Mistress of the Catacombs

10

Sharina’s stomach knotted in cold horror.

“Where did she go, wizard?” shouted King Carus, his hand curved like a claw over his sword. He wasn’t touching the sharkskin hilt, quite, but it was only by an effort of will that he held himself clear. “Where did you send Brichese? What—”

The king’s volcanic fury loosed Sharina’s muscles. She stepped toward him, her arms raised. In his present madness Carus could cut her down on his way to killing the wizard whom he blamed for what’d happened to Ilna, but Sharina was still thankful for a chance to act instead of standing frozen.

Carus sagged back against the wall, gasping with reaction. “Brichese is a thousand years dead,” he whispered. “And I would to the Lady I were with her now!”

Tenoctris sat on the floor again without bothering to speak. She drew out a fresh wand and a stylus of lead pure enough to streak gray lines onto the polished stone.

Sharina knew the wizard would have done the same if Carus’ sword were slicing down at her. Tenoctris focused completely on whatever task was before her. Whatever the limitations of her wizardry and the weakness of her frail old body, her mind was as strong and supple as Carus’ blade of patterned steel.

“Your highness?” called the captain of the guards from the hallway. The door wasn’t barred; it eased a finger’s breadth open. “Shall we—”

“Get back where you belong!” Carus said. “One fool with a sword in here’s a great plenty already!”

He banged his fist into the wall again, emphasizing his words and—to Sharina—the fact that his hand was empty. The door jerked closed.

“We need you, your highness,” Sharina said. She lowered her hands. She’d thought of embracing the man in her brother’s flesh, but this wasn’t the time for that. “We need you now more than ever.”

“Do you?” said Carus with a terrible smile. “Well, perhaps you do. More than Brichese does, that’s for certain.”

He looked around the room, still smiling. “What I would like,” he added in a voice as light as a lute air, “is something to kill. I suppose that’ll have to wait for a—”

There was a thump and quick rasping outside the open window. A guard on the ground below cried out.

“Don’t throw your spear, you idiot!” another Blood Eagle bellowed. “Your highness, watch the—”

A left hand, tanned and as strong as a grappling hook, clutched the bottom of the casement. Sharina reached for her Pewle knife; Carus’ great sword was in his hand with no more sound than a snake makes licking the air. Tenoctris continued her soft chant, tapping the figure with her bamboo split.

Chalcus lifted himself, squatting like an ape for an instant on the window ledge, then hopped to the floor. His curved sword was thrust through one side of his bright sash, his dagger through the other. His hands were empty, but his eyes were bright as hellfire.

“I’ve got it!” Carus shouted, slamming his sword home in its scabbard.

“But your highness…?” a guard below objected.

Carus stepped to the window, passing close to Chalcus. The men neither touched nor seemed to move to avoid one another; their motion was that of vinegar slipping through oil.

The king leaned out. “Did you not hear me? I’ve got it! Don’t bother me again unless you want to go back to following a yoke of oxen!”

He pulled the casements closed as vehemently as he’d sheathed his sword, then walked to the center of the room. He and Chalcus eyed one another.

“So, soldier…” Chalcus said in a voice that held the music of swordblades ringing together. “At Ilna’s house they told me that there’d been a summons, that her friend Sharina—”

Chalcus nodded toward Sharina. He was smiling, but though she’d always gotten on well with Chalcus, she had at this moment the feeling that a viper was measuring the distance to strike her.

“—had called her to aid Prince Garric in a crisis. And so I came here, thinking to wait politely outside till Ilna had finished her business, not intruding on my betters—”

Carus flared his nostrils at the open scorn Chalcus put into the words “my betters,” but his lips continued to smile. His arms were crossed, each big hand on the opposite elbow.

“—until I heard you shout,” Chalcus continued. “Where do you suppose I might find Ilna, soldier?”

“I don’t know,” Carus said, anger clipping the syllables. “Maybe the wizard—”

He gestured with a chop of his chin, then grimaced as though he’d bitten something sour.

“Maybe Lady Tenoctris, that is,” he said in correction, “can tell us what I want to know as badly as you do, sailor. Ilna was here on the bed; then she vanished.”

Azure wizardlight puffed above the five-sided figure Tenoctris had scrawled in lead over the mosaic. For a moment Sharina thought it was a tentacled creature, but there was no body—only a mass of lines intersecting like wormtracks. Several of them lengthened, then faded away; the whole image faded like the stars at dawn, then was gone.

Tenoctris dropped her wand and leaned forward, supporting her weight on her arms. Sharina squatted by the older woman and held her by her shoulders.

The men stared at the old wizard the way wolves sized up a flock: without hostility, but with a merciless desire that made nothing of the object’s needs or wishes. They wanted an answer they hoped Tenoctris would give. That she was wrung out with the effort of this and earlier wizardry meant no more to them than their own wounds or weakness would have mattered if they felt they needed to do something themselves.

Tenoctris raised her head, looking from Carus to Chalcus. Her smile was weak, but it was one of understanding.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Ilna’s—soul, I’ll call it, Ilna’s soul returned to the waking world at another point and drew her body to it. I don’t know where she went, but I don’t think she could have managed that by herself.”

Chalcus raised an eyebrow. He was taut as the top string of a lute.

Tenoctris sniffed at the implied question. “Not because I doubt her strength,” she said in something closer to irritation than Sharina had generally heard from Tenoctris’ lips. “This is a matter of technique, Master Chalcus. Ilna could probably force her own way into the dreamworld, but returning to a place other than where her body lies…that I do not believe. Even for her.”

“How then?” said Carus in a controlled voice. His left hand had slid down to grip his right, preventing it from drawing his sword as it so clearly wanted to do. “If she didn’t do it, who did?”

“I don’t know that either,” Tenoctris said. “She met someone or something—a wizard, though, not a demon; whoever drew her down did so through art rather than power, but power as well.”

Tenoctris struggled to get her feet under her; Sharina helped her rise and guided her back onto the stool. The lead symbols drawn on the floor had a dull sheen like the eyes of a landed fish.

“Now what I’m wondering…” said Chalcus, “simple man that I am—”

Sharina watched his expression. There was nothing simple about Chalcus. She wasn’t sure that even his two eyes saw the same things when they looked out on the world.

“—is whether it might have been planned that Ilna go off to this dreamworld and not return to trouble the mind of the king who set her the task? Kings are used to dicing with the lives of lesser folk, or so I’ve heard—eh?”

Carus looked at the smaller man without expression. Chalcus was a cat, but the king was a wolf, or mayhap a dragon.

“Once long ago,” Carus said, “there were men who thought I’d do as they said if they took Lady Brichese as their hostage. They could do that, because they were her cousins.”

He smiled. It was a terrible expression.

“I led the attack on their castle myself,” Carus said. “Some of them I captured, and afterward those lived much longer than they wanted to; but my Brichese died that day in the fire.”

The men stared into one another’s eyes. Their faces were cold as stone, but their eyes, those eyes…Sharina would have shivered, except that she had the hilt of her Pewle knife to steady her.

“I’d have done the same thing again to save the kingdom,” Carus said, smiling. “Perhaps I’d still do that. But I don’t think that I am the kingdom any longer, do you see? And regardless, whatever’s happened to Ilna is none of my plan nor my desire.”

“So,” said Chalcus mildly, liltingly. “So you say. But would you be lying to me, I wonder?”

Carus laughed like boulders slipping. “Don’t flatter yourself, sailor!” he said.

Chalcus’ lips twisted in a wry smile. “Aye,” he said. “I was getting above myself, was I not?”

His expression drew back into its previous taut, feral lines. “So, soldier,” he said. “We’ve a problem. Will our wizard here—”

He nodded to Tenoctris; she acknowledged his glance by raising her chin.

“—be able to solve it?”

