The Rats and the Ruling sea

3

7 Teala 941

'You will allow, sir, that the Annuncet is more than noise: it is music, after a fashion. No two Mzithrini elders sing it quite the same, although I'm told the words are simple: This house is open to men and gods; none need fear it save devils and the devilish; come, and find the good you seek. All very pleasant. Still our sfvantskor guests were loath to part with their blades.'

King Oshiram II, Lord of Simja, chuckled at his own remark. Walking at the royal elbow, at the centre of a vast, ecstatic throng, Eberzam Isiq returned a smile: the most false in his long public life. His heart was pounding, as from battle. He was hot in his wedding regalia — antique woollens, leather epaulettes, otterskin cap with the admiralty star — and the king's chatter grated in his ears. Still the old admiral walked with lowered eyes, measured step. He was an ambassador, now, and an ambassador must show the greatest deference to a king, even the petty king of an upstart island.

'Enlightened policy, Sire,' he heard himself say. 'Simja has nothing to gain by allowing armed and violent men to walk her streets.'

'Nothing,' laughed Oshiram. 'But by that token who can we afford to exclude, hmmm?'

The sun was high over Simja: it was approaching noon. The mob of well-wishers assaulted the king's retinue with their cheers, their spark-flinging firecrackers, their piercing fishbone whistles. Onlookers filled every window, the young men dangling perilous from the balconies. Flightless messenger birds nine feet tall skirted the crowds, grimy boys clinging to their necks. Monks of the Rinfaith droned in harmony with their bells.

They passed under an arch between the port district and the Street of the Coppersmiths. The king pointed out the workshop from which he'd ordered lamps for the ambassadorial residence. Isiq nodded, in agony. The blary fool. Does he think I wish to speak of lamps?

Before the two men walked a vision. His daughter, Thasha, had been at war with lavish clothing since she was old enough to ruin it. She was not a good Arquali girl but a bruising fighter, with a conscript's temper and a grip to make a wrestler wince. And yet here she was: grey-gowned, satin-shoed, cheeks dabbed with powdered amethyst, golden hair twisted up in a braid they called a Babqri love-knot. Exquisite, beautiful, an angel in the flesh: the mob breathed the words after her in a sigh no effort could contain.

Thasha looked straight ahead, back rigid, face quiet and resolved. Isiq's pride in her stabbed him at every glance. You did this. You brought her here. You dared not fight for your child.

A small entourage surrounded Thasha: the personal friends custom allowed her to name. The swordsman, Hercol Stanapeth, her friend and tutor of many years, tall and careworn and matchless in a fight. Mr Fiffengurt, the Chathrand's good-hearted quartermaster, whose stiff walk and one-eyed way of looking at the world ('the other just points where it pleases') reminded the admiral of a fighting cock. And of course the tarboys, Pazel and Neeps.

The two youths, despite vests and silk trousers hastily provided by the king, looked terrible. Ragged, red-eyed, bruised about the face. Pazel Pathkendle, child of vanquished Ormael, gazed out through his straight nut-brown locks with an expression more like a soldier's than that of a boy of sixteen. A searching look, and a sceptical eye. He had turned that sort of look on Isiq at their first meeting, when the admiral found him with Thasha in her cabin, and Pathkendle declared, in so many words, that her father was a war criminal.

At the time the charge had felt outrageous. By tonight it could well be an understatement.

The other tarboy, Neeps Undrabust, fidgeted as he walked. A head shorter than Pathkendle, he glared at the crowds on both sides of the street, as if searching for a hidden enemy. They fear the worst, thought Isiq, but have they lived long enough to withstand it when it comes? For that matter, have I?

They had argued the night away — the tarboys, the admiral, Hercol and Thasha — and yet they'd failed to find a way to save her. Not from a loveless marriage; she would suffer that but briefly. Days, weeks, a fortnight or two. The Mzithrin Kings would need no longer to discover how they had been deceived, and to murder the girl at the deception's heart.

His cravat was too tight. He had dressed without a mirror, repelled by the thought of the face awaiting him there: the face of an imbecile patriot, a blind blunt tool in the kit of Magad V, Emperor of Arqual, and his spymaster Sandor Ott. By the fiends below, I hate myself more than Ott.

The king touched his elbow. 'Are you quite well, Ambassador?'

Isiq drew himself up straight. 'Perfectly, Sire. Forgive me, I confess I was lost in thought.'

'As a father must be at such a time. And I know the matter of your musings.'

'Do you?'

'Of course,' said the king. 'You're pondering what last words of wisdom to bestow upon the child of your flesh. Before another man takes your place, as it were. Do not fear: Simjan custom shall be observed today as well as Mzithrini. On this island fathers and daughters enjoy a private leave-taking. I trust you've understood? It is of course why we make for the Cactus Gardens.'

'I'm aware of your tradition, Majesty, and glad of it.'

'Splendid, splendid. You'll have eleven minutes alone with her. But do wave to my people, won't you, Isiq? They've had no small bother about all this, and see! They've laid down flowers for the Treaty Bride.'

A whole street of flowers, in fact: the last approach to the gardens was buried in blossoms, a thousand yards of yellow scallop-shell blossoms with a honeyed scent, poured two inches deep and bordered with rosewood. Children from the mob had been allowed past the guards and stood with eager handfuls, presumably to toss at the Bride. It seemed a crime to walk on the flowers, but that was clearly the idea.

'Isporelli blossoms, Excellency,' said the king's chamberlain from behind them.

'Are they? Pitfire!'

His little outburst turned heads. Isiq had not seen isporelli in fifteen years, nor wanted to. They were his late wife's favourite.

'You may thank Pacu Lapadolma for this intelligence,' said the king, as they trampled beauty flat. 'She has exchanged letters with our Mistress of Ceremonies for the better part of a year, now, and helped out in many particulars.'

