Wyrms

Chapter 15. STRINGS

THE CLOSER THEY GOT TO SKYPOOT, THE BETTER THEY COULD see that it wasn't a sheer cliff at all. It was steep, but a slope nonetheless, with occasional deep ledges that were thick with orchards or farmland. Large reaches of the mountain were terraced for farming, while houses and buildings clotted and clumped in towns and villages and vast cities on the mountain's face. There were horizontal roads high up the mount, with carts that had been built on the mountain passing back and forth. There were hanging platforms that were constantly rising and lowering to carry passengers and cargos to towns hundreds of meters above or below. The whole face of the mountain as far and as high as they could see was a hive of activity.

Clouds hung only a few hundred meters above them when they came at last to the clean and seemingly bottomless lake that fronted the mountain like an apron many kilometers wide. Dozens of bustling harbors thrust wharves out into the water. River muttered his commands, and Sken worked the helm as they picked their way skillfully among the boats and jetties, finding an empty slip in the harbor River picked out for them.

To everyone's surprise, Will jumped ashore almost before an aging portboy had finished tying their line to the dock. Will elbowed the old man aside, then retied the line himself.

"Why did you do that?" demanded Angel as Will carefully stepped back into the boat. The portboy was muttering curses behind him.

"Because this is Freetown, and if you fall in with the jackals at the beginning you're lost."

"What do you know of it?" asked Ruin.

Will looked at him steadily for a moment, then turned to Reck. "I've been here before," he said.

Reck raised her eyebrows.

"I had a master once who brought me here as his bodyguard."

Patience saw that Will spoke with the same openness that she had seen a few mornings before, when they talked in the predawn darkness, lit only by the moon. It was the same in daylight. He did not lie. It was impossible not to believe that he believed what he said. Yet in all their journey, he had not given her or anyone else the slightest hint that he had ever been to Cranning before.

"You've been to Cranning?" asked Ruin.

"Why didn't you say so before?" demanded Angel.

Will considered a moment before he answered. "I didn't know you'd dock right here. This is the only part of Cranning I've visited." He smiled. "My master thought there were some secret whores in some of the houses higher in Freetown. Some whores who could do things that no one had ever imagined."

"Was he right?" asked Sken.

"He didn't have much imagination," said Will. "So he was easy to satisfy." He tossed a small coin to the old portboy, who was still wailing on the dock. The man caught it with a quick, snakelike strike of his hand and grinned. "Now he'll fetch us someone who has the money to buy our boat. Instead of pretending that he's willing to guard it for us."

From the back of the boat, they heard River's voice.

"I'm known here," he said. "I fetch a fair price."

"I daresay," said Patience. "But you didn't much care whether we got that price, or that old portboy's cronies."

"I can't spend it," River admitted freely. "What's money to me? But when they steal me, they put me back on the downstream voyage much faster."

Sken was furious. "I ought to break your jar."

"If I still had my body," River retorted, "I'd teach you what a woman ought to do to a man."

"You were never man enough for me," said Sken.

"You were never woman enough to know a real man when you saw one."

Their quarrel went on; the others paid no attention. In a matter of moments, the whole hierarchy of authority aboard the boat shifted. Sken and River, the autocrats of the voyage, were now mere background noise. The others simply transferred to Will the trust they had placed in Sken. The tyranny of knowledge.

Will did not embarrass himself with authority as Sken had done. Patience watched as he deftly took charge of their expedition. In all these many days and weeks of travel, he had never once asserted himself, except on that single morning with her, when no one else could see. But now he stepped easily and naturally into command. He did not have to order people about or raise his voice. He listened to questions, answered them, and made decisions in a quiet way that admitted of no discussion. She had seen many men who were accustomed to command; most of them wore their authority defiantly, as if someone had just accused them of being powerless. Will took his authority as if he didn't have it, and so the others obeyed him without resentment, without noticing they were subjecting themselves to him.

If he were my husband, would he expect me to obey him? Almost at once, she was ashamed of the thought.

For he was using his authority solely for the good of the group. That's why he was equally content to follow and to lead. For whether he gave the command or someone else did, if it was a good command it should be obeyed.

And so if he were her husband, if he ordered something that was right and good, she would do it, and have no doubt that if she ordered what was right and good, he would easily obey.

"You can't take your eyes off him," Angel whispered to her.

She had no desire to tell Angel why. "He's not the silent oaf we thought him to be."

"Don't trust him," said Angel. "He's a liar."

She could not believe that Angel would say such a thing. "How can you hear him and see him and think he says anything he doesn't believe?"

"All you're telling me," said Angel, "is that he's a very good liar."

She moved away from Angel to conceal how flustered she was. Of course Angel could be right. It hadn't occurred to her, and it should have, that Will's openness and honesty could be as much an illusion as her own.

After all, hadn't she schooled herself all her life to speak so she would be believed? Couldn't he have done the same?

Or had Angel sensed how much she was beginning to center herself on Will? Could he be jealous of the man's influence on her? But no. Angel had never acted out of jealousy in his life. She had trusted Angel from her earliest memories. If he doubted Will, it would be dangerous for her not to doubt him, too.