“No,” said Tenoctris calmly. “I may be able to find where Ilna has gone, but I won’t be able to bring her back myself. That’s far beyond my powers.”

Carus snorted. “Wizardry’s never done me much good,” he said. “This time wasn’t much different from other times. I’ll fall back on a cure for the kingdom’s ills that I know something about.”

He drew his sword a hand’s breadth from the scabbard, his thumb and index finger gripping the pommel; demonstrating, not threatening. He grinned at Chalcus. “This,” the king said. “What would you like for a command, sailor?”

Chalcus’ left index finger traced a scar barely to be seen against the tan skin of the opposite biceps. “I think…” he said, and the pause showed that he was thinking indeed, “that I’ll carry on as before. Merota and I will go to Tisamur and see what’s to be learned about Moon Wisdom.”

Sharina thought she was keeping a strait face, but Chalcus must have read the surprise she felt. He grinned at her, and said, “Long odds it was Moon Wisdom she was searching for when she vanished, not so? So it seems to me that other folk searching for Moon Wisdom may find themselves in the place Ilna has gotten to.”

He laughed. “Not that she’ll need me or Merota, either one,” he added. “But we’ll be in a place to watch her deal with those troubling our good friend Carus and his kingdom.”

“And perhaps,” said Carus, “she’ll need you. We none of us can have too many friends.”

Chalcus merely grinned, but his finger toyed with the eared pommel of his sword. For him, that was a sign of nervousness.

“What help do you need from me, then?” Carus demanded, his thumbs hooked in his sword belt.

“Need from you?” said Chalcus. “Don’t flatter yourself!”

Whistling a lilting hornpipe, he swaggered to the hallway door. Looking back with a grin, Chalcus said, “I’ll see you in Donelle, soldier.”

“Aye, or in Hell if we get there first,” Carus replied. They were both laughing again until the closing door separated them.

Ilna got to her feet cautiously. Her mind still saw ghost images of Garric’s room in the palace, the cracked plaster and her friends watching her worriedly on the bronze bed. That’s where her mind knew she should have been.

But she wasn’t, yet another example of reality being worse than what should have been. The polished marble floor beneath Ilna’s bare soles reminded her of how much she disliked stone.

She smiled faintly. That was fair: stone didn’t like her either.

The girl, Alecto, glared at the entrance. She was crouching, her athame held low for a disemboweling stroke. “Have you got a knife?” she demanded. “Maybe we can cut our way through them before they know we’re in here!”

Ilna didn’t let her sneer reach her lips. She did have a knife, a bone-cased sliver of steel that she used for everything from dressing chickens to trimming the selvage from the cloth she wove; she didn’t see herself slashing her way through an army of priests and worshippers with it, though. When she’d looked down at the scene earlier, this big circular room had been full of people.

“No,” she said looking upward. “We’ll hide.”

“You can’t get out that hole up there unless you can walk upside down like a fly!” Alecto said, but she raised her eyes also.

No, the cast-concrete dome curved up as high as the big room was wide. Though the inner surface was cross-ribbed, not even an acrobat—not even Chalcus!—could have crossed it against the pull of gravity.

The dome rested on pillars, each wider around than Ilna could span with both arms and separated from one another by about the distance of her arms spread. The pillars were only about five or six times a man’s height.

A solid wall surrounded the colonnade set out at half the distance of the pillars’ height, forming a corridor around the domed area in the center. Overflow from the crowd could stand beneath the corridor’s sloping roof, hearing though perhaps not seeing what was going on above the reflecting pool.

Alecto glanced behind a pillar. Her frown showed that she thought—as Ilna did—that if the room filled, there was little chance that the presence of the two interlopers wouldn’t be remarked. She started to speak; before the objection reached her tongue she saw Ilna uncoil her sash into a noosed rope. “Ah!” she said instead.

Ilna cast the noose with the skill she displayed in every use of fabric. The heads of the columns mimicked vines growing through a loose wicker basket; complex and delicate for stonework, though nothing to the subtlety of a weaver’s art. The silken loop settled over an extended tendril; Ilna pulled it tight.

“Will it hold me?” Alecto said. She took the blade of her dagger in her teeth instead of sliding the weapon back into its sheath.

“The cord will,” Ilna said coldly, wondering if the wild woman thought she was going to climb it first. “You’ll follow me up. The cord will hold an ox. I’m less confident about the stone, but there’s nothing better available.”

The chanting was growing louder. The interior of the temple was in shadow save for gray light blurring across the west half of the dome as the moon rose, but anyone on the floor would be in plain sight as soon the procession reached the rotunda.

Ilna tugged again, then climbed by the strength of her arms alone. Alecto muttered an objection, but Ilna already knew that Cashel or any other of the village boys who robbed seabird nests on the offshore islands would have used the grip of their feet on the rock as well. She made the choice not out of ignorance but from distaste for the stone.

Each time Ilna’s arms hitched her up another level, her body swung against the column. Still, she wasn’t deliberately touching the fluted marble.

Curves projecting from the column head gave Ilna somewhere to set her feet though they were too smooth to have held the rope. She laid her left arm flat along the vault’s lowest rib, gripping as well as she could, and motioned Alecto to follow. The girl did, scrambling like a cat up a fir tree.

It would’ve been safer for Ilna to loop the cord around a second knob to spread Alecto’s weight, but she decided against doing that. As soon as the wild girl saw the cord twitch upward the necessary foot or so, she’d have assumed that Ilna planned to abandon her to the incoming worshippers. She’d have come up in a flying leap that might well have sheared the stone when a more cautious approach did not.

Ilna smiled sourly. Leaving Alecto on the ground would surely lead to Ilna’s own discovery as well as being a wholly pointless bit of spite. She’d seen before that what people feared in others generally showed how they’d choose to behave themselves.

Alecto reached the head of the column and braced herself from the side opposite to Ilna. There was at least a chance that anyone glancing upward would mistake them for a pair of statues; though the better hope—and the likelier one—was that nobody would bother to look.

Alecto glanced at Ilna, then took the dagger into her free right hand. The hard set of her mouth didn’t change.

Ilna flipped the cord up to her hand, then cleared the noose with a twist that made Alecto’s eyes widen. The wild girl had used ropes and snares, that was evident; but she’d never seen anyone use them with Ilna’s ease and skill.

Acknowledging the unspoken praise with a slight smile, Ilna tossed the cord into a loop around the pillar, Alecto, and finally herself. The noose itself had been the only weight for the free end. Ilna tugged the cord tight, but instead of tying the loop, she kept the bight in her hands so that she could release it instantly at need.

Close up, Alecto had a strong animal odor compounded of fur and leather garments and her own intense femaleness. Ilna disliked it, but feeling dislike wasn’t a new experience for her.

The inner door opened. The worshippers, led by a phalanx of priests in black-and-white robes, entered the cavity of the temple. Their hymn had the rhythms Ilna remembered from Tenoctris’ incantations; and also during those of wizards she trusted far less than she did Tenoctris.

Ilna’s eyes narrowed as she realized for the first time that there was no statue of the Lady in the great room. Was this a temple after all?

As best Ilna could tell looking down from her perch, the priests, like the worshippers following them, were a mix of men and women in roughly equal numbers. They continued to sing as they filled the room. Two of the leaders carried covered wicker baskets.

The priests took their places around the margin of the reflecting pool, the white slashes of their robes showing up in the dim light like a row of slanting pickets. The laymen moved with solemnity but not precision to stand outside the ring of priests. They’d done this before, but they weren’t a military unit marching in formation.

The room continued to fill. Ilna could no more count than she could read, but she was certain that there were more people below her in this room than there were in Barca’s Hamlet. They stood at the base of the pillars and moved back into the corridor where Ilna couldn’t see them from her perch.