The girl in question walked just behind Thasha's entourage, on the arm of Dr Ignus Chadfallow. Isiq could hardly bear to look at Chadfallow, a favourite of the Emperor and, until yesterday, Isiq's best friend. Better to look at Pacu, lovely Pacu, daughter of a general and niece of the Chathrand 's owner. She was sixteen, like Thasha and the tarboys, and already a widow. She was also Thasha's Maid-in-Waiting. Thasha had once remarked that the girl could as easily have done her 'waiting' back in Etherhorde and spared them months of misery: she and Pacu did not get along.

'She has generosity of spirit,' Isiq had retorted. 'She loves Arqual as passionately as any man in uniform. And she believes in the Great Peace. I heard her say as much to her aunt.'

The Great Peace. He had believed in it too. Desperately, although in secret, for a soldier of Arqual was not expected to waste his energies imagining peace with the enemy he had been trained to destroy. Isiq had been born into a world of chaos and fear. He could not remember a time when the spectre of war, and annihilation should the war go badly, had not hung over his family. Defending Arqual against the Mzithrin, and the numberless small foes and revolutionaries that boiled up from the marshy edges of the Empire, was the noblest life he could have chosen. The only life, by damn. The only choice you could have lived with, once you knew you had it in you. He was a soldier of Arqual, and even if he sat out the rest of his days in the court of this foppish King Oshiram he would never truly be anything else.

Half a century in the service. Half a century of struggle and bloodshed, maimed friends, fatherless children: he saw now that they had all built to this moment. Treaty Day. The Great Peace. Millions were waiting for it to begin.

And it was all a monstrous sham. Peace was the furthest thing from the mind of his Emperor, as Thasha and her friends had grasped before anyone. For chained in the bowels of the Chathrand was a deposed king of the Mzithrin, the Shaggat Ness, a madman who thought himself a god. His twisted version of the Old Faith had seduced a quarter of the Mzithrini people, and inspired a doomed but hideously bloody uprising. When the Mzithrin Kings at last crushed the rebellion, the Shaggat had fled in a ship called the Lythra — right into the jaws of Arqual's own navy.

The Lythra had been blown to matchsticks. But the Shaggat, and his two boys, and his sorcerer: they had been plucked from the waves alive, and whisked off to a secret prison in the heart of Arqual.

He was the most dangerous lunatic in history, east or west. For forty years now the world had thought him safely drowned. And for forty years Arqual's guild of assassins, the Secret Fist, had been infiltrating the Shaggat's worshippers. On Gurishal, the fanatics' war-blighted island of exile, the Secret Fist had stoked their faith, encouraged their martyrdom, assassinated the moderates among them. And above all, it had spread a false prophecy of the Shaggat's return. Those gods-forsaken wretches! They might have abandoned their cult and rejoined the Mzithrin by now, if only we'd let them be!

Instead, the spymaster Sandor Ott had prepared them for a second uprising, even as Arqual and the Mzithrin prepared, with the greatest sincerity, for peace.

If you want a lie to fool your enemy, test it on a friend. The proverb was surely Ott's cardinal rule. Even the highest circles of the Arquali military (of which Isiq was indisputably a part) had been kept ignorant. And the blood-drinking Mzithrinis: they had taken the bait in both hands, as King Oshiram's prattle made clear.

'They've loaded three ships full of presents, Isiq. Sculpture, tapestries, fiddles and flutes, a whole spire from a ruined shrine. A petrified egg. A miraculous talking crow. All for Arqual — the ships as well, mind you. And they're sending artists to paint your Emperor Magad. I gather they're dying to know what he looks like.'

'The world changes swiftly, your Highness,' mumbled Isiq.

'It does not seem very swift to me — one day I will show you the City of Widows — yet I understand you, Isiq, I declare I do. Peace is our destiny, and we who have lived to see these days must rejoice. The future! How welcome it is!'

A few decades without a bloodbath, and he thinks it's for ever. But how could anyone have guessed the sheer, foul audacity of the plan? For the prophecy Ott had spread among the Shaggat's faithful came down to this: that their God-King would return when a Mzithrin prince took the hand of an enemy soldier's daughter. Isiq was that soldier, and Thasha the incendiary bride.

Horror and betrayal: and that was before the sorcerer entered the game.

Isiq waved to the mob, despair gnawing his heart like some ghastly parasite. Who among them would believe, even if he screamed it, that as soon as his daughter took Prince Falmurqat's hand the Great Ship would set sail — not for Etherhorde, as they'd pretend, but for the depths of the Nelluroq, the Ruling Sea, where no other ship left afloat could follow her? That by crossing that chartless monstrosity of ocean, resupplying in the all-but-forgotten lands of the southern hemisphere, and returning far to the west of Gurishal, they would do the impossible — sail around the White Fleet, that impenetrable naval wall, sweep down on Gurishal from the Mzithrinis' blind side, and return the Shaggat to his horde? Preposterous! Unthinkable!

So unthinkable that it could just come to pass.

No, King. Do not welcome the future, do not hasten it. A cracked mirror, that is all it will prove: a desert where we maroon our children, a broken image of the past.

The Cactus Gardens were the pride of Simja. Tended by a guild of botanical fanatics, they stretched over four dry acres in the heart of the city, a patch of earth that had never been built upon. There were cacti tall as trees and small as acorns, cacti that climbed and cacti that wriggled along the ground, cacti disguised as stones, or heavy with armoured fruit, or bristling with six-inch spikes.

At the heart of the garden rose the Old Sentinels: two rows of ugly, blistered, thousand-year-old plants that groped like tortured fingers at the sky. Between them walked Isiq and his daughter, hand in hand, alone. The procession had swept on without them, into the Royal Rose Gardens next door. Their eleven minutes had begun.

'Failed,' said Isiq.

