Prince of Dreams

Volume Two of the Seven Brothers Trilogy

Curt Benjamin

PART ONE
THE ROAD TO DURFHAG

C HAPTER O NE

"SO THIS is dying."

Llesho strained against his bonds, tormented by the fire burning in his gut and the icy sweat dripping from his shivering body. In his brief moments of lucidity, he wondered how he could burn and tremble with cold at the same time and where he was and how he had come to be a prisoner again. In his delirium, Master Markko came to him as a winged beast with the claws of a lion and the tail of a snake, or sometimes as a great bird with talons sharp as swords tearing the entrails from his belly. Always Llesho heard the magician's voice echoing inside his head:

"Among the weak, yes; this is dying."

No escape. He knew, vaguely, that he cried out in his sleep, just as he knew that help wouldn't come. . . .

"Are you waiting for someone?" Master Den rounded the rough wooden bench and sat next to Llesho, quiet until the confusion had cleared from his face. "Your eyes were open, but you didn't answer when I called."

"I was dreaming," Llesho answered, his voice still fogged with distant horror. "Remembering a dream, actually."

A low waterfall chuckled in front of him, reminding him of where he was. The Imperial City of Shan had many gardens, but the ImperialWaterGardenin honor of ThousandLakesProvincehad become Llesho's special place, where he came to sort out his thoughts. Like him, the WaterGardenhad taken some damage in the recent fighting. A delicate wooden bridge had burned to ash, and Harnish raiders had trampled a section of marsh grasses beside a stream that had flowed red with the blood of the fallen for many days. At the heart of the ImperialWaterGarden, however, the waterfall still poured its clean bounty into a stone basin that fed the numerous streams winding among the river reeds. Water lilies still floated in the many protected pools and the lotus still rose out of the mud on defiant stalks. The little stone altar to ChiChu, the trickster god of laughter and tears, still lay hidden under a ledge beneath the chuckling water.

Like the garden, Llesho had survived and healed. He sat on the split log bench just beyond the reach of the fine spray the waterfall kicked up, contemplating the altar to the trickster god—a favored deity of an emperor fond of disguises and mentor to a young prince still learning how to be a king—as if it would give up the secrets of the heavens. In his hand he held a quarter tael of silver and a slip of paper, much wrinkled and dampened from the tight grip he held on it. With a sideways look at Master Den, who was the trickster god ChiChu in disguise, he placed the petition on the tiny altar with the coin inside it for an anchor. Then he sat back down on his bench and prepared to wait.

Master Den said nothing, nor did he reach for the offering on his altar. If it came to a contest, the trickster god had eternity to outsit him. Llesho gave a little sigh and surrendered.

"He comes to me in my dreams. Master Markko. He tells me I'm dying, and I believe him. Then I wake up, and he's gone, and I'm still here." Still alive. But the dreams sometimes felt more real than the waking world.

"And you want to know—?"

"Is it real? Or am I going mad?"

"Ah."

Llesho waited for Master Den to go on, fretfully at first, but as the silence stretched between them, he found that his fears, all his conscious thought, for that matter, drifted away. He heard the merry chime of water dashing on stone, and saw the bright flick of the light bouncing off the droplets in myriad rainbows. He felt the sun on his back, and the breeze on his face, and the rough split logs of the bench under his backside. The sun moved, and he turned his head to feel its heat on his closed eyes, on his smile. Without realizing it was happening, the moment stole through him, sunlight filling all the chinks and crannies of his fractured existence. He was aware only of a profound peace settling in his heart and his gut, pinning him to his bench in a perfect eternity of now.

"As long as you hold the world in your heart, he can't touch you." Master Den gave a little shrug. "But if you ever tire of the world, have something else to grab onto."

His mind went to Carina, the healer with hair the color of the Golden River Dragon, and eyes like Mara's, who aspired to be the eighth mortal god. But he knew instinctively that wasn't what his teacher meant. He already had a purpose to hold him: to free his country and open the gates of heaven. Now he needed a dream more powerful than the ones Master Markko sent to trouble his sleep. His questions, about the brothers still lost to him that he had pledged his quest to free and the necklace of the Great Goddess that the mortal goddess SienMa had charged him to find, would keep for another day. This lesson, to store up the sights and sounds and smell and touch of peace against the struggle to come, he finally understood.

They sat in comfortable silence together until the sun had reached the zenith, and then Master Den swept up the petition Llesho had placed on his altar.

"You are wanted at the palace." He flipped Llesho's silver coin in the air, and when it had landed in the palm of his hand, he tucked it into his own purse with a wink and a lopsided grin. He was, after all, a trickster god. "It's time to go."

Lesho had already put on the disguise he would wear for the next part of his journey, the uniform of an imperial militia cadet. Hmishi had stowed the gifts of the mortal goddess—his jade cup, and the short spear that seemed to want him dead—in his pack for the road. He had only to find his companions and be gone. Still, he doubted their plan.

" don't know who in their right mind would hire me to protect their camels," he grumbled. Merchants would expect a cadet of his age to have the skills and reflexes of a soldier, but no real experience of combat. "I explained that to Emperor Shou, but you know how he is." Shou had simply raised an eyebrow and asked when had he ever left anything to chance.

"I'm sure he has something in mind. After all, he had a very good teacher." Master Den winked, sharing the joke. He was, of course, that teacher, which didn't reassure Llesho at all.

Their horses awaited them at the rear of Shou's palace, in a cobbled courtyard milling with servants and stable hands, with friends staying behind and friends who would continue the quest, though not as many of the latter as Llesho had hoped to see. Kaydu was crying openly. Little Brother, her monkey companion, offered what chittering comfort he could from his perch on her shoulder.

"If I were a better witch, I could send an avatar of myself to ride with you." She gave him a hug, which dislodged Little Brother and made Llesho wish they had been more than friends on the road.

"Her ladyship needs you here." He understood that.

Master Markko, the magician who had betrayed the empire to the Harn, had escaped: none of them were safe until he was found and taken prisoner. After Llesho, Kaydu and her father had more experience with the traitor's evil than anyone else alive.

"I'll come after you, when we find his trail," she assured Llesho. "The gods know that you can't take care of yourself on the road."

Llesho smiled weakly at the joke. He would have told her how the magician came to him in dreams and threatened all he loved, but they were only dreams and didn't change anything. "I'll watch for you along the way," he promised. He wished he'd had the nerve to ask ChiChu to watch out for her. Asking anything of the trickster god was . . . tricky . . . however, and secretly he had hoped the god of the laundry would come with him to Thebin.

"I'm letting you down again." Bixei kept himself a little apart from the crowd. Stipes, a patch over the empty socket where he'd lost an eye in battle, stood at his partner's side. Bixei wouldn't meet Llesho's gaze, but stared at his feet as if overcome by his own failure to put duty ahead of Stipes. "The old man needs me."

Stipes gave him a jab in the ribs. "I'm no old man, though I can't deny I need the young'un here." A smirk escaped him at the description, Bixei being no child but a young warrior, and himself still muscled from battle. But he admitted, half ashamed, "It tore my heart out when Lord Chin-shi sold him to her ladyship. Now that we are free, we'd not be split apart and, together, we'd be a hindrance to you. Who would hire a guard with just one eye?"

Llesho wanted to answer, "I will hire you, one eye or none," but he couldn't be that selfish. Stipes wasn't fit and the trek they had ahead of them might kill them all as it was.

"It's not like you have abandoned the fight," Llesho reasoned with him. "Shokar needs you to help train the recruits. You'll still be working against Markko and the Harn. And who knows? You may get a chance to save my ass again." Llesho smiled in spite of his anger. It wasn't Bixei or Stipes he was mad at.