Yet she couldn't doubt him. In that one night, he had moved to the very center of the story she saw unfolding for herself. She couldn't thrust him into the background again. Whatever Angel thought of him. Will's abilities were real enough, he was proving that. And she did love him, she was sure of that-

The doubt was there, though. Now Angel stood on the dock, talking with Will, paying no more attention to Patience; but his words had been enough to put a doubt in Patience's mind. Her trust of Will was no longer complete, as it had been. And she resented Angel for it, though she knew she ought to thank him. Trust no one, Father had said. And she had forgotten it, with Will. But what a fool she had been, a religious fanatic like that, a Vigilant, and she had trusted him completely. Wait and see. That's what she would do. Wait and see.

Will sold the boat almost at once, and for a low price.

River was included in the price-and he cursed Will for valuing him so low. Will only laughed. "I sold you fast to get you on the river sooner," he said. "I thought that was all you cared for."

River clicked his tongue, and his monkey turned his jar around to face downstream, so River couldn't see his former owners anymore.

Speaking to Patience, Will had another explanation for the low price. "We're better off if they think we care nothing for money. They'll take us for rich visitors who have come to play. In Freetown there's no official government and no written law. But as long as they think we're here to spend money, our lives are absolutely safe.

We could drop a purse of steel on the open street and come back a week later and find it untouched."

"People are that honest?" asked Angel.

"The robbery is more organized. The big thieves make sure that little thieves don't interfere with their profits.

Street crime? Just keep to the main streets, the well-lighted streets and walkways and stairs. We'll be safe.

The thieves will be waiting for us indoors, at the gaming tables and in the whorehouses. No one leaves with much more than the price of passage back home."

"What happens when they find out we're just passing through?" asked Patience. "That we aren't here to lose a fortune and then go away and tell other people what a wonderful time we had?"

Will smiled. "We may leave some corpses behind us when we leave. Angel told me you were good at that."

His words, his expression gave no hint that he remembered their conversation. He was a deceiver, then, a concealer; either he was hiding his love for her now, or he was wearing it as a false mask then. Either way, Angel was right-he could lie.

They called good-bye to River, who ignored them; then they left the wharf and took rooms at an inn three levels above the river. Patience and Angel passed as a rich young woman and her grandfather, with Will as bodyguard, Sken as servant, and Reck and Ruin as gebling merchants who had traveled with them as their guides.

The surprise was Ruin. Will insisted that he dress the part, and when he appeared on the dock bathed, brushed, and finely attired, with his sister elegantly at his side, Patience saw that his previous undress and uncivility were from choice, not ignorance. Together they were king of the geblings, and could look the part if they needed to.

All this time that we traveled together, thought Patience, I believed I was the only one in disguise. But we were all in disguise, and are in disguise again. When we reach Unwyrm, if we're still together, will the last disguise be gone, and the truth of all of us be known?

If there is any truth. Perhaps we are what we pretend to be, taking on new identities with each change of costume.

She knew that she, at least, would have no disguise when she faced Unwyrm. No hiding place. No protection but her wits and what strength she could muster. It made her feel naked, as if everyone could see through her clothing to the thin and white-bodied girl that Unwyrm called.

"You must come down to the gaming tables," said Angel.

"I have better things to do with my time," said Patience.

She sat at the window, looking out over the harbor and the forests beyond.

"Sit and brood? Feel his fingers close in on your heart?"

Sken piped up from the bed. "If I can bathe every day, you can go down and play Kalika."

"Sken is right, you know. We're here pretending to be pleasure-seekers. We therefore must seek some pleasure.

Whether it pleases us or not."

"Visit the whores for me. Angel. Do double duty."

But she left the window and walked to the mirror. Her hair was still cropped short, and deeply marred by the surgery. Still, the stubble was now a good two centimeters long. "Angel," she said, "cut the rest off, will you?

To this length."

"It's not your most attractive style," said Angel.

"I may need to shed my wig somewhere along the way. Be a good fellow." She smiled flirtatiously. Since Angel was the one who taught her how to smile that way, she knew he would see it as a joke. And, indeed, he smiled. A trifle late, though. He was preoccupied. It was harder for them to pretend to be calm when they were here in Cranning, with Unwyrm's lair somewhere above them.

Angel took the shears from his trunk and began to cut.

It gave her a severe look, to have her hair almost gone.

"Where is the nearest tunnel from here?" asked Patience.

"Reck says we'd be insane to try the tunnels from here. It would take three times as long, and there are robbers who live in the shallow caves."

"I didn't ask if we should use the tunnels, I asked where the nearest tunnel entrance was."

Angel sighed. "There's probably one in the back of this place. Somewhere. Along this cliff, though, the houses are built half on top of each other. Who knows which ones touch the mountain face at a point where a tunnel comes out?"

"If I could once step inside a tunnel, I'd know where he is. I have the geblings' memory of the labyrinth. I'd have a sense of where we're going, then."

"And what's to stop him from forcing you to go through the tunnels? He can keep you safe enough, Lady Patience, but we'll have no protection. I imagine he'd be just as glad to have us all dead somewhere in the tunnels, and bring you safe and sound-and alone-to meet him."

"If I want to step into a tunnel for a moment, Angel, I don't see why I can't do it."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Doyow want to?"

Or was the idea coming to her from Unwyrm? She frowned into the mirror. "Are you trying to make me doubt everything?" she asked.

"I just want to make sure you're doing what's best."