'Stop saying that,' said Thasha, pulling a wayward spike from her gown. 'And pick your feet up when you walk! You never used to shuffle along like a clown.'

'I won't waste these last moments bickering,' he said. 'Nor will I ask you to forgive me. Only to remember, to think of me now and again, should you somehow-'

Thasha put a hand to his lips. 'What a silly ass you are. Why won't you trust me? You know I have a tactical mind.'

Isiq's brow furrowed. Despite his best efforts he had dozed off briefly in the night. One moment he had been seated on a bench in his cabin, his great blue mastiffs snoring at his feet. The next she was kissing him awake, saying that the Templar monks had drawn their boat alongside the Chathrand, waiting for her. A new steadiness had shown in her face, a resolve. It had frightened him.

Now between the monstrous cacti he pressed her hand to his chest.

'If you have devised some plan, you and Hercol and those mad-dog tarboys, it is for you to trust me. Reveal it now. We'll have no other chance to speak.'

Thasha hesitated, then shook her head. 'We tried, last night. You started shouting, remember? You forbade us to speak.'

'Only of madness. Only of running, or fighting our enemies head-on, or other forms of suicide.'

'What if suicide's the answer?' she said, looking at him fiercely. 'No marriage, no prophecy come true. It's better than anything you've come up with.'

'Do not rave at me, Thasha Isiq. You know His Supremacy left me no choice.'

'I'm tired of that excuse,' said Thasha sharply. 'Even today you're saying "no choice," when the most dangerous thing would be to take no risks at all.'

'That is juvenile idiocy. I know what risk is, girl. I have been a soldier three times as long as you've been alive. You have courage, that's something no one denies. But courage is just one of the virtues.'

Thasha heaved a sigh. 'Daddy, this is the last thing-'

'Another is wisdom, rarer and more costly to earn than skill with a blade. And dearer than either of these is honour, which is a sacred trust, and once lost not easily-'

Something changed in Thasha's face. She snatched her hand away and boxed him in the ribs. The blow made a dull clink.

'Ouch! Damn! What's that blary thing in your coat?'

Isiq looked embarrassed. 'Westfirth brandy,' he said.

'Give me some.'

'Out of the question. Listen, girl, we have just-'

'GIVE ME SOME!'

He surrendered the little bronze flask. And the Treaty Bride, head to toe the image of a virgin priestess of old, tilted back her head and drank. After the fourth swallow, quite deliberately, she spat brandy in his face.

'Don't even say the word trust. You sent me away to a school run by hags. Offered me to your Emperor when he snapped his fingers. You brought me halfway round the world to marry a coffin-worshipping blood-drinking Black Rag-'

'For Rin's sake lower your voice!'

'You denied what I told you about Syrarys.'

Isiq closed his eyes. Syrarys, the beautiful consort who had shared his bed for a decade, had been exposed two days ago as Ott's lover and spy. She had made a deathsmoke addict of him. She would have killed him as soon as Thasha wed.

'You laughed when I said the Shaggat Ness was aboard,' said Thasha, 'and that Arunis planned to use him against us. You've watched everything I warned you about come true — and you still think I'm a child.'

With slow dignity, Isiq dried his face with a sleeve.

'I also watched your mother fall through a rotten balustrade. Four stories, onto marble. She'd been waving to me. She reached out as she fell. She was twenty-six, with child again, although we'd told no one. That child would be twelve, now, Thasha. Your little brother or sister.'

He could tell she was shaken. Thasha knew, of course, how her mother had died, that horrid fall from a theatre balcony. But Isiq had never told her he'd witnessed the accident, or that Clorisuela had been pregnant at the time.

'You're all I have left,' he said. 'I can't watch you die before me as she did.'

Thasha looked up at him, tears glistening in her eyes. 'Don't watch,' she said.

Then she raised her gown and swept away down the path. 'Thasha!' he cried, knowing she would not turn around. He huffed after her, cursing his stiff joints, the throbbing in his head that had only worsened since the removal of Syrarys' poison, the red silk shoes he'd consented to wear.

Silk. It was like going out in one's socks — in women's socks. How was it that no one had laughed?

'Come back here, damn it!'

In a heartbeat she would be gone for ever. There were things yet to say. Humility to recover, love somehow to confess.

'Where are you?'

He would confess, too. Before the Mzithrin prince, that irritating king, the whole distinguished mob. Stand before them and declare that the Shaggat lived, that the wedding was a trap, and Arqual ruled by a beast of an Emperor. I am guilty. She is not. Exempt her from this infamy; let it be me whom you punish.

But of course he would do no such thing. For beneath his daughter's gown hung the necklace — his late wife's gorgeous silver necklace. Arunis had put a curse on that silver chain, and had sworn to strangle her there on the marriage dais should anyone interfere with the ceremony. He had demonstrated that power yesterday, though Isiq would never have doubted it. This was, after all, a man who had come back from the dead.

He had been hanged. Everyone agreed on that point: Arunis had been hanged, nine days on the gibbet, and his body chopped into pieces and tossed into the sea. Chadfallow had described the execution in detail; he had been there. Yet through some black magic Arunis had cheated death. For twenty years there had been no hint of him, no rumour. Like Sandor Ott, he had astonishing patience. And only when the spymaster was at last ready to deploy the Shaggat, his master weapon — only then did Arunis suddenly return, and strike.

'Do you hear the horn, Thasha? We have five minutes! Come back!' What fools the sorcerer had made of them all. Under their very noses he had left the Chathrand in Ormael, rendezvoused with Volpek mercenaries, and raided the sunken Lythra. With Pazel's forced assistance, he had retrieved an iron statue known as the Red Wolf. The statue itself was no use to him, but within its enchanted metal was the one thing he needed to make his Shaggat invincible: the Nilstone, scorge of all Alifros, a cursed rock from the world of the dead.