Shokar wasn't coming either. With the slaves freed, the oldest of the seven exiled princes had set himself the task of finding their Thebin countrymen carried into bondage by the Harn. Bixei and Stipes would train the Thebin recruits into an army, and they would follow later, when, or "if," Shokar had said. He had escaped the Harn attack, being out of the country at the time, and had spent the years of exile as a farmer and a free man. "If there are enough of us left to make a difference, we will follow.

"But there are a thousand li of Harn between Thebin and this, our only safe retreat. If we have to fight our way, march by march, there may not be enough of us left to do more than die on our own home soil."

Shokar had grieved for his brothers, but he had a family and a home in Shan, and he hadn't come looking in all the seasons that Llesho had suffered on PearlIsland. He felt Shokar's absence at his side like a missing weapon. The ghost had told him to find his brothers. He was not sure it would be possible to take Thebin back from the Harn if they didn't stand together. But he could not change his brother's mind. And Shokar, who had wanted him to stay safe in Shan, would not watch him go. Adar waited patiently, however, a hand on his mount's nose, and Lling and Hmishi both sat astride the sturdy little horses that had carried them from FarshoreProvince. Mara, who had traveled to battle in the belly of a dragon, had declared herself too old for such goings-on anymore. She had returned to her cottage in the woods with the explanation that adventures belonged to the young; the old needed more naps than a quest allowed. Her daughter, Carina, had joined them in her place, which suited Llesho just fine. During his recent convalescence, he'd had plenty of time to contemplate the color of her hair—the same burnished gold as the scales on the great back of her father, the Golden River Dragon— and her smile, which reminded him of her mother. Now he would have the weeks of their journey to debate the color of her eyes.

Shou hadn't come out to see them off. His ambassador had informed them that the emperor was occupied elsewhere. So, that was everybody. With a last look around to set the memory of old friends in a stolen moment of peace, Llesho raised himself onto his horse.

"It's time." With a jerk of his chin as farewell, he turned to the open gates. Adar moved up beside him, and Master Den took up a position on the other side, his stout walking stick in his hand.

"You don't think I'd send you off on your own, now, do you?" he asked gruffly. "Not after all the work I've put into you."

Some of the tightness over Llesho's heart loosened. I can do this, he decided. We can do this. "Let's go, then."

C HAPTER T WO

WITH Carina and Hmishi in the lead, and Lling following at the rear, Llesho's party left the Imperial City of Shan by the kitchen gate at which they'd entered. He'd been asleep when they'd arrived, and it had been dark at the time, so the narrow, rutted supply lane that took them away from the palace came as a surprise. Apple trees crowded them on both sides, their branches growing so low in places that he had to lean over in his saddle to keep from hitting his head. The lush growth cooled their passage under the two full suns, but Llesho wondered at how poorly kept the road seemed.

"Not what you expected?" Master Den eyed the dense foliage with appreciation.

"I thought . . ." Llesho paused, trying to put those thoughts in order. He didn't want to criticize Shou, but he had to wonder what manner of leader would conscience such neglect at the very gates of his own palace. "I thought the empire was rich and prosperous. But this—"

"Who would believe such a ramshackle lane would lead one to the very heart of the empire, eh?" Master Den grinned as if he knew some hugely entertaining secret. "Wait a bit before you condemn our friend too severely."

They had journeyed no more than a li when they came to a crossing. Even paving stones, broken here and there by the roots of trees burrowing near the surface, showed that once the road had been better tended. Like the lane before it, however, the new road suffered from neglect.

The crossroad seemed to be a signal for their party to reshape itself. Hmishi left them with a word over his shoulder about scouting ahead. Llesho would have moved up to take his place next to Carina, but Master Den held to the bridle of his horse. Adar, however, had no such restraint. There he was, riding next to Carina as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and she was looking over at him and smiling. Llesho sneaked a glare at Master Den, who caught him at it with a trickster's gleam in his eyes. Fortunately, he didn't say anything.

"Where is everybody?" Lling had moved up to replace Adar at Llesho's side, and she cast a worried look about her. Fewer trees hemmed them in here, but where were the travelers?

"Do you think it's a trap?" Llesho's hand went to the sword at his side, reflexes honed in battle immediately on alert.

"This road sees more traffic at dawn," Master Den waved a hand at nothing in particular, as far as Llesho could see. "And sometimes, after dark."

"Spies?" Llesho asked. He knew the emperor's penchant for slipping out of the palace undetected, and for sneaking secrets in after dark.

"Maybe. But vegetables for certain, and rice and coal and perishables for the larder. You are on the kitchen road, after all, and most of its usual traffic is home growing the crops that will come through the gate when the daylight fails."

As an answer it almost made sense. But a few moments later a farmer passed them heading back the way they had come with a wagonload of yams. The man had an unusually military bearing for one of such lowly rank, as did the herdsman they came upon who watched them pick their way around half a dozen sheep milling in the road. Both gave short bows to Llesho's party.

"They're not . . ."

Master Den twitched an eyebrow, but said only, "Look—"

The road they followed ended, spilling into the great Thousand Li Road to the West, and Llesho silently apologized for doubting Shou's powers as emperor. The builders had drawn from quarries all across the empire to construct a patchwork of colors and textures underfoot. The stones had been carefully dressed to fit together smoothly, and Llesho realized that they'd been laid out in a pattern of light and dark in grays and greens that mimicked brush strokes on pale green paper.

"It's as wide as the market square in the city," Den said, urging him forward. Transfixed, Llesho watched all of Shan passing before him in the shadow of the Great Wall of the imperial city. Traveling merchants and bellowing camels and covered wagons that served as homes on wheels for the hapless souls who pulled them followed the great trade road west. The emperor had released a division of his regular militia for hire to the merchants who rode or walked the Thousand Li Road. Even Stipes might have felt at home among some of the more grizzled bands that marched purposefully forward to their private cadences.

There should have been dust from the tramp of so many feet, but the stones of the road showed patches of damp where a sprinkler wagon had passed. On the far side of the road the trees had thinned. Between them Llesho could see softly rolling fields of green topped with bright yellow flowers in rows like ribbons floating over the dark brown earth.

On the near side, the city wall raised its massive stone shoulder high above his head. Each green block in the Great Wall would have come up to his chin if stood on end instead of lying on its side. He saw no mortar between the stones, but the wall didn't suffer for the lack— hardly a chink showed for as far as Llesho could see.

"Does this please you more, my prince?" Master Den asked, pausing only for an ironic bow as he walked.

"I take it all back," Llesho admitted, although he had spoken few of his doubts aloud.

Master Den looked very pleased, as if he were responsible himself for the Imperial Road. Which he might be, Llesho figured. If asked, the trickster god was as likely to lie about it as not, but one could never tell with a powerful being which way the lie would go. Would he claim a feat he hadn't performed, or deny a feat he had?

"It's a wonder," he finally offered. The god could take it as a comment or a compliment as he chose. It seemed the right thing to say, because Master Den's eyes twinkled with pleasure.

"Yes, it is. Travelers' tales mention the Thousand Li Roadto the West as one of the great wonders of the world. The Great Wall of Shan they count as another. Three guards can walk abreast along the watch-path at the top, and a fast messenger can run from one end of the city to the other within the wall itself. There are cuts carved high overhead to give the inner passage light during the day, and torches light the way by night."

