Let me say right now that I won't have anything to do with harming King Valence!” Pitre said. “If you're going to talk about that, I'll leave the room until you're finished.”

Garric sat at one end of the dining table they'd moved from the servants' refectory into the vast circular room that had been the queen's private suite. He looked at Pitre in expressionless amazement, wondering what went on in the mind of a person who could mouth those words.

“There were more cowards than brave men in my day, lad,” said the voice in his mind. “I wouldn't expect that to change in the next thousand years either.”

“We needn't hurt Valence,” Waldron said curtly. The conspirators were undisguised and the members of their entourages present wore their colors openly. “Not if he'll listen to reason, anyway. I won't even demand that he abdicate immediately, though of course we'll appoint a regent Valence's line still has a lot of respect among the lower orders, and I don't see any call to borrow trouble before we've consolidated the real power in our own hands.”

Before Garric and his companions had reached the queen's sanctum, members of the mob had pushed the tourmaline mirror over on the stone floor, cracking it across. Tenoctris had nodded approval at the result, saying that destroying the mirror had been her first priority.

The large room was under a dome in the center of the one of the five wings. There were no tapestries on the granite walls, and no furniture save for the great mirror and an empty circular table standing waist high. The queen had existed without chairs, wardrobes, or even a bed.

It was a little past midnight in Valles. Outside, the sea breeze had blown clouds over the sky and only a few stars managed to sparkle down. Inside, the windowless room would have been equally dark with the sun at zenith.

Garric remembered that the scene he viewed-in Tenoctris' scrying mirror was suffused by soft light. The conspirators' servants had brought in lanterns, but their smoky flickering accented the gloom they were intended to dispel.

“Appointing a regent might lead to the mistaken impression that one of us was somehow superior to the others, Waldron,” Lord Tadai said, holding his hands before him as though he were examining his perfect manicure. “I think we'll call ourselves the Council of Noble Advisors and avoid the sort of awkward discussions that would otherwise result, don't you?”

Waldron flushed. Besides their aides and advisors— nobles like themselves—each conspirator was accompanied by his personal bodyguards. Waldron himself might be the only real man of war among the five, but all the liveried soldiers looked tough and competent. Whoever started a fight under these circumstances guaranteed his own slaughter by the combined forces of his former allies.

Garric smiled faintly. He drew his long sword down the whetstone he'd set on the table before him.

“Does he have to make that noise?” Sourous said loudly. The young noble rubbed his hands over themselves as though he were washing. He indicated Garric only by a sideways tic of his goatee.

“Yes he does, Sourous,” Royhas said, speaking for the first time since the conspirators convened in the queen's suite at his insistence. “While I stood in the crowd here and the rest of you hid in your town houses, Master Garric single-handedly slew the giant whose skeleton you passed to enter this mansion. He's readying his sword for the next time he needs to use it.”

In truth, the blade was in better shape than Garric—or Carus within him—had expected after the vicious fight. The cyclops' bones hadn't dulled the edge significantly. More important, the blade had snapped back straight after the brutal twisting it got while levering the monster's ankle apart.

All eyes were on Garric. He smiled, reversed the sword, and drew it down again with a sliding motion which in its course passed the whole length of the edge across the stone.

There'd been a tiny nick in the tip where the blade had lopped off the cyclops' armored finger. A few strokes on the stone had restored the steel's smooth line.

“I have servants to do that!” Waldron snarled, speak-big to Royhas rather than Garric. Garric was still beneath Waldron's consideration, but the northern landowner knew Royhas to be his most serious rival among the conspirators.

“The presence of our young associate does raise an interesting possibility,” Tadai said, turning slightly to include Garric in his comment. “King Garric, the true heir of Carus and the Old Kingdom, might look better on the throne than Valence. Under a Council of Noble Advisors—”

Tadai smiled thinly.

“—of course.”

“Valence is insane,” Sourous muttered. “Completely mad!”

Garric found his bitter tone surprising. He hadn't realized the young man was capable of anything but fear for his own person—though something, come to think, had brought Sourous into the conspiracy. Garric realized again that he could never know all he'd like to know about those with whom his fate was now twined—even about Liane and Tenoctris.

