The flame-bordered island was twenty feet from Cashel in the skiff. The captain of the Successor's barge stood in the bow. He halted the paddlers with a hand signal, then bowed to Sosia and said, “It's not safe for you to go any nearer, Your Highness. The wizard and his companion should go the rest of the way themselves.”

The barge had a tasseled canopy made from cream satin. Sosia leaned out from beneath it to embrace Cashel in the skiff alongside. “Save my daughter,” she said. “Whatever else happens, don't let Ilmed have her.”

To Cashel's enormous embarrassment, she kissed him on the forehead. He kept his face rigid, but he felt the blush wanning his skin anyway.

The red-orange flames rising from the waters ahead were as silent as swordblades, but their radiance already made Cashel's skin prickle. “Time we go, then,” he muttered, refusing to meet Sosia's eyes. He turned his head over his right shoulder and said, “Are you ready, Za-hag?”

The ape in the back of the skiff stared at his fingers. His lips moved as he muttered scraps of verse. Between Zahag and Cashel was a coil of rope plaited from the attachment threads of giant barnacles. It was finer than bowcord, but Cashel had put his full strength against a loop of it as a test—and the rope had held.

“Zahag, answer me!” Cashel said. “Or I'll leave you. If you want to stay, stay.”

Zahag flailed the water angrily with both hands. Sosia jerked back as harbor filth soaked the pastel silk of her dress. An attendant raised his baton, but Sosia prevented the blow with a curt gesture.

“I'll stay with you!” the ape said. “You're a fool and you'll get us both killed, but I'm afraid to be alone.”

Cashel turned to his left and caught the eye of the barge's anxious officer. “Push us off,” he said. He thrust one end of his staff against the” side of the barge to bring the skiff's bow in line with the wall of fire.

Sosia and her diviner sat side by side on gilt seats in the center of the barge. The crew, a dozen men of matched physique, ordinarily stood facing forward in the bow and stern to work long paddles. Now a pair of them shoved the skiff toward the soundless flames.

Cashel rose to his feet. The skiff wobbled only min-usculely; Cashel had a countryman's poise, practiced by a life in which every day meant walking the top of a wall or a path id which rocks were as apt to turn as not.

“Keep us going, Zahag,” he ordered, sliding the pole between his -hands to find the balance that would have been instinctive with the hickory staff it replaced. “We've said we'll do this, so we can't back out.”

“Humans!” the ape said. “Sheep-stupid humans! Of course we could back out!”

Zahag dabbed the water, then splashed hard. His arms were so long that he could stroke with both paddle-broad hands at the same time.

The skiff slid toward the waiting flames. Zahag grumbled, but he continued to drive them over the still water.

A crowd stood on the shore of the harbor, to watch the event. Many waved scarves or their broad straw hats –when they saw Cashel turn to glance in their direction.

“They must like her,” Cashel said. People in Barca's Hamlet didn't give any thought to Count Lascarg in Car-cosa, let alone to the King of the Isles across the sea in Valles.

“Fagh!” the ape said. “They're watching to see us burn. How many did Tayuta say the flames have killed before us? Wasn't it twenty-three?”

“Do you apes live forever, then, if you don't burn?” Cashel said. He adjusted his grip on the staff by an amount too slight for anyone else to notice.

The flames were hammering him, now; he could feel the fuzz on his upper cheeks curl tightly and his eyes were dry. He began to rotate the staff .which palace artisans had hastily made to his directions.

The wood was fir, not hickory or another of the hardwoods. Some folk set store by the dense strength of cor-nelwood, but Cashel had always found that the springiness of his hickory staff made his blows easier on his palms without robbing them of their effect on his target. Nobody took a stroke from Cashel or-Kenset and stayed standing for an&ther.

He grinned. He'd never fought a fire with a staff before. Maybe firwood was the best choice for the job.

The staff was eight feet long and as thick as Cashel's wrists. It spun easily, making a blurred circle in front of the skiff's prow. The workmen had rubbed and waxed the wood, but craftsmanship alone could never give it a polish like that which came from years of friction from Cashel's palms.

The new staff would serve, he guessed. Cashel had never been one to refuse a task because he lacked this tool or that.

The flames shot straight up from the water. There was no steam or bubbles, but Sosia had said that attempts to swim under the barrier were as certainly fatal as trying to penetrate it in a ship armored with vinegar-soaked bull-hides.

