Wisdom of the Fox

IV

The horses were curried till their coats gleamed and hitched to the wagon waiting when Gerin went out to the stables to reclaim them. He tipped the groom who'd cared for them, saying, "You did more here than was required of you."

"Lord, you're generous beyond my deserts," the fellow answered, but Gerin noticed he did not decline the proffered coin.

Every other time Gerin had visited the Sibyl's shrine, the area around the fenced forecourt had been packed with wagons, chariots, and men afoot, and with all the visitors passionately eager to put their questions to Biton's oracle as soon as possible. The only way to get in quickly-sometimes the only way to get in at all-was to pay off one of the god's eunuch priests.

The Fox had prepared himself for that eventuality. At his belt swung two medium-heavy pouches, one an offering for the temple, the other (though the word would not be used in public) a bribe for the priest who would conduct him to the shrine.

He soon discovered he was going to save himself some money. When he and Van came to the gate in the marble outwall, only three or four parties waited ahead of them. Just a few more rolled up behind the wagon. Instead of shouting, cursing chaos, the oracle-seekers formed a single neat line.

Van recognized what that meant, too. "Let's see the priests try to squeeze anything past their due out of us today," he said, laughing.

To their credit, the priests did not try. They took the suppliants one group at a time, leading away their animals to be seen to while they consulted the Sibyl. Everything ran as smoothly as the turning spokes of a chariot wheel. Gerin wished all his visits had gone so well. He also wished this particular visit hadn't been necessary.

A plump, beardless fellow in a robe of glittering cloth of gold approached the wagon. Bowing to Gerin and Van, he said, "Gentles, you may call me Kinifor. I shall conduct you to the Sibyl and escort you from her chamber once the god has spoken through her." His voice was pleasant, almost sweet, not a man's voice but not a woman's, either.

Thinking of the mutilation eunuchs suffered, Gerin always felt edgy around them. Because the mutilation was not their fault, he always did his best to conceal those feelings. He swung a plump leather sack into Kinifor's equally plump hand. "This is to help defray the cost of maintaining your holy shrine."

The eunuch priest hefted the bag, not only to gauge its weight but to listen for the sweet jingle of silver. "You are generous," he said, and seemed well enough pleased even without any special payment straight to him; Gerin wondered if the temple would see all the money in the leather sack. The priest went on, "Descend, if you will, and accompany me to the temple."

As Gerin and Van got down from the wagon, another priest, this one in a plainer robe, came over and led the horses away. The travelers followed Kinifor through the gate and into the fenced-off temenos surrounding the shrine. The first thing the Fox saw was a naked corpse prominently displayed just inside the gateway; hideous lesions covered the body. Gerin jerked a thumb at it. "Another would-be temple robber?"

"Just so." Kinifor gave him a curious look. "Am I to infer from your lack of surprise that you have seen others Biton smote for their evil presumption?"

"Another, anyhow," Gerin answered. "With the chaos that's fallen on the northlands since the last time I was here, though, I wondered if your god was up to the job of protecting the treasures here from everyone who'd like to get his hands on them."

"This is Biton's precinct on earth," Kinifor said in shocked tones. "If he is not potent here, where will his strength be made manifest?"

Perhaps nowhere, Gerin thought. When the Elabonians conquered the northlands, they'd taken Biton into their own pantheon, styling him a son of Dyaus. But the Trokmoi brought their own gods with them, and seemed to care little for those already native to the land. If they prevailed, Biton might fail for lack of worshipers.

Van cast an appraising eye on the treasures lavishly displayed in the courtyard before the temple: the statues of gold and ivory, others of marble painted into the semblance of life or of greening bronze, the cauldrons and mixing bowls set on golden tripods, the piled ingots that reflected the sun's rays in buttery brilliance.

The outlander whistled softly. "I wondered if I misremembered from last time I was here, but no: there's a great pile of stuff about for your god to watch over, priest."

"The farseeing one has protected it well thus far." One of Kinifor's hands shaped a gesture of blessing. "Long may he continue to do so."

The white marble temple that housed the entrance to the Sibyl's cave was in a mixed Sithonian-Elabonian style, a gift of Oren the Builder to win the favor of Biton's priesthood-and the god himself-not long after the northlands came under Elabonian sway. The splendid fane, elegantly plain outside and richly decorated within, was surely magnificent enough to have succeeded in its purpose.

Seemingly out of place within all that gleaming stone, polished wood, and precious metal was the cult image of Biton, which stood close by the fissure in the earth that led down to the cavern wherein the Sibyl prophesied. The temple was a monument to Elabonian civilization at its best, to everything Gerin labored to preserve in the northlands. The cult image was… something else.

As he had the last time he visited the shrine, the Fox tried to imagine how old the square column of black basalt was. As he had then, he failed. This was no realistic image of the god, carved with loving care by a Sithonian master sculptor or some Elabonian artist who had studied for years in Kortys. The only suggestions of features the column bore were crudely carved eyes and a jutting phallus. Yet somehow, perhaps because of the aura of immeasurable antiquity that clung to it, the cult image carried as much impact as any polished product of the stonecutter's art.

"Seat yourselves, gentles," Kinifor said, waving to the rows of pews in front of the basalt column, "and pray that the lord Biton's sight reaches to the heart of your troubles, whatever they may be."

The eunuch sat beside Gerin, bowed his head, and murmured supplications to his god. The Fox also prayed, though unsure how much attention Biton paid to petitioners' requests. Some gods, like Mavrix, seemed to listen to every whisper addressed to them, even if they did not always grant requests. Others, such as Dyaus the father of all, were more distant. He didn't know where in that range Biton fell, but took no chances, either.

As soon as he finished his prayer, he glanced up at the cult image. Just for a moment, he thought he saw brown eyes staring back at him in place of the almost unrecognizable scratches on the basalt. He shivered a little; he'd had that same odd impression on his last visit to the shrine. Biton's power might not reach far, but it was strong here at its heart.

Puffing a little, a plump eunuch priest climbed up out of the fissure in the earth that led down to the Sibyl's chamber. Behind him came a grizzled Elabonian with a thoughtful expression on his face. With a nod to Gerin, he strode out of the temple and away to reclaim his team and vehicle.

Kinifor said, "Nothing now prevents us from seeking the wisdom Biton imparts through his sacred Sibyl. If you will please to follow me, stepping carefully as you descend-"

On his previous visit, Gerin had had to fight for his life against Trokmoi dissatisfied with what they heard from the oracle. He looked down to see if bloodstains still remained in the cracks between the tesserae of the mosaic floor. He saw none, which pleased him.

Kinifor stepped into the cave mouth. Gerin followed. Darkness, illuminated only by torches not nearly close enough together, swallowed him. The air in the cave felt altogether different from the muggy heat he'd endured in the temple: it was damp but cool, with a constant breeze blowing in his face so that the atmosphere never turned stagnant.

Kinifor's shadow, his own, and Van's swooped and fluttered in the torchlight like demented birds. Flickering shadows picked out bits of rock crystal-or possibly even gems-embedded in the stone of the cave walls. One glint came red as blood. "Was that a ruby we just passed?" Gerin asked.

"It could be so," Kinifor answered. "Biton has guided us to many treasures underground."

"Is it your god or your greed?" Van asked. Kinifor spluttered indignantly. The outlander laughed at the priest's annoyance. Just then they came to a branch of the cave that had been sealed up with stout brickwork. "What about that? Didn't you have to wall it up because your prying roused things that would better have been left asleep?"

"Well, yes," Kinifor admitted reluctantly, "but that was long ago, when we were first learning the ways of this cave. The bricks say as much, if you know how to read them."

Gerin did. Instead of being flat on all sides, the bricks bulged on top, as if they were so many hard-baked loaves of bread. That style had come out of Kizzuwatna in ancient days, not long after men first gathered together in cities and learned to read and write and work bronze. He took a long look at those bricks. They couldn't possibly reach back so far in time… could they?

After that first long look came a second one. Loaf-shaped bricks had not held their popularity long in Kizzuwatna: they required more mortar to bind them together than those of more ordinary shape. Some of the mortar on these, after Biton only knew how many centuries, had begun to crack and fall away from the bricks; little chips lay on the stone floor of the cave.

The Fox pointed to them, frowning. "I don't remember your wall there falling apart the last time I came this way."

"I hadn't noticed that," Kinifor confessed. "Some evening, when no suppliants seek the Sibyl's advice, we shall have to send down a crew of masons to repair the ravages of time." His laugh was smooth and liquid, like the low notes of a flute. "If the barrier has sufficed to hold at bay whatever lies beyond it lo these many years, surely a few days one way or the other are of scant import."

"But-" Gerin held his tongue. The eunuch priest was bound to be right. And yet-this wasn't a slow accumulation of damage over many years. Unless he and Kinifor were both wrong, it had happened recently.

The rift wound deeper into the earth. Kinifor led Gerin and Van past more spell-warded walls. Several times the Fox saw more loose mortar on the ground. He would have taken oath it had not been there when he'd last gone down to the Sibyl's chamber, but forbore to speak of it again. Kinifor, plainly, did not intend to hear whatever he had to say.

The priest raised a hand for those who accompanied him to halt. He peered into the chamber that opened up ahead, then nodded. "Gentles, you may proceed. Do you seek privacy for your question to the Sibyl?"

Privacy would have cost Gerin an extra bribe. He shook his head. " No, you may hear it, and her answer, too. It's no great secret."

"As you say." Kinifor sounded sulky; most people who thought a question important enough to put to the Sibyl also thought it so important that no one other than Biton and his mouth on earth could be trusted with it. Gerin had been of that opinion on his latest visit. Now, though, he did not mind if the priest listened as he enquired about his son's fate.

Kinifor stepped aside to let the Fox and Van precede him into the Sibyl's underground chamber. As before, Gerin marveled at the throne on which she sat. It threw back the torchlight with glistening, nacreous highlights, as if carved from a single black pearl. Yet contemplating the oyster that could have birthed such a pearl sent his imagination reeling.

"It is a new Sibyl," Van murmured, very low.

Gerin nodded. Instead of the ancient, withered crone who'd occupied this chamber on all his previous journeys to Ikos, on the throne sat a pleasant-faced woman of perhaps twenty-five in a simple white linen dress that fastened over her left shoulder and reached halfway between her knees and ankles. She nodded politely, first to Kinifor, then to those who would question her.

But when she spoke, she might have been the old Sibyl reborn. " Step forward, lads," she said to Gerin and Van. Her voice was a musical contralto, but it held ancient authority. Though the Fox and the outlander were both older than she, they were not merely lads but babes when measured against the divine power she represented. Gerin obeyed her without hesitation.

Coming to the crone on that seat had seemed natural to him. Finding a new, young Sibyl there made him think for the first time of the life she led. Biton's mouth on earth was pledged to lifelong celibacy: indeed, pledged never even to touch a whole man. Here far below the ground she would stay, day upon day, the god taking possession of her again and again as she prophesied, her only company even when above the earth (he assumed-he hoped-she was allowed out of the chamber when no more suppliants came) eunuchs and perhaps serving women. Thus she would live out however many years she had.

He shivered. It struck him more as divine punishment than reward.

"What would you learn from my master Biton?" the Sibyl asked.

Gerin had thought about how to ask that question all the way south from Fox Keep. If the god got an ambiguous query, the questioner was liable to get an ambiguous reply; indeed, Biton was famous for finding ambiguity even where the questioner thought none lurking. Taking a deep breath, the Fox asked, "Is my son alive and well, and, if he is, when and where shall we be reunited?"

"That strikes me as being two questions," Kinifor said disapprovingly.

"Let the god judge," Gerin answered, to which the priest gave a grudging nod.

Biton evidently reckoned the question acceptable. The mantic fit came over the young Sibyl, harder than it had with the old. Her eyes rolled up in her head. She thrashed about on the throne, careless of her own modesty. And when she spoke, the voice that came from her throat was not her own, but the same powerful baritone her predecessor had used-Biton's voice:

"The Sibyl's doom we speak of now

(And worry less about the child):

To flee Ikos, midst fearful row

(Duren's fate may well be mild).

All ends, among which is the vow

Pledged by an oracle defiled."

The god left his mouth on earth as abruptly as his spirit had filled her. She slumped against an arm of the throne in a dead faint.

Kinifor said, "Gentles, the lord Biton has spoken. You must now leave this chamber, that the Sibyl may recover and ready herself for those who come here next."

"But the Sibyl-or Biton, if you'd rather-said next to nothing about the question I asked," Gerin protested. "Most of that verse had more to do with you, by the sound of it, than with me."

"That is neither here nor there," Kinifor said. "The god speaks as he will, not as any man expects. Who are you, mortal, to question his majesty and knowledge?"

To that Gerin had no answer, only frustration that he had not learned more from the query over which he'd pondered so hard on the journey down from his keep. He took what coals of comfort he could: Biton had urged him not to worry. But what if that was because Duren was already dead, and so beyond worry? Would the god have mentioned him by name if he was dead, especially when Gerin had not named him? Who could say what a god would do? Where the Fox had done his best to prevent ambiguity, it had found him out. Dismayed, he turned to go.

Van pointed to the Sibyl, who remained unconscious. "Should the lass not have come back to herself by now? You'd not bring new folk down here if they were to find her nearer dead than alive."

Kinifor opened his mouth, perhaps to say something reassuring. But before he did, he too took another look at the Sibyl. A frown crinkled the unnaturally smooth skin of his face. "This is-unusual," he admitted. "She should be awake and, if a priest is here with her, asking what the god spoke through her lips."

Gerin started to take a step toward her, then remembered the conditions under which she served Biton: any touch from him, no matter how well-meaning, brought defilement with it. He wondered if that was what the last line of her prophecy meant, then stopped worrying about prophecy while she sprawled unconscious. He asked Kinifor, "Do you want to tend to her while we make our own way back up to the temple?"