Alecto watched with eyes like a hungry hawk. Her face, already hard despite its curves, grew taut.

The moon was near zenith, reflecting upward from the pool’s surface. The last of the worshippers had entered the room. A husky man wearing a sword—a temple servant, distinct both from the priests and from the ordinary townsfolk who made up the worshippers—swung shut the great bronze door.

Priests—one at either axis of the reflecting pool—raised the lids of the round wicker baskets they’d carried in. Their fellows continued to chant. Ilna blinked and would have rubbed her eyes if she’d had a hand free; the rhythms of the hymn were beginning to disturb her balance.

The priests lifted rabbits out of their baskets, tied as though they were going to market. One of the animals was black, the other white. They bawled in terror, a penetrating sound so like a baby’s cry that several of the female worshippers faltered in their chanting.

Ilna’s lips tightened. She knew what was going to happen. She’d killed her share of poultry in the past with neither qualm nor hesitation; she’d kill more in the future if events spared her to cook more dinners.

Blood sacrifice, this, was a waste of meat and a perversion of what every peasant knew was a part—the last and greatest part—of nature. It disgusted Ilna almost as much as the folk performing the ritual disgusted her.

The chant deepened. Even at the first Ilna hadn’t been able to make out individual syllables in the echoing cavity of this temple, but now the sound had the groaning weight of the millpond frozen in midwinter.

The kneeling priests held knives; they flashed together in the moonlight. Black blood gouted into the reflecting pool. The reflected moon seemed to swell across the surface of the stained water.

A man cried out, but the chanting of his fellows continued like hollow thunder. A moment before, light had entered through the eye in the dome’s center and been reflected from the pool beneath throughout the temple; now the eye was dark, and the moon blazed in full glory where before the water had been.

Ilna’s limbs were tight with the strain of holding herself to the column, but her face grew rigid as well. She could see Alecto’s lips moving, but she couldn’t be sure whether the girl mouthed a curse or a prayer or a spell.

Something formed in the air above the moon. The worshippers’ voices were growing hoarse, but the chanting continued with even greater desperation.

At first it was only a blue nimbus, a haze of wizardlight. As the assembly shouted words of power, the ring of priests brought out athames and waved them to the rhythm of the chant; some slashed their own arms. Droplets of blood arced through the air, sinking without trace into the moon’s blazing face.

The nimbus shrank into three figures. They were no longer blue; they had no color at all, only a gray sheen as bleak as Ilna’s thoughts when she woke in the hours after midnight. They swayed to the rhythm of the chant.

Alecto’s face was stark with terror. Her tongue moved slightly, but the sound she made had no more meaning than a death rattle does.

The three creatures were as bonelessly supple as an ammonite’s tentacles, but their heads were flat and reptilian. Their conical bodies tapered from two squat, folded legs to the narrow snout. Their arms waved; they ended in cilia rather than fingers or claws.

The creatures were neither evil nor good; they merely were, the way the sea is or the sun. They were terrible beyond anything Ilna had ever seen.

The chanting stopped. Its echoes rolled about the dome for long moments after, but even that finally stilled. In the silence Ilna heard her companion whisper, “The Pack! These are the ones….”

The three figures faded gradually like fish swimming downward through clear water. There was a crackling that Ilna felt rather than heard; the Pack were gone, and the moon—edging westward past zenith—streamed through the dome’s eye again.

The pool was still clear, save for where the rabbits’ corpses lay on the coping. The last drops of blood leaking from the severed throats now swirled in dark tendrils through the water.

Gasps, whispers, and sighs of relief echoed through the domed hall. The tension had dissipated as soon as the worshippers below were sure the Pack were gone. The prayer had brought the creatures out of whatever place—whatever Hell—normally held them, but the worshippers were as frightened of the Pack as Alecto was.

Alecto had said only fools would loose the Pack. Ilna didn’t see any reason to fault her companion’s judgment on that point.

The guard threw open the door, sucking in a breeze to purge the warmth of enclosed bodies and the stench of fear. The worshippers drained from the room with a haste just short of panic, jostling at the doorway to the long entrance passage. They’d entered chanting, but there was no pretense of a recessional to put a solemn seal on the proceedings.

This wasn’t religion: it was wizardry, and wizardry of a particularly unpleasant sort. Ilna’s lip curled. Those who’d performed it were anxious to return to their homes and pretend they had no idea of what was going on.

The priests followed the layfolk, murmuring among themselves. They controlled their fears more carefully, but they too wanted to be gone. The pair—a man and a woman—who’d made the sacrifice carried away the dead rabbits in their baskets instead of leaving them for servants.

Did servants ever enter this room? Now that she thought about it, Ilna thought there’d been smears from previous slaughter on the pool’s marble coping before the priests carried out the present sacrifice. This was truly a sanctum, perhaps the more so because it didn’t hold the God’s image.

Only initiates entered. If they didn’t carry out menial tasks like scrubbing blood from the marble, nobody did.

The last of the priests passed from the hall; she didn’t bother to close the inner door behind her. Ilna heard the sound of steps shuffling down the passage, fewer and fewer, then the clang of the outer door. The hall was silent, save for the wind sighing softly past the dome’s open eye.

“All right, loose me!” Alecto said. She reached for her athame as she spoke, preparing to cut the rope if Ilna didn’t release her instantly.

Ilna’s hand twitched, curling the noose back around into her hand in a single motion. Manipulating the rope brought her to herself. Strength returned to muscles which her cramped position had reduced to trembling weakness.

Alecto spread her arms wide and gripped the column’s flutings between thumb and fingers while her legs circled the shaft. She scrambled down the pillar without waiting for Ilna to snub the rope off for her. She probably couldn’t have climbed without Ilna’s help, but she could get down again swiftly and safely by herself.

Ilna knew her own limitations. She hung the noose over two separated stone acanthus flowers, drew it tight, and lowered herself hand over hand to the floor. Going down, her body twisted on the rope, but at least she didn’t bang into the pillar as heavily as when she’d climbed.

Alecto was already at the inner door. Instead of peering around it, she stood at the hinge side. Her nostrils flared as she sniffed at the gap between the jamb and panel. She held her dagger by her side, the bronze blade concealed against her bare tanned thigh.

Ilna cleared her noose with a flick. She was a little piqued that Alecto didn’t notice the trick, and much more irritated to realize that the wild girl’s opinion mattered to her.

Alecto looked around. “There’s nobody in the hall,” she said, speaking in a low voice. She stared at Ilna appraisingly. “So,” she continued, “are you going to stick with me, then?”

Ilna frowned despite herself. “If you mean am I willing for us to continue on together,” she said, “then I suppose so. For the time being. Do you know where we are?”

“All I know is it’s a place I want to be far away from,” Alecto said. She glanced back at the air above the reflecting pool, now empty except for moonlight. “Raising the Pack! They’re insane!”

She faced Ilna abruptly with her eyes narrowed. “What were you doing where I found you, eh?” she said. “Are you fooling with the Pack as well?”

“Perhaps,” Ilna said, her hands shifting minusculely on the cord that she hadn’t yet wrapped around her waist again. “I may have been sent here to drive these creatures back where they belong. If you mean did I have anything to do with raising them, no.”

She suspected Alecto would be very quick and very deadly with her bronze dagger. If Ilna herself wasn’t quick enough to catch the girl’s neck and knife hand in her noose before the blade got home, well, then she deserved to die.

Instead of lunging, Alecto snorted, and said, “You’re going to drive the Pack? You’re crazier than this lot!”

She spat, then rubbed the gobbet into the marble with the ball of her bare foot. “Still, it’s no business of mine—if you don’t try anything so stupid when I’m anywhere around you. Agreed?”

“I’ll see to it that you’re warned,” Ilna said. “Now, shall we leave? Or shall I leave?”