Patience kept silent. Everyone seemed so eager to give her advice. As if the presence of Unwyrm's urging in her mind made her incapable of making decisions on her own. Or was her resentfulness coming from Unwyrm, in his effort to separate her from her companions? She wondered if she could trust her own judgment. It would be so comfortable to concentrate on keeping Unwyrm at bay, while letting Angel lead her up the mountain. Angel could keep her safe. Perhaps she should have been taking his advice all along. She thought about Will and Reck and Ruin in the next room, and wondered if she had been wise to take the road through Tinker's Wood after all.

They were just an added complication. Angel was enough, with Sken to help them where brute strength was needed.

Reck and Ruin were too unpredictable-when had human and gebling interests ever coincided? And Will-what insanity, his religion. With Patience as deity, a love goddess, a sacrifice; that morning on the boat was a dream, a deception. How could she go up the mountain with these strange people tagging along? Who knew what they might do?

She almost suggested to Angel that they ought to leave now, without telling the gebling king, just disappear into the crowds. As soon as she was far enough from Reck and Ruin, Unwyrm would repel them from Cranning again; they could never follow her.

But she felt uneasy about that. A fleeting memory of lips on her cheeks, fingers touching her body. Am I such an adolescent, to be held by such meaningless stirring in the blood? But it held her. And something else, too: the memory of being the gebling king herself. She felt the pressure of that, too, the sense that Cranning was herself, that all the millions of geblings who lived their busy lives here were her responsibility, hers to protect, hers to command. She remembered clearly that she had ruled here once, when only a few thousand geblings inhabited the place. She couldn't cast aside that responsibility, not easily, anyway. So she said nothing.

Angel set aside the shears. "Lovely," he said.

"You look like a prisoner just getting out of Glad Hell," said Sken.

"Thank you," said Patience. "I find the style becoming, myself." She put on her wig and became a woman again. "What's the game of the house?"

"Actually, this is more of a show house." Angel smoothed the back of her hair. "There's a theatre here, with a company of gaunts. But they do have worm-and- slither fights, and the betting gets quite intense sometimes."

"I've never actually seen a worm-and-slither," she said.

"Not pretty," said Sken.

"We ought to bet something, or they'll think we aren't gamblers, and they'll worry about whether we're worth keeping around." Angel tossed a heavy purse into the air and caught it. Sken's gaze never left the bag.

"Still. The show sounds better. What is it?"

"I don't know. In this place, probably a scat show."

"Maybe we can look for a show somewhere else."

Angel frowned. "If you want theatre, there are better places than Freetown."

"I'm here on business," said Patience. "So I don't have much choice."

A knock on the door. Will stuck his head in. "We're ready when you are."

"We're ready now," Angel answered.

There was a fair-sized crowd in the worm-and-slither room. Angel led them to the pens first, to size up the evening's competitors. The slithers all clung to the front of their glass cases, colors shifting like ribbons inside them, new arms and legs growing in various directions as others retreated. They weren't more than five centimeters across. "I thought they'd be bigger," said Patience.

"They will be, during the fight," said Sken. "They starve them down to low weight for transportation. Slithers are all pretty much the same, anyway. What matters is the worms."

The worms were kept in swarms, as many as a dozen to a case. They drifted slowly and aimlessly through the water. Patience quickly lost interest in them and looked around the gaming room.

It was strange to see how easily humans and geblings intermingled here. There was no sense of separation, no hint of caste. There were even a few dwelfs who were not servants, and gaunts who might not have been prostitutes, though it was hard to tell about that. Gaunts wouldn't do very well in a game of chance-they'd take too many bad bets. Surely the people here weren't so unsporting as to steal from creatures with no resistance.

Everyone was beautiful, or at least wanted to seem so.

Dozens of thick women and paunchy men wore clothing tailored to emphasize this sign of wealth; jowls and chins abounded. Brocades tumbled from padded shoulders; velvets flowed from uncontainable hips. But the gaunts who stood here and there among the crowd made a mockery of human attempts at beauty. The human ideal was massive and strong for men, rounded and fertile for women; good breeding stock, it was called, and it was high praise. But men and women both had a way of thumping when they walked, as if beneath their clothes they wore bronze plate. The gaunts, on the other hand, seemed to glide. Not ostentatiously, the way a dancer might do it, isolating the legs from the trunk, so that the head stayed on an even, unmoving horizontal plane. Rather they moved like a ripple in the earth itself, as if they grew out of the floor like the graceful, purposeful pseudopodia of the slithers in their cages.

When they move, their bodies are the song of the earth.

When they speak, their voices are the song of the air.

When they love, ah! The pleasures they give are as strong as the pulse of the sea.

So said the "Hymn to Gaunts," a half-satirical, half- insane paean by an ancient poet who was too eccentric for his name to be remembered or his poetry to be forgotten.

And Father had said, Humans don't miss their machines on Imakulata because the gaunts are almost as obedient and far, far more beautiful.

One gaunt in particular, a young boyok, white-blond and, though small, too tall for his weight: Patience noticed him as he bobbed in and out of the front row of the crowd that gathered around the current game. His hand sometimes, and sometimes his shoulder, had a way of brushing ever-so-gently across the crotch of a rich-looking customer. A catamite? No-when he had their attention, he handed them a thin paper. Selling something, then, but something that sold better with a sexual approach.