"Kungol had no wall." Llesho stared up at the mass of stone that towered over them. His mother and father might still be alive if they'd had any defenses at all. But Kungol was a holy city, her people given to prayer and meditation—and to the daily struggle to survive the barren, airless climate of the heights. They had not concerned themselves with battle strategy.

Master Den nodded, as if he followed all that Llesho did not say. Then he went on, telling a story as he had so many times in the laundry on PearlIsland. As he had back then, Llesho figured there was a lesson Den meant him to learn, and settled in to listen.

"Shan first rose as a city in the time of the great warlords, before there was an empire or an emperor," Master Den explained. "The lands that now make up the independent provinces of the empire waged war against each other. Thieves and bandits plundered their neighbors and dashed across each other's borders to safety, only to return the next time they got hungry. The warlords built their walled cities as a defense against each other and the bandits.

"Shan had won more of its battles than most, however, and for a while its ruthless warlords imposed their iron control over their own people and their surrounding neighbors. In the deceptive peace that followed, the city grew like wild blackberries outside the walls that were originally built to protect it. The old city inside the defenses turned to administration and governance and left the work of providing food and clothing and shelter to the provincial citizens who gathered at the foot of the Great Wall. The officials thought they were safe against any attack, but the seemingly impossible happened. Those neighboring warlords banded together against their more powerful oppressor. They burned the city that had grown up outside the walled defenses, but no fire or hurled stone or wizardry could penetrate the stones themselves.

"During the siege that followed, the barbarians attacked from the west—not the Harn, but the people we know as the Shan today. They drove back the warlords, but the wall still stood, protecting the rulers who cowered within. Fortunately—" Here, Master Den gave Llesho a hard-eyed glance, "—a wanderer among them knew the secrets of the tunnels through the city walls. By night the barbarians crept into the city. By morning they held it all and had driven out those comfortable ministers and noliticians and false priests. Since that time, the wall has grown with the city. The old foundations make good roadbeds."

"I suppose it was the false priests who prompted the wanderer to reveal his secrets," Llesho gibed, more interested at the moment in the fall of the old city than the rise of the new. He had no doubt who that wanderer had been, almost expressed aloud the thought that crossed his mind—that only a fool would trust a trickster with the plans to one's defenses. Since he was doing the selfsame thing, he had to wonder if there was as much warning as history in the story.

Master Den fell still, a dark sorrow carving lines around his mouth. "Actually, it was the false generals. When the neighboring warlords put the new cityto the flame, no general, no politician, nor any priest rode out to rescue their dying people. Armies, grown fat on the taxes of those tradesmen and skillsmiths, hid themselves behind their wall for protection while outside the children screamed and the mothers begged for help and with their husbands beat their lives out against the flames."

Llesho could hear the anguish of the parents, even the crackle of the flames. He could feel in his throat the cries of the children, and the tight pain of holding back his own screams, waiting for his moment. Almost he imagined the slick glide of blood on a fist much smaller than the one he clenched now, the knife slipping between ribs, ;and the raider falling under the weight of Llesho's seven jsummers. It hadn't been enough. They'd murdered his father, killed his sister and thrown her body on a pile of 'refuse like yesterday's garbage, scattered his brothers, and sold them into slavery. His beautiful, wise mother was gone, dead.

"What was Thebin's sin?" he asked, his voice rough as if he was still holding back his screams today. "What did we do that was so terrible that our country had to die?"

"Nothing." Master Den shook his head slowly from side to side, as if trying to rid himself of the taste of ash in his mouth. "Sometimes evil wins, that's all."

Sometimes, evil wins. Llesho stared up at the wall that marched beside them, li after li of stone between the city and the fields that stretched away from it. "When I am king, Kungol will have a wall, and watchful guards, and an army," he decided.

But posing as traders and merchants, the Harn had entered the imperial city through her open gates as easily as thaj had entered Kungol. The fields that lay around him might be put to the torch just like that long ago city. Master Den already knew, of course. A wall could imprison its builders inside their own fears, but it could not keep out a determined enemy.

"There has to be a way to protect my people, or why am I going back at all?" he demanded. The goddess' people. "If all I can do is bring more death, what is the point?"

Master Den gave him that scornful look that he'd seen too often in the practice yard. So he ought to know better. Fine. If he didn't get it, was it his fault, or his teacher's?

"What protects Shan?"

Not the wall.

The emperor. Emperor, general, trader, spy. Friend. Judge. Not the office, then. "Shou. Emperor Shou."

"What is in here—" Master Den placed a hand over his heart. "Not the robes, the man. Can you be that man, Llesho?"

"Not yet." He didn't speak his doubts aloud—Shou was twice Llesho's age, and he had a heart for adventure, while Llesho just wanted to go home—didn't want to make his fears real in the world, as speech would do. But Master Den knew the uncertainty that curled like a worm in his gut.

"You will be."

Llesho didn't trust that confident smile. Master Den was his teacher, but he was also the trickster god. And trusting Thebin's fate to such a god seemed . . . unwise. It worried him that he couldn't seem to help himself, though the story of the Great Wall warned him against trust. Finally he shook his head. The story would simmer in the back of his brain somewhere, until the moment when need and understanding came together.

The sun was warm on his skin, however, and if nothing else, Master Den's stories were good to pass the time. He realized that they'd been riding for several hours and, with a shiver, that the Great Wall of Shan still tracked them on their way. He'd known the imperial city was big, but he hadn't quite wrapped his mind around how big.

They were coming to an end, however. From a distance the sound of the caravansary drifted softly on the wind. The lowing of camels, and the clanging of their bells, the general uproar of drovers and grooms and loaders and merchants and acrobats and beggars released a flood of happy memories. Llesho urged his horse to a faster pace, leaving his teacher behind with his concerns about the future. Master Den dropped back to walk with Carina, who smiled her welcome while her horse continued its slow amble. Llesho felt a sudden flash of temper that confused him before the smells of camels and cooking and dust pushed whatever thought he'd started out of his mind. Adar caught up with him and rode at his side as he had when Llesho was a child, with Lling and Hmishi following tight on his tail. A stranger would have mistaken Adar for the focus of the guards' protection. Llesho himself did not realize that his brother, as well as his companions and his teacher, all set their guard for him.

C HAPTER T HREE

TUCKED behind a screen of slender pine trees at the side of the road, the first inn came into view. Then another, then both sides of the street were lined with stables and lodgings for the grooms who smelled like the stables and, beyond them, open fields of camels that smelled the worst of all. More than a thousand brown and tan hummocks dotted the landscape surrounding the caravanserai. Only their dignified heads rising on tall necks showed they were not themselves part of the rolling earth, but pack camels resting peacefully on the grasses of the pastureland.

A little farther on, the road widened into a market square much larger than the one inside the city walls where Llesho had battled Master Markko and his Har-nish allies, but just as crowded. Food vendors hawked their sweet and savory wares behind counters decked with ribbons in the colors of their provinces. Scattered among the food shops, small traders called out prices from behind heaps of lesser grade silks and tin pots and incense, while street musicians and puppeteers vied for the dregs of the market-going pocketbooks. Just as Llesho had seen inside the city, however, great trading houses of dignity and power lined the square. Sturdy pillars carved from the trunks of fine hardwood trees framed these "temporary" residences of the wealthy merchants. Windows of real glass looked out onto the world of commerce, and silk banners with the names of their houses floated on the breeze in front of brass doors beaten in elaborate designs. One banner, over a house of modest design but elegant execution, said, "Huang Exotic Imports Exports" and Llesho wondered if the owner bore any relation to the emperor's minister, Huang HoLun.

