Another man might’ve argued that he’d done as much as any two of the sailors during the long, brutal day. Cashel didn’t bother. There were people who could give orders that he’d obey, but none of them were aboard the pinnace.

The sailors were bringing their oars aboard also. The breeze continued to freshen, so rowing was pointless even if Cashel hadn’t wanted to turn toward the land. He squinted, hoping he’d see something that’d make the shore look more attractive.

“I thought there’d be more than just wilderness,” Tilphosa said. “If we’ve really found Laut, I mean.”

“I don’t know about Laut,” said Cashel. “This is a big place, anyhow.”

He paused, letting the shifting light and the pinnace’s motion confirm what he’d suspected. “Anyway, there’s a building on that headland,” he said. “It could be a temple, I think. A little one.”

“Wizard, where is this that we’ve fetched up?” Mounix snapped. “Hook, take the tiller, will you? Where’s the cities you told us about?”

“I don’t know,” said Metra, turning from her view of the shore to look back at the captain. “When we reach land, perhaps I’ll be able to learn more. Through my art.”

She spoke deliberately, using the words as a weapon to threaten and silence Mounix. Cashel was sure that the crew hadn’t known Metra was a wizard as well as a priestess when they’d signed on for the voyage.

“Cashel?” Tilphosa said quietly. “This morning, were you thinking about the sea serpent that wrecked us on that terrible island?”

He shrugged. “I thought about it,” he said, drawing his quarterstaff up from where he’d stored it along the boat’s side. “I’d never seen one before, though, and I don’t expect to see another one anytime soon.”

The staff’s iron butt caps already had a light coating of rust. Cashel drew out his wad of raw wool and began to polish first the metal, then the hickory itself.

“But what if it had been sent?” the girl asked. “It could’ve still been waiting for us.”

“Well…” said Cashel as he continued his task. It relaxed him, even if he hadn’t needed to do it for the staff’s sake. “I didn’t plan to spend the rest of my life in that place, mistress. I guess if the snake had showed up again, I’d have tried to do something about it.”

“Yes, I suppose you would have,” said Tilphosa. She giggled. For a moment Cashel thought she was getting hysterical. After reflection, he still wasn’t sure she wasn’t.

The tide was going out, though low water wouldn’t be till well into the first watch of the night. A narrow beach sloped gently to a limestone escarpment never more than two or three double paces high. There was vegetation on the rocks, ordinary woodland from what Cashel could tell in the dimming light. The one stone building was either a small temple or a tomb made to look like one.

“Well, it doesn’t seem like much,” Cashel said, “but we ought to get a night’s sleep. In the morning, we can go look for your Prince Thalemos or somebody who knows about him.”

The shore was rushing up at a surprising rate. Mounix called orders that meant more to the crew than they did to Cashel. With a rattle of brails, several men hauled the sail up to a quarter of its original area. They were going to chance grounding without unstepping the mast, though.

“We could’ve used some of this breeze at midday when it was so hot,” Cashel said, but it wasn’t a real complaint. No peasant expected the weather to do the thing that best suited him.

The shore was already in darkness, but arcs of white foam outlined the waves’ highest reach. Mounix had the tiller to starboard, bringing them in at a slant that would ease the impact.

“Get out quick when we ground,” Cashel said as he judged where the pinnace would touch. “The less weight in the bow, the better.”

He slid his quarterstaff back for Tilphosa to take. “And hold this for me,” he added. “Ah, if you would, I mean.”

It bothered Cashel when he wasn’t always polite when he was working on a problem. Things weren’t happening so fast at the moment that he couldn’t ask properly instead of just ordering the girl around.

“You men in the bow!” Mounix called. “Get ready to drag us up the beach when we ground!”

“I have the staff, Cashel,” Tilphosa said clearly. She gripped it in both hands, putting just enough pressure on the hickory to assure Cashel that he could safely release it.

“I’m ready!” Cashel said, though the other forward oarsmen didn’t bother to reply. Mounix waved a sour acknowledgment to him.

Metra sat on the pile of canvas over the storage jars amidships, her expression unreadable. Her eyes met Cashel’s; she was watching him and Tilphosa, not the land. Cashel nodded the way he’d have done with a chance-met neighbor he didn’t care for, then returned his attention to the shore.

The keel grated, then bumped momentarily harder as Cashel vaulted the port side. To his surprise Tilphosa was in the shoaling water just as quickly, but she’d judged his intent and leaped out to starboard so that she wouldn’t be in his way. She scampered through the foam and up the beach with the staff crosswise before her. It was more weight for a slight-built girl than Cashel had realized.

Cashel had his own job, though. The pinnace heeled toward him. He gripped the gunwale and his port oar at the rowlock, then strained forward.

The furled sail thumped down amidships, raising an angry shout from Metra. Cashel smiled faintly. The wizard hadn’t been quite under the sail and spar when Hook released them, but she was close enough to have been surprised. That was all right with Cashel.

Another wave curled up the sand. With the weight out of the far bow and the water lifting, the keel broke free from the trench it’d dug. Cashel strode forward, dragging the pinnace three short paces up before the wave sucked back. The sailors were tumbling out also; with their help the keel slid on several paces more before sticking where only the tide could lift it farther.

Two sailors staggered inland with the anchor, a section of ironwood trunk. The prongs of two branches had been cut to form flukes and a ball of lead was cast above the forks for weight. The men carried it to the edge of the escarpment and set it as firmly as they could. It wasn’t a safe tether—the sand wouldn’t hold the flukes—but it’d do till someone ran a line around the trunk of a tree above.

It was growing dark. Tilphosa’s face and the smooth, pale shaft of the quarterstaff were blurs against the weathered limestone. Cashel sloshed toward her, stepping over the anchor cable on his way.

He heard a sailor mutter something; he didn’t turn to make something of it. Most of Cashel’s life people had been calling him a dumb ox or some variation on the notion. Knocking people down wouldn’t make them think he was any smarter, so he didn’t bother.

“Cashel,” the girl said as she handed him his staff, “I don’t want to stay with the sailors tonight. Do we have to?”