It was inevitable: in his passage through the crowd, the young gaunt did his brush-against-the-crotch routine to Angel. But then Patience noticed a curious thing. Angel acted exactly like all the others: a moment of startlement, a look of pleasant surprise at the beauty of the gauntling, a smile of recognition at the sight of the handbill, a look of wistful disappointment when the boyok moved away.

To Patience, though to no one else, this clearly showed that Angel was not surprised. For if he had really been surprised, he would have shown no emotion at all for a few moments, until he was certain what the encounter meant. Then he might have imitated the natural response, but not so perfectly. Obviously, then, he had been aware of the gauntling, but did not want anyone to notice that he had been aware. It disturbed Patience deeply, because no one in the gaming room would have paid the slightest attention except Angel's traveling companions, including her. For some reason, Angel had been aware of the boyok, and yet did not want her to know he had been aware.

So Patience walked over to Angel, who now was watching the slither being prepared for the next game, and whispered, "What was he selling? The little whore with the advertisement?"

Angel shrugged. "I dropped it somewhere-"

Patience saw the curl of paper on the floor, picked it up. It was written in glyphs instead of alphabetics, which explained why it was written on the single vertical strip.

The glyphs were easy ones, though, enhanced with graphic drawings. "Lord Strings and His Wandering Wonder Machine at the Melting Snow. Private Boxes. By Invitation Only."

"Just a sex show," said Angel. "Nothing worth seeing."

"You've been abroad in the world," said Patience.

"What's tedious to you might be interesting to me."

"You're only fifteen."

"With a lover," she said.

He frowned.

"Waiting for me on ice," she added. She put enough insistence in her voice that he would know she was serious.

His frown faded. "If you want to."

And she knew that this was what he wanted. Had he intended her to see his deceptive response before? Or was he planning some more indirect maneuver? For some reason, Angel wanted to go to the Melting Snow to see whatever entertainment Lord Strings had prepared. As so often before in her life, she was puzzled. What had he seen in that little gauntling that made him decide to go?

Angel placed bets-large ones, but not large enough to attract undue attention-on the upcoming game. He bet on the slither by five centimeters. It was daring to give such a wide margin, but the payoff would be so much the greater if he happened to win. Patience had never seen Angel gamble, though she had watched Father often enough. She had never figured out, in Father's case, whether he really enjoyed playing, or merely pretended to enjoy it for diplomatic purposes.

The slither was dropped through a dekameter of open air into the fighting tank. The shock of the air shriveled it; once in the tank, its body immediately began to expand as it took on nutrients from the surrounding culture.

It was a fast one; in the three seconds before the worms' release, it more than doubled in size.

The worms were slow and stupid at first, swimming languidly and aimlessly. The instant that the first of them bumped into the slither, however, all of them became purposeful and quick. They fastened to the surface of the creature and began to eat their way in.

The slither noticed them, too, of course, and in its eclectic fashion it considered the worms to be as welcome a meal as any other. The slither walls grew out around the worms, enwombing them in the semirigid gel of its interior. The worms immediately began to twist and corkscrew in agony as the slither's digestive fluids ate into their bodies. Yet their writhing was not directionless.

They moved from the edge of the slither inward, toward the yolk that included its primitive intelligence and all its reproductive system. If they reached it, the worms would deposit their own genetic molecules, which would take over the slither's body and make it a device for reproducing worms. But this slither had grown too quickly, and its yolk was by chance quite far from the side where all the worms had penetrated. The worms were all dead before any had reached the yolk. However, the nearest worm had come within four centimeters.

Angel showed no reaction at all. He just reached out his hand in a grandfatherly way and said, "Come along, little lady. We'd better eat before I lose everything." A few people chuckled-it wasn't likely that anyone would actually say such a thing unless there wasn't the remotest possibility of bankrupting.

They ate at a place with glass walls that looked out over the lake and forest on one side, and faced a delicate and beautiful cliff garden on the other. The food was as good as anything Patience had eaten in King's Hill, though many of the fruits were dwarfed and surprisingly tart, and the meat was flavored with liquors that she didn't know.

And then, when dinner was over and darkness had come. Angel made a show of inquiring where to find the Melting Snow. The master of tables cast a long and disapproving glance toward Patience-the Melting Snow was apparently a place where decent people, even plea- sure-seekers in Freetown, did not take virginal girls.

Angel was unabashed.

"Why are we really going?" she finally asked him.

They walked along wooden runways that hung precariously over rooftops and gardens three stories down. The geblings were close behind, but not close enough to hear.

Will and Sken were too large to walk abreast of anyone; they filed along to the rear.

"Didn't you see?" asked Angel. "The little fellow sought us out. From the time he came into the gaming room. As soon as he gave me the message, he left."

"What does it mean, then?"

"Gaunts have no will, Patience. They sense the desires of the people nearest them, and try to satisfy whatever desire is strongest. They make notoriously undependable messengers, since they can be distracted so easily.

But this one was unwavering."

"Unwyrm?"

"It occurred to me that he would be able to keep a gaunt focused on a single purpose."

"Then we should avoid this place."

"As I have futilely tried to tell you before, Unwyrm is trying to get us into his lair, and we are trying to get there. It isn't until we arrive that our purposes diverge."

It was a hopelessly stupid answer. Unwyrm wanted Patience there, but he didn't want anyone else. Obviously, then, the danger was not to Patience, but to everyone who accompanied her; if Unwyrm could, he would strip them all away so that she would come unaccompanied into his presence.