A fish flopped to the surface and twisted under again. One side was silvery; the other was bright red, parboiled by contact with the wizard fire.

“Twenty-four stupid humans,” Zahag muttered, “and an ape who's stupider yet because he knows better!”

The staff spun. Cashel no longer felt the heat. He'd found the rhythm, how, the same way he'd have judged the leverage in a weight he was bracing to lift. He wasn't sure how, but how didn't matter.

Faster, increasingly faster. Blue fire shot from the staff's ferrules, blending into first a ring and then a tunnel of light through which the skiff slowly moved.

The artisans who'd made the staff for Cashel had capped the ends as he'd asked—but instead of the simple iron cups he'd expected, they'd created bands of brass cutwork. One cap had a scene of whales battling, the other of eagles mating among the clouds. There wasn't a home in Barca's Hamlet with art as fine as what a trio of Sosia's workmen had created for an object as practical as a wagon wheel.

Hand over hand;, wrists crossing and recrossing, letting the staff's inertia carry it around. A man, even a man as big as Cashel, could leap off the ground in a fight and the spinning quarterstaff would carry him around to face in the opposite direction.

Sparkling blue fire met orange flame. The flames roared now, but Cashel's staff bored through them like an auger into a plank. Hand over hand, neither faster nor slower, despite the drag of the snarling flames.

The work had its own rhythm. Just as seasons came and went, just as clouds spread across the sky and currents changed the color of the sea, so Cashel spun his staff in the pattern that was right for these conditions, for this need.

Zahag gibbered in the skiff's stern. Sometimes the ape shouted blasphemies in the name of the Sister and other human Gods, but mostly he squealed in bestial terror. Cashel ignored his companion and the bright spears of fire that stabbed against his spinning staff and splashed away.

They were wrong to call Cashel a wizard. He was a part of the cosmos, neither more nor less. Any task is a matter of leverage as well as strength; Cashel saw the point of balance and where to exert the necessary force.

The wall of lapping red fire surged behind him. The skiff had passed the barrier and scraped on rock at the base of the prison tower. Cashel staggered as he stepped to dry ground. Zahag, capering and crowing in triumph, supported him with one long arm while the ape's other hand waved the coil of rope.

Cashel raised his staff overhead and shouted, “Through! By the Shepherd's aid, through!”

The Gods had aided; but the strength that was the borough's wonder, that had been part of the victory also.

And if Cashel was proud to prove that he could do something that no one else could do, well then, he had a right to be proud!

 

Garric's chest touched mud an instant before the float grounded on the lagoon's far side. He rose to his knees, then retrieved his sword as he stood. Ersa on floats landed to his right and left. Graz waited onshore with an armed party. The Ersa were silent, but their mobile ears flared and waggled.

Tenoctris got out unaided before Liane could help her. She bowed to Graz with perfunctory politeness and said, “The humans have decided to stay in the Gulf rather than go to our world. Most of them were born here, of course. They'll kill you all if they can. Garric can better judge if that's possible, but Rodoard believes it is.”

Garric realized that all the Ersa present were suddenly staring at him. It was a disconcerting awareness, because the humanoids' broader field of vision meant their heads didn't have to move.

“How many of you are there?” Garric asked. “Warriors, I mean.”

Male Ersa were physically equal at least to the Gulf-born humans. If Ersa numbers were sufficient, then they might be able to withstand a hasty attack despite the greater strength and better weapons of the recent human arrivals.

“Two hundred and thirty-two,” Graz said flatly. “And yourself, if you will fight.”

“Oh, I'll fight,” Garric said. He felt the cold death of hope. At the back of his mind, King Carus had analyzed the situation with the necessary dispassion of a herdsman deciding which animals to slaughter in the fall so that the remainder would have fodder through the Hungry Time in Heron before new growth came in. “But it won't do any good. They'll kill us all, I'm afraid.”

Garric looked at his sword. He wanted to wipe the blade, but he didn't have any dry cloth for the purpose. Liane saw the glance and offered a handkerchief from her sleeve. An Ersa child darted past the warriors and gave Garric a wad of fruit rind. It was dried and as coarsely absorbent as the loofa gourds folk in Barca's Hamlet used for washing.