Garric wiped his blade with a coarse woolen rag, then glanced over his shoulder. Behind his chair Liane and Tenoctris filled the place of the dozen retainers assisting each of the noble conspirators.

Garric grinned. He'd trade the two women and Carus, closer yet, for a hundred times their number of the sort of advisors the others had in their service.

“No, no,” Pitre said. He twisted and untwisted a silk handkerchief as he spoke, a replacement for the wooden puzzle he'd spilled across Royhas' floor. “Valence will stay king, but we'll get rid of that wretched wizard Silyon. Now the queen's gone, and when Silyon's gone too everything will go back to normal.”

“I say—,” Waldron said.

Garric stood. He shot the sword into its long sheath with a zing/tunk as the crossguard slid home against the mouth of the scabbard. Everyone in the room stared at him again. Though in fact Garric had put up his weapon instead of drawing it, the action had clearly been aggressive.

“We aren't rid of the queen, gentlemen,” he said. His mouth spoke his own thoughts, but King Carus' experienced direction gave Garric's tone and stance their present assurance. “We've bought time by driving her from Valles, but the first thing the revived Kingdom of the Isles needs to do is to meet the queen's counterstroke and crush her utterly.”

Tadai raised an eyebrow—half-mocking, but only half. Pitre looked at Garric in amazement, Sourous looked at his hands, and Royhas smiled faintly as he sat in a posture of apparent relaxation. His ankle was crossed on his knee and his right arm sprawled languidly on the table.

“Yes, of course,” Waldron said with a dismissive flick of his hand. To his fellow nobles he continued, “I'll take charge of mustering the royal forces, of course. We can decide later whether my title will be—”

“Gentlemen,” Garric said. He deliberately didn't raise his voice, though he noticed Tadai's gaze flick appraisingly from Waldron to him.

“—warlord or regent,” Waldron continued. The chief of his guard contingent, a craggy man whose hair, beard, and eyes were all the hue of cast iron, ignored his master and watched Garric intently. “Now—”

“Gentlemen!” Garric said in the voice that had called sheep from distant hills.

Waldron's hand gripped his sword hilt. His guard commander laid fingers on Waldron's wrist, preventing him from drawing the weapon. The other nobles, even Royhas, started in their seats. A secretary dropped his handful of ledgers on Tadai's feet.

“Gentlemen,” Garric continued, pitching his voice to carry but no longer at threatening volume. “You can't trust any one of yourselves with supreme power or what looks like it might become supreme power. You can trust me.”

He grinned, a wolfish but not unfriendly expression. “Trust me not to be in the pocket of another of you, at any rate.”

“This is absurd!” Waldron said; his tone showed that he realized that the suggestion was by no means absurd. He made a quick, angry gesture, brushing his guard away, but didn't put his hand back on his sword.

“I don't think it is,” Tadai said judiciously. “Though—”

“What of Valence?” Pitre said. He met Garric's eyes, making the youth wonder if possibly Pitre had a backbone after all.

“He's not an evil man,” Garric said. Tenoctris couldn't speak at this gathering, but she and Liane had coached Garric on how to handle a question that was certain to arise. “There's no need to supplant him—once we've removed his wizard, who is an evil man or at least one who does evil willingly.”

He paused, sweeping his eyes across the nobles at the other end of the long table. It was a measure of the authority Carus' spirit gave Garric that none of them interrupted him.

“Valence has no issue,” Garric continued. “He can adopt me as his heir, uniting the old royal line of Haft with the present line of Ornifal.”

“Ho!” said Tadai, clapping his hands as if at a keenly struck blow at a cockfight.

Pitre snapped his handkerchief out. “Yes,” he said, nodding with sudden enthusiasm. “Yes, Valence is a good man. The trouble's none of his doing, not really.”

Waldron went livid but he didn't speak. His right hand clasped and opened, clasped and opened.

“It seems to me,” Royhas said, still affecting a languid appearance, “that in the short run this solves all our problems. Master Garric's fame has already spread over the city as the man who slew the giant. Indeed, much of the populace probably sees him as King Carus reborn rather than merely the descendant of the old line.”

“That's right!” said Sourous with unexpected animation. “We'll give the mob a hero, while we run the kingdom as it should be run!”