Cashel ran his hands over the wood, checking it by reflex. “I don’t guess so,” he said. “I’ve got food in my wallet, enough for both of us. Biscuit, cheese, and a bottle of water is all, though. They’ll probably heat up a fish stew, you know. Well, salt fish.”

“I don’t care,” said the girl. “I heard the men carrying the anchor talking. They want to go back home, and they think if I’m with them, they’ll be safe from Metra.”

Some of the sailors were unloading the pinnace, but a good number of them had clustered around Mounix and Hook near the vessel’s prow. Their voices were lower than honest men would have needed to use, and their heads turned frequently in the direction of Cashel and the girl.

He couldn’t see their features. The sun was down, and the cliff threw a hard shadow over the beach.

“Let’s see what the temple’s like,” Cashel said. “It’s got a roof, anyhow.”

Storm-tossed waves had undercut the escarpment. Tilphosa was standing at a place where the limestone had collapsed into a slope of sorts—steep and irregular, but good enough even in the dim light. It wasn’t more than twice his height where they stood; well, maybe a little more.

Cashel expected to have to help the girl, but she turned immediately and started up using her hands as well as feet. She wasn’t as agile as Sharina would’ve been, but there wasn’t any doubt about her being willing.

Cashel waited for Tilphosa to crawl onto flat ground, then clambered to join her, using his staff as a brace. Metra, identifiable from the bleached white slash across her outer tunic, walked northward up the beach. She was carrying the satchel of silk brocade which held the implements of her art.

“Cashel?” Tilphosa said quietly. “I don’t think…”

She licked her lips, her eyes following the other woman’s progress. In a hollow, distant enough to be concealed from the pinnace, Metra squatted and began to draw on the damp sand.

“I knew the Children of the Mistress weren’t telling me everything about my marriage,” Tilphosa said. “But now I’m not sure that the things they did tell me were all true. If Prince Thalemos is a great and powerful leader, shouldn’t there be more than—”

She gestured toward the temple. Cashel had been wrong about the roof. It looked all right from below, but up close to the side he could see that several trusses had fallen and taken the tiles with them.

“—this?”

“We’ll know more by daylight,” Cashel said. “And after a good night’s sleep.”

He led the girl the rest of the way to the temple. It was only ten double paces, but it was pretty steep in the darkness. He tapped the end of his staff ahead of him; they didn’t want to go over the edge of the cliff.

The sailors had climbed the escarpment also. They were shouting to one another, though Cashel couldn’t make out what they were talking about. He heard Hook’s saw rasping, and also the sound of chopping from several places.

Firewood, he guessed, but his eyes narrowed. There was only one small hatchet in the carpenter’s tool chest, so they must be using the adze and probably the captain’s sword as well. That seemed a lot of effort when there were plenty of fallen branches available. You didn’t have to cut wood to length for an open fire.

Cashel rubbed his staff absently again. He wasn’t sure he’d be sleeping tonight after all, though he wasn’t the sort to borrow trouble that might never come.

The temple was small, but the masonry was well finished, and there’d been lots of carvings on the triangular front of the porch roof. They’d weathered badly, so Cashel didn’t guess he’d be able to tell much even by daylight.

He walked into the nave. The God’s image was gone, though the base remained. There was no writing on it.

The moon was rising out of the sea, painting a white road across the water. Cashel could see pretty well, but he found the light didn’t make him feel…comfortable, he guessed he’d say. Full moons always made a herd restless, so maybe that was his problem.

“Look at this reredos!” Tilphosa said. “This is marvelous!”

There’d been a thin wall made from a single sheet of pale stone behind where the statue had stood, dividing the public part of the temple from the back where the priests stored things. It’d split and later fallen to pieces on the floor, probably when the roof right above it collapsed. Tilphosa was bending over a triangular piece, one of the larger fragments.

Cashel stepped closer. He’d have guessed that the girl was talking about something he couldn’t see from where he stood in the doorway, but it turned out a reredos was the stone screen itself.

“The sculptor was illustrating the Demonomachia, the Battle of Demons,” Tilphosa explained, easing to the side to keep from blocking the light as she pointed with a slim white finger. Sure enough, the public side of the wall was as full of carved figures as an ungrazed meadow is of dandelions. “See? Have you ever seen art so involving?”

“Yes,” said Cashel. “But I guess I don’t know how you mean the word.”

Cashel knew his sister’s fabrics, not only the arras she’d woven as a votive to hang behind the statue of the Protecting Shepherd in Valles but also the lesser drapes and ribbons that carried no image at all when you first glanced at them. Ilna made people feel things. This was just carved stone.

And it wasn’t what Cashel called pretty carving, either. Six-limbed monsters, generally standing upright on the hind pair but sometimes on the bottom four legs, fought with monsters that walked like men but had the heads and tails of lizards. They weren’t animals, either: they were using swords and spears, and as best Cashel could tell in the light they wore armor besides.

“The guy who did it knew his business, though,” Cashel said, hoping that he didn’t sound grudging. Tilphosa obviously liked the thing, and the fact he didn’t was no reason to spoil her happiness.

“Pendill describes the battle,” the girl said. She was excited about the carving, picking up one piece after another to see how they fit together. “In his Changes, not the Love Lyrics, of course. But look at this, Cashel!”

Tilphosa started to hold out another slab, then changed her mind and got to her feet again. “Here, where the light is better,” she said as she went back onto the porch.

Cashel smiled faintly. The expression felt good; he hadn’t been smiling as much as he ought to since he’d gone into the palace pond and wound up here. This wasn’t anything he understood, much less cared about, but it was giving the girl a lot of pleasure.

“This is the Queen of the Archai,” Tilphosa said, tilting the stone in one hand so that it caught the light the right way. “But you see, she’s not an Archa. She’s human!”

“Right, I see that,” Cashel said. The fragment had been lying facedown so the carving was as sharp as you could ask. It was a woman all right, her right arm raised and her left hand stuck out like she was signalling somebody to stop.

He squinted and bent closer. “What’s that on her head?” he asked. “Does she have horns?”

“Cashel, I think she’s meant for the Mistress!” Tilphosa said. She touched her silver-mounted crystal pendant. “In Her guise as the Lady of the Moon, you see!”