The words were empty: Tenoctris had sent Ilna into the dreamworld to search. Ilna—and Tenoctris as well, most likely—had no idea of what to do to prevent those reptilian creatures from invading Carus’ sleep. Still, the statement had the desired effect of making Alecto relax and turn her attention to the passageway outside. Ilna supposed that sometimes it was better to mouth foolishness than to have to strangle somebody.

Alecto slipped into the passageway, moving with the silent grace of a cat. The passage was windowless. Some moonlight slipped past the inner door, but she hadn’t bothered to swing it fully open.

Ilna followed, wrapping the gathered noose back around her waist as an additional belt. Though…the temple faced south, into the full moon. There should be light enough outside the entrance for any guards present to see whatever design Ilna knotted. She took the hank of short cords out of her sleeve, smiling faintly as her fingers worked. “I’ll deal with the guards,” she said.

Instead of replying, Alecto merely looked back over her shoulder with an expression that was unreadable in the shadows. In a sharper tone Ilna said, “Don’t attack them, I mean! I’ll take care of anyone out there quietly.”

The outer door was heavy, bronze or bronze-covered like the inner one. There were staples and a heavy crossbar to lock it from the inside, but for now all that held it was a spring catch at the upper edge. A drawstring was reeved through a hole in the panel to open it from outside.

Alecto reached for the catch with her free hand. Ilna caught her arm. “I don’t want you stabbing somebody,” she said, each syllable a needle point. “Put your knife away.”

Ilna didn’t know why it mattered to her. Perhaps because as she’d watched the rabbits butchered, she realized that her companion was just as quick to offer blood sacrifice as the priests had been.

Alecto tossed her head dismissively. “All right,” she said, sheathing her blade with a quick motion. “I won’t kill anybody if you’re so squeamish.”

She tripped the catch and put her shoulder against the door to ease it open. Ilna waited, suppressing her frown. She’d meant to go out first, but it probably didn’t matter.

Alecto stepped outside. Ilna couldn’t see much except moonlight past the other girl’s shoulder, but that meant there wasn’t a covered porch that would keep a guard from seeing the pattern knotted into her cords.

“It’s clear,” Alecto said, stepping out of the building so that Ilna could follow. Then, “What is this place? These are houses!”

They were on a hill from which two- and three-story buildings marched down to a harbor. Patches of lamplight, yellower than the moon, shone from windows onto the winding streets; music trembled on the breeze.

Not long ago Ilna too would have been startled, but she’d seen far larger cities in the months since she left Barca’s Hamlet. “Come on,” she said crisply to Alecto. “We don’t want to stay around here.”

She shoved the door closed. Its weight resisted her, but the hinges pivoted smoothly. Too late Ilna remembered the bell note with which it had closed behind the crowd of priests and worshippers. She grabbed the long horizontal handle; even so, the door, several times as heavy as she was, bonged against its jamb.

Lamplight flared beside the steps leading down from the entrance. The caretaker’s room was built under the staircase. “Who’s there?” a man called as he stepped into view.

It was the servant who’d opened and closed the doors for the ceremony. He held his belt in his left hand and was drawing his hook-bladed sword from its scabbard.

“Hey, don’t worry,” said Alecto, unpinning her wolfskin cape with her left hand. “There’s room for you at the party too, handsome.”

She swept the cape off her torso, twirling it in a quick figure-eight. Her breasts were full but firm, standing out proudly from her hard-muscled chest. She sauntered down the steps, dangling the cape from the fingers of her left hand.

Ilna was cold with fury, though not even she could have said whether she was angrier at herself or at her companion. The caretaker stared transfixed at the wild girl’s naked chest. The spell Ilna had knotted into her cords was as useless as it would have been on a blind man. Of course, the fellow was frozen as rigid now as Ilna’s pattern would have left him.

Alecto glanced at Ilna, grinning in a mixture of mockery and open lust. “So, fellow, are you man enough to handle both of us?” she said to the caretaker.

He swung his heavy sword up for a chopping blow. “Harlot!” he screamed. “Profaning the house of the Mistress! I’ll—”

Alecto was just as skilled with the knife as Ilna had expected; her right hand dipped to the ivory hilt and came up to thrust the long blade through the fellow’s throat, choking the rest of the words in his blood. He’d only begun his own stroke.

The caretaker stumbled backward, continuing to swing the sword. He was dead but his body didn’t realize it quite yet.

Alecto toppled with him, cursing; her dagger was caught in cartilage, and she didn’t want to let go of it. Ilna’s noose settled over the caretaker’s wrist and jerked his arm harmlessly to the side. The sword, a clumsy thing better suited to pruning than war, clanged a sad note against the lowest step.

Alecto set her left foot on the caretaker’s chest and tugged her blade free. Blood gushed from both the wound and his mouth. His eyes stared at Ilna as she freed her rope.

Alecto lifted the man’s kilt to wipe her dagger. When he guarded the door during the service he’d worn a leather vest and cap as well, but he’d taken them off in his lodgings.

“Too bad,” she said, grinning at Ilna again. “He’s hung like a pack pony. I wouldn’t have minded a little fun with him. First.”

Ilna looked at the other woman with a loathing that made her stomach roil…but she’d let Alecto lead, and Alecto’s actions when the caretaker appeared showed a quick mind—though a disgusting one.

Ilna had alerted the caretaker by slamming the temple door. There was no question of whose fault the sprawled body was.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ilna said quietly. She nodded toward the countryside visible beyond the squat blocks of houses. “There’s woodland out there to the west. We can hide until daylight and then…”

Then what?

“Then make plans,” Ilna concluded. After all, that was what most of life was about: going on until, she supposed, you couldn’t go on anymore.

Cashel heard pipe music, a skirling high-pitched sound very different from the golden tones of the wax-stopped reeds Garric had played to the sheep in Barca’s Hamlet. He got to his feet with an easy motion, the quarterstaff crosswise in both hands; close to his chest, not threatening anybody but ready for whatever trouble chose to come.

“Cashel?” said Tilphosa. She was already standing, a pale figure in the shadows. “How did you bring us here? Where are we?”

“Mistress, I’m not sure,” said Cashel. He was polite by nature, but since he didn’t have any idea where they were or how they’d gotten there, he thought there were better uses for his time than talking about it.

Three sailors had come through with them: Hook, Captain Mounix, and a stocky fellow named Ousseau whose right arm and chest were bleeding from a deep cut. Ousseau cursed between moans; the two officers lay on the ground, turning their heads quickly in the direction of every noise. Mounix had retrieved the sword Cashel’d knocked from his hand; Hook was unarmed.

The pipe wasn’t playing a melody, just sequences of notes that had the same mindless quality as a brook flowing over rocks. Perhaps it was a natural sound, something the wind did in a hollow tree or the song of a night bird.

“Where’d the temple go?” Mounix said, rising to one knee cautiously as if he was afraid that were his head to come up the roof’d fall in on him. “And these trees aren’t like what they were on Laut. Where are we?”

“The bark’s smooth,” Tilphosa said quietly as her left hand stroked the trunk beside her. She still held the block of stone close to her body; the weight must be straining her by this time, but she didn’t seem ready to give up her only weapon.

They were in a forest with no sign of the temple or the Archai who’d surrounded it, and the many sorts of trees were different from any Cashel had seen before. None of them were as tall as a crab apple. The trunks were straight, some as thick as Cashel’s own body. Large leaves sprayed from the ends of branches that mostly kinked instead of curving. Some limbs carried balls that might be fruit, hanging just above easy reach.

He looked up. The sky was as bright as if the moon was full. The heavens were featureless—a gray-glazed bowl with neither moon, stars, nor the streaking of clouds to give them character.