He might as well have suggested burning down the fane. "That cannot be!" the eunuch priest gasped. "For one thing, you might well lose your way, take a wrong turning, and never be seen again. For another, some turns lead to treasures not displayed above ground. No one not connected with the cult of Biton may turn his eyes upon them."

"I know what Biton does to those who would be thieves," Gerin protested, but Kinifor shook his head so vehemently that his plump jowls wobbled.

Van, as usual, spoke to the point: "Well, what about the wench, then?"

Kinifor went over to her, put a hand in front of her nose and mouth to make sure she was breathing, felt for her pulse. When he straightened, his face held relief as well as worry. "I do not believe she will perish in the next moments. Let me guide you back to the surface of the earth, after which she shall, of course, be properly seen to."

"Honh!" Van said. "Seems to me you care more about Biton's gold and gauds than about his Sibyl."

Kinifor answered that with an injured silence which suggested to Gerin that his friend had hit the target dead center. But this was the priest's domain, not his, so he let Kinifor lead him out of the Sibyl' s chamber and back up the length of the cave to Biton's temple. Still grumbling and looking back over his shoulder, Van reluctantly followed.

To give Kinifor his due, he hurried along the stony way, pushing his corpulent frame till he panted like a dog after a long run. Surprisingly soon, light not from torches showed ahead, though the priest's body almost obliterated it as he climbed out of the cave mouth. Gerin came right after him, blinking until his eyes grew used to daylight once more.

"About time," rasped the tough-looking fellow who waited impatiently for his turn at the oracle. "Take me down there, priest, and no more nonsense."

"I fear I cannot, sir," Kinifor answered. "The Sibyl seems to have suffered an indisposition, and will not be able to reply to questioners at least for some little while."

That brought exclamations of dismay from the other eunuchs within earshot. They hurried to Kinifor to find out what had happened. He quickly explained. Two of Biton's servitors hurried down into the cave mouth. "If she has not yet returned to herself, we shall bring her out," one of them said as he disappeared.

The Elabonian warrior whose question was delayed shouted, "This is an outrage!" When no one paid any attention to him, he shouted viler things than that. His face turned the color of maple leaves in fall.

Gerin looked down his long, straight nose at the man. "Do you know what you remind me of, sirrah?" he said coldly. "You remind me of my four-year-old son when he pitches a fit because I tell him he can't have any honied blueberries till after supper."

"Who in the five hells do you think you are, to take that tone with me?" the fellow demanded, setting his right hand on the hilt of his sword.

"I'm Gerin the Fox, Prince of the North," Gerin said, matching the gesture with his left hand. "You should be thankful I don't know your name, or want to."

The red-faced man scowled but did not back down. Gerin wondered if he would have to fight in Biton's shrine for the second time in two visits. The temple complex had guards, but most of them were outside the fane keeping an eye on the treasures displayed in the courtyard and on any visitors who, careless of Biton's curse, might develop itchy fingers.

Then, from the entrance to the shrine, someone called, "Any man who draws his blade on Gerin the Fox, especially with Van of the Strong Arm beside him, is a fool. Of course, you've been acting like a fool, fellow, so that may account for it."

The angry Elabonian whirled. "And what do you know about it, you interfering old polecat's twat?" he snarled, apparently not caring how many enemies he made.

The newcomer strode toward him. He was a tall, lean man of perhaps forty, with a forward-thrusting face, a proud beak of a nose, and dark, chilly eyes that put Gerin in mind of a hunting hawk's. He said, "I'd be the fool if I didn't make it my business to learn all I could of Gerin the Fox. I am Grand Duke Aragis, also called the Archer."

The angry color drained from the face of the impatient warrior as he realized he'd caught himself between the two strongest men in the northlands. With a last muttered curse, he stomped out of the temple, though he took care to step wide around Aragis.

"Well met," Gerin said. He and Aragis were rivals, but not open enemies.

"Well met," Aragis answered. He turned his intent gaze on the Fox. "I should have thought I might find you here. After word of your son, are you?"

"Aye," Gerin said stonily. "And you?"

"On business of my own," Aragis said.

"Which is none of my business," Gerin suggested. Aragis noddedonce; he was not a man given to excess. Gerin said, "Have it as you wish. Whatever your question is, you may not be able to put it to the Sibyl, any more than that big-mouthed ruffian was."

"Why not?" Aragis asked suspiciously. The idea that Gerin should know something he didn't seemed to offend him.

Before the Fox could answer, the two priests who had gone down to see how the Sibyl fared came back up into the temple. They carried her between them, her face white and her arms dangling limply toward the ground. "Does she live?" Gerin called to them in some alarm.

"Good sir, she does," one of the eunuchs answered. "But since her senses do not return to her, we'll take her to her own dwelling"-he nodded his head to show in which direction from the shrine that lay-" and minister to her there. At the very least, she can rest more comfortably in her bed than in the underground chamber. Surely, though, the lord Biton will aid in her recovery." That would have come out better had it sounded more like assertion and less like prayer.

"Why should the lord Biton care?" Van asked, blunt as always. " Down below there, he sounded like he was getting out of the prophecy game."

"You rave, good sir, and tread the edge of blasphemy as well," the priest answered. He looked for support to Kinifor, who had heard the Sibyl's last prophecy.

The eunuch who had accompanied Gerin and Van made a strange snuffling sound, almost one a horse would produce, as he blew air out through his lips. Slowly, he said, "The verses may lend themselves to the interpretation proposed. Other interpretations, however, must be more probable."

Even such a halfhearted admission was enough to shock the other two priests. Clucking to themselves, they carried the unconscious Sibyl away.

Kinifor said, "I begin to fear there will be no further communing with the lord Biton this day. Perhaps everyone here would be well advised to return to his inn, there to await the Sibyl's return to health. We shall send word directly that occurs, and shall seek no further fee for your inquiries."

"You'd better not." Aragis put as much menace into three words as Gerin had ever heard. "And if the wench ups and dies, I expect my silver back."

The eunuch twisted his hand in a gesture to turn aside the evil omen. "The lord Biton would not summon two Sibyls to himself in such a short span of time," he said, but his words, like the other priest's, lacked confidence.

People filed out of the shrine, muttering and grumbling to themselves. Kinifor went out to let those who waited in the courtyard know they would be disappointed in their hope for an oracular response. Their replies, like those in the temple, ranged from curious to furious.

With rough humor, Aragis turned to Gerin. "What did you ask her, anyway, to put her in such a swivet? To marry you?"

Gerin growled down deep in his throat and took a step toward the Archer. Unlike the fellow who'd started to move on him, though, he mastered himself. "I ought to just tell you it's none of your cursed business," he said, "but since you already know why I'm here, what's the point? I asked after my son, as you've figured out for yourself."

"That's a bad business," Aragis answered. "The whoreson who did it may come to me, seeking advantage from it. By Dyaus, if he does, I'll run up a cross for him, and you'll have the boy back fast as horses can run. I swear it."

"If it happens so, I'll be in your debt," the Fox said. "I'd be lying if I told you the idea that you had something to do with it was never in my mind."

Aragis scowled. "Because we're the two biggest, we circle round each other like a couple of angry dogs-I don't trust you, either, as you know full well. But I did not have my hand in this, and I will not seek to profit from it, come what may. Would you, were it my lad?"

"I hope not," Gerin said. Aragis chewed on that, then slowly nodded. He looked sincere, but his face, as Gerin had already seen, showed what he willed it to, not necessarily what he felt. That was useful for a ruler, as Gerin knew-his own features were similarly schooled.

Van said, "All right, Archer, if you don't care to circle and watch and not trust, suppose you do tell us why you came up to Ikos, so long as it's not life or death for your holding that we know."

For a moment, Aragis was nonplussed. Gerin hadn't been sure he could be. Then his usual watchful expression returned as he considered the outlander's words. At last he said, "Fair enough, I suppose. I rode here because I've had bad dreams; I hoped-I hope still-the Sibyl could put meaning to them."

"What sort of dreams?" Gerin's curiosity was as dependable as the changing phases of the moons.

Aragis hesitated again, perhaps not caring to show a rival any weakness. But after another pause for thought, he murmured, "If I can' t understand them, you bloody well won't, either." He raised his voice to answer the Fox: "They've been filled with horrid things, monsters, call them what you will, overrunning my lands-overrunning the rest of the northlands, too, for all I could tell." He grimaced and shook his head, as if talking about the visions made him see them again.

"I too have had this dream," Gerin said slowly.

"And I," Van agreed.

"And the innkeeper from whom we've taken rooms," Gerin said. "I did not like the omen when it was Van and I alone. Now with four-" He checked himself. "Four I know of, I should say-I like it even less."

"Wherever else we rub, Fox, I'll not argue with you there." Aragis ran a hand down to the point of his graying beard. "Did the Sibyl say anything to you of this before she had her fit? What verse did she speak?"

"Why don't you ask him how big his is, as long as you're snooping?" Van said.

Like most men, Aragis seemed a stripling when set against the burly outlander. But he had no retreat in him. He reached for the sword that hung on his belt. Before Van could grab any of the lethal hardware he carried, Gerin held up a hand. "Hold, both of you," he said. "Aragis, you know what the question was. The answer has nothing to do with you, so I can give it without fear you'll gain from it." He repeated the oracular response.

Aragis listened intently, still rubbing his chin and now and then plucking at his beard. When Gerin was done, the other noble gave a grudging nod. "Aye, that's nought to do with me, and might even hold good news about Duren mixed in there. But what of the rest? I've never heard-or heard of-a reply so filled with doom. No wonder the Sibyl wouldn't wake up after she delivered it."

"I wonder if it's got summat to do with the dreams we've had," Van said.

Aragis and Gerin both looked at him. As if animated by a single will, their hands formed the same sign to turn away evil. "Off with you, omen," Aragis exclaimed. The Fox nodded vehemently.

Van said, "It's not much of an omen talk and finger-twitching'll turn aside."

"The little vole will turn and bite in the eagle's claws," Gerin answered. "One time in a thousand, or a thousand thousand, he'll draw blood and make the bird drop him. With omens, you never know which ones you can shift, so you try to shift them all."

Now it was Van's turn to look thoughtful. "Might be something to that, I suppose. I know what I'd sooner do, though, now that the Sibyl's not going to give you what you're after."

"And what's that?" Gerin asked, though he thought he knew the answer.

Sure enough, Van said, "Go back to the inn and hoist enough beakers of ale that we don't care about omens or Sibyls or anything else."

"If there's nothing for us here, we should head straight off to Fox Keep," Gerin said, but he sounded doubtful even to himself.

Van looked at the sun. "You want to start up the road just a bit before noon, so we can camp for the night in the middle of the haunted wood? Begging your pardon, Captain, that's the daftest thought you've had in a goodish while."

Gerin prided himself on his ability to admit mistakes. "You're right, it is. And if we're stuck with spending another day at the inn, how better to pass it than with a carouse?"

He looked doubtfully at Aragis. Polite talk with his main rival in the northlands was one thing, a day of drinking with him something else again. Aragis studied him with the same question on his face. The Fox realized that, while he and the self-styled grand duke were very different men, their station gave them common concerns. That was disconcerting; he hadn't tried mentally putting himself in Aragis' shoes before.

After a moment of awkward silence, the Archer resolved the problem, saying, "The way back to my holding is straight enough, and I'll be free of the woods well before sunset if I start now, so I think I'll head south."

He stuck out his hand. Gerin clasped it. "Whatever comes, I hope we get through it without trying to carve each other's livers," he said. "The only one who'd gain from that is Adiatunnus."

Aragis' eyes grew hawk-watchful again. "I hear he sent to you. You were worried whether his men stole your boy. You're telling me you didn't join forces with him."

"That's just what I'm telling you," Gerin answered. "The five hells will vomit forth the damned before I join hands with a Trokme."

He waited for Aragis to say something like that. Aragis didn't. He only nodded to show he'd heard, then walked off to reclaim the chariot or wagon in which he'd come to Ikos.

"Cold fish," Van said judiciously. "Not a man who makes an easy enemy, though, or I miss my guess."

"You don't," the Fox answered. "We've met only a couple of times before, so I don't have his full measure as a man, but what he's done in building up his holding speaks for itself. And you heard what he had done after his men hunted down a longtooth that had been taking cattle from one of his villages?"

"No, somehow I missed that one," Van said. "Tell me."

"He had an extra strong cross raised, and nailed and lashed the beast's carcass to it as a warning to others of its kind-and, more to the point, as a warning to any men who might have thought about trifling with him."

"Mm. It'd make me think twice, I expect," Van said. "Well, let's amble after him and get back our animals."

The beasts and the vehicles they drew waited outside the walled courtyard around the temple. By luck, the low-ranking priest who'd taken the wagon by the gate stood close to it now; that meant Gerin didn't have to convince someone else he wasn't absconding with the property of another. As he climbed in, he pointed to a thatch-roofed wooden cottage not far away. "Is that where the Sibyl lives when she's not prophesying?" he asked.

"So it is, good my sir," the priest answered. His smooth face held worry. "I saw her carried there not long since, and heard rumors and tales so strange I know not what to believe: even those who brought her seemed confused. Did the mantic trance take her for you?"

"It did. In fact, she lost her senses just afterwards, and did not get them back again as she usually does." Without repeating the oracular verse, Gerin told the priest what had happened in the underground chamber.

The corners of the eunuch's mouth drew down even further. "Biton grant she recover soon," he exclaimed. "Never has the good god seen fit to call two Sibyls to himself so quickly. The temple suffers great disruption while the search for a new maid to speak his words goes on."

"To say nothing of the fees you lose when the oracle is quiet," Gerin said, remembering sacks of silver he'd pressed into priests' pudgy palms.

But, in injured tones, the eunuch replied, "I did say nothing of those fees." Perhaps he was genuinely pious. Stranger things had happened, Gerin supposed. He twitched the reins, urging the horses back toward the inn.