Cashel didn’t see, not really, but he was glad for the girl to be so excited. “I wish Sharina was here,” he said. “She’d understand better than I do.”

Tilphosa lowered the stone but didn’t look up for a moment. “Sharina is your wife, Cashel?” she asked.

“What?” said Cashel. The smile that had blossomed across his face when he thought of Sharina now faded slowly.

“Well, not that,” he continued, turning over in his mind how he ought to explain. Deciding that the simplest way was best—at least for Cashel or-Kenset, and probably for more people than tried it—he said, “I love her, though. And I think she loves me.”

“Let’s sit down, shall we?” said Tilphosa, walking out to the second of the four pillars holding up the porch. She seated herself with a graceful motion.

Cashel butted the quarterstaff on the littered floor beside the third pillar and lowered himself carefully, controlling the motion by his grip on the staff. He angled his legs onto the temple’s three-stepped base so that while facing the girl he could watch Metra on the beach below as well.

“Do you miss your Sharina, Cashel?” Tilphosa said.

“Well, I miss talking to her,” he said, frowning as he tried to understand the question. “But I don’t…”

He balanced the staff across his lap and shrugged. “Tilphosa,” he said, “she’s not really gone, you know. She’s always with me, and I know that when I get back to Valles or wherever she is, she’ll be there. Do you see?”

Tilphosa didn’t, he could tell that from the carefully neutral expression on her face. Well, they’d both managed to puzzle the other tonight by talking about things the other didn’t understand.

He looked down at Metra. The wizard had drawn her symbols across at least three double paces of wet sand. They were in a line rather than a closed figure the way Cashel had seen these things done in the past. Metra walked behind them, turning when she reached the end and starting back.

He could hear her chanting, but he couldn’t tell what the words were. She wasn’t using her athame, but on every third step she tossed a pinch of glittering dust toward the words in the sand.

“I wonder if I’ll feel that way about Thalemos,” Tilphosa said, her face turned out to sea. She was looking at the moon or the path it drew on the water. “I’ve never even seen a picture of him. He’s supposed to be exactly my age, but…”

She shrugged. “Laut isn’t like what I was told,” she said, “so I don’t know if Thalemos or anything else is.”

“Tilphosa?” said Cashel. He pointed with his staff. “Do you know what Metra’s doing there?”

The girl leaned forward, then shifted the way she was sitting so that she could see around the pillar. She said nothing for a moment, then turned to Cashel with worried eyes.

“Cashel?” she said. “When Metra was in the woods this morning, before we boarded the boat—could she have gone back to the top of the hill where you killed the thing?”

Cashel stroked his staff as he considered. “I guess she could’ve,” he said. “There was time enough, and she knew the way. I wasn’t paying any attention to her.”

“Because I wonder…” Tilphosa said. “If she went back for the amulet the thing was wearing.”

“There’s no amulet, Tilphosa,” Cashel said. He spoke calmly, just as if he didn’t know the girl had watched him grind it to dust. Maybe she’d gotten too much sun on the pinnace? “I smashed it, remember?”

“Yes, I know you smashed it,” Tilphosa said with a little of the sharpness that Cashel had carefully kept out of his voice. “But that didn’t make it vanish—or its power either, I’m afraid. What do you suppose Metra is dusting onto her words of power?”

She grimaced. “Oh, I’m sorry, Cashel!” she blurted before he could speak. “I’m just mad at myself for not thinking of that before it was too late. It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t know that it’s too late, either,” Cashel said, rising to his feet like an ox. He shrugged his whole body, loosening the muscles for what he might have to do after he went down and rubbed Metra’s symbols out of existence.

“Cashel,” Tilphosa said, not loudly but with a hint of urgency. She was looking inland around the north corner of the temple.

Cashel, his staff held close along his side, stepped past to look for himself. Sailors were coming through the woods toward the temple in groups of three or four men, each with a lighted pine knot for a torch.

“Mounix!” Cashel said. “I don’t need your company tonight. We’ll talk in the morning, if you think you need to.”

“Stand aside, farmer!” Hook called. “You don’t need to get hurt, but it won’t bother us if you do.”

He carried a sapling with a chisel lashed to the end to make it a spear. Other sailors had spears tipped with the belt knives that had been their only weapons when they landed, or sections of branch shaped into cudgels. Mounix had his sword out, but he let his carpenter do the talking.

“I’m not standing aside,” Cashel said. “And you’re not getting past me either, Hook.”

He knew there were sailors to the south side of the building where he couldn’t see them; there was no chance of getting to the shore the way he and Tilphosa had come up. As for trying to climb straight down at night from where he and Tilphosa stood at the highest part of the cliff, he’d likely break his neck even without sailors dropping rocks on his head.

There wouldn’t be much gain to being down on the sand. And besides, he didn’t feel like running.

“We’re not going to hurt the girl!” a sailor said. “We just want her with us while we go back to Tisamur where we belong. The wizard stays here, and the girl comes with us so we’re sure she doesn’t send anything after us!”

Tilphosa had stepped sideways into the nave, where the sailors couldn’t see her until they came around the front. She fingered her crystal pendant and watched Cashel with wide-open eyes.

“I told you no!” said Cashel. Tilphosa gasped at the volume of his growling bellow. “If I need to crack heads, I’ll do that. It won’t be the first time!”

The dozen men Cashel could see from where he stood had reached the back of the temple. He risked a glance to the side; torchlight flickered around the southern edge of the masonry, showing that the rest of the crew were close to being able to rush him from behind.

“Get inside,” he snarled to Tilphosa. There’d been a door through the back wall to the storage room, but half the roof had collapsed across it. Beams and broken tiles blocked the opening. Given time, the sailors could clear a passage, but Cashel didn’t guess they’d try that for a while.

“We’re coming for you, farmer!” Hook shouted.

The girl had obediently moved to the center of the nave. She nodded when Cashel’s eyes glanced across her. She’d picked up a jagged piece of the screening wall, small enough to throw but big enough to hurt if it hit somebody.