Yesterday, in an unnatural calm, the mage had demonstrated his power to kill Thasha with a word. His advantage proved, he had forced the crew to raise the iron forge to the Chathrand's topdeck, and to stoke a great fire under the Red Wolf. Bit by bit the Wolf had succumbed to the flames. At last, before their eyes, it had melted to bubbling iron.

There had followed an hallucinatory succession of shocks. The Nilstone, revealed. Captain Rose flying like a madman at Arunis; Sergeant Drellarek clubbing him down. The molten iron spilled, men in agony leaping into the sea. The Shaggat bellowing triumph as he grasped the artefact — and death running like a grey flame up his arm: for the Nilstone (as they all learned presently) killed at a touch any with fear in their hearts.

Finally, strangest of all, that instant silence, like the deafness after cannon-fire, and a brief but ghastly dimming of the sun. When Isiq recovered his senses, he saw Pazel with his hand on the Shaggat — on a stone Shaggat, one withered hand still clutching his prize.

It seemed this dusty tarboy was himself steeped in magic: he had a language gift (the little bastard spoke some twenty tongues; Isiq had heard him; he was a walking Carnival of Nations) as well as three powerful spell-words, Master-Words he called them, each of which could be spoken only once. He had used the first yesterday: a word that turned flesh to stone. And in a burst of genius for which Isiq would thank him forever, Pazel had foreseen that if the mad king died, Arunis would slay Thasha the next instant. Before the Nilstone could kill the Shaggat, Pazel had leaped forward and petrified him. Arunis believed he could reverse the spell — and as long as he dreamed of doing so, he had a reason to let Sandor Ott's game of betrayal go forwards.

But the necklace — every scheme for saving Thasha foundered on that necklace. Arunis would kill her if they talked, if he overheard the least rumour of a conspiracy, passing among the guests. And the necklace tightened of its own accord if any hand sought to remove it. I cannot even sacrifice myself for her. I have the courage. And no cause left to live for, witless servant that I have been. I would humble them ere they slew me, if I could but strike'Confound it all!' he thundered. 'Where are you, girl?'

'This way, Daddy.'

He turned a corner and there she was, sipping from his flask again, beside an odd little reflecting pool. No, it was a birdbath. No'Is that… a plant?'

Thasha pointed to a sign at their feet.

BIRD-EATING BRAMIAN CACTUS DO NOT TOUCH!

What seems a multicoloured pool is in fact a highly toxic jelly above a vegetal maw. Birds as large as vultures spot this cactus from the air, stoop to drink, and die. Those falling forward pass through the jelly over the course of several weeks and are dissolved. The body of a single desert finch can sustain the cactus for a month.

Isiq put an uncertain hand on her shoulder. 'A strange, cruel world,' he said.

'Yes,' said Thasha, leaning against him, 'it is.'

'They're fighting again,' said Neeps.

Pazel held still, listening. ' "A coffin-worshipping, blood-drinking" — Rin's teeth! She shouldn't say that.'

The two ex-tarboys stood near the garden wall, Hercol and Fiffengurt at their sides. Unlike Thasha they kept their voices low. These rose gardens were smaller than their cactus counterparts, and the wedding entourage quite filled them. The flowers were scarlet, white, yolk-orange; their perfume hung like a sweet steam in the air. Caterers in royal Simjan livery were dashing among them with with trays of clinking glasses. Servants fanned the elder statesmen, who grumbled in their chairs. Beside a fountain in the shape of the Tree of Heaven the king was promising the wilting dignitaries 'a feast for the ages' when the ceremony ended. Pacu Lapadolma, true to her Maid-in-Waiting role, hovered by the gate to the Cactus Gardens.

Fiffengurt trained his good eye on her. 'Perhaps we should confide in Mistress Pacu.'

'No!' snapped Neeps.

'No,' Pazel agreed. 'She's fond of Thasha in her way, but her only real passions are horses and the glory of Arqual. Who knows what she'd do if we told her the plan?'

'The boys are right,' said Hercol. 'The Lapadolmas have fought and bled for the Magad Emperors for two hundred years, and Pacu embraces that history with measureless pride. We must assume, moreover, that Sandor Ott's spies remain active, no matter what has happened to their master.'

'I hope a ton of bricks happened to him,' said Pazel. 'Maybe one of those half-ruined buildings in Ormael.'

'He may have fled Ormael by now,' said Hercol, 'whether or not the Imperial governor has had the courage to order him brought to justice. But his agents are still in place, and they will be watching us. We shall be in danger by land and sea. Yet I cannot forget Ramachni's warning. At some point we must risk confidences again.'

Pazel felt a stab of worry. Ramachni was their mage, a good wizard in the body of a coal-black mink, who for reasons he would not discuss had taken an interest in Thasha for years. His home was not Alifros but a distant world. Pazel had glimpsed that world once, through a magic portal, the thought of which thrilled and frightened him to this day.

But last night Ramachni had left them. The battle with Arunis had taken all his strength, and forced him to crawl back through the portal to his own world, to recuperate. Find new allies, he had told them as he left: find them at all costs, or you can't hope to prevail. And when would he return? Look for me, he had said, when a darkness falls beyond today's imagining.

To Pazel that sounded like a very long time. He wondered if the others felt the same vague terror as he did. Without Ramachni's wisdom they were fumbling, blind — lost in the darkness already.

'You took one risk this morning, didn't you?' said Fiffengurt. 'You trusted me.'

Hercol laughed. 'That was not difficult. Pazel, Neeps and Thasha all vouched for you. Agreement among them is too rare a thing to ignore.'

'Yet I'm fond of Arqual myself,' said Fiffengurt. 'Not the Empire, mind you: I mean the old notions we sang about in nursery-days — Arqual, Arqual, just and true, land of hope forever new — before all this lust for territory and hugeness. They stole that Arqual out from under our noses a long time ago, in my granddad's day, maybe. If it ever existed, that is. By the Blessed Tree, I always thought it once had. But after what I've seen aboard Chathrand I don't know what to think.'