The innkeeper and the head groom met him in front of it. "You'll honor my establishment with another night's custom?" the innkeeper asked eagerly, adding, "I trust all went well for you with the Sibyl? I gather there was some sort of commotion in the temple?" Like anyone else, he delighted in gossip.

"Not in the temple-under it," Van said. Gerin let him tell the tale this time. The outlander was a better storyteller than he, anyhow. When Gerin told what he knew, he did it baldly, laying out facts to speak for themselves. Van embellished and embroidered them, almost as if he were a minstrel.

When he was through, the innkeeper clapped his hands. Bowing, he said, "Good my sir, if ever you tire of the life you lead, which I take to be one of arms, you would be welcome to earn your bread and meat here at my inn, for surely the stories you spin would bring in enough new custom to make having you about a paying proposition."

"Thank you, sir, but I'm not quite ready yet to sit by the fire and tell yarns for my supper," Van said. "If you'll fetch Gerin and me a big jar of ale, though, that'd be a kindness worth remembering."

Seeking to be even more persuasive, Gerin let silver softly jingle. The innkeeper responded with alacrity. He shouted to his servants as Gerin and Van went inside and sat in the taproom. Grunting with effort, two men hauled a huge amphora up from the cellar. Right behind them came another fellow with a flat-bottomed pot full of earth. The Fox wondered at that until the two men stabbed the pointed base of the amphora down into the pot.

"It won't stand by itself on a wooden floor, don't you see?" the innkeeper said. "And if the two of you somehow empty it, you won't be able to stand by yourselves, either."

"Good. That's the idea," Van boomed. "You have a dipper there, my friend, so we can fill our jacks as we need to? Ah, yes, I see it. Splendid. If we do come to the point where we can't walk, you'll be kind enough to have your men carry us up to our beds?"

"We've done it a few times, or more than a few," said one of the men who'd lugged in the amphora. "For you, though, we ought to charge extra, seeing as you're heavy freight." He looked ready to bolt if Van took that the wrong way, but the outlander threw back his head and laughed till the taproom rang.

The innkeeper hovered round Gerin like a bee waiting for a flower to open. The Fox didn't take long to figure out why. He'd jingled silver, but he hadn't shown any. Now he did. The innkeeper bowed himself almost double as he made the coins vanish-no easy feat, for he was almost as round as some of the temple eunuchs.

Once paid, he had the sense to leave his guests to themselves. Van filled two jacks, passed one to Gerin. He raised on high the one he kept. "Confusion to oracles!" he cried, and poured the red-brown ale down his throat. He let out a long sigh of contentment: "Ahhhh!"

Gerin also drank, but more slowly. Halfway through, he set down his jack and said, "The poor Sibyl seemed confused enough already. I hope she's come back to herself."

"Well, so do I," Van admitted. He clucked impatiently. "Come on, Captain, finish up there so I can pour you full again. Ah, that's better." He plied the dipper. Before upending his own refilled jack, he went on, "I wonder if, for a woman with juice in her like the new Sibyl looks to have, letting the god fill you makes up for long years without a man to fill you. Not a swap I'd care to make, anyhow."

"I had the same thought myself, when I saw her in the chamber in place of the crone who'd been there time out of mind," Gerin answered. "I don't suppose Biton would speak to anyone who wasn't willing to listen, though."

"Mm, maybe not." Van kicked him under the table. "What shall we drink to this round?"

Without hesitation, Gerin raised his jack and said, "Dyaus' curse, and Biton's, too, on whoever kidnapped Duren." He emptied the jack in one long pull, his throat working hard. Van shouted approval and drank with him.

After a while, they stopped toasting with each round and settled in for steady drinking. Gerin felt at the tip of his nose with thumb and forefinger. It was numb, a sure sign the ale was beginning to have its way with him. Suddenly, half drunk, he decided he didn't feel like sliding sottishly under the table.

Van filled his own jack, lowered the dipper into the amphora, and brought it, dripping, toward Gerin's. When he turned it so the dark amber stream poured into the jack, it quickly overflowed. He scowled at the Fox. "You're behindhand there." Only the care with which he pronounced "behindhand" gave any clue to how much he'd poured down himself.

"I know. Go on without me, if you've a mind to. If I drink myself stupid today, I'll drink myself sad. I can feel it coming on already, and I have plenty to be sad about even with my wits about me."

The outlander looked at him with an odd expression. Gerin needed a moment to recognize it; he hadn't often seen pity on his friend's blunt, hard-featured face. Van said, "The real trouble with you, Captain, is that you don't let go of your wits no matter how drunk you get. Me, I'm like most folk. After a while, I just stop thinking. Nice to be able to do that now and again."

"If you say so," Gerin answered. "I've lived by and for my wits so long now, I suppose, that I'd sooner keep 'em about me all the time. I'd feel naked-worse than naked-without 'em."

"Poor bastard." Van had drunk enough to make his tongue even freer than it usually was. "I tell you this, though: a long time ago I learned it was cursed foolishness to try and make a man go in a direction he doesn't fancy. So you do what you feel like doing. Me, I intend to get pie-eyed. Tomorrow morning I'll have a head like the inside of a drum with two Trokmoi pounding on it, but I'll worry about that then."

"All right," Gerin said. "You've touched wisdom there, you know."

"Me? Honh!" Van said with deep scorn. "I don't know from wisdom. All I know is ale feels good when it's inside me, and I feel good when I'm inside a wench, and a nice, friendly fight is the best sport in the world. Who needs more?"

"No, really." The Fox had enough ale inside him to make him painfully earnest. "So many folk aren't content to let their friends"he almost said the people they love, but knew with accurate instinct that that would have been more than Van could put up with-"be what they are. They keep trying to make them into what they think they're supposed to be."

Van grunted. "Foolishness," was all he said. He plied the dipper yet again, then burst into raucous song in a language Gerin didn't know.

The outlander went to the jakes several times over the course of the afternoon as the ale extracted a measure of revenge. When he came back from the latest of those visits, he zigzagged to the table like a ship trying to tack into port against a strong wind. His chair groaned when he threw his bulk into it, but held.

Even after more drinking, he was able to paste an appreciative smile on his face when a servitor brought over flatbread and a juicy roast of beef. He used his eating knife to carve off a chunk that would have done a starving longtooth proud, and methodically proceeded to make it disappear, lubricating the passage with ale.

After so many years' comradeship, the outlander's capacity no longer amazed Gerin, even if it did still awe him. The innkeeper watched Van eat and drink with amazement, too: glum amazement that he hadn't charged more, if the Fox was any judge. Gerin did his best to damage the roast, too, but, beside Van's, his depredations went all but unnoticed.

Twilight faded into night. Torches, their heads dipped in fat for brighter flames, smoked and crackled in bronze sconces. Gerin drained his jack one last time, set it upside down on the table, and got to his feet. He moved slowly and carefully, that being the only sort of motion he had left to him. "I'm for bed," he announced.

"Too bad, too bad. There's still ale in the jar," Van said. He got up himself, to peer down into it. "Not a lot of ale, but some."

"Don't make me think about it," the Fox said. "I'm going to have a headache in the morning as is; why bring it on early?"

"You!" Van said. "What about me?" Pity showed on his face again, this time self-pity-he had indeed drunk titanically, if he'd managed to make himself maudlin.

Gerin climbed the stairs as if each were a separate mountain higher than the last. Triumph-and a bellyful of ale-surged in him when he got to the second story. The floor seemed to shift under his feet like the sea, but he reached the room he shared with Van without having to lean against the wall or grab at a door. That too was triumph of a sort.

He rinsed out his mouth with water from the pitcher there, though he knew it would be a cesspit come morning anyhow. Then he undressed and flopped limply onto one of the beds. He pulled off his sandals, hoping Van wouldn't choose the same bed and squash him when-if-the outlander made it upstairs.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the Fox sat bolt upright in bed, eyes staring, heart pounding. His head was pounding, too, but he ignored it. The horror of the dream that had slammed him out of sodden slumber made such merely fleshly concerns as hangovers meaningless by comparison.

Worst of all, he couldn't remember what he'd seen-or perhaps the darkness of the dream had been so absolute that even imaginary vision failed. Something dreadful was brewing somewhere in the dark.

The room in which he lay was dark, too, but not so dark that he could not see. Light from all the moons save Elleb streamed in through the window, painting crisscrossing shadows on the floor. In the other bed, Van snored like a bronze saw slowly cutting its way through limestone.

Just as Gerin tried to convince himself the dream, no matter how terrifying, had been only a dream and to go back to sleep, the outlander stirred and moaned. That he could move at all amazed the Fox; the room reeked of stale ale.

Van shouted-not in Elabonian, not in words at all, but like an animal bawling out a desperate alarm. One of his big hands groped for and found a knife. He sprang to his feet, naked and ferocious, his eyes utterly devoid of reason.

"It's all right," Gerin said urgently, before that mad gaze could light on him and decide he was the cause of whatever night terror Van faced. "It's only a dream. Lie down and sleep some more."

"A dream?" Van said in a strange, uncertain voice. "No, it couldn' t be." He seemed to shrink a little as consciousness came back. "By the gods, maybe it was at that. I can hardly believe it."

He set the knife back on the floor, sat down at the edge of the bed with a massive forearm across his eyes. Gerin understood that; now he noticed his own throbbing head, and Van's had to be ten times worse. The outlander stood again, this time to use the chamber pot. Gerin also understood that. "Pass it to me when you're done," he said.

"I thought I was lost in a black pit," Van said wonderingly. " Things were looking at me, I know they were, but I couldn't see even the shine of their eyes-too dark. How could I fight them if I couldn't see them?" He shuddered, then groaned. "I wish my head would fall off. Even the moonlight hurts my eyes."

"I had a dark dream, too, though I don't remember as much of it as you do," Gerin said. Analytical even hung over, he went on, "Odd, that. You've drunk much more than I have, yet you recall more. I wonder why."

"Captain, I don't give a-" Van's reply was punctuated by a frightened wail that came in through the window with the overbrilliant moonlight. The Fox recognized the innkeeper's voice, even distorted by fear.

More than his headache, more than his own bad dream, that fear kept him from falling back to sleep. Van said nothing but, by the way he tossed and fidgeted, he lay a long time wakeful, too.

Breakfast the next morning was not a happy time. Gerin spooned up barley porridge with his eyes screwed into slits against the daylight. Van drew up a bucket of water from the well outside the inn and poured it over his head. He came back in dripping and snorting, but turned aside with a shudder from the bowl of porridge the innkeeper offered him.

The innkeeper did his best to seem jolly, but his smiles, although they stretched his mouth wide, failed to reach his eyes. Little by little, he stopped pretending, and grew almost as somber as his suffering guests. "I have some word of the Sibyl, good my sirs," he said.

"Tell us," Gerin urged. "You'll give me something to think about besides my poor decrepit carcass." Van did not seem capable of coherent speech, but nodded-cautiously, as if afraid the least motion might make his head fall off.

The innkeeper said, "I hear she still lies asleep in the bed where the priests put her, now and again thrashing and crying out, as if she has evil dreams."

"I wonder if hers are the same as mine and Van's," Gerin said: " darkness and unseen things moving through it."

"I saw-or rather, did not see-the same last night." The innkeeper gave a theatrical shiver. His eyes flicked over to Dyaus' altar by the fireplace. The king of the gods might hold the ghosts at bay, but seemed powerless against these more frightening seemings that came in the night.

Van made a hoarse croaking noise, then said, "I wonder what Aragis dreamt last night." He didn't quite whisper, but used only a small piece of his big voice: more would have hurt him.

"Are you sure you won't eat something?" Gerin asked him. "We'll want to do a lot of traveling today, to get beyond the wood and also past that peasant village where they hunted us in the night."

"I'm sure," Van said, quietly still. "You'd make a fine mother hen, Captain, but if I put aught in my belly now, we'd just lose time stopping the wagon so I could go off into the woods and unspit."

"You know best," the Fox said. The porridge was bland as could be, but still sat uncertainly in his own stomach, and lurched when he stood up. "I do think we ought to go upstairs and don our armor, though. However much we hurt, we're liable to have some handwork ahead of us."

"Aye, you're right," Van answered. "I'd be happier to sit here a while-say, a year or two-till I feel I might live, or even want to, but you're right." With careful stride, he made his way to the stairs and up them. Gerin followed.

The rasps and clangs of metal touching metal made the Fox's head hurt and, by Van's mutters, did worse to him. "Don't know how I'm supposed to fight, even if I have to," Gerin said. "If I could drive somebody away by puking on him, I might manage that, but I'm not good for much more."

"I feel the same way," Van said, "but no matter how sick I am, if it's a choice between fighting and dying, I expect I'll do the best job of fighting I can."

"Can't argue with that," Gerin said. "If you think I'll be looking for a fight today, though, you're daft."

"Nor I, and I'm a sight fonder of them than you are," Van said. " The thing of it is, a fight may be looking for you."

"Why do you think I'm doing this?" Gerin shrugged his shoulders a couple of times to fit his corselet as comfortably as he could, then jammed his bronze pot of a helm over his head. Sighing, he said, "Let' s go."

"Just a moment." Van adjusted the cheekpieces to his own fancy helm, then nodded. By his pained expression, that hurt, too. Anticipating still more future pain, he said, "And we'll have to listen to the cursed wagon wheels squeaking all the rest of the day, too."

Gerin hadn't thought of that. When he did, his stomach churned anew. "We've got to do something about that," he declared.

"Stay here a while longer?" Van suggested.

"We've stayed too long already, thanks to you and your carouse. Curse me if I want to spend another useless day here because you drank the ale jar dry-and I helped, I admit it," the Fox added hastily. He plucked at his beard. Thinking straight and clear through a pounding headache was anything but easy, but after a few seconds he snapped his fingers. "I have it! I'll beg a pot of goose grease or chicken fat or whatever he has from the innkeeper. It won't be perfect, the gods know, but it should cut the noise to something we have hope of standing."