She didn't have time to find out why Angel had said such nonsense, however, for they arrived at the Melting Snow and Angel at once began to arrange a table. Patience supposed that he still thought her so childish he could fob off a stupid answer while he kept his real reasoning to himself. After all this time, he still underestimated her. Or did he? Perhaps the reason for what he was doing was obvious, and only Unwyrm's pressure kept her from understanding. She would not notice if Unwyrm impaired her thinking, but Angel would, and perhaps he had already seen that her judgment was unreliable.

It frightened her, and Unwyrm's joy surged within her.

The show was just ending as the boxmaster seated them in a grill-fronted box overlooking the circular stage.

The boy ok from the gaming room was there, along with two tarks and an unusually tall, sad-looking gaunt with long, grease-gray hair. They were all naked, all fragilely, ethereally beautiful as gaunts were supposed to be. But in the final minutes of the dance. Patience realized that this was no mere sex show, designed to warm the couches in the boxes around the stage. There was a story being enacted through the dance. The sad-looking gaunt was not even aroused. He just stood, tall and straight, yet with his head hanging limply to one side, hair falling unkempt across his face, as if his shoulders were suspended by taut wires from the ceiling, but nothing held up his head at all. The boyok was trying to reach the old gaunt; the tarks, just as young as he, and almost as boyish, tried to hold him back with touches and strokes that were at once violent restraint and gentle provocation.

The boyok was aroused-the customers were paying for it, weren't they?-but he seemed uninterested in what the tarks were doing. Finally, as the music climaxed, the boyok reached the old gaunt. Patience steeled herself for some unpleasantly coarse pornographic climax, but instead the gauntling climbed the old fellow as if he were a tree, knelt on his shoulders-his balance was precarious and yet he did not so much as waver-and then lifted the old gaunt's head by the hair, until it was upright and alert as the rest of his erect body.

Silence. The end.

The audience applauded, but not with enthusiasm. Obviously, they had noticed what Patience had seen: that this was not a sex show at all, but rather dance with an erotic theme. The climax had been aesthetic, not orgasmic.

The audience was, quite properly, disappointed.

They had been cheated.

But Patience did not feel cheated. It had kindled in her, in those few moments, a longing that defied her self-control and brought tears to her eyes. It was not the sort of passion that Unwyrm put in her, not a compelling, coercive urge. It was, rather, a melancholy longing for something not physical at all. She wanted desperately to have her father back again, to have him smile at her; she longed for her mother's embrace. It was love that the dance had aroused in her, love as the Vigilants spoke of it: a pure need for someone else to take joy in you. And almost without thought, she turned to look at Will, who stood near the door at the back of the box. She saw in his guileless face a perfect mirror of the longing that she felt; and she rejoiced, for he was also looking at her, searching for the same thing in her.

Then she turned back to look at the stage. The applause had died, but still the four gaunts held their final pose. Wasn't the show over, after all? The music was gone; there was only silence, except for the breathing and murmuring of the audience in their boxes and in the cheap open seats on the floor. For a long few seconds, the pose remained perfect. Then, slowly, the old gaunt began to sag. The boyok pulled upward on his hair, as if trying to hold him up, but the gaunt sank from the shoulders, as if the boyok's weight were too much for him.

As he sank, he turned, so that when he finally stretched full length on the floor, propped barely on an elbow, with the boyok supine across him, still gripping his hair and pulling his head up, the old gaunt's face was directly toward the box where Patience sat. Indeed, his eyes seemed to see her, and her only, looking at her with supplication. Yes, she said silently. This is the perfect ending for the dance. In silence, in collapse, and yet with the boyok's effort unabated, the head still up, the face still skyward.

Then, as if her unspoken approval were the cue, the lamps were snuffed out all at once. The darkness lasted only a second or two, but when the lamps were rekindled, the stage was clear. Patience applauded, and some in the audience joined her; most had lost interest. "I want to meet them," said Patience. "Gaunts or not, that was beautiful."

"I'll go get them," said Will.

"I will," said Angel.

"Then give the money to me," said Will.

"I won't be robbed," said Angel.

"I've been here before," said Will. "You're safe on the open street, but not in the passageways of a house like this."

Angel paused a crucial moment, then gave two purses to Will. Patience knew that he had probably kept most of the money anyway, but it was a compromise, and there was no point in arguing over something stupid.

If the show had been a success, there would have been little hope of getting even one of the gaunts up into their boxes, not without a serious effort to bribe the boxmaster.

But since it had failed, only the two tarks had been spoken for-a tark was a tark, after all. Both the old gaunt and the boyok from the gaming room followed Angel when he returned to their box.

Another, more predictable show was beginning on the stage; Patience drew the curtain to shut out the sight of it and muffle the sound. Will opened the candle-window all the way, so they could see each other.

"Did you like it?" asked the old gaunt.

"Very much," said Patience.

"Yes, yes, you're the one I felt. You're the one who needed to see the real ending. So many were disappointed, but I felt you, stronger than any.

"How does it usually end?" asked Sken.

"Oh, with an audience like this, we usually touch each other three ways each. Scum. No sense of art." He smiled at Patience. "That was the best the ending has ever been. The collapse, with my head still up-ah, thank you, lady."

It had not occurred to Patience, though she should have realized it. Gaunts always respond to the strongest desire. No wonder they had pleased her so perfectly.