Graz nodded; a human gesture, just as he used human speech to Garric and his companions. His ears fluttered at the same time, however, and four Ersa warriors ran off along separate paths in the adjacent forest. Couriers, Garric supposed, warning the race of its certain doom. The Ersa females and children nearby left together by the broadest of the routes.

“If you let me use what you called the Hand,” Tenoctris said, “then I can open a gate for your folk as well as ourselves. It isn't what I wanted to do, but it's all the hope I see now.”

“Yes,” Graz said. “I told my people to gather at the First Place anyway. Our ancestors entered the Gulf through that grove. It's fitting that our existence should end there as well.”

He and the warriors beside him turned in unison and started off down a broad trail covered with planks. The local vegetation was too pulpy to make good structures, but by replacing slats when they cracked or wore through the Ersa provided dry footing in the Gulf's sodden expanse. There was nothing like this on the human side of the lagoon.

Garric dropped the wiping rag and sheathed his sword. Liane had given fenoctris her arm, though the older woman seemed to have regained her normal sprightly animation. It was anybody's guess what another major incantation would do to Tenoctris after the strain of deflecting Lunifra's horror; but they were all doing more than reason said they could.

Liane gestured Garric ahead. There was no need for a rear guard. The humans hadn't pursued directly across the lagoon, so the attack would come from one side or both. Garric nodded to his companions and took long strides to join the warriors. The Ersa in the rear parted to permit Garric to walk alongside their leader.

“If my ancestors had killed the first humans and all other humans who reached the Gulf,” Graz said without turning his head, “then we would be safe now.”

“In Sandrakkan we have a saying,” Liane called from behind them. Her ears were as sharp as those of an owl striking its prey through leaves in a nighted forest. “A man has as many enemies as he has slaves.”

Graz stopped in the middle of the trail, so suddenly that even his warriors were taken by surprise. He turned, holding his spear at the balance.

Garric's face lost all expression. He spread his hands at his side, ready to act if the Ersa raised his weapon to thrust or throw.

“Four of you carry the old female,” Graz said, speaking so the humans would understand at the same time his ears semaphored the command to his fellows. “If the Ersa are to survive beyond this day, it will be through her efforts.”

He resumed walking. His stride was loose and his steps were shorter than those a human of his height would have taken. There was no reason for the party to weary itself running; the distance around the lagoon meant a delay of at least half an hour before the humans could attack.

“Do you think that if my people had treated yours as equals from the start,” Graz said quietly, “that this would not be happening?”

Garric shrugged. “I’d like to say that, but I don't know,” he admitted. “We humans don't have a perfect record, even with our own kind.”

Graz squealed like a rabbit in pain. Garric gripped his sword, then realized the sound was laughter.

“We are not perfect either,” Graz said. “Only death is perfect. Well, we Ersa shall hope to continue living and being imperfect in your world, human.”

The board track passed through the forest and into a field of food plants and other vegetation which the Ersa exploited. Some of the fruits had shapes and colors that -Garric hadn't seen on the human side of the lagoon.

“The First Place,” Graz said, pointing ahead of him. Though the track was arrow-straight, the ground's surface even in the Gulf rose and fell enough that Garric's first sight of the twelve bulbous-trunked trees was completely unexpected though the nearest was only a hundred yards away. That didn't surprise him. Often enough he'd seen how a sheep could be concealed on a meadow so flat he'd have guessed even a vole would stand out like a flagpole.

Ersa of all ages were converging on the grove. Some of them spoke, particularly children and their mothers, but in the main the process was much quieter than a gathering of humans in a similar crisis.

Females and the older children carried a wide variety of baskets, chests, and bags made from bark fabric. There was no pottery, though Garric had seen some crude jars in the human community.

The adult males carried only weapons: clubs and spears. Few of the latter were metal-pointed. The mind at the back of Garric's mind noted the lack of projectile weapons. Apparently none of the available wood was springy enough to provide bowstaves, and slings were of little utility without stone, metal, or hard-fired clay for bullets.

“There's so many of the women and children,” Liane said. She'd joined Garric unnoticed when the warriors lifted Tenoctris onto a platform of their spearshafts. “There must be two thousand Ersa, but so few soldiers.”

“Right,” said Garric. “Well, another time I'd wonder how their society works.”