Cashel placed himself in the middle of the opening, just back of the porch. It was some three times as wide as he was tall, about the right width to give him free play with the quarterstaff but not let the sailors get around him to the sides. The raised steps gave him an advantage too.

Sailors edged into sight on both sides, staying close to the cliff edge until they were sure where Cashel stood. One of them waggled his torch between two pillars, then jumped back. A fool’s trick, a nervous fool’s trick.

Cashel started to spin his quarterstaff slowly before him, waiting for the moment one of the gang milling in front of the temple would get up the courage to rush him. He was a lot better at this kind of fight than any of the sailors dreamed of being, but there was a right herd of them.

“We’re coming!” Hook repeated, holding his spear by the butt instead of the balance to make it reach longer.

“Then come!” growled Cashel.

A heavyset sailor with a club bounded up the temple steps. Cashel’s staff struck—half spin, half thrust—and broke the man’s knee as the rest of them came on.

Red wizardlight mushroomed from the beach below. It wrapped the ruins of the temple, and the stones began to change.

“No like water, Gar,” Tint whimpered. “Gar, take Tint to land? Tint smell land close.”

“We’ll be ashore soon, Tint,” Garric said, seated in the fishing boat’s stern with the beastgirl hunched against his legs like a hound frightened by thunder. “We’re just looking for the place to land.”

“Shut that monkey up,” snarled an oarsman, “or by the Lady she goes over the side!”

The vessel the Brethren had stolen for the voyage was undecked but broad and beamy. There was a mast step amidships, but Vascay had decided they’d row instead. “You can see a sail for a long ways,” he’d explained when Garric raised an eyebrow on first seeing the boat.

“Gently…” Garric said. It took him a moment to dredge the man’s name from Gar’s damaged memory. “Alcomm. We’ll all be happier when we get to shore.”

The sun had set an hour before. The air was cooler, but rowing an uncertain course in the darkness was more uncomfortable than the glare of sunlight reflected from the calm sea. Except for Hakken, a fisherman before his wife had gone off with one of the Intercessor’s officers, the bandits were landsmen.

A few households in Barca’s Hamlet supported themselves by fishing. Garric had pulled an oar on occasion himself, though never one as long as the sweeps of this Laut craft which the men sculled standing.

“Aimal,” called Vascay to the lookout, standing with a foot braced on the stempost and a comrade holding his belt for safety. “Can you see anything?”

“There’s lights, Vascay,” Aimal said. “Hearthfires through a window, or maybe shepherds on the hillsides. I can’t tell any more than that there’s lights.”

“We’ve got to go in,” a man in the belly of the boat said. He wasn’t being belligerent; just tired and maybe frustrated. “We can’t hang around out here till dawn. The Protectors’ll see us sure and wonder what we were doing out all night.”

“Yeah, we drifted bugger knows how far in the mid-channel,” said another bandit. “Best to get ashore any which place and head for Durassa overland when we figure out where we’re at.”

Vascay squinted at the shore, then looked up at the sky. The stars were bright points in the clear night, but even the most skilled navigators—none of whom were aboard this vessel—could draw only direction, not location, from them.

He sighed and cocked an eyebrow to Garric. Garric nodded minutely in agreement.

“Aye,” said Vascay, cramping the steering oar to head the boat toward shore. “Put your backs in it, boys. And keep your eyes open in the bow. We don’t want to run up on the private dock of one of Echeon’s cronies.”

The vessel had four sweeps, each worked by a single man; they creaked as the oarsmen leaned into them. Metal chinked and whispered as the others readied their weapons.

Garric drew his new sword a hand’s breadth out of the scabbard, then let it slip back with a faint chime. It moved freely.

Vascay lifted a bundle of three short javelins from the boat’s bottom, leaning them points up against the gunwale beside him. He caught Garric’s eye and shrugged.

“Take the tiller, lad,” he muttered. “One of us needs to be in the bow, and you’ve got your dog to care for.”

Garric gripped the steering oar’s crossjack as the chieftain took the javelins in his left hand. He ducked under Alcomm’s sweep, and called in a loud voice, “Make way, brothers! I’m coming forward.”

Garric craned his neck to see past his poised fellows. The shore was rocky, and there was no beach at all.

“We’ll break her ribs if we come in here, Vascay!” a man warned nervously. “We’re leagues east of where we ought to be! This must be somewhere in Haislip Parish, not Matunus.”

“Then we’ll stave her in, Hakken,” Vascay snapped. “The District Clerk we stole her from isn’t any friend of mine or of any decent man. And as for a few leagues, I’d rather walk them than row.”

“Aye!” Alcomm grunted as he put his back into his oar.

“Ready yourself!” Aimal warned.

Garric laid the fingers of his left hand between the shoulders of the whimpering beastgirl. “We’re going to land now, Tint,” he said. “There’ll be a scrape—”

They ground into the rocks with the crash of a door being broken down. All the men lurched forward, Garric included. The impact was much worse than he’d expected. The boat wasn’t moving fast, but it was so heavy that it took a great deal of stopping.

Garric would’ve sprawled into Alcomm’s oarpost if Tint hadn’t held him firmly while bracing herself with a three-limbed grip on the boat’s ribs. So much for taking care of the poor animal….

Men carrying their personal gear jumped to the shore with more haste than grace. The crumpled bow was filling, but the boat wasn’t properly aground; sinking, it started to slide backward into deeper water. Hakken cursed and threw a bight around one of the taller rocks as his fellows splashed past him.

As the last of the bandits splashed into the bow, Garric said to the beastgirl crouching at his feet, “All right, Tint, let’s go—”

Tint leaped to shore in a single twenty-foot movement, as smooth as a cat. She whirled, and chattered, “Come, Gar! Come quick!”

The bow had settled to the bottom with only a hand’s breadth of the hull above water; the stern continued to fill. Garric hefted the blanket roll with his belongings and hopped onto the port gunwale. It was no great trick for him to walk to land dry-footed.

Ceto’s clothes fit Garric. None of the Brethren quarreled when Vascay awarded the entire kit to “Gar,” who’d regained his faculties, though he gathered that normally the whole gang would share in the division. Garric didn’t mind wearing a dead man’s clothes, though he had chosen not to take the shirt Ceto had on when Vascay let his life out in a gush of blood.