Even Waldron looked at Sourous in amazement. Liane drew in a hissing breath at the young noble's effrontery. Garric simply laughed. How could he get angry at a fool who was so dismissively insulting to a man standing well within the reach of his just-sharpened sword?

“Lord Sourous,” Garric said. He nodded with a slight, friendly smile toward Waldron and the blank-faced guard commander at Sourous' shoulder. “Friends all, I hope. You gentlemen know more of Ornifal than I could ever hope to. Your lineage, your wealth, and the patriotism that led you to act when your king would not—these all mark you as the sort of advisors any ruler would wish to have.”

Tadai's plump face wore a watchful expression in place of its usual mocking humor. Pitre looked expectant, and Sourous showed a degree of startled-bunny fear; his guards had moved close to the table on either side of the young man, and the reason for their concern had apparently dawned in Sourous' limited brain.

“You must realize, though,” Garric continued, speaking the words an ancient king whispered in his mind, “that though I'll listen willingly to your advice and that of other wise and noble folk throughout the kingdom, I will not be taking your orders. You'll be taking mine.”

Waldron until that moment had held himself tense as a bent spring. He leaped up, kicking .over his chair.

“In this room,” Waldron said, “you see some of the oldest blood on Omifal.”

He looked at the cowering Sourous. In a snarl he added, “Sadly decayed though some members may be! But not even Sourous is fool enough to take the orders of a shepherd from Haft!”

Garric stepped around the comer of the table and walked deliberately toward Waldron. Pitre, seated between the two standing men, jumped to his feet and backed away. His guards formed a hedge in front of him.

“Waldron bor-Warriman...” Garric said. His hands were spread open at his sides. “I see three choices for you. You can accept me as your leader by birth, because I'm directly descended from King Carus.”

“You say!” Waldron said. His guard commander's posture was very like Garric's own, open-handed but tense as a drawn bowcord.

“Second,” Garric continued, his voice rising in volume but remaining a thunderous tenor with no touch of shrillness, “you can decide to turn your hereditary lands over to the folk tilling them, because you have no title on the basis of heredity if you refuse to accept my rule.”

“If I bowed to every madman who called himself king, I'd never be able to straighten up!” Waldron said.

“As for your third choice, Lord Waldron...” Garric said. He was trembling. The body he wore was no longer his alone. The muscles quivered with the fierce, channeled bloodlust of King-Carus.

“If you think I'm a lying Haft shepherd rather than the King of the Isles,” Garric/Carus said, “try to prove those lies on my body. We'll duel in front of the mansion, by torchlight or we'll wait till dawn. And no one who watches will doubt that every word I've said since I came to Ornifal is the truth!”

“We'll do it now,” Waldron said in a grating voice. He seized his sword hilt and had half-drawn the weapon when his guard commander stepped in front of him and grasped the noble by both elbows.

“Let go of me, you fool!” Waldron said. “Do you think I'm afraid of a shepherd?”

“Sir, look at the way he moves!” the guard cried. “If he's a shepherd, then I'm a gravedigger. And I'd be your gravedigger if I let you fight him, I swear by my soul in the Lady's arms!”

Waldron tried to shove the man away. The guard, blocky where his master was tall, and very, very strong, kept his grip. He pushed Waldron toward the wall. The other men wearing the Warriman cat's-head crest on their tabards stepped between Waldron and Garric, though they were unwilling to put hands on their master as the guard commander had.

For a moment, the only sounds were wheezing breaths and the scrape of boot soles on the granite floor. Waldron let go of his sword and lowered his arms; his retainer released him.

“Lord Waldron,” Garric said quietly, “I need you and I'll hold you in the highest honor; but I am your king.”

Waldron continued to gasp for breath; his face looked gray. The nobleman was more than three times Garric's age. Waldron knew—as Carus did—that courage and skill counted for more than youth on a battlefield; but the old man had seen enough battles in his years to be able to size up Garric as surely as his guard commander had done. A fight between the two of them would no more be a duel than a hog duels the butcher who holds its nose in a hooked clamp as his knife slices the beast's throat.

Garric knelt and righted Waldron's fallen chair. “Please, Lord Waldron,” he said.

Without waiting to see what the nobleman decided, Garric walked to his Own seat at the end of the table.

Liane gave him a tiny nod. When Garric turned and sat down, Waldron was seating himself also. His guard commander held the chair for him.