In fact, he didn't wonder. The proportion of adult males to females and offspring was pretty similar to the sheep he'd herded in the borough. With domestic animals the numbers were decided by culling. The owner slaughtered the young rams for meat but saved most of the ewes, which provided milk as well as the next spring's increase. . Garric didn't see any other likely way that the Ersa population remained the way it was. It made him think again about just how light a burden slavery to Ersa masters had really been, for the humans across the lagoon.

Perhaps that doubt showed on his face. Liane touched his arm. “We've made our choice,” she said. “Not that the Ersa are holy saints, but that they're the better of the two choices we had.”

“Right,” Garric repeated, smiling grimly. “I guess we should thank Rodoard for making the choice so easy.”

Graz watched them with his left eye, but the Ersa leader didn't speak.

They entered the grove, brushing through silky foliage which hung to the ground in curtains of long strands. The leaves would have been colorless in normal light; here they had the same bilious hue as the sky. The trunks looked like water-filled bladders.

There was a broad track between the shrouding trees and a circular earthen mound higher even than Graz's head. The mound was the only structure Garric had seen on this side of the lagoon. Directly before them was a narrow opening, barely wide enough for Garric to pass without turning sideways. The Ersa females and young drifted through the trees to stand near the wall, but the warriors remained outside.

The warriors carrying Tenoctris set her on her own feet and went back to join their fellows in awaiting the human onslaught. Graz bent and touched the opening's threshold with the palms of both hands.

“Go in, humans,” Graz said. He gave his hideous  squealing laugh. “You needn't do reverence to the Hand, since it's the greatest blasphemy for you even to have entered the grove.”

Tenoctris stepped briskly into the enclosure with only a nod to acknowledge Graz's religious scruples. The old woman saw the interplay of forces that others, even other wizards, did not see; but Tenoctris had never seen the Great Gods. Garric respected Tenoctris and understood her position, but he believed in many things which he hadn't yet seen.

Liane looked from Garric to Graz. “I'd better go... ?” she murmured.

“Right,” said Garric. He didn't know what was right. Perhaps all they were doing was desecrating the Ersa holy place in the minutes before the whole race was exterminated.

“But we have to try,” he said. He smiled. He wasn't sure whether he or King Carus had directed his tongue into the words, but either way it was the truth.

Graz looked at him straight on. Garric wondered what thoughts were behind the Ersa leader's expression.

Humans shouted in the near distance. Metal clattered on wood, a sound more like that of carpentry than the battle Garric knew it was. “Right,” he said, and drew the sword he'd bought in Erdin.

The blade was good steel. It shimmered even in the changeless light of this sky.

He'd killed a man with it, less than an hour ago.

He remembered turning to see Liane struggling with one of Rodoard's henchmen. The eye and arm of Garric or-Reise—not another man, not even a dead king using Garric's body—had brought the sword around in an arc calculated to miss the girl but to open the thug's skull and let his life out.

He'd done that thing, and not until this moment had the awareness struck him. His knees began to tremble so fiercely that he was afraid he was going to fall.

“Stay with your females,” Graz said with an unreadable expression. “If you're needed, the fight will have to come to you.”

Garric licked his dry lips. He was steadier already, due to his own natural resilience and the help of King Carus, whose life had been war.

“I'm not afraid to die,” Garric said. The Ersa leader had already gone through the trees toward the sound of fighting. “I'm not even afraid to kill. I'm afraid of becoming a man who kills men.”

“As well you should be, lad,” whispered a silent voice. “But it's worse to be a man who can't do what has to be done, no matter what it costs him:”

There was still confused shouting beyond the grove, but the battle itself had paused for now. The human vanguard had met the waiting Ersa warriors, had skirmished, and had fallen back to wait for reinforcements to arrive.

Most of the Ersa females faced the curtain of foliage, but the children turned their heads in all directions. One of them came up to Garric and fingered the hem of his woolen tunic. When the mother noticed what was going on, she snatched the child back with clucks of anger.

Tenoctris' voice rose in the rhythms of chanting, though Garric couldn't hear the syllables from where he stood. He looked again in the direction where the fighting had begun, then sheathed his sword. The First Place was a temple, so a drawn sword would be out of place.

Garric slipped through the entrance.