Hook came over to Cashel; the carpenter’s eyes held a new respect. “Did you bring us here?” he asked, glancing around with the nervous quickness of a woodchuck foraging when hawks are about. “Are you a wizard too, Master Cashel?”

“All I did was break a hole in the wall,” Cashel said, maybe a bit more harshly than he’d meant to. Tilphosa stood to his side and a little behind, her place and posture showing that she was with him and against the part of the world that included the sailors. “Well, I broke a hole in the light that Metra raised. I don’t see any opening from this side, do you?”

“I watched you grow out of the empty air,” Tilphosa said quietly. “First you were a shadow, then it was you all whole, and you fell to the ground. And I thanked the Mistress that She’d returned my champion to me.”

Cashel glanced at her in surprise. “I don’t know…” he said; but the truth was, he didn’t know much about the Mistress, so there wasn’t any point in him talking about Her.

“There’s nothing there,” Mounix said. He and Ousseau, the latter clutching the torn skin over his right biceps with his left hand, had joined Hook. “I hope to the Lady that means the wizard and her monsters can’t come after us.”

“I sure don’t want to go back there!” Hook said, and even Cashel nodded agreement with that thought.

They were all looking at him. Cashel didn’t think he was much of a leader, but the sailors had proved they were no good at trying to think for themselves. As for Tilphosa—well, Tilphosa hadn’t any reason to complain about sticking with him.

Cashel cleared his throat. Mounix still held his sword. The blade was twisted sideways, so he probably couldn’t have sheathed it if he tried. “Straighten your sword out,” he said. “It won’t be much good like it is. And we better do something about that cut of yours, Ousseau. Maybe—”

“I’ve been taught some healing in the temple,” Tilphosa said. She dropped her stone and brushed her hands on her tunic. “I wonder if the light’s better over…”

The sailors turned their attention to the girl. Ousseau allowed her to guide him toward a tall tree whose spindly, needlelike foliage blocked less of the sky’s faint illumination.

“Hook?” Cashel said. He didn’t raise his voice much, but he spoke loud enough all the sailors had to hear him. “You weren’t respectful to Lady Tilphosa back at the other place, on Laut, but I let you live.”

“Yes, Master Cashel, we know we were wrong,” Captain Mounix said before Hook decided what or whether to reply. “We—”

Cashel shifted the quarterstaff in his hands very slightly. Mounix’s mouth shut in mid-babble; Hook said nothing but spread his hands to show, perhaps unconsciously, that they were weaponless.

“That’s good,” Cashel said. “Because I wouldn’t leave you alive a second time.”

He turned his back, mostly because he didn’t want to look at the sailors for a while, but it was also a good way to end a conversation that had gone as far as he figured it needed to. He was pretty sure there was light ahead through the forest. It wasn’t as sharp-edged as a lamp in an open window, just a glow that couldn’t be the sky even though it was about the same texture and brightness.

A will-o’-the-wisp, maybe? Cashel worked his big toe into the ground to test it. The soil had a spongy lightness, but in his experience it wasn’t wet enough to breed that sort of ghost light.

He didn’t know how he felt about the sailors deciding he was a wizard. Ilna always said that what other people thought was their own business; but she really meant “so long as they kept their thoughts to themselves,” because she’d always had a short way with anybody she thought was lying about her or Cashel.

Cashel’s own concern was a little different: he didn’t want it to seem he was claiming credit he didn’t deserve, and he knew that he wasn’t a wizard the way Hook and the others meant it. He scowled into the forest, trying to grapple with the problem.

There’d be less trouble for Tilphosa if the sailors thought Cashel could turn them into monkeys. He didn’t want to kill the trio, which he’d surely have to do if they did try something with the girl again. He guessed he’d let them think what they pleased; but he’d be really glad when he saw the last of them.

“I’ve done what I can for the wound, Cashel,” Tilphosa said from close behind him. “I don’t recognize any of the leaves, and I didn’t find any spiderwebs to pack the wound, but I made do.”

She paused, then added, “What…what do you suppose we ought to do now?”

Cashel shook his head slowly, mostly as a way of settling his thoughts. “The woods seem pretty open,” he said. “Even though it’s night, I thought we’d head toward the light there.”

He nodded, suddenly wondering if what he saw was more than imagination.

“Anyway, I think it’s a light,” he went on. “Maybe we’ll find a better place to bed down than here. And I don’t feel much like sleeping.”

He looked at the sailors. “That all right with you?” he asked.

“Let’s go, Cashel,” Tilphosa said, touching his elbow. She turned to Mounix again, and in a cold voice said, “Captain, you were told to straighten your sword; do so at once!”

Cashel blinked. He’d started off when Tilphosa told him to, then stopped again when he heard her tell Mounix to fix his sword. Put it on a fallen log and hammer it with the heel of his boot, Cashel wondered? Because there wasn’t a proper forge anywhere about, and no flat stones on the ground here either.

“Let’s go,” Tilphosa repeated, this time murmuring close to Cashel’s ear. She gave his biceps a light pressure in the direction of the light.

Cashel stepped off on his right foot, smiling faintly. Now he understood. He’d warned the sailors in his fashion, but Tilphosa—Lady Tilphosa—was repeating the message by training them to jump when she whistled. Mounix was hopping around, trying to fix his sword and follow the others at the same time.

It wasn’t the way Tilphosa preferred to be, not judging from the way she’d handled herself around Cashel. He’d seen before—when she hauled up Metra—that she could put on the Great Lady when it suited her, though. Of course…

In a quiet, apologetic voice, Cashel said, “The thing about reminding people who’s boss is, well…Metra came back with her own ideas, you know.”

“Yes,” said Tilphosa cheerfully. “I was glad that you and your staff were there to protect me, Cashel.”

She stroked the hickory with the tips of two fingers.

“I’m even more glad that you’re still with me,” she added.

Cashel cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. When he thought about it, there wasn’t anything to say.

There were various kinds of trees. Every one of them was a different sort, it seemed to Cashel, but that wasn’t something he’d have wanted to swear to till he saw them by daylight.

“How long do you suppose it is before sunrise, Cashel?” Tilphosa asked in a falsely bright voice. In those words he could hear the question she really meant but was afraid to speak: “Do you think the sun ever rises here?”

“I don’t know,” Cashel said. “I’ve been wondering if we wound up underground when I went through that wall. But there’s light enough to get along by, even if it never gets brighter.”

“No,” Tilphosa said, the tension gone from her voice. “Things growing in a cave don’t have leaves and all these trees do. But you’re right, Cashel, we have plenty of light now. I’m sorry to have been…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. If the word she’d swallowed was “worried,” then Cashel didn’t see it was anything to have been ashamed of.

The bright blur was close now and the size of a house, but the edges were just as fuzzy as they’d been when Cashel first saw it. It wasn’t in a clearing, exactly. The light took the place of trees that should’ve been there, even though the roots and upper branches showed outside the glowing field.

“Something’s moving in the light,” Cashel said, speaking a little quieter than he might normally have done. “I don’t think it’s just the trees.”

“Cashel, I see Metra,” Tilphosa said. Her voice was calm, but she gripped his arms fiercely. “If you look—”

“Right, I see her,” Cashel said.

It was funny: when he squinted just right, it all fell into place. After that he could see the wizard even if he straightened and opened his eyes wide.

She knelt holding her athame on the porch of the temple which Cashel had defended not long ago. She’d spread one of her silk figures on the stones. The scene was washed out and ripply, like Cashel was watching her on the bottom of a pond, but it was Metra all right. Around her stood—

“By the Sister, you fool!” Captain Mounix squealed. “You and the bitch’ve led us straight back to those monsters!”

Hook took one look at the light and another at Cashel’s face as he shifted and brought his staff up. The carpenter grabbed Mounix by the shoulder and clamped the other hand across his mouth.