Unwyrm's intrusion had made all her passions so much more intense that of course she was the most dominating person in the theatre.

Yet even though the impulse for the ending had come from her, the execution of it was theirs. "You were beautiful," she said.

"You don't even want a taste of Kristiano here, do you?" said the old gaunt, pointing to the boyok. His surprise was obvious.

"No," she said.

"Or me. But you're hot as a bitch in heat, lady. I could feel it before you came in the building."

"Never mind," snapped Angel. Patience saw just a flicker of movement from Will, too, as if he had been prepared to stop the conversation even more abruptly than Angel.

"Who are you?" Patience asked.

"Strings," he said. "Not really Lord Strings, of course. I never heard of a gaunt being a lord, did you? Just-Strings. And Kristiano, my dear boyok, best I ever had."

"The finest artist from ice to Cranwater," said Kristiano.

It was a slogan, of course, but the gauntling believed it.

"We travel," said Strings.

"Where are you going? We'll go with you, and perform for you every night. Your need is very strong, and you guide us into beauty we crave to create."

Reck and Ruin had remained silent throughout this human entertainment. It was well known that geblings felt contempt for the human fascination with sex. Their own couplings were informed by empathy, so that each knew when and how the other was satisfied. They didn't hunger, as humans did, for some relief from isolation, for some reassurance that what one felt, the other felt.

So it was not surprising that Ruin immediately spoke against the suggestion. "We have companions enough for our purposes."

Angel coldly corrected him. "We have more than enough companions, sir."

At once Strings looked a bit ill. "I really don't enjoy disputes, if you please."

"It was a pleasure to watch you," Patience said. "But my gebling friend is right. We're here to sample the pleasures of Freetown, and then be on our way."

Strings laughed.

Kristiano touched her knee. "Lady, great lady, Strings can't be deceived, not by someone whose need shouts so clearly."

"I know where you're going," said Strings, "and I know the way."

Will spoke softly. "Let's leave here. Now."

Patience was uncertain. Obviously this gaunt was unusually adept at empathy. Yet how could empathy tell him her destination? There were no words in it, no images.

As if in answer to her question, Strings let his head rock backward at an impossible angle, as if all the muscles in his neck had gone slack. Then he began to murmur, his words an incantation. "I'm not so old now that I can forget the taste of the need like a knife in your heart. I've tasted the hunger, the yearning to climb to the ice where he waits, where he waits, where he waits. And the lady he calls is the one that he waits for, he calls you more strongly than any before you, but under the layers of pain that he sends you I feel something stronger than ever before. You are his enemy. You are his lover. And I am your guide to his lovemaking chamber."

During the speech, Kristiano had almost unconsciously begun to move, as if the words were lyrics and he the visual music. Even in the confines of the box, the shape and movement of the boyok's body were exquisite. He oriented himself, perhaps instinctively, so that the light from the candle-window played off his arms and hands, profiled his face, and made shadows that became part of the dance.

How can one so young be so experienced already in the most difficult of arts? No sooner had she asked herself the question than Patience saw an answer to it:

Kristiano was enacting the dance that Strings gave him.

Strings-and Kristiano his puppet. But that would mean that Kristiano was responding to a gaunt as if the gaunt were a human or gebling, with a powerful will.

"How does a gaunt put a dance into a gauntling?" she asked.

Strings came out of his trance, looking confused.

"Dance?" Then he looked at Kristiano, as if he had been unaware the boyok was dancing. "Not now," he said.

Kristiano at once relaxed his pose.

"You gave him a dance as you spoke to me," she said. "How can you do it, when you have no will?"

He was preparing to lie; she could see that. But if he was indeed Unwyrm's guide up the mountain-for the Wise who had come before her, and now for the seventh seventh seventh daughter-then she had to have the truth from him, and for some reason she knew that this was the question that mattered.

His face contorted. "Lady, you torture me with your desire."

"Then ease yourself, and answer me."

"I am a monster among gaunts," he said.

"Because you have a will, after all?"

"Because I wish I had one. I wish. I take them up the mountain-from the time I was little I find these men and women with the hunger on them, and I take them up the mountain to the yellow door. It's where they want to go, but they never come down. And you, such beauty you gave me, do you think I can forgive you far being such a lifegiver? Like the water down the mountain out of his palace, a lifegiver, and I'll take you up the mountain like all the others and you'll never come down and what am I to do then? How are we ever to dance again, now that we've found the audience that can bring us to life?"

Again, Kristiano danced during Strings' recitative, giving a strangely separated life to his words.

"I'm old," said Strings. "The boyok here, he is my child-self. What dance can I do now, except to stand and give the others their movements around me? Not until you came, not for years have I done anything but stand in the middle of my dance."

"Then you are powerful," said Patience. "Enough to control the others, anyway."

"I have no will, great lady, but I have desires, as strong as yours are, hot as fires, cold as the bedchamber waiting for you, and perfect, yes, I know the perfect shapes. I desire the shape of perfection from them, and they answer me, they follow me. Let me follow you, lady." His eyes pled with her.

She tried to understand the pleading look he gave her.

All that he had told her was true. But something more.

She had to know even what he kept back from her. She let the desire grow within her, pushed into the background her desire for Will, her fear of this place; she even subdued, for a moment, her need to rise to where Unwyrm waited.

His face twisted. His breath came in labored heaves.