The interior of the roofless enclosure was forty feet in diameter, smaller than Garric had supposed. The mounded walls were a good ten feet thick. The ground had been dug out into a pit as deep as the mound was high, with only a central hub left at the original surface level. That pillar was bound with plaited withies to keep the soil from crumbling away.

On it was a human hand made of or covered with mother-of-pearl. Its luster was brighter than the dim green light of the sky could account for. It was an object of great beauty and great power, and of evil.

“Archedama phochense psensa...” Tenoctris said. She had drawn Old Script characters in the dirt around the pillar. She walked its circuit as she spoke the syllables, marking each accent by twitching a wand made from a length of slender branch. “Rerta thoumison kat huesem-migadon!”

A cylinder of light the color of the glowing Hand was forming above the written symbols. Garric looked upward. He couldn't see the light meet the changeless sky, but neither did it appear to end at any point short of that presumed contact.

Liane watched the wizard, ready to act or speak if called to but otherwise silent. Her visage had the controlled stillness of a frightened person who's too iron-willed to give in to fear.

She met Garric's eyes and smiled. He winked, wondering what his own face looked like, and left the enclosure again. Behind him he heard, “Maarchamma zabarbathouch...”

The battle had been fully joined beyond the grove. Screams and curses from the human attackers and the clacking anger of the defending Ersa formed the background. Against those voices the clatter of weapons rose to a crescendo, fell away, and redoubled, accompanied by a shout from many throats.

Garric reached for his sword hilt.

“Garric!” Liane called. “Garric, it's time! Send them through while, while she can...”

“Come!” Garric said. Heads turned at his cry, but the Ersa stayed where they were. Did these females even speak the human tongue?

Garric seized the nearest female by the shoulder. The bones beneath the light fur were thicker than he'd expected. “Come!” he repeated, waving his right arm high to summon the others. He dragged his—captive? victim?—dragged his example through the entranceway.

Liane had started to mount the flight of wooden steps from the enclosure's floor. Garric pushed the Ersa toward her, not harshly but with an awareness that if he had to carry each one in himself he'd be an old man before he finished.

Liane drew the Ersa toward her by the mere touch of her hands. The cylinder was now a translucent wall. Garric couldn't see the opposite side of the enclosure through it, but the Hand itself glowed like the sun in an empty sky.

“Zadachtoumar didume chicoeis,” Tenoctris said, her face notched by lines of deep fatigue. She continued to walk around the circle of power. The old wizard would keep going until she dropped; but she would drop, perhaps sooner rather than later.

“Go through it now!” Liane said, gesturing the Ersa toward the column of cold radiance. “Quickly!”

The Ersa walked into the translucent surface without hesitation. She vanished through it as if she had fallen into night itself.

Garric turned. More Ersa, females and their children, waited in the narrow entrance which his body blocked. He jumped aside, stifling a curse at his own foolishness. He should have guessed that when the first of this sheep-like race moved, the rest would follow.

One by one the Ersa passed through the wall of the cylinder. The shuffling line blocked the entrance. The walls of the enclosure were low enough to climb, at least if Garric got a running start. He judged the angle, then saw something from the comer of his eye and stopped.

Tenoctris wasn't alone. A nude woman formed of shimmering, nacreous translucence like the cylinder itself walked beside her. Tenoctris appeared unaware of her ghostly companion.

Liane caught Garric's startled expression. She followed the line of his eyes, then looked back at him perturbed. “What's the matter, Garric?” she asked.

The ghost woman smiled lazily and stretched out an arm toward Garric. Her body was perfect and beautiful. Where her eyes should have been, Garric saw pits stretching all the way to Hell. He staggered back, stunned as if by a sudden hammer blow.

“Kill them all!” Rodoard's voice shrilled over the sounds of battle. “Slaughter them like the beasts they are!”

Garric took two strides along the inside of the enclosure, then leaped to the top of the mound. He drew his sword. He knew he was as much running from something he didn't understand as entering the fight on the side of those he'd joined, but he was needed in the fight as well.

The line of Ersa warriors had been forced back to the inner curtain of foliage. Carus' practiced eye judged that the Ersa had lost nearly half their original number. The survivors screened the females and children in a perimeter that shrank as the last of the noncombatants passed through the narrow entrance.