At the backs of the great houses, along side streets wide enough to accommodate the flat carts used for moving merchandise, counting houses and storage warehouses and money-changing establishments rose in support of the wealth of the caravan merchants. Llesho mulled over Master Den's story about the fall of the old walled city as he guided his horse through the market. The settled part of the Imperial City of Shan now lay protected behind the great city wall, but too much of the wealth of the city had moved out among the inns and stables and marketplaces. As in the story of old, the caravanserai had become a city of its own sprawling into the countryside on the outside of Shan's defenses. He couldn't help but wonder if the emperor committed the same mistake as his ancestor. If he'd understood the story aright, though, Shou's ancestors had been the barbarian invaders, not the self-serving officials who had let their people die rather than risk battle.

As evening softened around them, the crowd thinned. Imperial citizens packed up their wares and returned to the illusion of safety within Shan's walls, leaving only the strangers to tend their camels and their trade. "The barbarian is once again at your gate," Llesho muttered to himself as he guided his horse around jugglers and past vendors who reached for his stirrup with bits of food upraised to tempt the traveler. "But this time he's brought his shop and money counter with him."

A hand brown as his own thrust at him with a skewer of meat cooked over coals in the Thebin style. The wonderful smell of woodsmoke and food made his mouth water, but Llesho kept his head turned forward and gave no sign that he recognized what he was offered. Adar had the look of the North about him, and Llesho was supposed to be on guard. He stole a glance at the vendor as they passed, however, and bit back the disappointment when a lined old face he didn't know stared up at him. Foolish, to expect his brothers to fall over his horse on the road, especially on the caravan road at Shan. Shokar would have found any brother in the area. Still, he had hoped for a moment, and he felt the disappointment like a loss.

Adar led them to a small inn of modest frontage, suitable for one of careful means and a delicate nose. The sign on the door announced the inn as "Moon and Star: rooms to let by the evening." They entered through a small dining hall, much cheered by the thought of food and sleep. A window screened in oiled parchment let in the light but kept the dust of the road out of the public room, which was decorated in quiet tones of pine and oak polished to a respectable sheen.

The proprietor—Llesho identified him by the huge apron that wrapped twice around his thin form—dozed on a low padded bench in the corner. His occasional loud snorts interrupted the drone of his snoring, but his brood of energetic children seemed to manage perfectly well without his assistance. A girl about Llesho's age swept the rush mats scattered on a floor of wide, short boards while another with a few more summers scrubbed the small, low tables until they gleamed. A son with a round face and complacent smile stood duty at the taps, surrounded by the crockery and glassware of his profession. The inn offered no entertainment, but did a passable meat pie, so a comfortable number of the small tables were occupied.

Adar set his hands palm-down on the teak counter. "Two rooms, if you have them, and supper all around."

"Supper we have, for a fair price to any traveler." The tappy waved his hand at a small boy who scurried out from behind a folding screen with a tray of the richly seasoned pies. The boy delivered his steaming treasures to a table of hungry soldiers laughing in the corner and stopped for Adar's order. When he had disappeared again into the back of the inn, the tappy wiped his hands on his apron and considered the man sleeping in the corner.

"As for rooms, Pap has a caution, there, what with daughters in the house."

One of those daughters stole a glance at Adar and blushed before scurrying into the kitchen. Her step grew decidedly more pigeon-toed beneath her long wrapped tunic and dress. The tappy gave Adar a sharp look, but Adar smiled blandly, with no sign that he noticed the gentle suggestion in the girl's walk.

With a little shrug, the tappy made his decision: "The emperor trusts all of Shan to his militia, I suppose I can do no less with the inn. A quarter tael for pies and ale. Rooms are one tael, but there aren't two to let. If you take the one, you'll find clean covers and a fresh mattress. If your guards wish to hire companionship, they will have to look elsewhere, however, as this inn does not provide such entertainments." Llesho suspected that the pigeon-toed young daughter feathered her nest with the gifts of her admirers, but said nothing of this to her brother, who continued to explain the house.

"We have four rooms occupied besides your own, all men and one room a large party, so your lady should not go wandering during the night." He gestured at Carina when he spoke. Whether he did not know that Lling was also female, or assumed that she could handle any unwanted attentions from fellow lodgers, Llesho couldn't quite tell. Neither could Lling, whose expression closed down while she tried to figure out if she should consider the omission an insult or a compliment. "Your man sleep in the stables?"

The innkeeper jerked his chin in Master Den's direction, and Llesho bristled at this casual dismissal. This is no servant but a god, he thought, and you are not worthy to serve him in your house. Pray he doesn't curse your pies with burned bottoms for your insolence. But he knew their safety depended upon the ruse.

Adar had a cooler head, and a purse to back his demands, however. "I am never parted from my servant, or my apprentice," he insisted blandly.

"Of course, my good sir." The tappy shrugged a shoulder—the ways of foreigners were no concern of his—and led them to a pair of low tables inlaid with elaborate leaf swirls of black and red lacquer. The three guards and the "servant" he directed to one table. The master and his apprentice shared the second.

From where he sat, Llesho could scan the entire public house, and he did so carefully, noting patrons scattered through the room as varied as the milling crowd outside. The table at their right was unoccupied. On Adar's left several burly men dressed in modest but well-repaired coats and breeches, and with a family resemblance about the eyes, dug into a dinner of eel pie in thick green gravy. In the far corner, two men with golden skin and dark hair shared a table. The younger reminded him of Bixei, and he wondered how his sometimes friend was faring on Shokar's farm. He shivered in spite of himself when his gaze fell upon the older man, who might have been Master Markko himself, except for the scar that crossed his face, and the humor that lit his eyes. Master Markko had never smiled, never laughed like that, in all the time Llesho had known him. But the presence of members of the magician's race at the inn reminded Llesho that his enemies could likewise travel in disguise.

Llesho and his friends were the only Thebins, but not the only patrons who wore the imperial uniform, although they were the youngest and wore insignia of the lowest rank. Several widely scattered tables of officers sat with dignity in quiet conversation over their dinners.

As Llesho's gaze passed over them, each officer's table paused in mid-word or bite to return his study before picking up their own business. Adar's presence as their employer explained why a table of young recruits might stop at an inn that would exceed their pocketbooks and sorely disappoint their search for the pleasures of the caravan marketplace. If deeper calculation went on behind those experienced eyes, they gave no evidence of it.

A boy and a girl each wearing a brightly patterned apron moved about their tables to offer water for washing and warm towels for drying their hands and faces before they began their dinner. The servers departed again, the boy to disappear behind a painted screen that hid the door to the kitchen. He returned with a tray full of pies. Eel had given way to a filling of questionable ancestry that took a bit of chewing, but the roots used for flavoring had a savor to them that brought tears to the eye and a smile to the lip.

"Wine, sir?" The tappy had returned with two small earthen vessels filled with wine in one hand and a candle set in a small wire basket in the other. He set one crock of wine on the table between the guards—they must content themselves with cold wine. To Adar he gave a bow calculated to the station he had measured them to fit, and set the wire basket on the table. The girl lit the candle, and her brother the tappy set the wine vessel into the basket which held the earthen base just above the flame.

"And some cider for the ladies," Adar amended. Lling, of course, would drink as much wine as any of the men at the table, while Llesho preferred cider. He had already scandalized the house by sitting down to supper with his servants, however, and felt no need to burden the kitchen boy with this intelligence. As they settled to demolishing their own dinners, a rumble of voices filled the open door of the public room.

". . . slaves . . . trade . . ."

The Harn who piled into the public room wore native dress, still red with the dust of the grasslands. Secure in the knowledge that no one so far from Harn would understand their language, the traders went on with their animated argument, speaking freely among themselves.