“We'll need to discuss the situation with Valence as soon as possible,” Royhas said, continuing the previous conversation. “Pitre, you're probably the person to make the arrangements, don't you think?”

“I wonder what it's going to be like living under a real king,” Tadai said. His laugh held a strain of hysteria.

 

The powdery soil broke Ilna’s fall instead of her bones, but it rose in a plume that threatened to choke her. She clawed her way up, swimming as much as climbing. When she finally burst clear of the pit her impact had dug, she found it was still desperately hard to breathe.

She was on a barren plain which stretched to the horizon in every direction. The sun shone with bitter intensity, but the sky was black and the atmosphere so thin that she could see the stars. None of them looked familiar.

Halphemos, coughing and wheezing, dragged the cart with Cerix on it from another soft-rimmed crater nearby. Ilna strode over to them, trailing her toes at each step as she would have done were she walking in mud. The dust neither clung to her feet nor hung in choking clouds—the latter a small benefit from the thin air.

“Where are we, Halphemos?” Ilna said. Her voice was a bat squeak. She smiled faintly. “I'm not complaining. It isn't on fire, so it's a better place than I was standing a moment ago.”

“I don't know,” Halphemos mumbled. He looked numb and exhausted. He'd been working his wizard arts; he must have been, to have saved Ilna this way. “I don't... Cerix, do you know?”

Ilna helped pull the wheeled chair up from the hole it had splashed when it landed. The wheels were too narrow for this dust: they sank to the hubs, like those of farm carts after the spring thaw. A sledge would be better, but there was no wood in this wasteland from which to fashion one.

Cerix spat out a gobbet of phlegm and the dust he'd swallowed when impact flung him out of the cart. This landscape's harsh light drew the lines of the cripple's face deeper, but Ilna judged he'd have looked terrible under any illumination.

“The boy didn't bring us here,” Cerix said. He shook his head, either to clear it or from anger; Ilna couldn't be sure which. “We were opening a passage to you through a circle of power, but before we arrived you entered the circle. And brought us here.”

“I saw you in the air,” Ilna said. She kept her tone even. She'd heard rebuke in the cripple's tone, but she'd lived in her own head long enough to know that she sometimes heard rebuke where none was intended. “I went to you because the choices were to bum or to drown.”

“She entered the circle after we formed it?” Halphemos said to his mentor. “That isn't possible, is it?”

He wiped his face with the sleeve of his robe. The cloth was dark, with rich gray silt because the boy had caught himself on his arms when he landed. Halphemos looked like a mummer in blackface playing a minion of the Sister.

“It wouldn't be possible for me or even you, boy,” Cerix said, “but it's what she did, clearly enough.”

He looked up at Ilna. “Who are you, mistress? And don't tell me you're a weaver from some village in the back of beyond. We have to know where we are if we're ever to get out!”

Ilna’s nose wrinkled. Breathing this thin air was like being half-smothered by a pillow. No matter how Ilna’s lungs strained, she couldn't draw in a satisfying breath. It made her irritable and she supposed she should make allowances for her companions being irritable for the same reason.

She'd never been good at excusing bad behavior in herself or other people.

“If you think I'd bother to lie to you,” she snapped, “then you've lost more than your legs. If you didn't rescue me from the ship as I'd thought you did, then neither of us owe the other anything. I'll see if I can find more congenial company.”

Ilna turned to walk away. One direction was as good as another—and all of them bad. The rolling terrain was completely barren. The landscape could stand as a symbol for life; at least life for such folk as Ilna os-Kenset. She smiled like a razor at the thought.

There was something in the middle distance. The odd sharpness of the light here made it hard to identify shapes with those they had normally, but she thought she was seeing the bones of some vast creature.

“Mistress, please!” Halphemos said. “Cerix didn't mean to accuse you of anything. We were trying to go to you. If instead we came here, it must have been a mistake of mine. Like the one where I made your brother vanish.”

Ilna looked over her shoulder. She was letting anger rule her. That was worse than anything Cerix thought— or believed.

“Mistress,” the cripple said. “I'm afraid. I don't know where we are, but I don't think we can live here. I think, I pray, you have the power to get us out of this place but I don't know how. I misspoke because I was a fool.”

He touched his stumps with a bitter smile. “As these legs already prove,” he added.