Tint fawned on Garric when he stepped to a rock, then jumped to shore. The band had gathered around Vascay, looking into night and muttering.

“That’s the high road, there past the trees,” Hame said. “Many a time I hiked it while my sister was alive in Durassa.”

The shore was a rising waste ground of rock and coarse, prickly bushes. A line of poplars grew fifty feet inland, straggling in both directions to where they were lost in night and the hills. A farmhouse was silhouetted on the eastern horizon; an ox moaned, but there were no lights.

Vascay nodded; the band trotted forward, forming a loose line abreast without need for discussion. Vascay was on the left flank, so Garric fell in on the right.

“Aye, it’s the high road!” Hame repeated with satisfaction.

So it might be—and a better road than Barca’s Hamlet had known since the fall of the Old Kingdom—but it was years since the track had last been gravelled. Twin ruts showed there was wagon traffic, but Garric couldn’t imagine anything but walkers and pack mules using it during the rain.

“There’ll be patrols, like enough,” a man said, looking at the road doubtfully.

“Not at this hour,” another said. “Look at how high the Phoenix is.”

Garric followed the line of the bandit’s pointing arm. The constellation was the one he’d learned to call the Goat Horns in Barca’s Hamlet.

“We’re deep in the second watch by now. The Protectors of the Peace like their sleep as much as honest men do. They won’t ride again till dawn.”

“We still dassn’t take the high road,” said the first man—Blesfund, Garric saw now as the speaker’s head turned. “ ’Tain’t safe.”

“We’ve no choice,” Vascay decided abruptly. “There’s no place to lay up near here, not the whole lot of us, and we’ve got to get to Lord Thalemos’ estate by daybreak. Prada, go on ahead to scout. We’ll give you two furlongs’ lead. I’ll take your sword and you carry one of these javelins. That way if you run into the Protectors, you’re just a traveller who needed to be in Durassa at daylight.”

“Why me?” muttered Prada, a lanky, sad-looking fellow at the best of times. He unbuckled his sword, though—a wide-bladed, square-tipped weapon like no other Garric had seen—and traded it to Vascay for the javelin.

“Somebody’ll spell you in a while,” Vascay said.

Prada grimaced but started trudging down the road. With his pack and the javelin over his shoulder, he really did look like a traveller who’d decided to keep on through the night. Garric suspected—and Prada almost certainly knew—that regardless, the Intercessor’s patrols would sweep up anyone they caught out at night.

“Get out of the middle of the road,” Vascay said mildly to his band. He gestured.

Obediently the band moved into the shadow of a poplar, each man squatting or stretching his muscles, according to his individual taste. Tint crept on all fours along the rock-strewn slope toward the sea. Occasionally her hand shot out and snatched something into her mouth. Once the prey squeaked before the beastgirl’s molars crunched down.

Prada reached the farmhouse and started down the other side of the hill. The road seemed to curve as well.

“Gar, keep him in sight,” Vascay ordered. “The rest of us will follow you.”

“Right,” said Garric. He rose, hitched his sword belt to settle it more comfortably, and strode down the dusty track after the scout.

Tint gave a squeak of alarm and bounded to his side. Men laughed, and somebody muttered, “I still don’t believe Gar coming around the way he’s done. I swear I don’t.”

“We leave Vascay now, Gar?” the beastgirl asked. She didn’t sound concerned, just curious. She ambled along the road on all fours most of the time, but every few paces she rose to her hind legs and scanned her surroundings. Her flat nostrils flared.

“No,” Garric said, “we’re just watching Prada so that if the Intercessor’s patrols catch him we can warn the others. Vascay and the others will come behind us.”

Tint scratched herself between the shoulder blades with a long-fingered hand. “Tint tired,” she said. “We sleep soon, Gar?”

“Probably not till almost dawn,” Garric said. “I’m sorry, Tint.”

He could use some sleep too. He’d had two shifts on the sweeps, but it hadn’t been a hard day so far as work went.

Lord Thalemos—or his advisor, Metron—had hired Vascay’s band because they were willing to go. They didn’t have any particular expertise at searching for a ring on a deserted islet some distance from Laut.

It wasn’t until he’d boarded the stolen fishing boat that morning that Garric had realized almost the whole crew were landsmen as surely as he was himself. Garric had faced worse dangers than setting off in an open boat with men who barely knew how to row, but the hours of constant low-level tension had wrung him out worse than the same time spent digging a drainage ditch would’ve done.

Garric walked briskly to keep Prada in sight. The full moon gave good light, but the poplars frequently hid the scout on the winding road.

Garric and Tint neared the farmstead to the right of the road. A waist-high drystone wall set the foreyard off from the highway—to keep out animals being driven to market in the city, Garric guessed, rather than to keep the household’s own stock in. The house was stone like the wall and had a thatched roof, but the large barn was of frame construction. It slumped sideways; the boards gapped and seemed never to have been whitewashed.

Pigs grunted from the pen at the back of the yard; the sharp, bitter stench of hog manure had already announced their presence. There wasn’t a dog, though, which was surprising.

Tint stopped and gripped Garric’s thigh. Her fingers were painful. “Gar!” she said. “Men behind wall! Men hurt us!”

“How do you—” Garric said.

He swallowed the rest of what would’ve been a stupid question. Tint’s senses were sharper than his, as she’d proved several times in their brief acquaintance. Besides, now that she’d warned him, Garric could smell horses. A farm like this plowed with oxen, not horses which had to be fed grain.

The corner of the farmyard was fifty feet ahead—an easy spear throw, and no distance at all if those waiting in ambush had bows. Since they had horses as well…

“Walk on,” he murmured to Tint, but he only took one more pace before he stopped to look at the sole of his bare foot as though he’d picked up a thorn. By bending over he could see that Vascay and the others were only a hundred feet behind him. He was simply the relay; Prada was expected to spring any ambush.

If the ambushers were mounted, then the bandits who survived the first volley of arrows would be run down as surely as the sun rises; which it would not, for them, ever again.