Hercol gave a rueful smile. 'It existed,' he said. 'But not in your grandfather's time. Perhaps his grandfather saw its twilight, as a young man. Such talk must wait, however. We must concentrate on Thasha if we are to save her.'

'I just wish we could tell the admiral,' said Pazel, looking sombrely through the gate.

'Not a chance,' said Fiffengurt. 'Thasha said it herself: old Isiq would never have agreed.'

'Master Hercol,' said a voice behind them.

The friends fell quickly silent. A young man with a bright smile and handsome, chisel-jawed features was standing a few paces away, hands folded. He was dressed smartly, dark vest over white shirt, billowed sleeves held snug at the wrists with cufflinks of polished brass: the uniform of a page or errand-runner for the well-to-do. He gave them a slight, ironic bow.

'What do you want, lad?' said Hercol. 'I don't know you.'

'Not know me?' said the youth, his voice amused. 'Does the leaf forget the tree that made it, or the tree the wooded mountain?'

Hercol froze at the words. Then he slowly turned to face the young man. The youth gave him a barely perceptible nod.

'Keep an eye out for Thasha,' said Hercol to the others. Then he took the young man by the elbow and moved swiftly away through the crowd. Pazel watched them cross a pebble-strewn path, around a trellis of scarlet flowers, and disappear towards a far corner of the garden.

To his surprise, Pazel felt a sudden, irrepressible desire to know what they were up to. Leaving Neeps protesting by the gate, he darted after Hercol and the youth. The rose bushes were tall and thick, and the guests were many, and it was several minutes before he spotted the pair — through the sun-dappled spray of the fountain, as it chanced.

Hercol was standing beside a pair of tall, fair women, wearing sky-blue gowns and circlets of silver in their hair. They were twin duchesses from Hercol's country; he had pointed them out to the tarboys just an hour before. The three were chatting quietly, sipping cups of hyacinth nectar. The Simjan youth was nowhere to be seen.

Pazel felt rather a fool — Hercol was making pleasantries, like everyone else. But when the sisters took their leave Hercol did not start back to the gate. Instead he turned very casually to face the juniper bushes. Pazel followed his gaze. And to his great surprise, he saw a face.

The junipers, he realised now, were arranged to hide a section of the iron fence around the gardens. The gaps were few and narrow. But framed in the largest, just beyond the fence, were the head and shoulders of an old but striking woman. She was tall and stern, grey eyes under a grey mane of hair, a face not so much wrinkled as creased with long thought. A royal face, Pazel thought, for he had been looking at royalty all morning; and yet there was something about this face that was like no other he had ever seen.

Her eyes met the Tholjassan's. Hercol kept very still, but it was like the stillness of a hunting hound tensed to spring. Then the woman drew a hood over her face and turned away. Pazel saw a pair of large, hard-faced men beside her, gripping her arms in the manner of body-guards. An instant later she was gone.

'What in the Pits?' muttered Pazel.

A hand touched his elbow. It was Neeps, looking rather flustered. 'Where've you been?' he demanded. 'Thasha will be here any minute, and Pacu's throwing a first-class fit.'

'You won't believe what I just saw.'

'Try me,' said Neeps.

Before Pazel could say more, a voice cried shrilly: 'Here she comes now! Boys! Boys!'

Neeps sighed. 'Come on, before she calls out the marines.'

They hurried back to the gate. The fact that they were Thasha's best friends did not matter a fig to Pacu Lapadolma. To her they were just tarboys, born to serve their betters, and nothing short of marrying royalty themselves could change that.

She snapped her fingers at them. 'Get in position! You' — she pointed at Pazel — 'must straighten your coat, and your hat, and keep your hair out of sight if possible. And there is a rose petal stuck to your shoe.'

Pazel raked uselessly at his hair. They had already thought of a dozen choice insults for the general's daughter. Neeps for his part was only awaiting the end of the crisis to deliver them.

'Do you have the Blessing-Band?'

Pazel tapped his vest pocket, where the silk ribbon lay coiled. 'Nothing's happened to it since the last time you asked.'

The young woman might have snapped a retort had Thasha not appeared just then at the gate.

'Darling!' said Pacu, seizing her arm.

Thasha firmly detached the hand. 'The last person who called me 'darling' was poisoning my father, Pacu.'

'What a dreadful comparison, you heartless thing! Syrarys never meant the word, and I love you like a sister. But you're simply gorgeous, Thasha Isiq! Yes, a sister, that's the exact sensation in my heart!'

'You're an only child.'

Pacu rescued an orchid that was sliding free of Thasha's love-knot. She gave an inquisitive sniff, and her eyes widened. 'Have you put on some new perfume? Or is it your father's cologne?'

'Never mind that,' said Thasha quickly. 'Be an angel, Pacu. Fetch me a glass of water.'

When she had gone Thasha turned and looked at the tarboys. 'Darlings!' she said.

'Thasha,' said Pazel. 'You're swaying.'

'You'd be swaying too if you tipped left and right.'

Neeps' jaw dropped. 'Lord Rin,' he whispered. 'She's drunk.'

Pazel leaned closer, sniffing. 'Brandy! Oh Thasha, that was a bad idea.'

'Yes,' she said. 'It took me about half a minute to realise that. But I'm all right.'

Hercol returned, with Mr Fiffengurt at his side. 'The girl's been drinking,' Neeps informed them. 'Eat something, Thasha. Anything. Rose petals. Grass. Make yourself sick before-'

'Neeps,' said Pazel. 'She's not exactly falling down.'

'Ha!' said Thasha. 'Not yet.'