Van managed the first smile he'd risked since he woke up. He made as if to slap Gerin on the back, but thought better of it; perhaps he imagined how he would have felt had someone bestowed a similar compliment on him in his present delicate condition. "By the gods, Captain, it can't hurt," he exclaimed. "I was thinking we'd have to suffer the whole day long, and no help for it."

"No point in suffering if you don't have to," Gerin said. "And I can't think of a better way to use wits than to keep from suffering."

The innkeeper produced a pot of chicken fat without demur, though he said, "There's a cure for a long night I never ran across before."

"Aye, that's just what it is, but not the way you mean." The Fox explained why he wanted the fat. The innkeeper looked bemused, but nodded.

Gerin crawled under the wagon and applied a good coat of grease to both axles. When he came out and stood up again, Van said, "We'll draw flies."

"No doubt," Gerin said. "After a while, it'll go bad and start to stink, too, and somebody will have to scrub it off. For today, it'll be quieter. Wouldn't you say that's worth it?"

"Oh, aye, you get no quarrel from me there." Van's laugh was but a faint echo of his usual booming chortle, but it served. "Thing of it is, I'm usually the one with no thought but for today and you're always fretting about tomorrow or the year after or when your grandson's an old graybeard. Odd to find us flip-flopped so."

The Fox considered that, then set it aside. "Too much like philosophy for early in the day, especially after too much ale the night before. Shall we be off?"

"Might as well," Van said. "Can I humbly beg you to take the reins for the first part of the go? I don't think you hurt yourself as bad as I did."

"Fair enough." Gerin clambered onto the seat at the front of the wagon. The reins slid across the calluses on his palms. Van got up beside him, moving with an old man's caution.

"The lord Biton bless the both of you, good my sirs," the groom said.

Gerin flicked the reins. The horses leaned forward against their harness. The wagon rolled ahead. It still rattled and creaked and jounced, but didn't squeak nearly as much as it had. Van looked wanly happy. "That's first rate," he said. "With even a bit o' luck, I'll feel like living by noon or so."

"About what I was hoping for myself," Gerin said. He drove out of the stable yard and around to the front of the inn. The wagon wasn't as quiet as all that, but it was enough quieter than it had been to satisfy him.

The innkeeper stood by the entryway and bowed himself double as the wagon passed him. "The lord Biton bless the both of you," he said, as the groom had. "May you come again to Ikos before long, and may you recall my humble establishment with favor when you do."

"They didn't used to act like that before the Empire blocked the last pass through the Kirs," Gerin murmured. "Then they had guests up to the ceiling and sleeping in the horses' stables, and they hardly knew or cared whether they saw anyone in particular again."

"Reminds me of a story, Captain, indeed it does," Van said, a sure sign he was feeling better. "Have I told you how they get the monkeys to pick pepper?"

"No, I don't think I've heard that one," Gerin answered. "How do they-"

He got no further, for the horses gave a snort of alarm and reared in terror. Trying to fight them under control, Gerin thought their unexpected motion the reason the wagon swayed beneath his fundament as if suddenly transformed to a boat bobbing on a choppy sea. Then Van shouted "Earthquake!" and he realized the whole world was trembling.

He'd felt earthquakes once or twice before, years ago. The ground had twitched, then subsided almost before fear could seize him. This quake was nothing like those. The shaking went on and on; it seemed to last forever. Through the roar of the ground and the creaking of the buildings in the town of Ikos, he heard cries of fear. After a moment, he realized the loudest of them was his own.

A couple of inns and houses did more than creak; they collapsed into piles of rubble. And when the Fox looked down the street toward the temple of Biton, he saw with horror that the gleaming marble fane was also down, along with great stretches of the wall that protected the holy precinct.

When the earth finally relented and stood still, Gerin realized his hangover was gone; terror had burned it out of him. He stared at Van, who stared back, his usually ruddy face fishbelly white. " Captain, that was a very bad one," the outlander said. "I've felt quakes a time or two here and there, but never any to compare with that."

"Nor I," Gerin said. The ground shook again, just enough to send his heart leaping into his mouth. He scrambled down from the wagon and ran toward the nearest fallen building, from which came pain-filled shouts. Van ran right beside him. Together they pulled away timbers and plaster until they could haul out a fellow who, but for a couple of cuts and a mashed finger, had taken miraculously little hurt.

"All the gods bless you," the man said, coughing. "My wife's in there somewhere." Careless of his own injuries, he began clawing at the wreckage himself. Gerin and Van worked with him. Men and women also came running from buildings that had stayed upright.

Then someone screamed, "Fire!" Flames born in the hearth or on Dyaus' altar or of some flickering lamp were loose and growing. Black smoke, thin at first but all too quickly thicker, boiled up to the sky-and not just from the downfallen inn where the Fox labored. Every wrecked building was soon ablaze. The shrieks of those trapped under beams rose to a new and dreadful pitch.

Along with everyone else, Gerin fought the fires as best he could, but there were not enough buckets, not enough water. Flames grew, spread, began to devour buildings the earthquake had not tumbled.

"Hopeless," Van said, coughing and choking against the smoke that now streaked his face with soot. "We don't get away, we're going to cook, too, and the wagon and horses with us."

Gerin hated to retreat, but knew his friend was right. He looked again toward Biton's overthrown temple. "By the gods," he said softly, and then shivered when, as if the gods were listening, the ground shook again. "I wonder if the Sibyl foresaw this when she prophesied yesterday."

"There's a thought." Van's face lit up. "And here's another: with the wall down and the temple guards likely either squashed or scared to death, what's to keep us from scooping a wagonload of gold out of the holy precinct?"

"You're braver than I am if you want to chance Biton's curse," Gerin said. "Remember the corpses we've seen of those who tried stealing from the temenos?" By Van's expression, first sulky and then thoughtful, he hadn't remembered, but did now. Gerin went on, "But let's head over there anyhow. We ought to see if we can do anything for the poor Sibyl. If I know those greedy priests, they'll be so worried over the temple and their treasures that they're liable to forget her-and she may not even be aware to remind them she's alive." The thought of her lying in the rubble, trapped and unconscious and perhaps forgotten, raised fresh horror in him: he could not imagine a lonelier way to die.

"Right you are, Captain." Now Van got into the wagon and took the reins without hesitation; maybe the shock of the earthquake had made him forget his morning-after pains, too. Gerin scrambled up beside him. The horses snorted, both in fear and from the billowing smoke. The Fox counted himself lucky that they hadn't bolted when the fires started. He was anything but sorry to get away from the flames himself.

Along with so much else, the gold-and-ivory statues of Ros and Oren had fallen in the earthquake-fallen and shattered into the pieces from which they were made. Oren's head, its features plump and unmemorable but decked with a crown heavy with gold and sparkling with rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, had bounced or flown out beyond the overthrown marble wall that delimited Biton's precinct.

Gerin and Van looked at each other, the same thought in both their minds. So much gold-Whispering a prayer of propitiation to Biton, the Fox leaped down from the wagon. He seized the image of the dead Emperor's head, ready to cast it aside at the first sign of the curse striking home (and devoutly hoping that would be soon enough). Grunting at the weight of gold, he picked up the head and crown and chucked them into the back of the wagon.

"We won't need to fret about money for a bit," Van said, beaming, and even the abstemious Fox could only nod.

The quake struck so early in the day that hardly anyone had yet come in hope of hearing the Sibyl's prophetic verse. Only one wagon and one chariot had their horses tethered out in front of the dwelling the Sibyl used as her own. The cottage still stood, while chunks of the marble wall around the temple precinct had come down with gruesome result on the priest who the day before had tended Gerin's team.

Seeing the Sibyl's dwelling intact made the Fox hesitate. "Maybe we should just head for home," he said doubtfully. "Those fellows over there will be able to take care of her without violating ritual." He pointed through a gap in the wall toward figures running around by the ruined temple.

Van looked that way, too. His eyes were sharper than Gerin's, perhaps because, unlike the Fox, he spent no time peering at faded script in crumbling scrolls. He grabbed the mace off his belt. " Captain, you'd better look again. Whatever those things are, you don't want 'em tending the Sibyl."

"What are you talking about? They must be priests, and they-" Gerin's voice broke off as, squinting, he did take another look. He saw priests, all right, but they were down on the ground, not one of them moving. Over them bent pallid shapes hard to make out against the white marble of the temple. They didn't quite move or look like men, though.

One of them raised his head and saw the wagon. The bottom of hisits?-face was smeared with red. Gerin didn't think the thing was hurt. The blood around its mouth likelier said it had been-feeding.

As Van had seized the mace, so Gerin grabbed for his bow. The pale, bloodstained figure loped toward the wagon. The Fox remained unsure whether it was man or beast. It carried itself upright on two legs, but its forehead sloped almost straight back above the eyes (which were small and themselves blood-red) and its mouth was full of teeth more formidable than anything Gerin had seen this side of a longtooth.

Ice ran down his back. "The quake must have knocked down the underground walls, the warded ones," he exclaimed. "And these are the things the wards held back."

"Belike you're right," Van answered. "But whether you are or not, don't you think you'd better shoot that one before it gets close enough to take a bite out of us? Whatever it was eating before doesn't seem to have filled it."

Staring at the pallid monster, Gerin had almost forgotten he was holding his bow. He pulled an arrow from his quiver, nocked, drew, and let fly in one smooth motion. The monster made no effort to duck or dodge; it might never have seen a bow before. The arrow took it in the middle of its broad chest. It clawed at the shaft, screaming hoarsely, then crumpled to the ground.

The scream drew the attention of a couple of other monsters. How many of them had lived underground? Gerin wondered. And for how long? Whatever the answer was, the things were above ground now, and looked to be out for revenge against the men who had forced subterranean life on them for so long-and on any other men they could sink their teeth into.

Before the monsters rushed the wagon, a charge by a squad of temple guards distracted them. They attacked the guardsmen with the ferocity of wild beasts. The guards had spears and swords and armor of bronze and leather. The monsters looked to be faster and stronger than anyone merely human.

Gerin got but a brief glimpse of the fight, which looked to be an even match. "If we mix ourselves up in that, all we'll do is get killed," he said to Van. "More of those cursed things keep swarming up out of what's left of the temple."

"Well then, let's snatch the Sibyl and get out of here before they find her and figure she'd make a tasty snack," Van said. In other circumstances, that would have seemed rough humor. Remembering the blood round the mouth of the monster he'd shot, Gerin thought the outlander was just stating a probability.

He jumped down from the wagon when Van reined in by the Sibyl's dwelling. The door stood ajar, perhaps knocked open by the earthquake. Gerin ran inside.

Had the quake not thrown pots from shelves and lamps from tables, the cottage would have reminded the Fox of one inhabited by a prosperous peasant. Tapestries enlivened whitewashed walls; the furniture looked better made than most. That hadn't kept stools from falling down, though, or the clay oven in one corner of the cottage from cracking.

The Sibyl lay on her bed, unconscious still, in the midst of chaos. As Gerin stepped toward her, the ground trembled beneath his feet once more. That was almost enough to send him fleeing out of the cottage in terror of offending Biton. But, he reasoned, earthquakes were not in the province of the farseeing god. Had he angered Biton, the deity would have shown his displeasure more directly.

He stooped beside the Sibyl, who still wore the thin linen dress she'd had on in the chamber beneath the ruined temple. He wondered if his touch would bring her to herself. She stirred and muttered as he lifted her, but her eyes stayed closed. He hurried back out through the doorway.

"Good thing the monsters are still battling in there," Van said when he returned. "A wench in your arms is pleasant even if you're not having her, but worthless to fight with."

"Scoffer," Gerin said. But the rising noise of combat inside the temple precinct warned him he had no time to swap banter with Van. As gently as he could, he set the Sibyl in the back of the wagon. Again she muttered but did not wake. He took his seat beside Van, snatched up his bow and quiver once more. Nocking another arrow, he said, "Let' s get out of here."

"Right you are." Van twitched the reins. The horses bolted ahead, glad to have an outlet for their fear. As the wagon rattled past a gap in the fence, a monster came through. Gerin shot it. It fell with a roar. Van pushed the horses up to a gallop. Skirting the burning town of Ikos, the wagon plunged into the old woods.

V

Not long after noon, the Sibyl came back to herself. By then, the travelers were more than halfway through the strange forest that guarded the road to Ikos. Gerin had expected trees fallen across that road, perhaps other signs of upheaval from the earthquake. He discovered none. As far as the woods were concerned, the temblor might never have happened.

"Good," Van said when he remarked on that. "Maybe the trees'll swallow up those creatures, too, when they come swarming out of Ikos."

"Wouldn't that be lovely?" Gerin said. "Likely too much to hope for, though, because-" He broke off as the wagon shifted under his fundament. It wasn't, as he'd first feared, yet another quake: rather, he found when he looked back into the bed of the wagon, the Sibyl had gone from lying to sitting up. He nodded to her. "Lady, I bid you good day."

Her eyes showed nothing but confusion. "You are the pair for whom I prophesied just now," she said, her voice also halting. Though it suited her appearance well, hearing it once more gave Gerin a small shock: after Biton had spoken through her, he'd almost forgotten she had a voice of her own.

"Not 'just now,' " he said, wondering how he could let her know what had happened while she lay unconscious. "That was yesterday; you' ve been in Biton's trance for more than a whole day."

"Impossible. It never takes me so," she said angrily. But a moment later, she looked confused again. "Yet if you do not speak truth, why am I on the point of bursting? Halt a moment, I pray you." Van reined in. The horses, glad of a breather, began nibbling grass by the side of the road.

Gerin got down and went around to the back of the wagon. He held out a hand. "Here, lady, I'll help you down so you can ease yourself."

She recoiled as if he'd proposed helping her down so he could ravish her. "Are you mad?" she demanded in a voice like winter. "I may have no contact whatever with any entire man. Were I to do so, I'd be Sibyl no longer."