“Yes, well,” said Ilna. “I've acted the fool myself often enough that I should have greater charity for others, I suppose.”

She didn't think anything of the sort, but Cerix had apologized and it behooved her to do the same. She grimaced. “I know nothing about how we got here or how we can get out. If no one has a better idea, I suggest we walk in that direction—”

She indicated north with a tic of her chin.

“—because that puts the sun at our back. My skin is prickling already. The light scarcely seems bright enough for sunburn, but that's what it feels like.”

“We may as well,” Halphemos said doubtfully, squinting toward the northern horizon. It was just possible that there were hills in that direction, but they were probably an illusion.

“If she says we go north,” Cerix said, “that's where we go.”

He scowled and admitted, “I can't move myself. I can turn the wheels, but they won't bite in this dust. If you want to leave me...”

“Don't talk nonsense,” Ilna said. “Halphemos, we'll use your sash as towline. It's silk and long enough, I'd judge.”

As the youth unwrapped the garment, Ilna continued to the cripple, “As for who I am—my father drank himself to death after he brought my brother and me home to Barca's Hamlet as infants. I never knew my mother. I ask' only the respect due a decent woman who pays her debts. That's all the discussion I intend to have about my private business. Do you understand?”

Cerix burst into hacking laughter. Halphemos rose from tying the end of his sash to the chair's front axle. He watched his mentor in concern.

The fit ended when Cerix brought up another mass of filth from his lungs. He wiped his mouth and looked at Ilna with a smile of self-mockery. “I don't understand anything at all about you, mistress,” he said. “But as for my respect—on that score you need have no doubts.”

Ilna nodded curtly. To Halphemos she said, “The sooner we get moving, the better our chance of finding water while there's still daylight. Not that I see the chance as very good.”

The youth gave her a hopeful smile and leaned into the makeshift towline. Ilna gripped the silk from the other side and fell into step.

The cart cut a wide furrow. Halphemos had rigged the sash to lift the front edge when they pulled, so at least they weren't digging deeper with every step.

It was still hard work. Carrying water from the well to the laundry cauldron, two buckets at a time on a yoke, was punishing for a lightly built woman; but the task ended when the cauldron was sufficiently full. This trek wouldn't end until the three of them died.

She smiled to think of the well back home. Her thoughts and those of her companions were the only place there was going to be water in this desolation. Occasionally they trudged across bands of discoloration around a central hub. Perhaps lichen had grown there once, but the stain and a slight firmness to the soil were all that remained.

They walked. Ilna didn't know how long. The sun moved more slowly here than it did in the waking world. Sometimes they rested, but there was little rest to be had in this wasteland.

“We're on the bottom of the Outer Sea,” Cerix said. “It's like this all the way from the Ice Capes to the southern lands where men have their faces on their bellies.”

Ilna risked a look over her shoulder; “risked,” because she knew that when she was so tired any change of routine meant that she might stumble. Getting to her feet again would be as difficult as climbing a mountain in her normal state of health.

Cerix was grinning as his chair rocked over the rolling landscape. He made swimming motions with his arms and his eyes watched stars move in the black sky.

Ilna faced forward again. Delirium wasn't a bad response to their situation. It was a form of weakness, of course; the drug in which the cripple saturated himself and whose stench clung to his clothing like the dye itself had obviously sapped his will.

Strength wasn't going to save Ilna, but weakness wasn't an option for her either. She walked, setting the pace now. The soil dragged like the surf, retarding each step without gripping.

For all the cripple's madness, this plain did look much as Ilna supposed a sea bottom would. Twice in her lifetime a neap tide had drawn the water back half a mile from the gravel strand at the eastern margin of Barca's Hamlet.

There was no wind. The chill air was so thin that the sweat of effort didn't evaporate quickly. A drop trickled like the touch of a cold knife down Ilna’s backbone. She breathed only through her nostrils though each inhalation seared like the fumes of a bonfire; gasping with her mouth open would dry her body even faster than was happening already.

“What's that?” Halphemos croaked. He nodded toward the scatter of objects a few hundred paces to the right of their aimless course.

Metal ribs similar to those of a wooden ship stuck out of the silt. A few scraps of hull sheathing clung to the uprights, but not enough to give more than a hint of the vessel's original size. The panels were still bright despite their advanced decay; the sun and stars glinted from them.