“Hey, Vascay!” Garric called. He stood straight and waved toward the gang. “Come up here, will you? There’s something funny out to sea!”

Hame started forward, then paused when he saw his fellows had stopped where they were. Garric’s call was unexpected, and in a bandit’s life the unexpected was usually bad news.

“Gar, we run!” Tint whimpered, tugging his left hand hard. “Many many men hide by wall!”

Garric gently disengaged her. There was no use asking the beastgirl exactly how many ambushers there were—six? A hundred?—because she couldn’t count. Besides, the number didn’t matter because no matter how many there were…

“Come along, Sister take you!” Vascay growled. “Didn’t you hear the boy?”

He sauntered up the road, one javelin point down in his left hand. The other missile was in his right hand but behind his back, as though he were scratching himself behind the shoulder blades with the butt; it was unobtrusively cocked to throw. After a further moment’s hesitation, the rest of the gang followed.

Garric waited as they approached, smiling broadly. “I noticed it when I was getting a thorn out of my foot,” he said in a loud voice. He was only halfturned, so that though he was speaking to Vascay, he had the farmstead in the corner of his eye. “Come here, and I’ll show you.”

“So, lad?” Vascay said as he walked to touching distance. He continued to scratch his back; his eyes flicked about him the way sunlight dances from running water.

“Don’t look around,” Garric said quietly. “There’s a band of men behind the wall; they’ll jump us any moment. They’ve got horses, so our only hope is to go for them first.”

“They can’t be waiting for us!” Ademos said. “We didn’t know where we were going to fetch up on Laut. Nobody could’ve set an ambush here.”

“Gar, we run!” Tint demanded.

Garric was ice-cold and trembling; he wasn’t consciously frightened, but the emotion racing through his veins had its own logic. “Let me borrow this,” he said, taking the javelin from Vascay’s left hand. The shaft was thumb-thick and three feet long, with a short fluted head and a length of cord tied just above midpoint to stabilize the missile when thrown.

“This don’t make any sense!” Ademos said. “They can’t be laying for us, it don’t make sense!”

“Let’s get ’em!” Garric shouted in the clear, carrying voice he’d learned from Carus for ruling troops. He turned and charged the farmstead, cocking the javelin back as he ran.

“Blazes!” a bandit squealed. “He’s gone nuts a—”

Armed men stood up behind the stone wall, two at first and then a score. Garric loosed the javelin with the skill he’d learned hunting squirrels as a boy with similar weapons. The strength of Gar’s right arm was behind the cast.

The first man to stand was the officer whose silver gorget gleamed in the moonlight. The javelin thumped into his breastbone, sinking to the knotted cord. The officer flopped over backward, his orders frozen in his throat by the shock of death.

“Carus and the Isles!” Garric screamed as he drew his long sword.

An archer went down with Vascay’s remaining javelin in the eye. He’d started to draw his bow; the arrow wobbled into the dirt when his fingers spasmed open. Several others of those behind the wall had bows, but the dying man was the only one who’d been alert enough to respond instantly.

There were twenty Protectors along the wall. There must be others in the barn with the horses, but those didn’t realize yet what was happening.

“Carus!” Garric repeated, whirling his sword in a moonlit circle. He knew from experience—his own and that of Carus before him—how frightening a ten-foot arc of edged steel looked when it was coming at you. The bandits’ only hope of survival—Garric’s only hope of survival—was to startle the ambushers so completely that they didn’t react until their would-be prey was among them.

He wasn’t quite successful.

An archer drew his arrow to the head while Garric was still ten feet from the wall. Both the Protector’s eyes were open. He aimed at Garric’s midriff, but the arrow’s lift at the moment of release would take it through his heart.

The ambushers wore close-fitting iron caps, not real helms, and breastplates of quilted linen. Except for the archers they carried six-foot spears with a knob instead of spike on the butt; the latter would make a useful baton for crowd control. Echeon’s Protectors were more closely akin to the City Patrols who policed Valles than they were to the Royal Army of the Isles. The bandits, most of whom had real swords instead of the long knives the Protectors carried, were armed as well or better than the ambushers.

But one arrow would be enough to end Garric’s existence, in this time and probably all time. Still running, he tensed himself to receive the missile—

Tint bounded past in the same sort of flat leap that had carried her to shore. Her long jaws closed on the archer’s throat as they tumbled backward together. The man didn’t have time to scream.

Garric bounded to the top of the wall, slashing to right and left. His edge cut deep into the forearm a Protector flung up reflexively to cover his face; the back of Garric’s curved blade wasn’t sharpened, but it rang on the skullcap of the fellow short-gripping his spear to jab at the sword-swinging demon who towered over him. The Protector staggered sideways, sprawling onto the wall; his cap fell off. Vascay, swift despite his peg leg, beheaded him. Prada’s sword turned out to be serviceable after all.

Except for Vascay the bandits had been almost as surprised by events as the Protectors were, but they reacted with the desperate suddenness of men who’d long been hunted. Several hurled javelins as they rushed the wall. The hail of missiles dropped two more ambushers, and others ducked or flinched away. The Protectors’ knobbed spears couldn’t be thrown, so they’d lost the initiative even before the bandits closed.

Blesfund squealed as he took an arrow and doubled up. The archer tried to nock another, then turned to flee. Toster jumped the wall and sank his axe—an ordinary forester’s tool—helve deep in the Protector’s back. He jerked the axe head free with casual ease.

The barn door opened. A Protector stood there, one hand on the door and the other holding a horse’s bridle. He stared bug-eyed at the carnage: most of his fellows were down, and the few still upright were trying to run.

“Don’t let ’em break out!” Garric said. He ran toward the barn, raising his bloody sword. He was gasping for breath.

“Shepherd guard me!” the Protector cried. The javelin Vascay had retrieved from a dead man’s eye socket took him in the hip joint; the point had bent so that the missile didn’t fly true, but it was true enough. He fell over screaming.

A man already mounted spurred his horse out of the barn, trampling his comrade. His spear jabbed at Garric. Garric hunched and chopped the rider’s left knee as he passed. The fellow toppled over his horse’s right shoulder as it shied because of the reek of fresh blood.