The Fox sucked in a long breath. She hadn't figured out how she'd got into the wagon. He could hardly blame her, but it didn't make what he had to say come any easier: "Lady, I fear that to save your life I had to touch you. The gods know I'm sorry for it, but I saw no other way." He repeated the oracular verse she had given him, and explained the morning's horrors.

The more he talked, the paler the Sibyl grew. "Lies," she whispered. "It must be lies. You've ruined me, and now you seek to twist my own words against me and make me believe you did it for my own good?" Her head whipped around like a hunted animal's; her eyes lit on the gold and ivory head of Oren the Builder. Gerin had thought she was already white as could be, but discovered he was wrong. "Youtook this?" she demanded. "And the lord Biton did not strike you dead?"

A flip answer came to Gerin's mind; he stifled it before it passed his lips. "Lady, he did not. When I took it, it lay outside the bounds of the holy precinct. As I said, the earthquake knocked everything into confusion. The temple itself no longer stands. What happened to the chamber where you prophesied I could not say, but the quake must have knocked down the warded walls that kept those monsters from coming to the surface."

Van turned and said, "For all you know, Fox, it might have been the other way round. Remember the bits of mortar we saw at the base of those walls when Kinifor led us down to the lady? The things might have been trying for years to breach the magic that held 'em in check, and when they finally did it, that could've made the earth shake."

"You're right; it could have happened so," Gerin agreed. "But whichever way it was doesn't matter." He gave his attention back to the Sibyl. "Lady-have you a name, by the way?"

She'd been listening to him and Van talk back and forth as if they were madmen whose madnesses by chance coincided. She snapped back to herself when the Fox asked her that question, but needed a moment to find an answer for it. At last she said, "I was called… Selatre. They took the name from me when I became Biton's mouth, but I recall it was mine." The bitter curve of her lips was anything but a smile. " I may as well wear it again, for thanks to you I'll serve the god no more. If all you say is true, better you should have left me to die there."

"Lady… Selatre… I pray I'm wrong, but I don't think I am, when I tell you the only things left alive in Ikos by sunset tonight will be the ones that came out from under Biton's fane. How deep and wide the caves run, how many monsters there are-I know none of that. But I couldn't leave you in your cottage to perish from their teeth and claws, not when the question I put to you was what made you swoon away," Gerin said.

Selatre said, "If you think saving me was a favor, you're wrong. Lost, polluted… how can I hope to make my way in the world again, now that you've taken away my reason for being?"

"You made your way in it before you were Sibyl," Van said roughly. "And plenty of people go on living who've taken worse hurts than you. Go into the woods, water the ferns, and come back and we'll feed you bread and sausage and ale. Things always look cheerier with food in your belly, and you must be hungry as a longtooth after sleeping the day around."

Selatre sniffed at the homely advice, but, perhaps because nothing better occurred to her, nodded after a moment. Gerin started to offer his hand again, but the first motion made her shrink back with such dismay that he stopped before it was well begun. Instead, he ostentatiously stepped away from the wagon and let her clamber down by herself.

"What do we do if she tries to run to Ikos on her own?" he whispered to Van when she walked in among the bushes by the side of the road.

"If the jade's that foolish, let her go," the outlander answered. "Me, I don't think she is."

Gerin got out the food Van had promised the Sibyl. She took longer to come back than he'd expected, and he wondered if she had slipped away. The idea of pursuing her through the uncanny forest was far from appealing. But just when he was beginning to worry he might have to, she returned, her face unreadable. He pointed to the meal he'd fixed from the travel supplies, but did not try to give it to her. If she didn't want to be touched, that was her affair.

She did manage a quiet word of thanks, then fell on bread and sausage and onions and ale as if she'd gone without food for ten or twenty days, not just one. She was still eating when, faintly, from far down the road to the west came a snarling roar that wasn't bear or longtooth or wolf or any beast Gerin had heard before. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck prickled up even so.

Van said, "That's one of the things from the caves, if you ask me."

Selatre put down the piece of bread she'd been gnawing. "A terrible sound," she said, shuddering. "I've heard it in my nightmares. Now, perhaps, I begin to believe you."

The innkeeper had said she seemed to be having evil dreams. That was this morning, Gerin thought, amazed. It seemed an age ago, in a different world. Given all that had changed between then and now, maybe it was.

The Fox said, "We've seen monsters in our dreams, too-and seen them in the flesh today, in the temple compound."

"And if we don't want to see more of them in the flesh, I think we'd better get rolling again," Van said. "If I had to guess, I'd say they're likely not after us in particular right now, just out exploring, finding out what aboveground is like after being down below so long. But if they come on us, I don't think they'd stop with a cheery good day, if you take my meaning."

Gerin stood aside to let Selatre scramble into the wagon by herself. Getting her back to Fox Keep was going to be awkward if she thought any accidental bump the equivalent of a violation. Of course, if that was how she felt, she was already convinced he'd violated her, and he couldn't do anything about it. He chewed on the inside of his lower lip. No time to worry about any of that now. Once they were safe away from Ikos would be soon enough.

He said to Van, "I'll drive for a while now. You can rest your head."

"It's all right," the outlander answered. "Since the ground started shaking, I haven't hardly noticed my poor aching noodle."

"The same with me," Gerin said. "It's not the cure for a long night of drinking I'd choose, though."

"Nor I, Fox, nor I." Van started to laugh, but broke off: another one of those snarling roars cut through the stillness of the woods. The outlander yanked on the reins, then reached around behind him into the wagon for the whip. He cracked it just above the horses' backs. Gerin thought that was laying it on thick; the animals seemed alarmed enough to run hard just from the fierce sound of the roar.

Selatre said, "Have a care, please. You almost touched me when you were groping back here." She sat huddled in a far corner, as if certain Van had intended to grope her.

"Lady-Selatre-we're not out to do you harm or throw you down in the roadway and have you or anything of the sort." The outlander sounded as if he were holding on to his patience with both hands. "For one thing, Gerin and I both prefer willing wenches. For another, or if you think I'm lying about the first, we could have had our way with you four times each before you woke up."

"I know that," she answered quietly. "Any touch, though, pollutes me, not just a lewd one. Lord Gerin, I grant you meant well when you plucked me from my cottage, but I'd sooner you had not done it. To lose that sense of union with the god, to know he will never speak through me again because I am his pure vessel no more… life stretches long and empty ahead of me."

The Fox exhaled through his nose in impatient anger. "Lord Biton would have spoken through you no more whether we came to your dwelling or not. If we hadn't, you'd have been monster fodder before another hour went by. And that, if you ask me, is a short and empty life, save perhaps when speaking about a monster's belly, which would have been quite comfortably full."

He twisted around to see how Selatre took that. He didn't want to flay her with words; after all, she was suddenly cast into a situation she'd never imagined and for which she'd never prepared. If he'd hit too hard, he was ready to backtrack and apologize.

But, to his surprise, she returned the ghost of a smile. "Next to being devoured, I suppose rescue may be a better choice. Very well; I do not blame you for it-much."

"Lady, I thank you." He could have-given his nature, he easily could have-freighted that with enough sarcasm to make it sting. This time, though, it came out sincere. The Sibyl-no, the ex-Sibyl-was trying to adjust; he could at least do the same.

Shadows were lengthening when they came out of the haunted forest that surrounded Ikos and into woods like those in the rest of the northlands. The transition point was easy to spot: as soon as they returned to the normal woods, the earthquake showed its effects again, not least with a couple of toppled trees stretched across the roadway.

Moving those trunks would have taken half a village of serfs. Van drove around them through the undergrowth. As he did so, he said, " Wouldn't have wanted to try this back a ways. You go in there, who knows if you come out again?"

"I like that," Selatre said. "You were willing enough to send me off into those woods when I needed to make water. Did you hope you would be rid of me?"

Van coughed and spluttered. "No, lady, nothing like that at all. If I thought of it at all, I thought you were holy enough to have nothing to fear."

"So I may have been, once," Selatre said, gloom returning. "No more."

They rode on a while in silence after that. Eyeing the sinking sun, Gerin said, "We might do well to look for that spot after we came through the free peasant village. They won't know what we're about until we roll past them early tomorrow morning."

"If they're not all downfallen from the quake," Van added. "Only thing I worry about there, Captain-not counting the ghosts, for we've little to give 'em-is monsters on our trail."

"The ghosts will keep them from traveling at night…" Gerin's voice trailed away. "I hope," he finished, realizing he had no way of knowing what-if anything-the ghosts could do to the horrid creatures from the caves.

"We can't go on traveling all night," Van said. "Whether the ghosts let us or not, we'd ruin the horses, maybe kill 'em. So stopping's still our best plan, and I think you picked a good place for it."

To the Fox's admiration, Van recognized the little side road down which they'd turned a few nights before. Gerin recognized it, too-once he was on it. But the landmarks looked different coming west from the way they had going east, and he might well have driven right past the junction.

The outlander got busy making a fire. Bow in hand, Gerin walked through the woods in search of a blood offering for the ghosts. When the light began to fade alarmingly before he'd found either bird or beast, he began turning over stones and pieces of bark. He grabbed a fat, long-tailed lizard before it could scuttle back into hiding. It twisted in his grasp and bit his finger hard enough to draw blood from him, but he held on and, swearing, carried the creature to camp.

Van gave it a dubious look. "That's the best you could come up with?" he asked, and made as if to get up himself. But the sun was down by then, and the ghosts beginning to haver. Scowling against their cries, he said, "Cut its throat, quick. It has to be better than nothing."

Gerin made the sacrifice, then flipped away the lizard's writhing body. He peered down into the trench he'd dug. The blood seemed hardly enough to dampen the dirt at the bottom. He wondered if he should have kept hunting till he found a creature with more to give the ghosts.

But in spite of the paltry offering, the night spirits seemed no more vicious than they had at other times when he'd camped in the open. Mildly puzzled but not inclined to complain at his good fortune, he pulled a sack of supplies from the back of the wagon. Selatre accepted the small loaf of hard-baked bread he held out to her, but was careful not to let her fingers brush his when she took it.

He forgot to be irked, exclaiming, "Lady, I wonder if the holiness you bring from Ikos-the last holiness left of Ikos, I fear-isn't helping hold the ghosts at arm's length."

"I am holy no more," she answered bleakly.

"You're the Sibyl no more, true," Gerin said, "but I wonder if the other is so. You didn't abandon Biton; he chose to leave you. How could that be your fault?"

She looked startled, and did not answer. She looked startled again when Gerin and Van drew straws to see who would take first watch and who second, but shook her head at her own foolishness. "Of course that's needful here," she said, half to herself. "Who would do it for you?"

"We didn't bring any temple guards along, that's certain," Van said. He got up and paced about; Gerin had won his choice, and decided to sleep through the first watch. The outlander went on, "Here, lady, you can take my blanket till I wake up the Fox; then I expect he'll let you have his."

"You're generous, both of you," the Sibyl said, watching Gerin nod. Even so, she made sure she placed herself on the far side of the fire from him before she wrapped the checked square of wool around her and settled down for the night.

Van needed to shake and prod and practically pummel Gerin before he'd wake. The outlander pointed over across the embers to Selatre. With a grin, he said, "She's human enough-she snores." The grin disappeared. "Now how am I supposed to wake her and get my blanket back without making her think I've got rape on my mind? That's what she thinks of touching, plain enough."

"You can have mine if you like," Gerin said.

"Too small for my bulk; you know mine's bigger than the usual," Van said. "I'll take it if I have to, but I'd really like to roll up in my own."

Gerin did some thinking. With his wits midnight-slow, it wasn't easy. At last, though, he said, "Here, I have it." He rose creakily and poked around under a tree until he found a long, dry stick. Then he went over to the Sibyl and tapped her with it until she jerked awake and sat up.

"How dare you lay hands on-" she began. Then she realized Gerin hadn't laid hands on her. Faint firelight and the beams of all the moons but Elleb (which hadn't yet risen) showed her confusion. "I see," she said at last, inclining her head to Gerin. "Your friend wants his blanket back, not so? And you found a way to let me know without touching me. I wonder if I would have done as well." She unwrapped herself and stood. "Here you are, Van of the Strong Arm."

As Van came to strip off his armor and claim the blanket, Selatre stepped back to make sure they didn't bump even by accident. She looked away till he was settled. Then, instead of taking Gerin's blanket at once, she said, "Let me walk off into the woods for a moment first."

She didn't go far because of the ghosts (whose wails seemed to Gerin to get worse while she was away), and came back as fast as she'd promised, but Van was snoring by the time she returned. He'd said Selatre snored, too, but the Fox doubted she came anywhere close to the thunderous buzz he produced.

The former Sibyl wrapped herself in Gerin's blanket and wiggled around on the ground, trying to find a comfortable position. She kept squirming for some time, while Gerin walked back and forth waking up. Finally Selatre said, "I can't sleep right now."

"Nothing too out-of-the-way about that, I suppose, not when you lay in your bed through the day and the night and into the next day again," Gerin said.

"I can still hardly believe that." Selatre looked up into the sky. After a moment, Gerin realized she was studying the moons. When she spoke again, her voice held wonder: "Tiwaz is closer to Math than he should be, and has sped farther past golden Nothos. What you say there must be so, which argues for the truth of the rest of your tale."

"Lady, I told you no lies, nor did Van." The Fox was nettled; here he'd risked his life to save her, and she still wondered if he was nothing more than a kidnapper? That irritation came out in the sneer with which he said, "I trust you don't find yourself polluted by mere talk with a man?"

She flinched as if he'd slapped her. "By no means," she answered tonelessly. "However-" She turned her back on him and started to wrap his blanket around her once more.

"I'm sorry," he said, scraping a shallow trench in the ground with the hobnailed sole of his sandal. "I shouldn't have said that. Talk all you care to; I'll listen."

He wondered if she'd pay any attention to him; he would not have blamed her for ignoring him after that gibe. But, slowly, she turned back to him, eyeing him with the same grave attention she'd given the moon not long before. "You will forgive me when I say that (knowing little of men in general and barons in particular) you strike me as unusual?" she asked.