“Shut up, will you!” he screamed at the captain. “Did you doubt what he told us? I didn’t! He don’t need monsters to finish us if he wants to!”

Ousseau, looking misshapen in the dimness because of his bandaged chest, was still stumbling along after them. His head was lowered; he probably didn’t know what was going on.

Mounix’s eyes widened. He tried to scramble back. Hook twisted the sword out of his hand and let him go.

Cashel relaxed, taking a couple of deep breaths. He nodded to Hook, and said, “Yeah, she’s there with the Archai, just like we left ’em.”

“I don’t think she can see us,” Tilphosa said. She put her hand on Cashel’s shoulder the way he himself might’ve calmed a plow ox who’d startled a wildcat in the stubble.

The thought made him chuckle. “I don’t guess they can or they’d be trying to do something about us,” Cashel said. “But there’s no reason for us to hang around here regardless.”

He nodded in the direction they’d been going thus far. “It looks like there’s another light up there,” he said. “Maybe if we keep going, we’ll find a place we want to be, huh?”

“Yes, let’s go,” Tilphosa said with a grateful smile. The hazy globe didn’t make the woods around it any brighter, but Cashel wasn’t having any difficulty seeing things by the light of the sky or roof or whatever it was.

Cashel held a hand up to stop her, then called into the darkness, “Hey, Mounix! Give Ousseau here a hand, will you? We’re not leaving anybody behind unless they want to stay, got that?”

They started forward. Tilphosa said very softly, “You’re a remarkably gentle man, Master Cashel.”

He snorted, but he was more pleased than not by the comment. “When you’re my size, you better be,” he said. “Otherwise, you break things.”

The second blur of light was much the same as the first, though this one appeared in a clump of saw-edged grass that Cashel wouldn’t have tried to fight through. He cocked his head slightly; the shadows condensed into the image of a man in a green robe, seated on a couch spread with the lush, dappled pelt of some animal. Curtains hung on the wall behind him; the embroidered figures of strange beasts cavorted on the cloth, tossing six-horned heads or screeching from bird beaks on antelope bodies.

Guards stood with their backs to the man on the couch. He stared at the bowl of water on the table before him, his expression cold and angry.

“Do you know him?” Cashel said. “I don’t.”

“I’ve never seen him before,” Tilphosa said. “That’s a scrying bowl, so he must be a wizard.”

After a further moment’s consideration, she added, “Is he a eunuch, do you suppose? The way his flesh hangs looks like he is.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Cashel said shortly. They didn’t geld men in Barca’s Hamlet. Cashel had learned things were different in some other parts of the world, but that wasn’t knowledge that pleased him.

He frowned at the man in the watery image. “He looks like a guy I saw once,” he said. The fellow who’d been talking to Garric on the bridge when he fell over and Cashel jumped in to save him…“But it’s not the same guy. He’s too young, and the fellow I saw was thinner by a lot.”

“Are we stopping here, Master Cashel?” Hook asked with nervous politeness.

Cashel turned. Captain Mounix was holding Ousseau. The wounded man looked rather better than he had when Cashel last noticed him. The captain flinched, shifting to put Ousseau’s body between him and Cashel.

Cashel nodded. “No,” he said, “there’s nothing here to hold us.”

A fairy glow showed in the farther distance, and just maybe another hung at a slightly higher level beyond that, though the second could’ve been a patch of the sky itself. The ground was rising, though gradually enough that nobody who hadn’t followed sheep for a living would’ve noticed it. Sheep can find a slope where a drop of water’d hesitate.

Cashel started on. Tilphosa walked with him—the forest was open enough for two side by side most places—and the sailors followed. Cashel smiled. They followed at a respectful distance.

“I’ve never read about this place,” Tilphosa said, picking her words carefully to seem, well, not worried. “Have you, Cashel?”

He smiled. “Mistress, I can’t read,” he said. “I can spell out my name with a little time, that’s all.”

“Ah!” said Tilphosa. She probably hadn’t thought about that sort of thing. Well, she wouldn’t, being a lady and all.

“I wasn’t educated as a wizard, of course,” she said. Cashel wasn’t sure if she was changing the subject or if she just needed to talk. “I haven’t any talent for it. Some of those who came to the temple did, and they were trained to be Children of the Mistress. They had much reading to do for what they had to learn.”

She linked her fingers and clutched them over her stomach, the way she’d have done if she was cold. Cashel didn’t think she could be. The air was warm; besides, they’d been walking at a good pace, and there wasn’t a breeze.

Cashel saw what she was hinting at. He swallowed and said, “Mistress—”

“Tilphosa,” she corrected him.

“Tilphosa,” he said, “I’m not a wizard like you think. I can do things, sure, but I don’t know how it happens. I just do them.”

She gave a little laugh. It didn’t sound forced. “I’m told that Metra is very skilled, very powerful,” she said. “As a wizard. That’s why the Council chose her to accompany me. And you freed us from her enchantment, Cashel.”

He smiled. “It looked like a wall,” he said. “Sometimes you can break a wall down if you hit it hard enough.”

They were close to the light by now. This one seemed to have color, or anyway a different color: a hint of red instead of blue to its silvery grayness. Ilna would be able to say for sure; there was nothing about shape or color that she didn’t see.

In the light a man knelt before a pentagram scratched on the narrow deck of a galley. Cashel could see a few of the rowers on the benches beyond the fellow. They leaned into the oarlooms with faces set in a fierce determination not to watch what the wizard was doing.

“I know him!” Cashel said. “This is the guy I asked you about, the one who looks like Metra. He was going to take a piece of statue away from me.”

Cashel frowned with a realization. It wouldn’t have been the statue the fellow was after, just the ruby ring the statue wore. And that was here in Cashel’s purse.

“He’s a Son of the Mistress,” Tilphosa said, frowning also at some thought of her own. “I don’t recognize him, Cashel. He does look a lot like Metra.”

Cashel glanced back at the sailors. They were keeping up all right. As they should: Cashel was walking at the pace that a herd of sheep would’ve set.

“Let’s go on,” he said aloud.

Cashel didn’t understand this, but he was used to things he didn’t understand and to going ahead anyway. He might not like the scenery on the way, but eventually he’d always gotten to a place where he wanted to be.

There was another fog of light ahead, and Cashel supposed there’d be more after that one. He wondered if they’d ever come out of this forest. He had bread and cheese still in his wallet. With the frugal reflex of growing up poor—and poorer yet—he’d bundled the leftovers away before he started down to deal with Metra’s wizardry.

He smiled. That seemed a long time ago, now.

“Do you suppose they’re all looking for me, Cashel?” Tilphosa said. “All the wizards whose images we’ve seen? Metra is, we know that.”

“Um?” said Cashel. He thought about the question. “I don’t see how they can be, Tilphosa. That last fellow was somebody I met in Valles. He…I mean, that was…”

What would Tilphosa say if he told her he came from a time farther in her future than he could imagine himself?

“I’m from a long way away, Tilphosa,” he said. “A long way ahead in time.”

She turned her head to study him as they walked along. “I see,” she said, but Cashel wasn’t sure that she meant anything by the words. “Well, I’m glad the Mistress’s powers enabled Her to go even through time to bring me a champion.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about the Mistress bringing me, Tilphosa,” Cashel said. He looked straight ahead to avoid the girl’s eyes, but he flushed regardless. “I mean…my sister and I never had much to do with the Great Gods. Well, we couldn’t afford to, that was part of it, but with Ilna it was more besides. And, well…I just wish you wouldn’t say the Mistress is moving me around. I don’t feel right hearing that.”

“All right, Cashel,” Tilphosa said. She didn’t sound angry or even hurt. “I’ll be more careful about what I say.”