“Nothing that helps us,” Ilna said. Her voice rasped worse than the youth's did. It would be a relief to die.

“We're sailing through the air,” Cerix caroled in cracked cheerfulness. “See how we dance in the clouds, Halphemos? Oh, I've never been so free!”

The youth winced. He looked at the ground before him and paced onward as if oblivious of his friend's raving.

Ilna kept going because that was what she'd always done. Her lungs burned, her shoulders felt as though the strain of pulling would dislocate them, and the throbbing pain of her headache put a halo around anything she tried to focus her eyes on.

There was no purpose in going on, but there was no purpose in life either, not that Ilna had found. She went on anyway.

“Oh, look at the fountains playing!” Cerix said. “Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as the way the water sparkles in the light? We've found paradise, Halphemos! The Lady took flesh and rescued us!”

Ilna thought of gagging the cripple with a strip of his tunic. She wondered if she still had enough strength to tear cloth. Strangling Cerix would be even more satisfying than simply stopping his mouth.

“So graceful!” Cerix said. “All golden and so beautiful!”

Halphemos was beginning to weave from side to side. His tug on the sash threw Ilna off her line. “Wake up!” she said. “Watch what you're doing.”

She wasn't sure the words came out of her mouth. Her lips were as dry as the dust that caked them.

A circular trapdoor opened in the surface ahead of them, spilling radiance the color of a winter dawn. Humans climbed out and walked toward the trio. They were golden, beautiful; glowing with their own internal light.

Halphemos stumbled and fell as though heart-stabbed. He didn't throw out his hands to catch himself. Ilna dragged the cart a pace onward without noticing. When it jammed against the youth's feet, it jerked her to her knees.

She fumbled, trying to lift Halphemos' face. The dust would suffocate him as surely as the ocean Cerix kept maundering about. She finally laced the fingers of both hands in his hair and tugged his mouth and nose clear.

The golden folk of Ilna’s hallucination gently lifted the youth. Other hands helped her rise. Her body felt as light as dandelion fluff.

“Relax, just let us carry you,” said a melodious voice. Ilna drifted across the landscape toward the trapdoor and its spire of light. She couldn't see her companions. She supposed she was dead.

A sponge soaked in sweet wine bathed her lips. The alcohol bit where the dry skin had cracked.

The pain seemed real. Her eyes focused again. A male figure, tall and slender, passed her through the trapdoor to a statuesque female. Similar figures carried Halphemos and Cerix down a curving ramp ahead of her.

Beyond, all was light and vegetation and architecture as delicate as sugar sculptures. Water danced in scores of streams and fountains among the greenery. The illumination soaked through Ilna’s being. She could hear singing voices more pure and rapturous than those of cardinals in springtime.

Her consciousness sank into the pool of golden radiance and vanished beneath its warm surface.

 

The wizard Nimet, who called himself Nonnus the Hermit when he wore his present guise, had scribed his circle of power on a roof slate from the ruins of Unarc's hut. He tapped his athame of fossil bone as he intoned, “Barbliois eipsatha athariath....”

Nimet's six soldiers waited at the entrance to the baobab's interior. Osan pretended to be studying the rim of his round buckler, unaware of the wizardry going on a few paces away. None of the others looked uncomfortable, though their expressions ranged from boredom to the concern of Crattus, their commander. The girl was active and resourceful, and a Pewle knife wasn't a joke no matter who wielded it.

“Pelchaphiaon barbathieaoth io,” Nimet said. The sun had risen a few minutes before, though no light had as yet penetrated to the forest floor. A spherical effigy of the -dawn sky formed above the circle of power, complete with clouds and a line of fruit bats straggling home. The great bats were tiny as dust motes in the illusion.

The soldiers held small shields in their left hands. They had simple bronze helmets and cuirasses of stiffened linen, already soaked with their sweat. Denalt and Bies held their spears reversed to use as clubs since they'd be the first into the cavity. Osan and Seno had their swords drawn; they would follow.

“Marmarauoth ieaoth,” the wizard said. As he spoke the illusion of sunlit sky rose to the height of a man's head. It began to drift toward the opening into the baobab.