His laugh held little mirth. "Since everyone in the northlands says as much, why should you be any different?"

"I meant no insult," Selatre said. "The word of you that came to Ikos after Biton laid his hand on me and made me Sibyl held no reproach: indeed, you were on the whole well thought of for trying to hold to the standards of the Empire of Elabon even after Elabon abandoned the northlands."

"Nice to know someone somewhere had some notion of what I was about," Gerin said. "More than my vassals do, I think." With a deliberate effort of will, he forced his thoughts from that gloomy track and changed the subject: "How did it happen that Biton chose you through whom to speak?"

"I'd known he might since I became a woman," Selatre answered. " For though I was normal in every other way, my courses never began, which is a sign of the farseeing one's notice in the villages round his shrine. But Biton's mouth on earth had served him so long I never dreamt he might one day call her to himself at last-or that his eye would fall on me to take her place."

"How did you know you were the one he wanted?" Gerin asked.

"He came to me in a dream." Selatre's eyes went far away, looking through the Fox rather than at him. Slowly, she continued, "It was the realest dream, the most lifelike, you can imagine. The god-touched me. I may say no more. I've never felt anything like that dream for realness, save, very much the opposite way, with horror rather than delight, the evil dreams I've had of late."

Gerin nodded. "I've had those myself. They're worse than any I've known before, that's the truth." He wondered if she experienced them even more vividly because of her intimate contact with Biton and things of the spirit generally. Not knowing any way to find an answer to that, he chose a different question: "Did you go and proclaim yourself at the temple, then?"

"No. I would have, but the very next day the priests came to my village instead. Biton had sent some of them dreams of me, and they sought me out."

"Ah," the Fox said. Had the dream come to Selatre alone, he might have thought it sprang from her imagination, but if the priests also knew the farseeing god had chosen her to succeed the ancient Sibyl, not much room was left to doubt Biton had sent it.

Endlessly curious, the Fox found a chance to put a question he'd never expected to be able to ask: "What is it like when Biton speaks through you? What do you feel or think or whatever the word is?"

"It's not-like-anything else I know," Selatre answered. "When the mantic fit takes hold of me, of course, I know nothing at all; I always have to ask the priest, if one is there with me, what my response was. But while the god's power is coming over me, before he takes me fully-" She didn't go on, not with words, but she shivered, and her eyes were full of longing. At last she added, "And now no more, never again. No more."

Her voice wept. Suddenly Gerin believed in his belly that she would sooner have died than be rescued at the cost of losing that link with Biton; it struck him as almost like losing a lover or a husband. But with the temple cast down and monsters loose on the northlands, the link was surely lost anyhow. Had he not believed that, he would have drowned in guilt.

Maybe Selatre conceded the point, however reluctantly, for she said, "And now that it is to be no more, what, lord Gerin, do you see life holding for me at Fox Keep? What would you have me do?"

Gerin had his mouth open to reply before he realized he had no idea what to say. What place had he, had the keep, for Biton's former Sibyl? Serving woman, apt to be pawed by his vassals and his guests? Could she return to peasant life after time spent with the god? He doubted it.

And then, just as he was about to confess ignorance, inspiration struck. "Do you have your letters?" he asked.

"No-Biton spoke to me direct, not through scribblings," she answered. "But I always thought I might like to learn."

"I'd be glad to teach you," he said. "One of the things that goes into keeping up the standards of the Empire of Elabon, as you called it, is having a grasp of time and place that goes farther than what you-or I, or anyone-can keep in your head. The more people who read and write, the more who can get that wide knowledge civilization needs. I teach as many folk as I can."

"As may be," Selatre said. "But what has it to do with whatever my life at Castle Fox would become?"

"I have a fair store of books at the keep," Gerin answered. "Oh, any bibliophile south of the Kirs would laugh himself silly to hear it called such, but I do have several dozen scrolls and codices, and I get new ones-old ones other folk don't care about, most of the timenow and again. I had in mind for you, if you think it would suit, to take charge of them, learn what's in them and where it can be found, make new copies as they're needed or if someone asks for such: not likely, I admit, in the state the northlands are in, but stranger things have happened. What say you?"

She was silent a long time, so long he began to fear he'd somehow insulted her after all, even if he'd just intended to find her a place where she could be useful and one that might keep her from some of what she would surely see as indignities. Then, at last, she said, "I am not ashamed to tell you I must apologize, lord Gerin."

"Why?" he asked, startled. "For what?"

"In spite of everything you've said, you have to understand I had trouble fully crediting your reasons for snatching me from Ikos," she answered. "Once you had me back at Fox Keep, who could guess what you might do with me? In truth, I could guess, and my guesses frightened me." Her laugh came shaky, but it was a laugh. "And instead of putting me in your bed, you'd put me in your library. Do you wonder that I needed a moment before I found a way to answer you?"

"Oh," Gerin said. "Put that way, no." He too took a while groping for words before he went on, "Lady, enough women are willing that forcing one who's not has always struck me as more trouble than it's worth. But folk who have wits and can use them are precious as the tin that hardens copper to bronze. I judge you may be one of that sort. If you are, by Dyaus, I'll use you."

"Fair and more than fair," she said, then seemed to surprise herself with a yawn. "Perhaps I shall sleep more, after all. My heart is easier than I thought it could be."

"I'm glad of that," Gerin said as she wrapped herself in his blanket again. She seemed to have forgotten the creatures still issuing from the cave under Biton's temple. He remembered, but forbore to remind her. Let her rest easy while she could.

The free peasant village whose men had hunted Gerin and Van through the night on their way to Ikos was a sorry place when they and Selatre rode up to it at midmorning the next day. Half the houses had fallen down in the earthquake; several bodies lay sprawled and stiff on the grass, awaiting burial.

"If they'd built stronger, they'd have come through better," Van said, unwilling to waste much sympathy on folk who would have robbed and maybe murdered him.

"Maybe so," Gerin said, "but maybe not, too. Stronger houses might still have fallen-look at Biton's temple. And if they did, they'd have crushed whoever was inside them. This way, a lot of people probably managed to crawl out of the wreckage."

"Mm, something to that, maybe," Van admitted. "All the same, I won't be sorry to see this place behind me." He started to urge the horses up from a walk to a trot.

"No, wait," Gerin said, which made the outlander grunt in surprise and send him a disbelieving look. He explained: "The lady there has but the one linen dress, which is all very well for prophesying in but not what you'd want to wear day in and day out. I was thinking we might stop and buy another here, something of sturdy wool that would do until we got back to Castle Fox."

"Ah. There's sense to you after all. There usually is, but this time I wondered." Van reined in.

Several of the villagers were in the fields; earthquake or no, tragedies or no, the endless routine of tillage had to go on. The women and children and few men who stayed by the houses swarmed toward the travelers' wagon. "Noble sirs, spare us such aid in our misfortunes as you can give," a woman cried. Others said the same thing in different words.

The Fox stared down his nose at them. "By Dyaus, you're better disposed to us now than you were when you came after us in the night to take our armor and swords."

"And mace," Van added, hefting the viciously spiked weapon in question. If the peasants had any thoughts of trying to attack now, the blood-red reflections of the sun off those bronze spikes did a good job of dissuading them.

The older man who'd sold the travelers a hen spoke for his people: "Lords, we all have to live as best we can, so I shan't go grizzling out I'm-sorries, though I expect you wish the five hells would take us. But would you see us cast down like this?"

"You don't have it as bad as some," Gerin said: "The temple at Ikos crashed in ruins yesterday." The peasants wailed, some in genuine horror and distress, others, Gerin judged, in fear that, with the temple ruined, no one would ever again use the road from the Elabon Way to Ikos. That was, he thought, a good guess. He went on, "In aid of which, I present to you the lady Selatre, who was till yesterday the Sibyl at Ikos, and whom we rescued from the wreckage of the place."

The villagers gasped and exclaimed all over again. The Fox got down from the wagon to let Selatre descend without-the gods forfend!touching him; Van shifted on the seat to make her way out easy. The peasants stared at her and muttered among themselves. At last one of them called to her, "Lady, though the temple be fallen, why did you not stay and wait for its repair?"

Selatre cast down her eyes and did not answer. Gerin looked for some gentle way to break the news of the eruption of the monsters from the caves below the fane. While he was looking, Van, who minced few words, said, "If she'd stayed, she'd have been eaten. The same is liable to happen to the lot of you in the next few days, so you'd better listen to what we have to say."

He and Gerin, as was their way, took turns telling the tale of what had happened back at Ikos. When they were through, the fellow from whom they'd bought the chicken, who seemed to be a village spokesman, said, "If you didn't have the Sibyl with you, I'd reckon you were makin' up the tale to pay us back with a fright for wanting to lift the bronze off you."

"And since the lady is here, what do you believe?" Gerin demanded in no small exasperation. "You'll find out soon enough whether we lie, I can tell you that. You've made a point of getting arms and armor, however you do it. When those creatures come, you'll need them. Don't leave them sitting wherever you've got them hidden; wear the mail, and take the spears and swords out into the fields with you."

"Take bows, too," Van said. "These monsters aren't what you'd call clever, from the little we saw of 'em. They don't know arrows. Every one you kill from long range is one you won't have to fight up close. I'd say they're stronger and faster than people, and they have nasty teeth."

The details the Fox and Van gave were enough to begin to convince the villagers they weren't just trying to frighten them. "Maybe we'll do as you say," the old man said after looking over his comrades.

"Do whatever you bloody well please," Gerin said. "If you don't care about your necks, don't expect me to do your worrying for you. All I'd like to do before I get out of here is buy a proper wool dress for the lady. I'll pay silver for it, too, though the gods alone know why I'm dealing justly with folk who aimed to deal unjustly with me."

When he said "silver," three or four women ran into their housesthose that still stood-and brought out dresses. None of them seemed to the Fox to stand out from the others; he turned to Selatre. She felt of them and examined the stitching with the air of a woman who had done plenty of her own spinning and weaving and sewing. Gerin remembered she had been a peasant before she was Sibyl: she knew of such things.

"This one," she said at last.

The woman who'd produced it tried to set a price more or less equal to its weight in silver. Gerin, who parted with precious metal reluctantly at best, let out a loud, scornful laugh. "We don't have to buy here," he reminded her. "Other villages must have seamstresses who've not been stricken mad." After that, she quickly got more reasonable; he ended up buying the dress with only a slight wince.

"Have you also a pair of drawers you might sell?" Selatre asked.

The woman shook her head. "Don't wear 'em but in winter, to help keep my backside warm." Selatre shrugged; likely it had been the same where she grew up, too.

"Do you want to put the dress on here, where you'll have more in the way of privacy?" Gerin asked her.

"I'd not thought of that," she said. "Thank you for doing it for me." She ducked into one of the peasant huts, soon returning wearing the wool dress and with the linen one under her arm. Some of the aura of the Sibyl's cave left her with the change of clothes; she seemed more intimately a part of the world around her, not so much a waif cast adrift by circumstance. Maybe she felt that, too; she sighed as she stepped around Gerin to stow the linen dress in the wagon. "It's as if I'm putting away part of my past."

"The gods willing, you have long years left ahead of you," Gerin answered. He meant it as no more than a polite commonplace, but it set him wondering. With monsters not only loose on the world but emerging from the ruins of Biton's temple, who could judge the will of the gods?

Van spoke to the villagers: "Remember what we told you, now. How sorry you'll be in a few days depends on whether you listen to us or not. You take no notice today, you won't have the chance to be sorry and wish you'd paid heed."

"And the lot of you, you're just driving away and leaving the trouble behind your wheels," said the older peasant who spoke for the peasants.

He had some reason to sound bitter. Peasants stayed with their land; a journey to the next village was something strange and unusual for them. But Gerin said, "If what I fear is true, you'll just see the creatures before us; there may well be enough to torment all the northlands."

He did not convince the peasant, who said, "Aye, but you're a lord; you can hide behind your stone walls." He gestured to the buildings of the village, some of them fallen and even those still standing none too strong. "Look at the forts we have."

To that the Fox found no good reply. Once Selatre was aboard the wagon, he climbed in, too. Van clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The animals snorted and began to walk. The wagon rolled out of the peasant village.

When they'd gone a couple of furlongs, Selatre said, "The man back there was right. He and his have no way to shelter against the creatures that come forth against them."

"I know," Gerin answered sadly. "I have nothing I can do about it, though. Did I stay to fight, I'd die, and so would they, and so I'd do them no good, and myself only harm."

"I saw as much," Selatre said. "Otherwise I'd not have waited to speak until the villagers could not hear. But that's a callous way to have to look at the world."

"Lady, the world's a hard place," Van said. "Begging your pardon, but I'm thinking you've not seen a whole lot of it. Well, now you will, and much of what you see, I fear, will leave you less than joyful."

Selatre didn't answer. Gerin couldn't tell whether that was because she disagreed with Van but was too polite to say so or because she agreed but didn't care to admit it. His opinion of her good sense had risen a notch, though, for the way she'd held her tongue where speaking out would have embarrassed him.

They returned to the Elabon Way that afternoon. Selatre exclaimed in pleasure at seeing Biton's mark on the stone that marked the side road. Then, remembering what had happened back at Ikos, she sobered once more. Gerin said, "I'm sorry the stone reminded you of the temple, but I must say you're taking it bravely."

"In part, I suppose, what happened back there still seems unreal, not least because I wasn't awake to see and feel it myself," she answered. "And I lived most of my life in a village not much different from the one we went through. I know life can be hard."

Van urged the horses onto the stone slabs of the Elabon Way. The drum of their hoofbeats, so different from the muffled clopping they'd made on the dirt side road, caught Selatre's notice. She exclaimed in wonder: "Here's a marvel! Who would have thought you could cover over a roadway and use it the whole year around? No mud here."

"That's why they made it so," Gerin agreed. "You catch on fast."