'Don't joke about that,' hissed Fiffengurt. 'You shouldn't have drunk a blary thing! Foolish, foolish, mistress!'

'That it certainly was,' said Hercol. 'More than any of us, you need your wits about you. But we must make the best of it now. Perhaps the drink will steady you for the ordeal to come. Hello, Admiral.'

Eberzam Isiq had arrived at the gate, quite winded. He waved at Thasha in distress. 'She has — I objected fiercely — but the fact is-'

'We noticed, Excellency,' said Pazel. 'Don't worry. Neeps and I will stay close to her.'

'He will worry,' said Thasha. 'And just wait — he's going to try once more to tell us all what to do, even though he has no idea and will have to make up some useless flimflam on the spot. He's an old buffoon.'

'No he's not,' said Pazel, startling everyone. 'Leave off baiting him, won't you? Think of what Ramachni said: we're a clan, like Diadrelu's clan, and we have to work together.'

'Dri's clan took her title away,' said Thasha.

'And we are humans, not ixchel,' said Hercol. 'There are worthier comparisons. But Pazel speaks a vital truth. Our enemies bicker; we must not, for whatever advantage we may have can be lost in a heartbeat.'

At that moment King Oshiram spotted Thasha and her father. He gestured to his guard captain, who sounded a note on a boar's-tusk hunting-horn: the signal for the march to the shrine. The dignitaries rose and hurried to their places. Thasha looked Pazel swiftly in the eye. It was an involuntary look, a reflex. It was the first time since daybreak that he had glimpsed her fear.

The road to the Mzithrini shrine stretched for a gentle mile, but some of the older dukes and bishwas had not walked so far in years (or their whole lives, in some cases); and the Templar monks at the head of the procession were much given to their gongs, and stopped dead for their ritual beatings; and the Boy Prince of Fuln was stung by a wasp; and goats defiled the road, leading to an ablutionary summit of all the attendant holy men. So it was that a walk the young people might have finished in half an hour stretched to thrice that time and more.

Treaty Day was a holiday, naturally. From all over Simja the common folk had come, and from neighbouring islands, and well beyond. At first light they had rushed to the city square to watch the Rite of the Firelords, in which masked figures representing the Night Gods were driven back to their dark kingdom by dancers with torches, who then proclaimed Simjalla ready to receive the bride. Later when Thasha approached the Cactus Gardens, the crowd stretched far ahead of her, and so again when she left the city by the North Gate.

Everyone who had entered the city seemed to have raced out of it again, eager for another glimpse of the procession. Beyond the wall the land was mostly field and heath, but wherever a barn or goat-shed or granary abutted the road it was covered with well-wishers, crammed in the windows and on the rooftops. Others had scaled the stormbreak pines that rose in a thin stand halfway between the city and the shrine.

But most simply swarmed alongside. They could draw only so near: the king had caused a chain to be stretched waist-high on either side of the road, and the palace guard saw to it that the crowd stayed on the outside. But there were exceptions. Those especially favoured by King Oshiram had the freedom of the road. So did certain musicians, city elders, the rich and their voluminous families, children in school uniform, and a few dozen others whose form of distinction no one could recall.

In the last category was the same pale young man who had conducted Hercol to his meeting with the woman behind the fence. He was alone as before, although he greeted certain of the wealthier citizens with a bow. He trotted along quite close to Thasha's inner circle, hands in pockets, and now and then glanced at them sharply with a bright, knowing smile. His expression suggested a great desire to please. But he unsettled the wedding party, for none of them knew why he was there.

'If he smiles at me again I'll throw a rock at him,' growled Neeps.

'You do that,' said Pazel.

'Don't you dare, Undrabust!' said Fiffengurt. 'You stand for your birth country, and must do proud by her. But what do you suppose that hoppity-smiley fellow wants? It's blary plain he wants something. Each time I think he's about to speak he runs off again. And now there's a dog!'

For there was a dog: a little white creature with a corkscrew tail, dashing through the legs of the guard (to the king's great amusement), darting ahead of the monks, spinning on its hind legs before them all, yipping once, and vanishing into the throng.

The guests roared. 'Jolly old Simja! What next?' cried an Ipulian count.

Thasha and her friends did not laugh. They all knew the dog. It belonged to the sorcerer, Arunis.

'That cur's woken, I'd bet my beard,' hissed Fiffengurt. 'I reckon Arunis sent it to remind us that he's watching our every move.'

'It never speaks, though,' said Pazel. 'Arunis said it hadn't woken yet — as if he expected it to, one day. But it's a nasty little brute, woken or not. We'd never have been taken prisoner back in the Crab Fens if it weren't for that dog.'

'There are woken beasts cropping up everywhere,' said Neeps. 'Do you know what the tailors who dressed us this morning were gossiping about, Mr Fiffengurt? A rabbit. A little brown hare who screamed "Mercy! Mama! Mercy!" as it ran, until the hounds caught up and killed it. And I swear I heard one of those messenger birds talking back to his rider.'

'And two woken rats on the Chathrand,' said Pazel. 'And Ott's falcon, Niriviel. Five animals in three months. Five more than I'd met in my lifetime to this point.'

'Or I in mine,' said Hercol, 'except for Ott's bird. That poor creature I have known for years.'

'Something's happening to the world,' said Thasha with conviction, 'and all these wakings are a part of it. And so is Arunis.'

Pazel looked at Hercol with alarm. 'Could he literally be causing it all?'

'No,' said Hercol. 'He is mighty, but not so mighty that he can light the flame of reason in creatures from one end of Alifros to another. If that were the case he should hardly need such servants as a prancing dog, or a washed-up smuggler like Mr Druffle. Besides, why should he wish for beasts to wake? Arunis dreams of enslaving this world, and nothing is so inimical to slavery as a thinking mind.'

'I'm a part of it too,' said Thasha, 'and the Nilstone is a part of me.'