Either Cashel had started walking faster in embarrassment or this time the image of light was located closer to the previous one. The scene within was a barn, a big one. There were horses stabled there, so it belonged to rich people. A man sat on an upturned wicker basket, talking to a circle of many other men.

The one talking shared a family resemblance with both Metra and the fellow who’d tried to take the ring back in Valles. He wore a coarse tunic now, but his black-and-white robe was hung to dry on a rafter.

Most of the audience were strangers to Cashel, but—

“That’s Garric!” he cried. “That’s my friend Garric! But what happened to his head? He’s got scars on his scalp!”

“Maybe it isn’t really your friend, Cashel?” said Tilphosa. She was frowning when he turned to look at her, but she smoothed her face at once. “I mean…the men who look like Metra? Perhaps…?”

Cashel grimaced. One of the beastmen of Bight, a female, fawned at the feet of the fellow he’d thought was Garric. That didn’t seem like something the real Garric would’ve let happen.

The wizard in the center talked urgently, gesturing repeatedly toward the ring held by the older peg-legged man at the side of maybe-Garric. The ring looked a lot like the one in Cashel’s purse, but the when the light caught this one right it winked blue.

“I don’t know,” Cashel said harshly. “Let’s get on. There’s nothing here for us.”

He turned. When the girl didn’t follow him at once he reached out—then jerked his hand back.

Cashel’s body was cold. Had he been thinking of pulling Tilphosa along against her will? All he knew was that it frightened him to see his friend changed that way; frightened him as he’d never feared death.

“Yes, of course, Cashel,” Tilphosa said. She stared at his horrified expression with obvious concern. “Let’s get away from here. We’ll get to the edge of these woods soon, I’m sure.”

Cashel wasn’t sure of anything except that he was jumpier than he’d been since, well, a long time. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“I haven’t heard the night bird recently,” the girl said brightly, changing the subject for sure this time. “Have you?”

“Um?” said Cashel. “Oh, you mean the music? No, not since just after we got here. These woods are quieter than the ones I’m used to.”

“Is that because there’s no wind?” Tilphosa asked. She looked about her as they walked along, swaying a little closer to Cashel. She was nervous, but she was keeping it well inside.

“Partly that, I guess,” Cashel said. “There’s always something happening in the woods, though. Squirrels running about, limbs squealing as they grow…. You can hear the trees breathe if you take the time to listen.”

“But not here?” said Tilphosa.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Cashel said; walking steadily forward, but keeping his eyes on the things around him as he always did. He noticed most things, though he didn’t generally talk about them.

He cleared his throat. “You can generally tell when there’s something wrong with your flock, you know,” he said. “Things don’t feel right, even if you can’t see what it is that’s wrong. I don’t feel like that here, for what it’s worth.”

“Thank you, Cashel,” the girl said. She laid her fingertips briefly on his arm.

They’d reached the next of the scenes in light. This one was smaller than the others, scarcely the size of the shelter a shepherd might weave for himself from sticks and branches in bad weather. Cashel squinted, waiting for the image in his mind to focus.

“That’s Tenoctris!” he said. “It couldn’t be anybody else! Oh, if she’s looking for us, then everything’s going to be all right!”

Tenoctris sat at a table in her cottage in the palace grounds, reading a scroll by the light of a three-wick oil lamp hanging at her side. Most of the room’s furnishings were simple, but the lampstand itself was a scaled, sinuous body of gilded bronze. Each wick projected like a breath of flames from a dragon head.

“She’s a very powerful wizard, Cashel?” Tilphosa asked. She bent her head as if to read over Tenoctris’ shoulder, but of course you couldn’t see anything that small in the light here. It was clearer than what you saw through the rounds of bull’s-eye glass in the casements of Reise’s inn, but not much clearer.

The sailors had fallen farther behind, so Cashel figured to wait here for a time anyway. And if there was a way to get into this vision, then that’d be a very good thing.

He pushed his quarterstaff into the light. He was careful for fear there might be a spark when the iron touched it or even that the whole scene might vanish with a blaze and crashing.

The metal-capped hickory blurred and vanished; then it hit something and stopped. Cashel pushed harder, but whatever he’d hit was solid. He couldn’t see either the end of the staff or anything in the image that ought to be blocking it.

“Cashel?” said the girl, watching him closely.

“Wait,” he said tersely. He heard the rustle and whispering of the sailors joining them, but he didn’t look around.

Withdrawing the quarterstaff, Cashel thrust his bare left arm into the image of light. His fingers touched—

Cashel laughed and withdrew his hand. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s nothing here except what we see, and that won’t help us.”

“But what was it?” the girl said, a trifle sharply.

“Just a tree,” Cashel said. “That tree.”

He pointed upward. Branches like the stems of ancient wisteria twisted out of the image at about the height Cashel could reach by raising his staff. At the ends were sprays like the whips of a weeping willow, though much shorter.

“Tell him,” Mounix whispered.

“You tell him!” Hook snapped back. “I’m all right.”

Cashel turned. Tilphosa turned with him but moved a little back. “Tell me what?” he said. His voice was a growl, almost angry; he wasn’t pleased to be reminded of the sailors’ presence.

“Master,” Hook said after a quick glance at Mounix. “The captain wants me to say that Ousseau’s pretty well done in. He really means he wants to stop, is what I think.”

Cashel looked at them. Ousseau’s eyes were open; so was his mouth. There was as much intelligence in the one as the other. Mounix forced a smile that looked like he was dying of lockjaw; Hook tried to lean on the sword he’d taken from the captain and fell sideways when it slid into the soft ground. He barely caught himself.

As for Tilphosa—

“How are you feeling?” Cashel asked, turning to the girl. “Do you want to go on?”

“Yes,” she said, though she seemed to be trembling. “We can…Maybe a little farther. I’d like to get out of these woods if we could.”

Cashel sucked in his lower lip as he thought. “We’ll go to the next of these lights,” he said after a moment. “The one up there.”

He nodded in the direction they’d been heading. “Then we’ll bed down if we don’t see something better close by. All right?”

“Of course it’s all right,” Tilphosa said, glaring at the desperate sailors. She touched his arm. “Let’s go, Cashel.”

Cashel smiled as they trudged on. This one wasn’t a girl to get on the wrong side of. He was used to that, of course, since you could say the same thing about his sister Ilna. Despite her being a lady and all, Tilphosa made Cashel feel pretty much at home.

“Cashel?” the girl said. “Are the lights a kind of window that you created when you broke down the barrier around us in the temple?”

Cashel shrugged. He didn’t like that sort of question. It was partly that he didn’t know the answer, and partly that he was afraid the answer was yes. Like he’d told Tilphosa, he’d always been careful with the strength of his arms because he knew the damage he’d do otherwise. If he was doing things that he didn’t know about, then Duzi alone knew the harm he might cause.

“I don’t know, mistress,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, but I don’t know.”

As they got closer to the pale blur. Alone of the images he’d seen since they came to this place, this was in a real clearing. It hung in the air, in the middle of six straight-trunked trees whose branches wove a kind of arbor overhead.

Cashel hadn’t felt anything around the other images. No reason he should, of course, since he’d found that they were only there to his eyes, or maybe to his mind’s eye; but this one—

This one didn’t frighten Cashel; but he guessed the feeling he got would have frightened a lot of other people.

Tilphosa looked around with a set expression, then picked up a fallen branch and raised it as a club. The wood had rotted to punk, but it seemed to make her feel better to hold something she could at least pretend was a weapon. She must feel something here too.

There was only blackness inside the ball of light. Cashel squinted, then twisted his head to one side and the other, waiting for the image to appear.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“It’s dark wherever it is,” Tilphosa said. Her voice had a studied firmness. “Whatever it is. But it’s there. It’s watching us, Cashel.”

“Yeah, I think it is,” he said.