"The work it must have taken," Selatre said. "How far does it run?"

"From the Kirs up to the Niffet," the Fox said. "In the old days, they could command and have folk heed." He clicked his tongue between his teeth, remembering the troubles he had keeping the stretch of the Elabon Way under his control even partly and poorly repaired.

Van said, "Seems to me, Captain, every time we come north toward your holding, we're in the midst of trouble. Last time, we were heading into the teeth of the Trokmoi, and now we're stormcrows ahead of those-things-coming out of Ikos."

"We'd better stay ahead of them, too," Gerin said. "Otherwise we won't make it back to Fox Keep." He pointed to the horses. "We have to get the best we can from them without making them break down. Getting stuck somewhere could prove downright embarrassing."

"That's one word for it," Van said, "and a politer one than I'd choose, too."

Gerin had hoped to reach some lordlet's castle by nightfall; all at once, the idea of sleeping behind walls too high to be easily climbed developed a new and urgent appeal. But the approach of sunset found the wagon on the road with no keep in sight, only a peasant village. The Fox glumly bought a chicken and pushed the horses forward until the first stirrings of the ghosts reluctantly made him stop.

"No sooner than we start out tomorrow, we'll ride past three keeps," he grumbled as Van spun his firebow. The outlander made fire with his usual skill; Gerin killed the fowl, drained its blood as an offering, then gutted it and did a hasty job of plucking before he cut it in pieces for cooking.

"That's the way of things, Captain, so it is," Van agreed. He turned to Selatre. "Ah, thank you, lady-is that wild basil you've found?"

"Yes." She set the herb on the ground so he could pick it up and rub the chicken with it before he put the meat over the flames.

Gerin drew first watch. Selatre curled up in his blanket and tonight fell asleep almost at once. When she began to snore (something Van had mentioned, but not a noise the Fox had thought to associate with someone a god sometimes possessed), the outlander sat up. Gerin jerked in alarm. "I thought you were gone, too," he said reproachfully.

"I nearly was, before I thought of something that woke me right up again," Van said. "Mind you, Fox, I'm not saying a word against aught you've done since the earthquake-you'd best understand that. But-"

"What is it?" Gerin asked, suspicion in his voice. Anyone who prefaced his remarks by denying he was going to criticize always ended up doing just that.

"Well, Captain, all well and good we rescued the Sibyl here, even if she won't let herself be touched by the likes of us. All well and good-better than well and good-you've figured out a place for her at Castle Fox if she picks up her letters as you hope. But we're bringing back with us a lass who's young and not the least comely I've seen-and what will sweet Fand say to that?"

"Oh, father Dyaus." Gerin didn't know in detail the answer to that question, but contemplating it was plenty to make his head start aching. "She'll wonder which of us aims to throw her out of the keep, and she won't think a finger's breadth past that-which will end up tempting me to throw her out even if the notion hadn't crossed my mind till now."

"Just what I was thinking, Captain. Hard to have lustful thoughts about a woman who'd turn blue if you brushed her hand while you passed her a drumstick, but will Fand see it the same way? I ask you."

"Not likely." One of the serfs in Besant's village was a decent potter, not for any fancy ware but for serviceable cups and jars. Gerin had the feeling he'd be busy soon: when Fand got upset, crockery started flying. The Fox scowled at his friend. "Thank you so much. I wasn't going to have any trouble staying awake through my watch anyhow. Now I wonder if I'll ever sleep again."

Van started to bark laughter, then abruptly stopped. "Might not be safe sleeping in the same bedchamber, and that's a fact, seeing how she stuck a knife into that Trokme."

"Mm-there is that." Gerin tried to look on the bright side: "Maybe she'll take it all in good part, or maybe she'll be so offended when we bring in Selatre that she'll get up on her hind legs and take the next boat over the Niffet."

"Since when did Fand ever make anything easy, outside the bedroom, I mean?" Van said. He didn't wait for an answer-which was as well, for Gerin had none to give him-but lay down again and soon began to snore loud enough to drown out Selatre.

After a while, what precisely had happened at Ikos began to blur in Gerin's mind with the tale he told of it at every peasant village and lord's holding up along the Elabon Way. The disbelief he met was so strong that sometimes he began to doubt his own memory. Only when he looked to the former Sibyl at his side was he reassured he hadn't imagined it all.

"They're a pack of fools," Van said after the travelers rolled out of the keep of one of Ricolf's vassals.

"Oh, I don't know," Gerin answered resignedly. "Had someone come to Fox Keep with our tale, would you have believed it?"

"They'll find out soon enough whether we're telling the truth," Van said. "And they'll be sorry they think we aren't."

The outlander's pique lasted through a midday meal at the holding of Ricolf himself. Van, though, so loved to spin stories that telling Ricolf about what had happened at Ikos restored his good humor. Ricolf said, "Aye, we felt the quake here, and lost crockery in it, but I'd not looked for word so weighty as what you bring."

Seeing his former father-in-law at least willing to take him seriously, Gerin said, "You'd be wise to start thinking of ways to keep your peasants safe from the monsters as they spread, either by making sure they have a keep they can flee to or by posting armed men among 'em."

"Ah, Fox, you should have been a schoolmaster after all," Ricolf said, smiling not quite enough to take the sting from his words. "You' re so good at telling everyone else what he should do; if only you'd try telling yourself as well."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Gerin said.

Instead of answering directly, Ricolf got up from the table and walked out of the long hall into the courtyard. Gerin followed him. Ricolf paused by the well. Gerin started feeling foolish as he walked up to him; if the older baron wanted to make a pleasantry at his expense, he should have ignored it. But he hadn't, and now he'd lose more face by turning around and walking away than by going on.

"What did you mean by that?" he repeated.

"I believe you may not know, so I'll answer straight," Ricolf said. "Anything at all can happen to a person once; the gods delight in keeping us confused so we remember we're not so wise nor so strong as they are. But when a man does something twice, that says more about him than about the way the knucklebones fall."

"You call that a straight answer?" Gerin said. "Dyaus preserve me from a twisty one, then-or Biton, if you aim to take the Sibyl's station now that she's let go of it."

"The Sibyl enters in, sure enough," Ricolf answered, leaning back against the stonework of the well. "This is the second time now, Fox, you've snatched away women you had no proper business taking, Elise being the first."

Gerin exhaled in annoyance. "What was I supposed to do, Ricolf? Leave the Sibyl to be devoured by those-things? If I'd come here with that tale, you'd have found some other way to connect it to your daughter… and to blame me for it. It's not as if I'm in love with Selatre."

"As I recall, you weren't in love with Elise, either, not when you took off with her," Ricolf said. "You were just bearing her to her uncle south of the Kirs. But those things have a way of changing."

"Ricolf, however our holdings have sometimes rubbed these past few years, have I ever used you with less than the courtesy any man owes the father of his wife?" Gerin asked. He waited for Ricolf to shake his head before he went on, "Then within that courtesy, I have to tell you you've got your head stuck right in the dung heap."

He took a wary step back. If Ricolf drew blade on him, he wanted room in which to fight. He had no great worries about holding off the older baron, but he wanted to be able to hold him off in a way which suggested to Ricolf's warriors that he wasn't trying to murder their overlord, merely protect himself.

Ricolf stared as if he doubted his own ears. A flush turned his face as red as his hair had once been (Elise had had skin like that, the Fox remembered-transparent as a Trokme's). Then, to Gerin's relief, a snort escaped his lips and turned into a guffaw. "All right, Fox, you win that one," Ricolf wheezed, but he added, "For now, anyhow. A year or two down the road, we'll see who laughs last."

"Oh, go howl," Gerin said.

"I'm done, I'm done." Ricolf pacifically held up his hands. "Dyaus forbid I should try to tell you anything when you already know all that's been written or thought by every wise man since the gods decided they'd like to have a ball they could kick around and made the world to give themselves something interesting to do: besides swiving one another, I mean, and if that gets stale for a man after a while, it likely does for the gods, too."

"Not by the tales that are told of them," Gerin answered, but he let it go at that; Ricolf waxing philosophical struck him as unlikely enough to make a challenge unwise.

And indeed, Ricolf's next words were utterly mundane: "With all this hurrah behind you, you'll be all in a sweat to get back to Fox Keep, so I don't suppose you'll stay the night. You'll be wanting a trussed fowl, then, or some such, to hold the ghosts out of your head."

"Aye, that would be kind of you," the Fox agreed. "Do you know, though, Selatre seems to calm them-not altogether, but partway-by herself. I suppose it's because she was Biton's intimate for so long."

"Does she?" Ricolf's tone irked Gerin, but not enough to make him rise to it. The older baron shrugged and said, "I'll see what sort of bird the kitchen crew can scare up for you."

Instead of a hen, Ricolf's cooks presented Gerin with a trussed duck that tried to bite his hand and quacked furiously when he stowed it in the back of the wagon. It kept quacking, too. "Can't say as I blame it," Van remarked as he got onto the wagon's seat himself. "I wouldn't be happy if anybody did that to me, either."

"Can you tie something around its beak?" Gerin asked Selatre when the duck went right on making a racket after the wagon rolled out of Ricolf's keep and headed up the Elabon Way once more.

"Oh, let it squawk. What else can it do, poor thing?" Selatre said. Since she was in the back of the wagon with it and had to endure more of the noise than Gerin did, and since Van had already said more or less the same thing, the Fox let her have her way. Nonetheless, by the time the sun neared the western horizon, he looked forward to lopping off the duck's head for more reasons than just keeping the ghosts happy.

When they stopped to camp for the night, he steered the wagon off the road to a little pond that had enough saplings growing close by to screen it away from the casual glance of anyone on the road by night. Van got down and began gathering dry leaves and twigs for tinder.

Gerin descended, too. He went around to the back of the wagon and said to Selatre, "Hand me out that pestiferous duck, if you please. We'll eat him tonight, but he's already had his revenge. My head aches."

The ex-Sibyl seemed merely practical, not oracular, as she picked up the duck by the feet and held it out to Gerin, warning, "Be careful as you take him. He'll do his best to bite; he won't just quack."

"I know." Trying to take the duck from Selatre without touching her as he did so didn't make things any easier for Gerin, but he managed, and didn't bother mentioning the extra awkwardness. If that was how Selatre was going to be, he'd accept it as best he could.

Once he had the duck, he set it on the ground. He made himself stand by and not offer Selatre a hand as she got down from the wagon, wondering all the while how long he'd need before not offering aid became automatic for him. Then Selatre stumbled over a root, exclaimed, and started to fall. Altogether without thinking, Gerin jumped forward and steadied her.

"Thank you," she said, but then stopped in confusion and jumped back from him as if he were hot as molten bronze.

"I'm sorry," he said, though apologizing for having kept her from hurting herself struck him as absurd.

She shivered as she looked down at the arm he'd grabbed, then nodded with the same sort of deliberation Gerin had shown when he kept himself from helping her down a few moments before. "It's all right," she said. "However much I try to stay away from them, these things will happen now that I'm so rudely cast into the world. I may as well do my best to get used to them."

The Fox bowed. "Lady, on brief acquaintance I thought you had good sense. Everything you do-this especially-tells me I was right."

"Does it?" Selatre's laugh came shaky. "If that's so, why do I feel as if I'm casting away part of myself, not adding on anything new and better?"

"Change, any change, often feels like a kick in the teeth," Gerin answered. "When the Trokmoi killed my father and my elder brother and left me lord of Fox Keep, I thought the weight of the whole world had landed on my shoulders: I aimed to be a scholar, not a baron. And then-" He broke off.

"Then what?" Selatre asked.

Gerin wished he'd managed to shut up a few words earlier. But he'd raised the subject, so he felt he had to answer: "Then a few years ago my wife ran off with a horseleech, leaving me to raise our boy as best I could. His kidnapping was what made me come to Ikos."

"Yes, you've spoken of that." Selatre nodded, as if reminding herself. "But if you hadn't come, by everything else you've told me, the creatures that dwelt in the caves under Biton's temple would have killed and eaten me after the earthquake."

"If the earthquake would have happened had I not come," Gerin said, remembering the words of doom in the last prophecy Biton had issued through Selatre's mouth.

Van came around the wagon. "I've already got the fire going," he announced. "Are you going to finish off that duck, or do you aim to stand around jabbering until the ghosts take away what few wits you have left?" He turned to Selatre. "Take no notice of him, lady, when he gets into one of his sulks. Give him a silver lining, as you did, and he'll make a point of looking for its cloud."

"To the hottest of the five hells with you," Gerin said. Van only laughed. The nettle he'd planted under Gerin's hide stung the worse for bearing a large measure of truth.

The Fox dug a trench in the ground with his dagger, then drew sword and put an end to the duck's angry squawking with a stroke that might have parted a man's head from his shoulders, much less a bird's. He drained the duck's blood into the trench for the ghosts. Van took charge of the carcass. "It'll be greasy and gamy, but what can you do?" he said as he opened the belly to get rid of the entrails.

"Gamy or no, I like the flavor of duck," Selatre said. "Duck eggs are good, too; they have more taste than those from hens."

"That's so, but hens are easier to care for-just let 'em scavenge, like pigs," Gerin said. He glanced around. "Even though we were slow with the offering, the ghosts are still very quiet. Lady, I think that's your doing, no matter that we happened to touch again."

Selatre cocked her head to the side, listening to the ghosts as they wailed and yammered inside her head. "You may be right," she said after she'd taken their measure. "I remember them louder and more hateful than this when I was still living in my village, before Biton made me his Sibyl. But I am Sibyl no more; the god himself said as much, and your touch sealed it-" She shook her head in confusion; the dark hair that had spilled over one shoulder flew out wildly.

Gerin said, "I don't think holiness is something you can blow out like a lamp. It doesn't so much matter that I touched you-certainly I didn't do it with lust in my heart, or aiming to pollute you. What matters is that the god touched you. My touch is gone in an instant; Biton's lingers."