". . . dead . . . money . . ."

They were almost right. Llesho had never learned more than a few words of Harnish, but picking the few he did know out of the conversation in the doorway sent a chill down his spine. Now that Shan had outlawed the sale of prisoners in the slave market, the Harnishmen had to decide between smuggling in the illegal slave market or finding a new business. Their debate seemed to hinge more on the penalties for breaking the law than any change of heart about the trade.

Unconsciously, Llesho's fingers went to his knife. Before he could draw, however, a larger hand wrapped his own. Master Den held him firmly but gently in place, giving him a twitch of his head imperceptible to anyone but Llesho, who knew his teacher's methods very well. "Not now," that almost not there gesture said, and "No danger . . . yet." Harn on the attack would approach with greater caution. Llesho relaxed back into his seat, a wait and see promise in his eyes that satisfied his teacher.

When Master Den removed his hand, Llesho's awareness opened up to take in the silent room around him. All attention was concentrated upon the strangers. Terrified, the innkeeper's daughter gasped and dropped the empty wine jug she had collected from their table. The crash of breaking crockery snapped the attention of the room like the crack of a whip.

They don't know who we are, Llesho repeated silently to reassure himself. They can't know who we are. They carry the dust of the eastern road on their clothes and could not have been in Master Markko's army when he attacked. The leader among them said something in his own language, out of which Llesho caught the word for a child-slave and another that meant incompetent soldier, but he gave no sign that he recognized the Thebins in their militia uniforms by anything more than their nationality. His comrades' answering laughter died, however, when the senior militia men began, one by one, to rise from their seats.

"We are full up, gentlemen," the innkeeper informed them with a shaky voice and a desperate glance at the scattered soldiers coming to attention throughout the public room. "And we have just run out of pies."

The leader of the small group considered the innkeeper's words and the battle-nervy veterans ranged against him. "We are not welcome here," he conceded. "We will bother you no further." Raising his hands to show that he was weaponless, he gestured to his companions. Following his lead, they made a solemn bow to the room and filed out of the inn much more quietly than they had come. Once outside, the argument began again, this time in grimmer tones. Llesho heard only well remembered curses that faded as the party moved away.

"They will find no warmer welcome anywhere in Shan Province," a grizzled old soldier asserted from the corner. "Treacherous bastards will sleep with the camels tonight."

Agreement murmured throughout the public room and Adar seized the moment of camaraderie with the poise of an accomplished liar—a skill Llesho had never known him to possess.

"Probably looking for protection," he sniffed, "As if a decent goddess-loving man would attach his party to the company of barbarians!"

This brought a laugh from the room, as Adar was taken for a fool who did not know how useless his youthful guards would be.

"It's no cause for laughter," Adar chided them. "I have purchased the services of the empire's great militia to protect myself and my apprentice on the journey and already they have served me well—note how our intruders withdrew upon recognizing the military presence in this room. With such success I should have no trouble in trading their services to a likely merchant in exchange for passage with a party heading West by the southern route.

"Though not," he added, "a Harnish party."

Someone at a nearby table snorted his disbelief, and Llesho tried to look both foolish and attentive as an untried cadet might. He noticed bland calculation in the eyes of the officers, however. The danger, if it existed, came from the men who did not doubt at all the skill of Adar's young cadets, but wondered what experience they might have gained in the recent battle with the Harn.

By the time the broken wine jug had been swept away and a new one brought, the soldiers in the room had returned to their pies, Adar and his young company just a lingering joke among them. The barkeep kept his opinion to himself, but offered what assistance he could to his customer:

"You've come to the right place, if you are looking to hook up with a caravan party, stranger." He wiped his hands absently on his apron, lost in a moment of calculation. "There are two such caravans forming now for the high mountain passes in the west. Bargol Shipping is first out tomorrow morning. Old Bargol takes the long way round, through Sky Bridge Province and down the Thousand Peaks Mountains, but you'll be wanting to talk to the agent who deals for Huang Exotic Imports Exports, I think. Huang's caravans take a more direct route. They sometimes cross into the Harnlands in bad seasons, but not so far as to expect trouble. Huang agents favor this inn, the Moon and Star, so you are in the right place."

Huang. Llesho had met an ambassador Huang HoLun at the border between Thousand Lakes and Shan Province, right after the emperor, in one of his many disguises, had brought Shan's provincial troops to their aid in battle against Master Markko. Master Jaks had died there. Llesho did not believe in coincidences, so he was not surprised when the barman added, "Just this afternoon I overheard a trading man with twelve camels and three horses who said he wished to travel with the Huang caravan to Guynm. You're too late to talk to him tonight, but he expressed an interest in obtaining protection for the journey."

Adar did not believe in coincidences either, and he was prepared with his foolishly eager expression to inquire, "Do you know if he has already engaged suitable guardsmen for his journey?"

"I can't rightly say. You might ask him yourself. He has a room upstairs for the night. You will have the room next to his and can make your own arrangements as you wish."

Adar offered his thanks to the barkeep, who scurried away with a word for the serving lad to show them their room.

Lling watched him leave with a worried frown. "I'll bed down with the horses," she said. "Those Harnish traders might come back and try something while the inn is asleep."

Hmishi shook his head. "I'll do it. You should stay close to Carina, for propriety. We don't want the innkeeper telling tales after we leave." He gave her a rueful smile of farewell, and was gone before the innkeeper's son returned.

C HAPTER F OUR

"FIRE! Fire!"

The dreams latched onto the frantic voices, heat of remembered wounds painting orange flickers behind his eyelids. Then a hand grabbed his shoulder and shook it.

"Llesho! Wake up!"

He flinched awake at Adar's voice to find his brother still shaking him. "What?" But he didn't need an answer. Light and shadow danced on the walls in the unmistakable pattern of fire. Bells clanged in the courtyard, and someone pounded urgently on a door.

"The stables are on fire," Adar explained while he tore through his pack, shifting ointments and cloths into a smaller sack.

Hmishi had been sleeping in the stables.

Llesho, reacting with the speed of his military training, was up and dressed by the time his brother straightened with his healer's bag ready in his hand.

"Where is Master Den?" Llesho asked as he belted on his sword. Lling was already heading out the door, with Carina on her heels, but the trickster was nowhere to be seen.

"He left while I was trying to wake you."

The dream hadn't wanted to let go.

Adar grabbed up some additional supplies for tending burns, and they ran for the door.

"That way!" The innkeeper stood at the head of the staircase that led to the public room, but he was pointing in the other direction, to a door at the far end of the hall. "Able-bodied men to the courtyard!"

To help fight the fire. Llesho turned to go, but Adar grabbed his sleeve. "Injured?" he asked, holding up his healer's supplies.

The innkeeper moved aside. "Below,"

Adar pulled Llesho after him. "I need you here."

"No, you don't." He stopped, refusing the offered protection, and whispered urgently. "What kind of king hides from a crisis?"

"Survive long enough to be king and we'll discuss it." It was really no argument at all. They both knew safety was an illusion, and they had attracted the notice of the innkeeper, who strained forward in an attempt to eavesdrop on the argument.

"I have to go." Llesho freed his sleeve and ran. He'd apologize later, after he'd found Hmishi.

He'd thought that in the Long March and in the battles against Master Markko he'd experienced the worst that the gods could throw at him. When he tumbled, running, into the courtyard of the inn, Llesho realized that he'd been wrong. Fire was the Devourer, more terrifying by far. Searing heat burned the sweat from his body, leaving him dry and blistering, sucking the superheated air out of his lungs and burning when he managed to gulp a gasping breath.