Its cold illumination, faint in absolute terms, was as bright as a torch in the gloom beneath the canopy.

Crattus and Bayen were veterans of thirty years' experience. They'd pin the girl's shoulders to the wall with their spears if they had to, trusting the Goddess Fortune to keep them from fatally nicking an artery. Nimet wanted the girl captured alive, but he'd made it clear that he was even more concerned to stay alive himself.

Crattus didn't quarrel with an employer's priorities. Besides, his own were similar.

“Achrammachamarei!” Nimet cried. He staggered up from his seated position. The sympathetic illusion, in all ways an image of the sky above the jungle, trembled through the slot into the baobab. It illuminated the wood as it passed.

“Tune to earn our pay,” Crattus said, nodding to Den-alt. The leading soldier eased into the tree, holding his buckler sideways until the opening widened sufficiently for him to straighten it before him.

“You mean we haven't been already?” Bies said with a morose grimace. He followed Denalt. Osan, then Seno, slipped through behind them. Each waited just long enough that he didn't tread on the heels of the man preceding.

The illusion hung in the center of the cavity, casting its soft radiance on the living wood. A lump covered by a blue cloak lay in the sleeping notch on the far side. A sturdy javelin leaned against the wall beside it.

“Is she dead?” Denalt said. He took a careful step toward the cloak, his buckler well advanced.

“Watch—,” Bies screamed.

Nonnus leaped down from where he clung to the wall above the entrance. He landed between Osan, just squirming .through the opening, and the soldiers already inside. The Pewle knife severed Osan's throat.

Nonnus turned on the balls of his feet. Bies was trying to face around and reverse his spear for use. The Pewle knife, sharp and as heavy as an axeblade entered beneath the lower edge of Bies' short cuirass and continued through the way a scythe cuts wheat. The same stroke severed the tendons and arteries at the back of Denalt's knees before the man had fully realized the debris rolled in Sharina's cloak wasn't his real enemy.

Osan bolted into the cavity, spewing blood like a headless chicken. He tripped on a coil of Bies' intestines; both men fell, tangled with the screaming Denalt.

“What?” cried Seno, pushing ahead to see why Osan had jumped forward that way. His head was slightly lowered. Nonnus chopped through his spine from behind and slipped into the opening like a gory shadow.

“Get back!” Crattus said. The shouts within the cavity were meaningless, but he could smell fresh blood.

Bayen stepped sideways to let Seno through the narrow slot. He'd opened his mourn to say something to Crattus. Nonnus gripped Bayen's spear just behind the head and jerked the soldier to the side. Bayen dropped the spear, but he was still off-balance for the instant it took the Pewle knife to stab up tiirough his throat. His severed tongue flew out in a red spray.

Crattus thrust over the body of his toppling comrade. Nonnus had gone under Bayen instead.

Crattus shouted a curse and jumped backward. The slashing Pewle knife opened the side of his left thigh, nicking the bone. Severed muscles shrank back to their attachments, leaving the ends of the femoral artery writhing unsupported. The lower portion oozed; the upper end spurted, draining the soldier's blood in powerful gouts.

Crattus fell on his back. He was a good man; he managed to throw his spear in Nonnus' direction, though he can't have imagined he had any chance of success.

Instead of ducking, Nonnus ticked the point aside with the back of his knife. He'd have liked to finish Crattus quickly for mercy's sake, but the old veteran drew his sword while his left hand tried to clamp his wound closed.

It wouldn't do him any good, but Nonnus respected his willingness to try. Crattus wasn't a man to take chances with.

Nimet had run away blindly when he saw a bloody demon spring from the opening into the tree. Nonnus bent and wiped the Pewle knife on the hem of Bayen's tunic before he sheathed the weapon again. He followed the wizard at an easy pace. The jungle wasn't a familiar environment to him, but the laws of every place were the same: stay aware of your surroundings, and don't do anything hastily.

He found Nimet fifty paces away. The wizard had run into a stand of bamboo. Nonnus grinned faintly. He'd have had as much luck pushing his way through a granite boulder as he did with a grove of thumb-thick bamboo.

Nimet had penetrated several feet into the wiry mass; now he was clawing his way back and finding the springy stems just as determined a barrier in this direction as the other. He saw Nonnus waiting under the broad leaves of an elephant-ear plant

Nimet screamed and tried to draw his sword. His arm was tangled with the bamboo stems. The leaves, tiny but saw-edged, had covered his bare skin with a tracery of cuts.