'You're drunk,' said Neeps.

Thasha shook her head, then turned and glanced over her shoulder. 'He's close, you know.'

The others were startled. Neeps, feigning a stone in his shoe, stepped to one side of the procession and bent down. A moment later he caught up with them. 'She's right,' he said. 'Arunis is very close. Uskins is with him, looking scared out of his mind. And Dr Chadfallow's between them, talking.'

'Damn him,' whispered Pazel.

The remark did not escape Hercol. 'The doctor did not choose his walking companions,' he said. 'Rose provided a list to the Mistress of Ceremonies, and she decided who should stand with whom.'

'That doesn't mean he has to talk.'

'Nor does talk mean he is betraying us.'

'Let's not argue about the doctor,' said Fiffengurt. 'He's lost your trust, and that's the end of that. You've got a mighty task before you as well today, Pathkendle.'

'One you ought to let me help with,' said Neeps sulkily.

'Those debates are behind us,' said Hercol. 'Look: we are almost to the shrine.'

Indeed they were climbing the last little rise. The broad, whitewashed structure loomed before them, and the jade-green dome of the Declarion shone brilliant in the sun. On the broad stairs hundreds of figures, in robes of white and black, waited in silence.

'Thasha,' whispered Pazel with sudden urgency. 'Let me hear your vows.'

She looked at him blankly.

'You know,' said Pazel. 'Your vows.'

'Oh. My vows.' She pushed a drooping orchid from her face. Then, leaning close, she rasped out a string of wet Mzithrini words. The smell of brandy notwithstanding, Pazel was relieved.

'Almost,' he said. 'But for the love of Rin don't leave out the r in uspris. You want to call Falmurqat "my prince," not "my little duckling." '

'Hercol Stanapeth,' said a sudden voice behind them.

It was the pale young man from the gardens again. Hercol turned and looked at him.

'Well, lad?'

Again, that shallow, ironic bow. Then the young man fell in beside them and pulled a small envelope from his pocket. 'A gentleman stopped me at the gate, sir, and bade me deliver this to your hand.'

The young man was looking at Thasha, who returned his gaze warily. Hercol snatched the envelope. It was sealed with oxblood wax, and bore no writing. Hercol made no move to open it.

'What is your name, lad, and who is this gentleman?'

'I am Greysan Fulbreech, sir. King's clerk, though my term of employment is coming to an end. As for the gentleman, I did not ask his name. He was well dressed, and he gave me a coin.' He was still looking at Thasha. 'This message, however, I would have delivered free of charge.'

Pazel was finding it hard not to dislike this clerk. 'I'm sure King Oshiram's keeping you very busy,' he said.

'I don't get a moment's rest,' said Fulbreech, not sparing him a glance.

'Then be on your way,' growled Fiffengurt, 'unless you've more to tell us?'

The young man looked at Fiffengurt, and for a moment his smooth demeanour failed him, as though he were struggling to reach some decision. At last he took a deep breath and nodded. 'I bear another message,' he said. 'Master Hercol, she on whose answer you wait has decided. This winter there shall be fire in the hearth.'

Fulbreech stole a last glance at Thasha, and left without another word.

Only Thasha, who had known Hercol all her life, saw the shock he disguised so well. A code, she thought, but who could be sending coded messages to Hercol? She did not bother to ask for an explanation, and was glad to see the tarboys keeping silent as well. Hercol would explain nothing until he judged the moment right.

But Fiffengurt could not restrain himself. 'What in the bower of the Blessed Tree was that all about?'

'Very little, maybe,' said Hercol. 'Or perhaps the whole fate of your Empire. How does the rhyme, go, Quartermaster? Arqual, Arqual, just and true? We shall see.'

He would say no more, but in his voice was a happiness Thasha had not heard in years. Then he opened the little envelope, glanced at the single line of writing it contained, and the joy vanished like a snuffed match.

He put the envelope in his pocket. 'Greetings from the Secret Fist,' he said. 'They are watching us. As if there could be any doubt.'

The Father stood atop a staircase of great stone ovals, before the central arch of the shrine. His arms were spread as if in welcome, or perhaps to hold back the procession. Here in the sunshine his great age was more apparent, and so was his unnatural vigour. His raiment was black, and the white beard against it was like a snowdrift on a hill of coal. In his right hand he clasped a sceptre: pure gold but for a crystal set at the top, within which some dark object glittered.

His aspirants stood below him, three to a side (Look at them, people whispered, they're sfvantskors, they can kill you with their eyes shut). Like their master they wore black, but their faces were young: faces of men and women barely out of their teens. Symbols for birthplace and tribe gleamed in red tattoos upon their necks. Those nearest the Father wore white masks — ghostly against the sable robes. A seventh knelt just before the Father with a silver knife across his lap.

On the steps below the aspirants stood rows of women — a hundred or more, old and young, light and dark. Below these stood as many men, holding strange glass pipes of many colours, each one dangling from a braided thong.

Like a wave about a sandcastle the crowd engulfed the shrine, blanketing the low hills on either side of the road. A hush had fallen over them: the old man's stillness had erased all sense of a carnival from the proceedings. Toil and wind, hard stone, cold seas: these were what they saw in his unblinking eyes.

'I am nameless,' he said, and his voice carried a surprising distance. 'My holy office is my fate: there is nothing more. I am Father-Resident of Babqri City, Master of the Citadel of Hing, Confessor to His Serene Majesty King Somolar. I am the sworn foe of things evil, for ever.

'Two thousand years ago the shrines of the Old Faith stood on every isle of this archipelago, and the Gatri-Mangol, the White Kings of Mangland, presided over an age of wealth and order. Here where we are gathered rose one of the most beautiful shrines of all, destroyed by the rising sea in the Worldstorm. Twenty-six years ago I sent a letter to a monarch, new to his throne but wise beyond his years, and begged a great favour, and he granted it. We of the Faith bow before thee, Oshiram of Simja, first king of these isles to allow the rebuilding of a Mzithrin house of prayer.'