The stable was engulfed in sheets of orange-and-blue flame that towered high in a moon-drenched sky, roaring like a typhoon. Timbers exploded, sent sparks rocketing into the night sky, falling back to earth in showers that landed on the roof of the inn and on the firefighters toiling in the face of the destruction. They'd given up on saving the stable; brigades of bucketeers worked frantically to wet down the red clay tiles of the inn's roof and to put out the fires that smoldered in the bits of straw and debris scattered in the courtyard.

Reacting to the maddened cries of the horses and more purposeful calls directing the bucket brigade, Llesho quivered with battle nerves. Tensed, he waited only for a order to unleash action.

"Here, boy, grab a bucket!"

He knew that voice—it got him moving again toward the lines of men and women hauling water from the well. A bucket found his hands, was passed on, replaced by another. He fell into the rhythm of the brigade, freeing his mind to wonder if the voice that set him to work had been a figment of his imagination. Needing a commander, had his mind supplied the voice that he would follow? If not, what was the emperor of all of Shan doing in the courtyard of a moderately priced inn on the great caravan road to the West? And what did Shou's presence have to do with the fire blazing at his back? He couldn't very well ask the camel driver who handed him the next bucket, or the innkeeper's daughter, who took it and passed it on.

Shou himself was nowhere in sight or hearing, and gradually, the strain on Llesho's arms and the heat on his back grew to fill all the space his mind had for thinking. He became a blank, moving out of habit when his mind abandoned the field. He'd go on until the buckets ceased to find his hand or he dropped where he stood. Or until somebody pulled him out of line and handed him a cup of water.

"Rest," Shou told him. Llesho blinked, realizing only then that the red haze flung against the smoky clouds was the dawn. The stable had sunk to blackened ruin, shattered support beams lying at crazy angles in the ash.

"Hmishi?" Llesho asked over his cup of water. "He was sleeping out here."

"He's around somewhere," Shou told him, "and well enough to rouse the house with the alarm."

Llesho craned his neck, but couldn't make out anyone he knew in the milling throng of dazed firefighters.

"Let's get you inside, let Adar have a look at those hands—"

Llesho dropped his gaze to stare at his hands. "I'll be fine," he dismissed his injuries. They could have been a lot worse, but some of his calluses had torn. Blood seeped around the edges of blisters he would have thought it impossible to raise on hands so used to weapons craft.

"You can't hold a sword, let alone fight with one, in that condition."

True enough. He was just so tired. "Okay."

Shou hadn't waited for his answer. With a firm grip on his shoulder, the emperor of Shan was guiding him through the milling crowd, into the public room where Carina and Adar had set up their aid station. Hmishi was already there, getting a bandage for his forehead while Lling fussed at his side.

"What happened to you?" Llesho asked, just as Hmishi said the same thing. Relief as much as anything else made them both laugh.

"You first," Llesho insisted. "What happened out there?"

Hmishi shot a wary glance at Shou, and then answered with a deliberate misunderstanding of the question. "A bit of flying debris hit me in the head—cut and cauterized at the same time—Carina just had to clean it up a bit. What about you?"

Llesho held up his hands, his tired mind catching up at last. Someone had burned down the stables. They'd nearly killed Hmishi, and might have intended to murder everyone sleeping at the inn. And whoever did it might be hiding among the victims.

"That's nothing," Hmishi boasted.

"It needs some salve and a bandage nonetheless," Adar interrupted their conversation, drawing Llesho over to the table where his supplies were laid out. He gently cleaned the blisters while Hmishi and Lling watched with detached interest.

"You should have seen my head before Carina put that bandage on it," Hmishi continued his boasting.

"Fortunately, it was your head, and nothing important." Lling snickered, but her eyes hadn't cleared of their panic.

"How is he really?' Llesho asked her. He wanted to know, but he was equally grateful for the distraction. Adar was cutting away dead skin, cleaning back to the healthy flesh. He winced, but didn't miss Lling's helpless shrug.

"What happened?"

"He was unconscious when I found him. I thought, at first, that he was dead."

"Then I woke up." Hmishi poked experimentally at his bandage, unhappy at the result.

"You scared me!" Lling punched him on the shoulder and Hmishi had the good sense to look contrite.

"I won't do it again."

"You'd better not!"

"You're done." Adar tied off Llesho's bandage with a flourish. "Someone else can keep watch for a while. The master of this house will reopen for business soon, and I want you both to go upstairs and get some sleep."

Llesho nodded, wanting nothing more than a bed or a bit of floor to sleep on. Shou was coming toward them, however, wearing robes well made and of fine cloth, but in the plain Guynmer style. His apparent wealth had come down several notches from the elegant dress of a Shan merchant he had used to travel undetected through the streets of his own imperial city. He gave Adar a little bow of politeness between not-quite equals with the blandly purposeful expression that caused his opponents to seriously underestimate his intelligence.

"If you have a moment, healer, I have business I wish to discuss. We may converse in my room?"

"I—" Adar hesitated briefly before returning the bow. "Yes, of course—"

"Then, if you are finished here, my man will find something to temper our thirst."

It did seem, then, that the worst of the injured had been cared for. Grooms and servants who had fled their beds in the stables were finding corners to curl up in for a few hours of sleep before the first wave of customers dislodged them in the morning. Adar packed up his sack, but a last look around the room for any wounded who had been overlooked reminded Llesho that he hadn't seen Master Den since he'd woken up to find that the fire was real this time.

"Where . . . ?"

There he was, coming toward them with long, sure strides, trailing a stranger in his wake. He didn't stop at the aid station, but passed them, presenting the stranger to Shou.

"This is the man I mentioned to you." Master Den bowed to Shou with scarcely a hint of irony. "May I recommend to you Harlol, a Tashek camel drover out of the Wastes. His master lost much of his load in the fire, and so he seeks a new position."

"I have a drover," Shou answered slowly. Like Llesho, he studied Den's face for a sign of what was expected of him. Unlike Llesho, the necessity of doing so set his mouth in a thin line of annoyance.

Harlol bowed deeply and spoke up for himself. "Not anymore. Your man was seen running away from the stables. I don't think he'll be back."

"He wasn't chased by a Tashek drover by any chance?"

"None that I saw, good sir." He couldn't have missed Shou's meaning, but Harlol met the emperor's gaze with a level innocence that Llesho didn't trust at all.

Shou, however, was looking at Master Den, not the Tashek drover. Master Den gave him a slow, lazy blink that said nothing useful.

"On your head be it," Shou answered the unspoken challenge in a tone that said more clearly than words how much he doubted the wisdom of trusting the trickster.

But Master Den grinned and bowed and clapped a hand on the drover's back. "There you are. Didn't I say it would work out?"

Harlol wriggled out of the trickster's grasp to give Shou a bow even deeper than Master Den's and with a great deal less irony evident. "I will make my bed among the camels, since your man no longer tends them."

"Indeed." Shou dismissed the man with a warning glare at Master Den. Bowing hospitably, he led his guest's entourage to a room next down the hall from the one where they had begun the night.

"Come in," Shou said, "I won't keep you long, but we have to talk." The emperor stepped aside and Hmishi entered first, blocking the doorway until he passed a quick glance over the room in search of an ambush. When he gave the "all clear," Llesho entered, with Carina, Master Den, and Lling right behind him. Adar entered last and closed the door tightly after them.

A brass lantern from Shou's travel pack lit the room, where a man in the tunic and breeches of a servant busied himself setting out a camp chair for his master. Llesho noticed that, in spite of his low station, he carried himself with the bearing and muscles of a soldier.