Selatre thought about that and slowly nodded, her finely molded features thoughtful. Watching her in the firelight, Gerin decided Van had been right: she was attractive enough to make Fand jealous. Was she more attractive than the Trokme woman? Their looks were so different, the comparison didn't seem worthwhile. But that it had even crossed his mind made him wonder if Ricolf hadn't been wiser back at his keep than the Fox had thought at the time.

He scowled, angry at himself for so much as entertaining that notion. Selatre said, "What's wrong? You look as if you just bit into something sour."

Before he could come up with anything plausible, Van saved the day, calling, "Come over here by the fire, both of you, and bite into something that's going to be gamy and greasy, like I said before, but better all the same than a big empty curled up and purring in your belly."

The duck was just as Van had predicted it would be, but Gerin fell to gratefully even so. A full mouth gave him the excuse he needed for not answering Selatre's question, and a full belly helped him almostif not quite-forget the thoughts which had prompted that question in the first place.

The wagon came out from behind the last stand of firs that blocked the view toward Castle Fox. "There it is," Gerin said, pointing. "Not a fortress to rival the ones the Elabonian Emperors built in the pass south of Cassat, but it's held for many long years now; the gods willing, it'll go on a bit longer."

Selatre leaned forward in the rear of the wagon to see better, though she was still careful not to brush against the Fox or Van. "Why are most of the timbers of the palisade that ugly, faded green?" she said.

Van chuckled. "The lady has taste."

"So she does." Gerin refused to take offense, and answered the question in the spirit in which he hoped it had been asked: "It was a paint a wizard put on them, to keep another wizard from setting them afire."

"Ah," Selatre said. Thin in the distance-Gerin did not allow trees and undergrowth to spring up anywhere near the keep; if anyone set ambushes, he'd be that one-a horn from the watchtower said the wagon had been seen.

He twitched the reins and rode forward with a curious mixture of anticipation and dread: seeing his comrades again would be good, and perhaps some of them had word of Duren. But the trouble he expected from Fand cast a shadow over the homecoming.

"We were free peasants in the village where I grew up; we owed no lord service," Selatre said. "Not much of what we heard about Elabonian barons was good, and I came to have a poor opinion of the breed. You tempt me to think I may have been wrong."

Gerin shrugged. "Barons are men like any others. Some of us are good, some bad, some both mixed together like most people. I'm bright enough, for instance, but I worry too much and I'm overly solitary. My vassal Drago the Bear, whom you'll meet, isn't what you call quick of wit and he hates anything that smacks of change, but he's brave and loyal and has the knack of making his own people like him. And Wolfar of the Axe, who's dead now, was vicious and treacherous, if you ask me, but he'd never shrink from a fight. As I say, we're a mixed bag."

"You speak of yourself as if you were someone else," Selatre said.

"I try sometimes to think of myself that way," the Fox answered. " It keeps me from making too much of myself in my own mind. The fellow who's sure he can't possibly go wrong is usually the one who's likeliest to."

A couple of men came out of the gate and waved to the approaching wagon: squat Drago with slim Rihwin beside him. "Any luck, lord?" Drago called, raising his voice to a shout.

"What did the Sibyl say?" Rihwin asked, also loudly.

"We're still the ripple of news furthest out from where the rock went into the pond," Van said.

"So we are." Gerin nodded, adding, "I like the picture your words call to mind." Behind them and in every other direction, others would also be spreading word of what had happened at Ikos. Soon the whole of the northlands would know. But for now, there was a dividing line between those who did and those who didn't, and he and Van were on it.

He raised his voice in turn to answer his vassals: "By your leave, I'll tell the tale in the great hall and not sooner. That way I'll have to retell it only once, and there's a good deal to it."

"Is that Duren in the wagon behind you?" Rihwin asked.

Drago's sight had begun to lengthen as he aged. Today, that served him well. "No, loon," he said. "That's a man grown. No, I take it back-a woman?" The Fox didn't blame him for sounding surprised.

Rihwin's agile wits let him leap to a conclusion that wouldn't have occurred to Drago. "You've caught up with Elise?" he said loudly. "Did she steal the boy away, lord Gerin?" That his wits were agile, of course, didn't necessarily mean he was right.

At that moment, Gerin wished he'd kept quiet. The rumor would be all over the keep, all over the serf villages, and would spread faster than the truth could follow it. "No, it's not Elise," he said, even louder than Rihwin had spoken. "This is the lady Selatre, who up till bare days ago was Biton's Sibyl at Ikos."

Warriors up on the palisade, who'd already begun to gossip about Rihwin's speculation, abruptly fell silent. Then they started buzzing again, more busily than before. Maybe Rihwin's wild guess wouldn't go everywhere after all, Gerin thought: the truth was so much stranger that it might take precedence.

He drove the wagon over the drawbridge and into the keep, then got down from it. Van slipped off from the other side. They both stood back to let Selatre descend with no risk of touching either of them.

Gerin introduced his vassals to her one by one. He wondered how good she'd be at matching unfamiliar names to equally unfamiliar faces; that often gave him trouble. But she coped well enough, and showed she knew who was who when she spoke to the men. The Fox was impressed.

Widin Simrin's son asked the question they all had to be thinking: "Uh, lord Gerin, how did you come to have the holy Sibyl riding with you?"

"You felt the earthquake a few days past?" Gerin asked in turn.

Heads bobbed up and down. Drago said, "Aye, we did, lord. Like to scare the piss out of me, it did. We lost some pots, too, and spilled ale from a couple of broken jars." He sighed in sorrow at the misfortune. Then he scratched his head. "Has that aught to do with the lady here?"

"It has everything to do with the lady here," Gerin said. Van nodded, the crimson horsehair plume on his helm drawing eyes to him. The Fox went on, "Let's all go into the great hall. I hope not all the ale spilled." He waited until reassured on that before finishing, " Good, for I'll need a mug or two to ease my throat as I-and Van, and the lady Selatre-tell you what happened, and why she's here."

He waved toward the entrance to the castle. Drago and Widin and Rihwin and the rest hurried inside. Selatre waited till they'd gone through the door before she too went in. Even if she'd consciously decided not to let getting touched every once in a while bother her, she aimed to avoid it where she could.

Gerin did not go into the great hall until even Selatre was inside. He told himself that was politeness, and so it was, but it was also anxiety: he put off for a moment the likelihood of confronting Fand.

He knew that was foolish: putting off trouble, even for a little while, wasn't worth the effort, and often made it worse when it finally came. But knowing that and facing up to a screaming fight with Fand were two different things. At last, bracing himself as if walking into a winter wind, he walked into the great hall.

His stiff pose eased as his eyes adjusted to the gloom within: Fand had to be still upstairs. "Took you long enough," Van rumbled, though he no doubt had the same concern. "If you'd stayed out there much longer, the ale would've been drunk by the time you got around to joining us."

"Can't have that." Gerin went over to the jar and dipped a jack full. He wet his throat, then told what had happened on the way to Ikos and after he and Van had got there. His vassal barons muttered angrily when he spoke of the peasants who'd hunted him in the night. He shook his head. "I was angry at the time, too, but it all fades away when you set it alongside what came later."

He spoke of the trip down to the Sibyl's cave and of the disturbing oracular response Biton had delivered through Selatre's lips. His listeners muttered again, this time with the same dread he'd felt when those doom-filled words washed over him. Selatre broke in, " I remember lord Gerin and Van coming into my underground chamber, but nothing after that, for the mantic trance had possessed me."

Gerin went on with the rest of the story: Selatre's continued and abnormal unconsciousness, the meeting with Aragis in the temple, the carouse afterwards (now that his hangover was gone, Van grinned in fond memory), and the earthquake the next morning.

Sometime while he was going through all that, Fand came down and sat beside Drago the Bear. Maybe the vassal baron's bulk kept Gerin from spotting her right away, or maybe he'd kept from looking toward the stairs on purpose. But she leaned forward when he spoke of the monsters that had emerged from the ruins of Biton's temple. Again, he had his listeners' complete and dismayed attention. Fand kept quiet while he spoke of the battle the creatures had had with the temple guards in the sacred precinct.

Then he said, "We'd gone back there, Van and I, because our innkeeper said the Sibyl still hadn't come to her senses. After the quake, we feared her cottage would burn like so many buildings in the town of Ikos. Since we'd been responsible for pitching her into the fit, we thought we should make amends for it if we could. As it happened, her dwelling hadn't caught fire, but the monsters would have made short work of her if we hadn't got there when we did."

Fand stirred but still did not speak. Selatre said, "I woke up in their wagon some hours later, with my world turned all topsy-turvy."

Actually hearing Selatre seemed to draw Fand's notice to her. The Trokme woman leaned forward, her chin on her hands, intently studying the former Sibyl. Then, to Gerin's dismay, she got to her feet and looked from him to Van. In a voice low but no less menacing because of that, she said, "And which of you was it, now, who was after wanting to trade me for the first new bit o' baggage you chanced upon, like a wandering tinker mending a pot in exchange for a night's rest and a bit o' bread in the morning?"

"Now, lass, didn't you listen to the Fox?" Van usually had no trouble with women, but now he sounded nervous, which didn't help. "It wasn't her body we had designs on, just saving her life."

"Likely tell," Fand snarled. "Sure and you'd have been just as eager to go back for her had she been old and toothless, not young and toothsome, sure and you would."

Gerin had thought himself the most sarcastic soul in the northlands; saying one thing and meaning another was a subtle art more often practiced south of the High Kirs. But wherever Fand had picked it up, she was dangerously good at it. And her furious question made the Fox ask himself if he would have headed back toward the fane to rescue Selatre's crone of a predecessor. He had to admit he didn't know, and that troubled him.

"Is this your wife, lord Gerin, thinking I'm some sort of menace to her?" Selatre asked. "I hope that is not so." Now she looked as if she doubted anew all the assurances she'd come to trust on the road north from Ikos.

"My leman, rather, and Van's," the Fox answered. Selatre raised an eyebrow at his domestic arrangements, but he ignored that; he'd worry about it later. Fand, as usual, was immediate trouble. To her, he said, "I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. By the gods, I did what I did for the reasons I said I did it, and if you don't fancy that, you can pack up and leave."

"Och, you'd like that, now wouldn't you?" Fand was low-voiced no more; her screech drove Drago from the seat close by her. "Well, lord Gerin the Fox-and you too, you overthewed oaf"-this to Van-"you'll not be rid of me so easy as that, indeed and you won't. Use me and cast me forth, will you?"

She picked up her drinking jack and threw it at Gerin. It was half full; a trail of ale, like a comet's tail, followed it as it flew. The Fox had been expecting it, so he ducked in good time-you needed battle-honed reflexes to live with Fand.

Van tried again. "Now, lass-"

She snatched the dipper out of the jar of ale and flung it at him. It clanged off the bronze of his cuirass. He was vain about his gear; he looked down in regret and anger at the ale that dripped to the floor.

"I ought to heat your backside for that," he said, and took a step forward, as if to do it on the spot.

"Aye, come ahead, thrash me," Fand fleered, and stuck out the portion of her anatomy he had threatened. "Then tomorrow or the day after or the day after that you'll be all sweet and poke that cursed one-eyed snake o' yours in my face-and I'll bite down hard enough to leave you no more'n a newborn wean has. D'you think I wouldn't?"

By the appalled look he wore, Van thought she would. He turned to Gerin for help in quelling this mutiny. The Fox didn't know what to say, either. He wondered if Fand would storm out of the castle, or if he'd have to throw her out. He didn't really want to do that; for all her hellish temper, he liked having her around, and not just because he slept with her. Till Duren was kidnapped, she'd watched over him as tenderly as if she'd given birth to him. Her wits were sharp, too, as he sometimes found to his discomfort.

Right now, though, he wouldn't have minded putting a hard hand to her behind, if only he'd thought that would make matters better. Unfortunately, he thought it would make them worse. If force wouldn't help and she wouldn't listen to reason, what did that leave? He wished he could come up with something.

Then Selatre got to her feet. She dropped a curtsy to Fand as if the Trokme woman had been Empress of Elabon and said, "Lady, I did not come here intending to disrupt your household in any way: on that I will take oath by any gods you choose. I am virgin in respect of men, and have no interest in changing my estate there; as lord Gerin and Van of the Strong Arm both know, any touch from an entire man would have left me religiously defiled before-before Biton abandoned me." Her brief hesitation showed the pain she still felt at that. "I tell you once more, I am not one like to steal either of your men from you."

Where Gerin and Van had fanned Fand's fury, Selatre seemed to calm her. "Och, lass, I'm not after blaming you," she said. "By all 'twas said, you had not even your wits about you when these two great loons snatched you away. But what you intend and what will be, oftentimes they're not the same at all, at all. Think you I intended to cast my lot with southron spalpeens?"

"I'm no southron," Van said with some dignity.

"You're no Trokme, either," Fand said, to which the outlander could only nod. But Fand wasn't screaming any more; she just sounded sad, maybe over the way her life had turned out, maybe-unlikely though that seemed to Gerin-regretting her show of temper.

"And what am I?" Selatre said. She answered her own question: "I was the god's servant, and proud and honored he had chosen me through whom to speak. But now he has left me, and so I must be nothing." She hid her face in her hands and wept.

Gerin was helpless with weeping women. Maybe that explained why he got on with Fand as well as he did-instead of weeping, she threw things. He knew how to respond to that. He hadn't known what to do when Elise cried, either, and suddenly wondered if that had been one of the things that made her leave.

He looked to Van, who made an art of jollying women into good spirits. But Van looked baffled, too. He jollied women along mostly to get them into bed with him; when faced with a virgin who wanted to stay such, he was at a loss.

Finally the Fox went into the kitchens and came back with a bowl of water and a scrap of cloth. He set them in front of Selatre. "Here, wash your face," he said. She gulped and nodded. Van beamed, which made Gerin feel good; he might not have done much, but he'd done something. It was a start.