Garric started into the barn, then jerked back to safety. The interior was full of horses, pitching and kicking in terror. With the door open they forced their way out two abreast. A powerful roan gelding struck the jamb with his shoulder and knocked it askew, causing the sagging structure to lean still farther.

“Catch the horses!” Vascay called. “By the Lady, we’ll ride to Durassa tonight on the Intercessor’s bounty!”

The last of the animals, a flea-bitten gray, plunged into the courtyard dragging a Protector whose left hand was tangled in the reins. The horse circled, trying to free itself from its living anchor.

Garric grabbed the beast’s headstall and held it steady. He pointed his sword at the Protector’s face, and shouted, “How many of you are there in the barn?”

“Mercy!” the man cried, lying on his back with his hand lifted in the reins. “No more, nobody more, just three of us!”

“Here’s the mercy you lot gave my sister,” Hame said. He set one of the Protectors’ own spears against the man’s breastbone.

“Don’t!” said Garric.

Vascay took Garric’s right wrist, his sword wrist, in a grip that would grow firmer if it needed to. “Aye, boy,” he said. “We must. And Hame would anyway, with good reason.”

Hame leaned his chest against the spear’s knobbed butt, driving the point through the man and deep in the ground beneath. The Protector thrashed wildly, then went limp.

Garric turned his head. He’d seen worse, and he understood the kind of reason Hame might have had, but…

He let go of the gray’s harness. Somebody else could hold the beast—or not, he didn’t care.

One of the Protectors had been wearing a short cloak. Garric pulled it off the body and wiped his sword. There was a nick in the belly of his blade; he’d have to polish it out with a stone. His first victim wore a wristlet in the shape of a curling snake; the sword had struck one of the ornament’s ruby eyes.

“That’s a rare bit of luck, isn’t it, brethren?” Vascay said in a satisfied voice. “Mount up and let’s get going. Oh, and Toster—lead one of the extras for Prada when we catch up with him.”

“Gar safe?” Tint asked, rising on her hind legs to stroke Garric’s neck.

“Gar is fine,” Garric said. If he’d had anything in his stomach, he’d have thrown it up, from reaction and from the slaughterhouse stench.

“I’m fine, Tint,” he said, squeezing tight the beastgirl whose warning had saved all their lives. “Thanks to you we’re all fine.”

Tint purred contentedly as she licked her muzzle. Her bloody muzzle.

Ilna stood above her body, though the only reason she recognized the still figure on the bed was that it wore her clothing: a bleached inner tunic beneath a heavier garment of blue yarn with a gray pattern woven, not embroidered, into the hem. Her own work, of course, so that was her body as well: slim but sturdy, not willowy—that was a word they used for tall blondes like Sharina—but showing the supple strength of a hickory switch.

Mirrors of polished metal were for rich folk. In Barca’s Hamlet, girls filled buckets and looked at themselves in the water’s reflection; but not Ilna, she’d never cared about that….

She was surprised to see how attractive her face was. The cheekbones, her cheekbones, were visible instead of being cushioned by fat; flecks of gold floated in the depths of her brown eyes; her lips were severe and thinner than some might choose, but in all ways they suited Ilna herself.

She sniffed. She supposed it was all right to be vain about your body when you weren’t wearing it anymore.

Tenoctris sat—had collapsed, more properly—on her ivory-legged chair; she looked utterly drained. Sharina stood close behind the older woman, supporting her by holding one forearm and the opposite shoulder. They both looked with concern toward the waxen figure on the bed. Despite the smoke of the charred parchment, the edges and colors of the scene were vivid to Ilna’s present eyes.

But her business wasn’t in the room where her body lay, nor even in this world. A gray curtain hung around her. She stepped toward it, walking through a corner of the bed.

The grayness resisted for a moment; the curtain wasn’t a fabric but rather a blurring of light and of all proper existence. Ilna grimaced sourly—the touch reminded her of putting her hand on a slug’s trail in the dark—but pushed on through.

That was her responsibility, after all. What was there in a decent person’s life besides carrying out her responsibilities?

The grayness closed around Ilna. She swallowed and continued walking. She’d been in this place, this clammy gray limbo, before. That time the way back to the waking world had led through Hell, and Ilna had brought a portion of Hell back with her. Tenoctris would never have sent a friend back to that place, but Tenoctris hadn’t, couldn’t, walk this route herself.

Ilna took the hank of cords out of her sleeve and began knotting them. She had no pattern in mind, but it gave her fingers something to do as she walked and stared into a self-lit emptiness, a place without shape or color or hope.

As the pieces of cord joined into fabric, a line of jagged darkness drove a schism through the gray. Ilna walked toward it, without confidence or even hope. She would face her future as she faced all things, without complaint or flinching. If that future meant this place, this non-place, for all eternity, then so be it.

She stepped into the crevice in the gray, and through it, into a world of color again. This wasn’t the waking world Ilna had departed a seeming lifetime ago: the hues were washed out like those of vegetable dyes left in the sun, and when Ilna tried to touch the oak beside her, her hand passed through the bark with only the slightest resistance.

That didn’t matter. This was a world, even if it wasn’t hers.

Breathing deeply, she stood among the trees on top of a hill otherwise grassy. On one horizon—the sky was bright but there was no sun, so she couldn’t tell directions—rose the hulking stone forms of great buildings, spires and cylinders and domed roofs carried on pillars. The movement along the ramp circling the outside of a tower was a line of human beings climbing it; at this distance they were ant-sized.

In a swale below Ilna, two chastely dressed women talked with what would have been a man—he was nude, so that wasn’t in doubt—if he’d had a human head instead of a stag’s. Ilna thought first he was wearing a mask, but the beast’s pinched-in skull was narrower than a man’s.

The stag-man extended a hand. One of the women took it tentatively. They turned and walked together toward a nearby glade. After a moment, the other woman followed them.

Ilna’s lips tightened, but it was nothing to do with her. Tenoctris told her there would be a track somewhere….