And then, suddenly, out of a mask of agony he spoke again. "Don't go up the mountain, lady, he'll have you then, all alone, there'll be no help for you."

"I'm not alone," she said.

"You will be, you will be, except for the liar, except for his puppet, except for the wise man who went and came back, the traitor who-"

As he spoke, Patience thought of the one man who claimed to be Wise and who admitted he had been to Cranning and returned. She looked at him, and so the others did, too. Will, ready to betray her for Unwyrm's sake.

And she would have gone on believing that, if she hadn't glanced back at Strings just before his speech petered out, and he went limp and collapsed on the chair, his breath a thin whisper of exhaustion. Kristiano gasped, and immediately felt him for a pulse; relieved that Strings was not dead, the boyok held the old gaunt against him.

But even in the dim light. Patience had seen. Strings had not collapsed from exhaustion. Angel's hand had reached out, had touched the gaunt in the places that Angel had taught her could make a man lose consciousness.

Just when Strings had said enough to incriminate Will, but before Strings had said all he meant to say, Angel had silenced him. Had silenced him at the moment when all were looking at Will. She was the only one who could have noticed. Had silenced him before Strings had actually named a name or pointed a finger or looked at anyone.

"You," said Angel. He was looking at Will. "You're the one he meant. You've been here before. And I heard you tell Patience the other morning on the boat, I heard you tell her that you had felt the Cranning call. That you are one of the Wise. Do you deny it?"

If she had not seen Angel's fingers at their work, she would have believed his words. But she knew that the traitor was Angel. Even as he accused Will, he confirmed the truth to her. He had been a young man when he heard the Cranning call. He came to Cranning as all the Wise had come, no better able to resist the call than any other. But Unwyrm needed one task performed. The daughtering of Peace. So Angel had come back down from the mountain, armed with the knowledge of how to repair what had been done to Peace. Soon Unwyrm's bride was conceived and born, and Angel then devoted his life to bringing her up, preparing her. And finally bringing her here. All the time, he had been in Unwyrm's service. All the time. And my father trusted him. She wanted to tear at him with her hands, reach in through the soft places of his face and rip him to pieces. Never had she felt such rage and shame as now, knowing that all her childish love had been given to a man whose show of affection was all a mockery. He is a pigherd, and I am his only swine. Now he leads me to the slaughter, and I, blind to what he truly is, love him.

Not blind now, though. And because she could hide anything when she needed to, she let nothing of her rage show.

Ruin was laughing at the thought of Will being one of the Wise, but Reck was alert. Patience caught her eye and gazed steadily at her for a moment, while Angel continued his accusation against Will. Did she understand?

I will act, and you must watch me if you mean to stay with me up the mountain.

Still her thoughts raced, putting everything together now, revising all her past memories to fit the present reality. Angel was the enemy. He had tried his best to keep her from meeting Ruin and Reck, and now he meant to get rid of them before she reached Unwyrm. He was too good an assassin for her to believe the gebling king would reach the top of the mountain alive, if Angel were with them, and Will not there to protect them. So Angel would not be with them.

"Will," she said. "With what has happened, you can see that I can't trust you anymore." She hoped that he, too, could read in her steady gaze a plea for him to understand, to play along with her. "But I don't want Angel to kill you."

"Not kill him!" whispered Angel.

"So I'll bind you here, and leave Sken to watch you, and we'll bribe the boxmaster to leave you undisturbed for the night. Don't try to follow us, or I'll kill you myself."

Will said nothing. Did he understand?

"This is insane," said Angel. "He's a dangerous man, and you mean to leave him alive?"

"There's no harm in him," said Reck. But she looked confused, as if she was not sure whether to believe that Will was a traitor or to cling to her long belief in the man.

"We can argue later," said Patience. "Outside this box." She glanced toward the curtain that was the only barrier between them and the audience. "Or do we want to be part of the show?"

Patience had Sken tie him with the cord she had worn around her waist. It was long and strong enough to hold.

Patience carefully maneuvered herself between Angel and Will, for fear Angel would slip a knife into him or poison him and then apologize for having done what he thought best. Patience wasn't sure yet how to get through this crisis without bloodshed. But she knew that she could trust Will, and wanted him alive. Will never took his gaze from Patience's face; he never denied anything, either. She hoped this meant he trusted her, too.

Every word that Angel said now, every move he made filled her with anger and dread. Hadn't she looked up to him as the master assassin? Everything she knew of attack and defense she had learned from him; she had come to rely on these skills, had believed she could defeat anyone, but now she wondered what Angel had kept from her. She could try this, or that, but he had taught it to her-a thrust with a needle, a dart in the throat, a pass with the loop, he knew every move she could make, while she could not guess what he might have hidden from her.

Did he notice that she kept herself between him and Will? Did he notice that she maneuvered so that he would leave the box first, giving him no chance to separate her from the geblings? Did he know that she no longer trusted him? She hoped he was too worried, too distracted by how close Strings had come to unmasking him, to realize from her actions that she knew the truth about him. The fact that she had even seen him silence the gaunt was proof that he was not at his best right now.

This alone gave her a chance to defeat him, to escape.

Angel led them out into the hallway. Sken stood in the doorway after the others passed through, watching them.

"We should take the gaunt," Angel said softly. "Even if Unwyrm controls him, he does know the way."