“Do you recognize me, Nimet?” Nonnus asked. His left hand reached into the bamboo, caught the wizard by the neck, and jerked him out. They stood nose to nose; Nimet's fingers clutched at the hand choking him but without loosening its grip.

The men's features were identical, but blood from the hermit's victims had bathed his skin and clothes. His free hand touched the knife hilt but did not draw it. Nimet's mouth blew bubbles as he tried to speak.

“You'd foul my steel!” Nonnus said. He twisted, flinging the wizard facedown on the leaf litter. Before Nimet could rise, Nonnus had stepped on the back of his neck.

“I'll—” Nimet screamed.

Nonnus caught a handful of the wizard's hair and jerked upward. The neck broke with a sharp crack.

The hermit stepped back, breathing hard. His job was done.

He looked upward, toward a star-shaped patch of clear sky. He smiled faintly. The change came with the suddenness of a tropic sunset. Flesh and bone flowed back to their original semblance.

Where a man in his forties had stood, a tall, willowy young woman sank to the ground unconscious. Her arms and clothing were red with the blood of her enemies.

 

Cashel couldn't breathe. Spiders were crawling on his face. He moved a leaden arm to brush them away.

He was facedown in saltwater, drowning. Aria screamed in his ear as she tried to tug his nostrils to the surface. He turned, blowing like a whale, and went under again. He didn't have any strength and he couldn't remember how he came to be in the sea.

“Zahag! Help me!” the princess cried. She was pulling on the neck of Cashel's tunic now.

Cashel tried to breathe, sucked water, and thrashed his arms in frustrated anger. This time his head and shoulders came up. He saw a dinghy bobbing a dozen paces away. The man in it—

The man in it was Cozro, the master of the ship that brought the corpse of the scaly man to Erdin. What was he doing here?

Cozro sat in the dinghy's stern, paddling clumsily with both hands. He rigidly ignored Cashel and the girl. She was screaming like she hoped to be heard back on Pandah.

Zahag swarmed over the dinghy's gunwale. Cozro stopped splashing and raised a rusty cutlass. The ape hopped backward into the bow, swinging his body between his long arms. His shrieks rose into an insectile chirping.

Cashel swam toward the dinghy in a walloping breast-stroke. He was so tired that he heard but did not feel the sea he splashed through.

Cozro saw him coming and settled back in the stern of the rocking dinghy. “Who are you?” he shouted.

Cashel caught the gunwale. He wasn't sure he could lift himself into the boat. He'd only been able to swim this far because he was worried about Zahag. “Put that sword down!” he shouted to Cozro.

Aria grabbed the side also. “Zahag!” she shouted. “Help Cashel get in!”

The princess floated like thistledown, buoyed up by her gauzy garments. If they became saturated they'd take her to the bottom like an anchor, but so long as air was trapped between the layers they were a benefit.

“How did 1 know you were human?” Cozro said. He lowered the cutlass though he didn't put it away. “I thought you were more, were more...”

Zahag grasped Cashel by the arm with one inhumanly strong hand and started to drag him upward. Though the ape also held the opposite gunwale, the dinghy still threatened to turn turtle. Cozro shouted in fear and threw his considerable weight to the other side. Cashel, finding the strength after all, rolled into the belly of the boat.

No one spoke for a moment. The dinghy rocked as Aria crawled in with assistance from Zahag.

“Who are you?” Cozro repeated. He'd put the cutlass down and seemed afraid to pick it up again. That showed he had an idea of how Cashel felt about the captain's apparent intention of leaving them to sink or swim as he paddled to the island alone.

Cashel was breathing hard. He wasn't quite ready to sit on a thwart instead of sprawling across it, but the abnormal exhaustion was draining away.

He raised his head from the hollow of the dinghy and looked at Cozro. In a voice that grated with controlled anger, Cashel said, “You were headed for the island. You go ahead and paddle there now. My friends and I will watch.”

Cozro nodded, swallowed, and began lashing the water with his hands. He probably thought that if Cashel got angry enough, he'd find the strength for anything he chose to do. Cashel thought he was right.