"Sento," the emperor called. Ignoring the camp stool, he made himself comfortable on the rug spread out on the floor, squatting on his haunches in the Guynmer style. "Bring a bottle, please, and cups from my pack."

"Yes, sir." Well trained or unaware, Sento gave no sign that he guarded an emperor. He dug into a pile of rugs and tents heaped in the corner and returned bearing not one bottle but two, and a stack of small tin cups. Llesho hesitated, unsure how much the servant knew or how to begin the conversation they needed to have.

"What are you doing here?" he finally asked, leaving it to the emperor to specify. He'd grown accustomed to speaking to Shou as the disguise of the moment called for, rather than with the formal court address due an emperor. Even when he hadn't figured out exactly what the disguise was. Then he thought about the standard saddle pack and larger bundle of tents and rugs of a caravan merchant dropped in the corner.

"You are the trader with twelve camels?"

"Of course. Who else could I trust to see you to the border?"

Llesho remembered his earlier question—where would the emperor find a trader foolish enough to take on three Thebin pearl divers as his only protection on the Thousand Li Road to the West. The answer, he realized, had a Shou sort of logic.

While Llesho dealt with his shock, the servant filled the tin cups and took up his position outside the door.

Hmishi made as if to follow. "How much do you trust him?"

"Enough. Sento has accompanied me before," Shou motioned them to take a seat. "No one will overhear us while he guards our door."

Llesho wasn't ready to trust the man—servant or soldier—yet. Master Den had already seen one of the emperor's party acting suspiciously. But then, trusting the trickster didn't make a lot of sense either. He was confusing himself, so he took a drink to settle his nerves and puckered up like a fish.

"Cider," Shou explained. "As a Guynmer trader, I honor the beliefs of that place, and neither serve nor indulge in spirits."

Llesho generally liked cider, had been drinking it with his dinner in fact. The Guynmer sort had a sour bite to it, though, and Llesho set aside the cup after just a couple of mouthfuls. He had too many questions to get through before he fell over, and he was in no mood to play Shou's spy games—not even with the cider.

"We could have been killed tonight."

"That's always a possibility," Shou agreed at his most irritating.

"Are we up against a plot to harm the empire?" Hmishi asked, almost hopefully, it seemed. That, at least, would mean it hadn't been meant for Llesho. Since he seemed to be asking the right questions, Llesho let him take the lead.

"What about that man Master Den saw running away from the fire? I saw him, too—didn't know he was yours, but he certainly wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the burning stable."

"He was mine, all right." Shou punctuated his assertion with an emphatic nod. "And with any luck he has made his way back to the palace, where he will advise the Lady SienMa of what has occurred here."

"Oh." Hmishi looked from the emperor to the trickster god and back again. "Master Den knew that?"

"Probably," Shou admitted.

"So you must have wanted this man Harlol for some reason."

"Not that I knew."

Master Den interrupted with a sigh. "Yes, I recognized an intelligence officer when I saw one. But we were still left without a camel drover. The Tashek are famous for their way with the miserable beasts, otherwise they're pretty mysterious. I thought" it would be interesting to have one around."

Picking the elements of truth out of that story would take more time than it was worth. Llesho figured that Master Den had some reason for wanting the drover in their party, and the emperor seemed to have decided to let further explanations wait as well.

"Did you find out who set the fire, or why?" Shou asked the trickster god.

"Take your pick." Master Den shrugged, denying higher knowledge of events. "The Harn who came in earlier in the evening might have wanted revenge for their hostile reception, or they may have recognked Llesho and used the fire to create a distraction, hoping to snatch him for the magician in the confusion. Or it might have been a personal vendetta having nothing to do with the Harn or our party. More than one merchant had stored his goods under the stable roof. It could have been a competitor, or even an accident with an unstable element in the trade goods." The trickster's eyes twinkled with mischief at the last possibility, but they all agreed to ignore the awful pun.

"If we wait to find out more, we'll raise suspicions about ourselves." Lling didn't look happy about her contribution to the debate, but there didn't seem to be much point in objecting.

"I guess if it happens again, it's us, and if the trouble stops here, it's not." Llesho didn't look any more convinced than his companions, and Master Den stated the obvious:

"We are bound to meet trouble on the road, whether or not it has anything to do with tonight."

"Her ladyship will not let it be," Shou assured them. "If we are in danger from this, she'll find a way to warn us."

That pretty much ended the conversation for the moment. But Llesho wasn't finished with his questions for the emperor.

"I would have thought you were needed in the imperial city," he hinted.

"The Lady SienMa sits on the throne in my place." The emperor's eyes seemed to focus far from the room in which they sat, and Llesho wondered about that meeting, and what had put the mortal goddess of war in command of an empire. Shou gave his head a shake, clearing it of the thoughts he kept to himself. "Markko and his followers proved the empire has taken its own power too much for granted. Harnish war bands came into the imperial city from somewhere."

Llesho knew that—they'd both suffered losses in the recent fighting, and the emperor's habit of traveling his empire incognito was one of Shan's few closely guarded secrets. In his many disguises, Shou heard and saw much that would otherwise remain hidden from an emperor. It didn't explain what he was doing on the caravan road this time, however.

"But why Guynm?" Llesho had no choice. The northern passage through the Gansau Wastes was impassable even in early summer. Already the springs and watering holes that made the trek possible just after the winter thaw would have dried up. Even the nomadic Tashek people, who clung to the brief-lived oases in the spring, would have packed up their tents and moved farther south, searching for water.

Like the route out of Guynm, the Sky Bridge Road led south before turning west to the passes above Kungol. Longer than either the passage through the Gansau Wastes or through Guynm and the Harnlands, Sky Bridge was considered the safest route precisely because the Harn had no trading presence there. If they were going to find his brothers, however, they needed to go where the Harn had been. And that meant Guynm, whether they liked it or not. But Shou had no such constraints. Taking a sip of his drink, however, the emperor explained:

"Guynm is Shan's most vulnerable border with the Harnlands. If Guynm Province falls, the empire stands open to its very heart. The Imperial Gaze has fallen elsewhere too long—it's past time I took a look."

Adar frowned, troubled. "So what are we likely to find when we reach Guynm?"

"If we're lucky, a stalwart governor and a Thebin prince or two, happy reunions, and a formal visit. Then I return to Shan in state, and you continue your journey."

The emperor gave a little shrug, as if to acknowledge his own doubts. "It is more likely that we will find a province that clings to the empire by a thread while it takes care to see nothing when Harnish raiding parties pass through. But I didn't expect trouble this soon."

The plan made sense if one assumed they didn't carry the spies and saboteurs with them. That wasn't a certainty right now. Llesho decided he should object, just as soon as he managed to pry his eyelids open again.

Adar's voice distracted him from his efforts to look alert. "More discussion can wait. If we are to be ready to go, we all need an hour or two of sleep."

Llesho agreed. His fingers and toes seemed to be a long way off and the distance between filled with a mist where his body ought to be.

"Help me get Llesho into his bed before he falls asleep where he sits," he added, and muttered, "I knew he wasn't ready to travel."

Llesho dragged his eyes open enough to catch a bleary glimpse of Master Den looking back at him. Then Adar had his left elbow and Carina his right, and he discovered that his legs did still work even if they didn't feel connected to his body. Before he knew it he was in their own room—he could tell because he recognized the baggage heaped behind a screen like the one in Shou's chamber. Then Adar was tilting him onto the bed and he let himself fall into the stiff mattress. Adar tucked in beside him with a kiss on the forehead and a quick prayer for a peaceful night.