Yes, of course; and quite obvious when she looked for it. A discontinuity trailed across the landscape—across this world, moreover, because the sky itself showed the same distortion. It was an absence and bunching, like the damage caused by pulling a single thread from a fabric.

In the middle distance, a procession of humans mounted on beasts Ilna had never seen or imagined came riding across the strain mark. There were hogs the size of oxen, horses with the hind parts of lions, and a thing like a goat that walked hunched over on two legs—but saddled and ridden by a nude woman as lushly beautiful as Syf, the goddess of love, whose image harlots wanted woven into their scarves.

Ilna grinned coldly. The customer can request any design she pleases; but the weaver refused some requests as she pleased.

The riders talked cheerfully among themselves. They didn’t seem to notice the discontinuity as they approached, but when each crossed it he or she fell silent for a time. A man plucking a harp made from antelope horns fumbled his instrument and almost dropped it.

They passed out of sight behind a hill. One of the women had brought a curved brass horn to her lips several times as she rode along, but Ilna heard neither the horn call nor the voices some of the others raised in song. So far as Ilna was concerned, this place was as silent as the bottom of a frozen millpond.

She started off, following the distortion. It struck her that whatever had warped this world might be unpleasant company to meet. Tenoctris hadn’t seemed to think that was likely; and if it happened, well, they’d see what came next.

Ilna smiled faintly. Her fingers were knotting another pattern, this time one she understood very well. If she met the thing, then it too might find it was in unpleasant company.

She continued in the direction of the strain. Her legs moved normally, but instead of feeling the touch of springy turf she found herself on a path circling a lake when her foot came down.

The water was so clear that only the ripples quivering from ivory boats shaped like fallen leaves showed that there was a surface. Couples and trios sat in the boats; a handsome older woman poled one while a youth smiled at her from a cushion in the bow, but the other vessels merely drifted.

A group of severe-looking bearded men stood on the shore a few feet away, talking among themselves with a solemnity obvious even without Ilna being able to hear them. One stared fiercely in her direction; she frowned and waved a hand toward him. He turned, having composed his mind, and resumed the discussion with his fellows.

So. She could see but not hear the inhabitants of this place, and they couldn’t even see her.

The chasm in the world stretched across a distant building that looked as if it was teased from meringue. It was decorated with fanciful wings, puffs, and feathers of alternating pink and blue. A naked man was dancing on the tip of one of the flares; a bird, easily the size of the man, watched him with the solemn dignity which he so completely lacked.

Ilna’s nose wrinkled. She stepped forward, wondering what would happen if she found herself within the dreadful structure. It disturbed her, and not merely because it was tasteless.

Ilna was used to tastelessness, after all. She’d now lived in cities as well as the countryside where she was born. She’d found people were generally the same anywhere, and even more generally without taste or decency—judged by Ilna’s standards, of course, but she lived by those standards and saw no reason she shouldn’t judge others by them also.

Her foot came down in a forest. Near her a stocky man with unkempt hair drew figures and symbols on a slab of rock, using his finger for a stylus and lees dipped from a wine cup for ink. He wore a calm, distracted look; Ilna suspected that he still wouldn’t have seen her if they’d been fully in the same world.

Ilna understood that kind of focus. She practiced it herself, after all.

Tenoctris had called this place “the dreamworld.” It wasn’t what Ilna thought of dreams being filled with, but perhaps that was because she herself dreamed rarely and those few times were always unhappy.

The strain mark passed through the kneeling man’s bare right foot. His big toe twitched to a rhythm controlled by the shimmer of the discontinuity, but his gaze never faltered and his finger continued to draw. With a nod of approval, Ilna strode on.

She was in a darkness lit by the fires of devastation. A city burned on the skyline. Its structures were silhouetted and picked out by flames leaping from roofs and through the windows.

A slender bridge arched between buildings. The figure crossing it was human or might have been, using a long pole to balance. The exercise seemed pointless as both ends of the bridge blazed like a rich man’s hearth in the winter, but the figure struggled on.

Ilna smiled without humor. She’d never dreamed that particular dream, but she understood the mind from which it sprang.

She walked on. How far was she to go? Until she’d found an answer, she supposed. She could only hope that she’d recognize what Tenoctris had sent her after. Since the old wizard hadn’t known what the thing was, Ilna might wander this landscape until she chose to turn back, having failed.

She smiled again, even more harshly. She might well fail, but she wouldn’t turn back.

She stepped into the boggy lowlands that fringed a river. Eyes peered through the reeds toward her, then vanished in a muddy bubble that popped silently. Did the things that weren’t human—the things that lived in this place that dreamers visited—see what the dreamers’ eyes did not?

Ilna took another step; she flinched despite herself when she found herself in a wasteland. The ground had been baked till it cracked. A few woody-stemmed plants twisted from it, their gray-green leaves wrapped into tight bundles in hope of better times. There’d been a creek large enough to be crossed by an arched stone bridge, but the channel was now so dry that a dust devil swirled briefly over the silt-blanketed rocks.

To Ilna’s right was a round tower; a fortress, perhaps, or a prison. The gate leaves were open; an iron grate had slipped halfway down from its slot above the passage, then skewed and stuck. Ilna saw no sign of life, either in the structure or the surrounding landscape it was meant to dominate.

On the dust-blown path between the bridge and the tower stood a wagon carrying a large iron cauldron. The skeleton of a horse lay between the wagon poles; the beast’s flesh and all but a few brass studs of the harness had wasted away.

The strain in this world’s fabric ended at the mouth of the cauldron.

Ilna looked about her, seeing nothing more than she’d seen the last time she looked around. She glanced at the knotted pattern in her hands, nodded, and took a step. This time she remained in the same landscape, just a little closer to the wagon.

The tailboard lay on the ground; it had shrunk out of the mortise meant to hold it. Ilna stepped onto the wagon bed, paused, and looked into the cauldron.

Instead of rusty iron she saw below her the interior of a temple. A group of priests wearing robes of white-slashed black chanted around a pool which reflected the full moon.

“Thank the Sister!” called a voice behind Ilna. She whirled to see a girl dressed in animal skins running toward the wagon. “That goat I sacrificed to Her has saved me after all!”