And with that the Father descended to his knees, placed the sceptre with infinite care before him, and bent his forehead to the ground.

The king fidgeted, cleared his throat. 'You're welcome, Father, very welcome. Now do rise.'

Slowly the Father took his feet.

'This house is young, but its founding-stones were recovered from the old shrine, and they are sacred. Therefore will I take my place beneath the great arch and bar the path to those whom devils claim. They may not enter here. Let them fear the attempt.'

He raised the sceptre high, and the sun gleamed on the crystal at its tip, but the dark heart was not illuminated. Then with a last fierce look he turned and marched into the shadows.

'Oh happy day,' muttered Neeps.

Thasha elbowed him. 'His sceptre,' she whispered. 'There's a drawing of it in the Polylex, or of one just like it. Something blary special, it was. Oh, what was its name?'

Pazel sighed. Thasha owned a copy of the most dangerous book ever written: the forbidden thirteenth edition of The Merchant's Polylex, the mere possession of which was punishable by death. Earlier editions, and later ones, were to be found in every ship's library and seamen's club; they were simply huge (and untrustworthy) one-volume encyclopedias. The thirteenth, however, was crammed with the darkest secrets of the Arquali Empire. But the book was more frustrating than useful, for the author had hidden those secrets in over five thousand pages of rumour and hearsay and outright myth. It was a wonder that Thasha found anything within its pages. The priest's sceptre, nowA terrible thought came to him suddenly. He gripped Thasha's arm.

'What if he's a mage?' he said, looking from one face to another. 'What if he can keep evil from entering the shrine? All evil?'

Neeps and Fiffengurt paled. Even Hercol looked alarmed. Thasha seemed to have trouble catching her breath.

'In that case…' she stammered. 'Well. In that case-'

She was interrupted by a burst of song from the Mzithrini women. It was a frightful sound, nearly a shriek. At the same moment the men raised their glass pipes and began to whirl them overhead by the straps, faster and faster, until they became mere blurs of colour in the sunlight. Astonishingly, although their orbits criss-crossed endlessly, the pipes never collided. And from them came a hundred eerie notes, high otherworldly howls, like wolves in caves of ice. It was the summons to the bride.

Thasha turned and looked back at her father. Isiq raised a trembling hand, but she was too far ahead of him to touch. She looked at each friend in turn, and longest at Pazel, who was fighting an impulse to shout, Don't go in there. Then she left her entourage and walked quickly to the steps.

The men fell back, still whirling their pipes, and so did the chorus of wailing women. And as Thasha climbed the stair a new figure emerged from the shrine. He looked to be in his thirties, nimble and straight, with a martial air about him: indeed he wore a kind of dark dress uniform, with a red sun pendant on his chest.

'Prince Falmurqat the Younger,' said Hercol.

'He's not young enough if you ask me,' growled Fiffengurt.

'A capable officer, according to Chadfallow's informants,' Hercol continued, 'but a reluctant one. Above all things his father desired a soldier-son, but until the Treaty raised the prospect of ending the long war, the son refused to have anything to do with the military. I gather he paints quite beautifully.'

'You're a lucky girl, Thasha,' said Pazel.

'And you're an idiot,' she said.

Behind the man came his parents, Falmurqat the Elder and his grey princess, and with them another Mzithrini holy man. This one was old, but not as old as the Father, and dressed not in black but a deep blood red.

Thasha and the prince met exactly as planned, on the step below the boy with the silver knife. The singing ceased; the men stopped their whirling display. Thasha looked utterly serene, now: she might have just climbed the steps of her own house on Maj Hill in Etherhorde. Without a word she lifted the knife from the boy's knees, turned and raised it to the watching thousands, and replaced it. Then she curtseyed before her prince, and he bowed in turn.

Thasha held out her hand, palm upwards and the prince studied it for a moment, smiling curiously. He spoke a few words in a voice meant for Thasha alone. Then he took up the knife and pricked her thumb.

Instantly the red-robed cleric held out a small clay cup. Thasha let seven drops of blood fall into the milk it contained. The cleric swished it seven times. And laughed — a deep, almost manic laugh. He raised the cup high.

'Mzithrin!' he boomed. 'The Grand Family! Brothers and sisters of Alifros, learn but this one word in our tongue and you learn the essence of the Old Faith. None stand alone! None are worthless, none sacrificed or surrendered, every soul has a destiny and every destiny is a note in the music of the several worlds. Before us stands Thasha Isiq, daughter of Eberzam and Clorisuela. What is to be the destiny of the Treaty Bride? I look into this milk and cannot see the gift of her blood. Has it ceased to exist? Only a simpleton could think so — only a heretic or a fool! So I ask you: can it be the fate of Thasha Isiq to vanish, dissolved in our gigantic land?

'We of the Old Faith do not believe it. The blessed milk in my cup has not destroyed her blood. No, her blood has changed the milk, irreversibly and for ever. The milk we tint red is a bond and a vow. Drinking it, we are changed: a part of this daughter of Arqual enters us, and remains. Blessings on your courage, Thasha Isiq! Blessings on our prince! Blessings on Mighty Arqual and the Holy Mzithrin, and all lands between! Blessings on the Great Peace to come!'

The crowd erupted. All that had been said until this moment left them confused, but they knew what peace was, and their cry was a surging roar of hope and excitement and remembered loss. Beaming, King Oshiram looked at his new ambassador. Smile, Isiq! One would think you were at an execution, you queer old fellow.

'But the time to drink is still a moment off,' shouted the red-robed cleric, over the lasting cheers. 'Enter now, Thasha of Arqual, and be wed.'