The human attack was disorganized but ferocious. A man nearly Cashel's size carried a heavy club in either hand; he had red tattoos on his right arm and blue on his left. Bellowing, he charged, swinging both clubs simultaneously.

The Ersa warriors moved to either side as smoothly as water parting before a dropped stone. Graz stabbed the tattooed man as he rushed past. The man continued forward, his clubs battering the Ersa females.

Garric jumped down in front of the man, who raised one club for a vertical blow. He held the other in front of his body on guard. Garric thrust, stabbing the hand holding the lower club. He'd used the trick a score of times in quarterstaff bouts during festivals in the borough: rather than stretching to reach your opponent's body, strike the hand holding his weapon and then strike the undefended body.

The tattooed man cried out in surprise and pain, dropping the club from his wounded hand. He stepped back and his eyes rolled up. Blood sprayed from his nostrils as he fell facedown like a toppling tree. Graz's thrust to his lung and heart had finally taken effect.

Garric was alone between the lines. The human attackers had fallen back for a moment; the Ersa females were all within the enclosure, and the warriors had taken a position on top of the mound. Garric backed quickly to stand in the entrance.

More humans came through the curtain of foliage. A party of eight Gulf-born men carried a litter on which Rodoard sat. Bandages of red silk tied off the king's lower legs.

“Kill them all!” Rodoard cried, pointing his demi-guisarme. “Charge!”

His bearers broke into a shambling run toward Garric. Josfred was the lead bearer on the right side. His ratlike face glistened with sweat and fear.

“Garric!” Liane called desperately.

Garric glanced around. The Ersa warriors had jumped down within the enclosure, moving in silent unison. Garric, unable to see to the side or to read ear movements as speech, was alone again.

Three burly sailors came toward him with spears made by lashing knives onto poles. They had shields of cross-pegged boards, not very durable but sufficient against the light weapons of the Ersa. Other humans were starting to climb the enclosure to either side.

Garric backed through the entrance, hoping that the sailors would try to follow him carrying their shields. That would slow them long enough for him and his companions to escape through the circle.

“Kill them all!” Rodoard squealed.

Graz flung himself into the cylinder of light, vanishing -as though he never was. He had been the last of the Ersa. Liane held Tenoctris around the waist and by one arm; the younger woman was helping the older continue her circle. Tenoctris' lips moved, but Garric couldn't hear the words of power anymore.

The Hand blazed with a fierce internal light. The object was the very sun to look at, but it neither cast shadows nor brightened the walls of the enclosure.

Garric jumped down to the floor of the pit. The woman of pearly translucence stood beside him. She caressed his cheek with fingers as soft as a butterfly's wing.

Garric jerked back in shock. The ghost woman laughed like chimes of crystal, pure and as cold as village charity.

“Garric!” Liane said. “What are you waiting for?”

Garric stepped toward her. Men had reached the top of the mound and were calling to their fellows to join them before they committed themselves by jumping down.

The woman of pearl took Liane's throat in both hands. Liane's weary frustration changed suddenly to horror. She let go of Tenoctris and tried to grasp the thing choking her. Her fingers met nothing.

Garric swept the pommel of his sword through the creature's head. Her form parted like smoke at the blow— and, like smoke, swirled together uninjured. She laughed as her grip tightened on Liane's throat. Liane's face was turning blue. Tenoctris staggered on, speaking the incantation by rote; perhaps she was unaware of what was happening around her.

The first of the sailors came through the entrance above Garric. Other men slid down the inner slope of the mound, their faces set and their weapons ready.

Garric stepped forward, his sword rising. The barrier of light made his skin tremble as he crossed it. Someone walking on my grave, he thought. He brought his blade down in a vertical cut that sheared through the Hand.

Something screamed. Perhaps it was the whirlwind that snatched Garric and whirled him into flaming darkness.

Light blazed. He saw Tenoctris and Liane; and then only the darkness, as deep as the ghost woman's blank hellpit eyes.

 

Sharina still held Halphemos' hand, but the young wizard was beginning to find the pace by himself. For the first several blocks after they left the prison, Halphemos had tripped himself every few steps. It was only Sharina's support that had kept him from falling. She couldn't imagine what it really was that a wizard did, but she'd seen the cost often enough to know that wizardry was work as brutal as scything in the hot sun.