"Angel," she said. "I'm so frightened. I trusted Will, and he was Unwyrm's creature all along." She put her arms around him, clung to him as she had when she was little. But before her fingers could reach the places she had to touch to render him unconscious, his fingers had found hers. She knew, then, that he was not deceived.

That he was perfectly aware that she no longer trusted him. She had a fleeting vision of herself, collapsing unconscious in his arms. He would tell them she had fainted; they would believe him. And without her there to protect them. Reck and Ruin would not last long. It was over.

But his fingers did not press. "I loved you," she whispered, letting the agony of betrayal sound in her voice.

And still he hesitated. Now her fingers found the places; she did not hesitate. He fell at once to the floor.

"Let's go," she said to the geblings.

"What's happening?" asked Ruin.

"Angel is the traitor."

The others looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending.

"I saw him silence the old gaunt before he could name names. It's Angel who is Unwyrm's man."

"Then we must set Will free," said Reck.

Sken turned around to go back into the box and untie him. But just then the boxmaster appeared at one end of the corridor. "What are you doing!" he shouted. He could see Angel's body lying on the ground. "What have you done! Murder! Murder!" He ran back the way he had come.

"This is stupid," Ruin said. "He isn't even dead."

"Stupid or not, if he brings the police, and they arrest us for questioning, they imprison humans and geblings in separate jails, where Unwyrm can push you away while he pulls me on," said Patience.

The boxmaster was still shouting, and soon he would be back. They could hear the audience, too, becoming alarmed. Patience wanted to wait for Will and Sken, but there was no time. Ruin tugged at her arm. Reck and Ruin led her quickly toward the far end of the corridor.

"What makes you think this is a way out?" asked Patience as they ran. "It's right against the mountain face."

There was a spiral stairway leading upstairs to the actors' rooms, where the pleasures of the performance were often continued through the night, with improvisation and audience participation. Since there was nowhere else to go, they climbed. Patience, between the geblings, stumbled and fell against the stairs.

"Unwyrm knows what I've just done," she said. "I can feel it-he's trying to punish me for leaving Angel."

She tried to climb, but could hardly take a step. Unwyrm was pounding at her; she was a storm of conflicting passions; she could not think.

Ruin ahead of her and Reck behind, they dragged and pushed her up the stairs. There were rows of dressing rooms here, with naked gaunts and humans busy cleaning themselves up from the last show or preparing for the next. The geblings held her by the arms and led her down the corridor. Step. Step. The movement gave her something to concentrate on. Unwyrm's surge began to weaken-he couldn't maintain such a powerful call for long. Gradually her self-control returned to her, and she began to walk faster, without the geblings' help.

"Are there windows in the dressing rooms on the outside wall?" she asked.

"This one," said Ruin.

A naked young gaunt was glittering his crotch when they came in and tried the window.

"It's cold out there," he said mildly.

"Lock the door, please," said Patience.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It doesn't lock."

"Pretty far down," said Ruin, looking out the window.

"And the walkway isn't very wide there. A lot farther down if we miss."

Patience looked out the window. "Child's play," she said. She swung out the window, hung from her hands, and dropped. The geblings had no choice but to follow her. Reck ended up sprawled on the walkway. "We geblings are not wholly descended from apes," she said.

"We don't have your instincts for jumping out of windows."

Patience didn't bother to apologize. The night was dark, with clouds only a few meters above them, and it was hard to see where they were going, but they broke into a run. Suddenly Patience felt very tired. It was a long way up the mountain. She hadn't slept since last night on the boat; why couldn't she just go back to her room and rest? She wanted to rest. But she shook off the feeling; she knew where it came from. Unwyrm was not going to make anything easy for them. As long as Angel had been with them, Unwyrm hadn't had to put obstacles in their way. But now, if Unwyrm was to keep the geblings from arriving with Patience in his lair, he would have to use other people to try to pry them from Patience.

Or kill them. Patience had no desire to face Unwyrm alone. She knew his strength, and needed help; if the geblings were all the help she could get, then she certainly didn't want to lose them. She could trust no one else. Everyone was her enemy.

They stopped at their rooms in the inn long enough for Reck to get her bow and Ruin his knife, and to take cloaks for the climb upward into winter. There was no human conspiracy working against them, only Unwyrm sensing the nearest people and arousing them against the Heptarch's party. So there was no particular danger in going to their rooms-only in staying for more than a few minutes. They did not separate: the geblings stayed with her in the room she had shared with Angel and Sken, and she in turn went with them to theirs. Someone knocked on their door as they were preparing to leave.

"It's probably just the innkeeper," said Reck.

"It's death," said Patience. "Unwyrm will see to it that we meet nothing but death on our way up the mountain."

Ruin thrust open the window. Patience climbed out.

The window hung over a thirty-meter drop. It was too much even for her. But she had always been a good climber, and she saw it would be easy enough to get to the roof. "Trust your human half," she said. "You'll need all your ape ancestry for this." She stood on the sill, reached up to the rain gutter, and pulled herself up.

Reck followed right behind her. Ruin had barely joined them on the roof when they heard a roaring sound.

Flames leaped out of the window of the room they had just left.

"We'll have to be quick about this, won't we?" said Ruin.

"Up," said Patience. They ran along the rooftop to where a ladder connected it to the walkway of the next level. How many kilometers to the glacier at the top of Skyfoot? Patience didn't want to remember. She just set her hands and feet to the ladder and climbed.