He turned. The sailors had stopped some distance back; they were watching him.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re not going to stay here after all.”

They resumed walking. “Do you think the sky ahead is getting lighter, Cashel?” the girl asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “We’ll know before long.”

Cashel felt the eyes on him long after the blur had vanished from sight behind them.

“Can’t we have a fire?” asked Metron, shivering on bucket upturned in the middle of the stable floor. He wore an ostler’s tunic, filthy but dry, while water pooled beneath the stall door from which his own robe of silk brocade hung. “It’s not just the cold water, you see. I shut my whole body down when I sent my soul out of it.”

Garric smiled. Several of the bandits went grim-faced at the mention of wizardry, but others laughed outright at the absurdity of what they’d just heard.

“Can we have a fire in a barn full of straw?” Vascay mused aloud. “No, we can’t. Anyhow, with all the horses in here you’d warm up quick enough even if it were cold out. Which it’s not.”

He coughed to clear his throat. Garric, sitting beside Vascay, glanced at him to judge his expression.

Vascay’s face gave nothing away. He opened and closed his left fist; at each movement, the sapphire ring appeared on or disappeared from his little finger. He didn’t speak.

“That’s the ring I sent you for, isn’t it?” said Metron. He’d obviously been taken aback by Vascay’s attitude but decided to deal with it by bluster. He held out his hand. “Well done. Now we have to release Thalemos before we can topple the Intercessor.”

Tint lay in the straw at Garric’s feet, watching Metron intently. At first Garric thought the tremble of her rib cage against his ankle was purring, but after a moment he realized it was an inaudible growl.

“We’ll listen to your proposal, wizard,” Vascay said nonchalantly. “But right at the moment, I’d say what my Brethren and I have to do is get out of this district by dawn…and Thalemos, I’d say, could take care of himself.”

“I’ve been saying that!” Ademos said loudly. “This whole business was a bad idea from the first. We’re lucky we didn’t all die on Serpents’ Isle instead of just Kelbat and Ceto, and now that the Intercessor knows what’s going on, well!”

Other men openly agreed with him. From the expressions around the circle, Garric thought more would’ve called, “Right!” and “The quicker, the better,” if they hadn’t disliked Ademos too much to willingly identify themselves with his position.

The wizard nodded to the Brethren, his expression bland. If the situation were what Vascay baldly stated, the gang would be gone already and Metron would still be on the bottom of the pond. Vascay was using the legitimate threat to restructure the relationship between him and Metron. If Metron called his bluff…

Except that Garric wasn’t sure Vascay was bluffing; and if Garric wasn’t sure, then Metron would be a fool to take the risk.

Metron wasn’t a fool. He spread his hands, and said, “I’m sorry, Master Vascay, I got ahead of myself. This isn’t the catastrophe it must seem to your good selves, arriving as you have on the tail of the Intercessor’s troops. Echeon is flailing about, but he can’t overcome foreordained fate.”

“Is fate going to keep the Intercessor’s knife from cutting Lord Thalemos’ throat?” Vascay said bluntly. “Why won’t he do that, Metron?”

“If Echeon kills Thalemos,” the wizard said, leaning forward to seem more earnest, “then the real Thalemos will appear somewhere else. Echeon has seen the future, or at least a portion of it. He knows that Lord Thalemos becomes Earl of Laut, so his only hope is to bend him to his will first. When we rescue Thalemos, we’ll be able to proceed with the plan.”

“Seems to me,” Hame said slowly, “that if it’s as simple as that, we all oughta go back east where we come from and wait for the happy day. Eh?”

Metron spread his hands again and nodded gravely, his expression studiedly reasonable. “Lord Thalemos will become Earl of Laut,” he said. “But he’ll surely do so as the Intercessor’s puppet if we don’t intervene. Echeon is a great wizard, I assure you; but with Thalemos and the power of the ring—”

He gestured toward Vascay’s hand, at the moment empty. He wasn’t demanding the ring as he had been before.

“—we can overturn him and return Laut to freedom and prosperity.”

Metron cleared his throat, and added, “I wonder if you’d be good enough to tell me how you found the ring, Master Vascay? I’m sure it was a difficult task.”

Vascay glanced at Garric and raised an eyebrow. The tiny sapphire winked on his finger.

“I found the statue of Thalemos,” Garric said. He saw more value in learning where Metron would go with the information than he did in hiding it from him. “It’d been dragged a distance from its plinth and built into a later wall. The ring was on its finger, as you’d said.”

Metron’s eyes narrowed minusculely. “There was no guardian, then?” he asked.

Instead of answering, Garric let his lips smile. He said, “Why did somebody put up a statue of Lord Thalemos hundreds of years before he was born, wizard?”

Metron’s eyes were wary, but he reflected Garric’s smile with an unctuous one of his own. “The statue was carved two thousand years ago, sir, not mere centuries. This was done by the command of the Intercessor Echea, every bit as powerful a wizard as her distant descendent of today. They both and all of their line wish to bind the fate they know they cannot change.”

The wizard turned his hand up; his smile a little harder, a little more real. Answer for answer…

“There was no guardian,” Garric said. “There was a poisonous snake, but there’s a lot of snakes on the island. And growing near the site were puffballs, which I avoided.”

“Did you indeed?” Metron said. “A foolish question, of course: you wouldn’t be here otherwise. You’re a very clever young man, sir; very clever indeed.”

He returned his gaze to the chieftain. “Master Vascay,” he said, “Echeon will have placed protections of art over Lord Thalemos; these I can overcome. But there will be physical barriers as well, and against them my arts are useless. Will you help me, knowing that the risk is great but that on the other side of danger is freedom for yourself and your compatriots?”

Men murmured to their neighbors, but for a moment nobody responded directly to the wizard. Vascay kept his eyes on Metron, his own face impassive. At last he said, “So. We’d have to find Lord Thalemos first, I suppose?”

“Lord Thalemos is in the prison in the center of Durassa,” Metron said. “The Spike, it’s called. It’s a tower.”

“We bloody well know what the Spike is,” Ademos muttered, staring blackly at the pounded-earth floor.

Metron raised a bead of clear quartz, one of several score round beads of various stones which he wore around his neck. “Thalemos had a similar necklace. Echeon took it from him when he arrived at the prison, but this”—he wriggled his necklace slightly, causing light to cascade from the highly polished beads—“has stored all the images it received before that moment.”

“He could’ve been moved,” Ademos said.

“To where?” Prada snapped. “Where is there that’d be harder to get into than the Spike, let alone out of? It’s all over if Thalemos is in there!”

“I think not, sir,” said Metron courteously. The ragged tunic handicapped him, but he still managed to project a degree of dignified authority. “If two of you men are expert climbers, and if you all have the courage of patriots, it will assuredly be possible to rescue Lord Thalemos.”

Vascay looked around the circle. Each of the bandits fell silent as his gaze crossed them. “What do you say, brethren?” he asked in an almost teasing tone.

“What do you say, chief?” Hame said fiercely.

Vascay tapped his peg leg with an index finger as he paused. “Hakken, you can climb, can’t you?” he said to the little ex-sailor.

“Yeah, all right,” Hakken said. He didn’t look happy about it. “But—oh, Sister take all wizards, I’ll go.”

Vascay’s eyes met Garric’s. “Gar,” he said, “you used to be able to climb like a monkey. Can you still?”

Garric grinned with anticipation. “I can climb,” he said. Regardless of the abilities Gar’s muscles remembered, Garric knew that the skills he himself had honed robbing gallinule nests off the coast of Haft would take him anyplace a sailor could go.

Tint sat up abruptly and clamped a possessive hand on Garric’s knee. “Gar?” she growled. “Me go!”

Garric smiled wider, though his stomach was twitching. “But there’ll be three of us, Vascay,” he said.