“Where are we going?” Halphemos gasped, the first connected words he'd managed since he'd shouted out the final syllables of his incan-tation.

“There's a ship about to leave for Erdin,” Sharina said, trying not to speak so loudly that passersby heard her. “Cerix is waiting aboard for us.”

Cerix had written only a spell to loosen locks and bars on the palimpsest. The phantasm Halphemos sent out before him was of his own creation. Sharina supposed it was an illusion he'd practiced before, but it proved that the younger wizard had a stock of his own wizardry safe in memory.

Pandah's waterfront was just as busy and varied as what Sharina had seen in Erdin, the capital and port of entry for one of the most powerful islands of thdngdom. Serian ships with square bows and slatted sails were berthed end to end with catamarans from Dalopo, bulbous grain haulers from Omifal, and small craft carrying wine or citrus fruit or metalwork from a dozen islands, some too small to have names to any but their own citizens.

A few months before Sharina had thought she'd never leave Barea's Hamlet. The variety she saw here seemed exciting and wonderful. While she imagined the wonders these ships implied, she could put aside for a time the darker mysteries of what had happened to her friends.

In contrast to the flimsy houses of mud brick and wicker which comprised most of the city, Pandah's quays were built of stone. A parrot squabbled with a seagull on the yard of a lateen-rigged coaster, and the chickens whose coop was being carried aboard a nearby vessel clucked a nervous counterpoint to the terns above.

A twenty-oared galley lay at wharfside of the nearest pier. Sharina knew enough of economics to be surprised to see such a vessel here.

Galleys were either military vessels or yachts for wealthy travelers who were willing to pay for the assurance of not spending weeks waiting for a favorable wind. They had very little carrying capacity and the crew was several times that of a sailing vessel. This one had neither military accoutrements nor the trappings of luxury to be expected in a yacht.

The Porpoise, the Sandrakkan freighter on which Cerix had taken passage, was berthed at the next pier. Sharina could hear the crew calling a chantey as they walked the capstan, raising the yard and sail which had rested on deck while the ship was in harbor.

A man stepped from behind a stack of timber, offloaded from an Onu'fal vessel but not yet carried to its next destination. The sun was behind him, throwing his squat form into silhouette. He was blocking Sharina's path.

Halphemos continued a step beyond Sharina; he hadn't noticed the figure until she stopped. She drew the Pewle knife.

“Are you going to use that on me, child?” the figure asked in a familiar voice.

“Nonnus,” Sharina said. She began to tremble. She couldn't find the slot to resheath the heavy blade. “Nonnus?”

“Who are you?” Halphemos demanded on a rising note. Sharina suddenly realized how young he was. Halphemos was smart and able and a few years older than Sharina in simple chronology, but there was a good deal of boy still in his personality.

Nonnus had been mature. Nonnus had made decisions instantly but without haste. Nonnus had always been in perfect control of himself until the moment he died.

“Nonnus, you're dead,” Sharina said as though she were whispering a prayer.

“Sharina?” Halphemos said, looking from her to the man who was a stranger to him. “What... ?”

“I was sent because I was the only messenger you would trust, child,” Nonnus said. “We need to go immediately. More than the world depends on it.”

Sharina moved closer so that she could be sure of the features even in the red light of sunset. The face and voice were beyond question those of the man who had died to protect her in a room full of hellspawn and slaughter.

“Cashel has disappeared,” she said. “We were going to find him, and then f-find the others.”

The crew of the Porpoise had belayed the falls to hold the sail in position. The captain shouted for the mooring lines to be taken in.

“Cashel will be all right,” Nonnus said. “Your friend—”

He glanced calmly toward the quivering Halphemos.

“—can find Cashel without your help. And even if he couldn't, this is more important. I've got a ship here. We have to leave at once.”

“I—,” Sharina said.

Nonnus put a hand on her elbow. “You do trust me, don't you, child?” he said. He nodded to the galley. The oarsmen were at their benches and only the stern line was still around the mooring bitt on the quay. “We have to go.”

Sharina turned to Halphemos. “I have to go,” she said. “When you get to Erdin, find Ilna os-Kenset. She's Cashel's sister. She can help you.”

“But—,” Halphemos said.

Over her shoulder as she strode to the galley with Nonnus, Sharina cried, “You don't understand. Just go!”