Lucky for them that they journeyed with a god. Their prayers had so little distance to travel. The thought drifted away into the dark of Llesho's sleep. In his dream it was his seventh summer, and he lay in his small bed in the shadow of the great mountains of the gates of heaven, listening to the call of the caravans. His body remembered the thin air and the smell of pack ice melting on a summer breeze in the great passes to the West, and he struggled against the heavy air of the lowlands.

"Mother!" he called in his sleep, in the high tongue of Thebin.

"Hush. Hush." Adar's hand stroked a cool path across his forehead. It was okay if Adar was there. He'd be safe. He slept.

C HAPTER F IVE

"OH, GODDESS!" Llesho woke with a snap just as the first rays of the great sun gilded the windowsill. He didn't notice the second sunrise, however, but made a dive for his travel pack, berating himself under his breath for how stupid he'd been the night before.

"Llesho? What's wrong?" Standing guard at the door, Lling came to attention with her sword in hand. Urgency sharpened her voice, waking the rest of their party who felt about them for their weapons. But there was no enemy to fight.

"We're not under attack," Llesho assured them, "at least not right now. But we forgot to consider a possible motive for the fire last night—" He dug into his pack, searching for the gifts that her ladyship had given him on the road from Farshore.

Master Den rose and stretched, the tips of his thick fingers brushing the ceiling at its highest peak. "You mean, that Master Markko might have wanted to clear the inn so that his thieves could have a go at your luggage?" he asked as he watched Llesho scramble on the floor.

"Do you think I'm wrong?"

"Not necessarily." The trickster god shrugged off the question. "No matter the diversion, however, the emperor would never have left these rooms unguarded. Luckily for Sento, the fire didn't take the inn as well as the stables."

Llesho shuddered. He'd known the man was more than a servant, knew that as soldiers they might all be called on to give their hves in battle. The idea that Shou's man might have stood fast, burning with the inn rather than abandoning his post, brought back memories of his own personal guard dying on the sword of a Ham raider in Llesho's seventh summer. He didn't want the people around him dying to protect his life and property, but it was going to get worse the closer they got to Thebin.

He found the wrapped shapes in his pack and pulled them out, took off their bindings to make sure that they were indeed safe. The jadeite bowl, a wedding gift in a former life, he took in his hands and turned in the morning light. Captured by the warm gleam of promises shining through the translucent jade, he spent a moment in quiet study. Something stirred in the back of his mind, like old forgotten memories, but they refused to come into clear focus. Wondering about its secrets, he set the bowl back in its wrappers and grasped the short spear by the shaft. The weapon had taken his life once and still thirsted for his blood. He hated the thing, but it came to his hand with the easy fit of long usage, and he marveled over how natural it felt there.

Master Den nodded at the spear. "Markko will know the legends. He'll want the spear because it is supposed to hold a deadly power over the king who wields it. That power goes two ways, however. You injured him with it before. Like yourself, he's had to heal, and he'll be wondering what control you now hold over the weapon."

Llesho hadn't considered that the bond might influence the weapon, but he had hurt the magician with it. Markko would be wondering, now. He'd want to protect himself from the legendary spear as much as to turn it against Llesho.

"We can use that," he said, and set the spear aside to carry on the road.

"If you're right that Markko is behind this—" Adar gestured at the window which opened onto the ash-drifted courtyard, "—carrying that thing openly will look like a direct challenge."

"And?" Llesho gave his brother a level stare.

Adar tilted his head back, eyes closed, and heaved a frustrated sigh. To Llesho's annoyance, Carina rested her hand on his brother's arm. "Adar is only worried about your safety."

The healer opened his eyes with a grateful smile. "Of course. How can we keep you safe, Llesho, if you make yourself a target?"

"Master Markko knows I have the spear. That makes me a target already. If he considers me a threat as well, it will slow him down, make him cautious, and that can work to our advantage."

"Listen to your king," Master Den interrupted before the disagreement could grow any more heated. "When it comes to a contest, we have to know which will rule— the weapon or the boy. Better to find out now than at the very gates of heaven."

"We need a living king, not a dead sacrifice," Adar snapped, though he let Carina soothe him.

"I don't intend to let it kill me." Llesho rose from his place on the floor with the spear in his right hand. His left he wrapped around the three black pearls—gifts of goddess and ghost and dragon—in the small leather pouch that lay on his breast. Hmishi and Lling gave Adar a polite bow, but followed Llesho from the room without a word or question, which seemed to please the trickster god immensely. Finally, with Carina's encouragement, Adar surrendered, bringing up the rear with a last objection: "We are going to regret this."

Llesho knew that, he just didn't see a lot of options. He wondered if he might win Carina's sympathy with the admission, but he didn't want her pity, and wouldn't accept it as a substitute for the care she seemed to offer his brother. So, he chided himself, chalk up another one to experience—or lack of same—and get your butt moving before the caravan leaves without you.

In the night, the fire that had burned the stables of the Moon and Star Inn had seemed all consuming, and Lles-ho'd expected signs of the disaster all over the cara-vanseray. Except for a thin gray mist that seemed to leave a gritty coat over everything, however, the broad square bustled with its daily business as if nothing had happened. Huang agents pushed their way through the crowd, bargaining final agreements while a thousand camels, annoyed to be rousted from their pastures and hemmed in on every side by the inns and counting houses and storehouses, milled and bellowed and spat thick, stinking gobs at their handlers. Drovers cursed their animals in a dozen languages, their voices blending with the shouted commands of the merchants and the smell of dusty camel and incense and bits of meat roasting on sticks. Through it all cut the high tenor clang of camel bells on harnesses and the deeper call of brass pots clattering where they were tied along the sides of the camel packs.

Surrounded by the familiar uproar of caravans gathering for the journey to the West, Llesho found himself caught up in memories both old and new—the present overload of sensation colliding with the memories of the great plaza of Kungol, where the caravans paused before daring the high mountain passes. Suddenly, images of the Harn raiders attacking the palace and killing everyone he knew mixed in his tired mind with the chaos of the night spent fighting the fire, freezing him in mid-stride. But Lling and Hmishi flanked him, their mouths hanging open and their eyes wide and shining.

The two ex-slaves had come to Shan from the poorest of the outlying farms of Thebin, packed in carts for the journey among the dour and threatening Harnish raiders. Nothing in their past, not even the marketplace at the center of Shan, had prepared them for the smells and sounds and crush, the sheer excitement of the greatest caravan staging area of the Shan Empire. Although they maintained the proper positions to guard Adar and Carina at the center of their party, they would convince no one who saw them now of their battle-hardened competence.

Their wonder was contagious, and Llesho caught their excitement, letting go of the past to grin back at them through the uproar. They might have stood there longer, gaping like bumpkins, but Emperor Shou's voice cut like a scythe through the din: the three cadets followed the sound of his curses down the slowly untangling line.

"Tighten that strap! Can't you see that beast is blowing out his ribs? We won't get two li down the road before he dumps five hundred tael of silk and pigments in the dirt!"

Experienced drovers looked up from their own work to watch the show, sneering behind their hands and with their own rude suggestions. The emperor nudged aside an inexperienced young groom and poked the camel in the ribs. The animal complained with a bellow, but his barrel grew noticeably thinner. Shou tugged on the cinch with a sure and practiced hand while he cursed, "The damned camel is smarter than you are."

If not for their meeting in Shou's rooms the night before, Llesho would have sworn the Guynmer trader with the dull clothes and the sharp tongue was a stranger with a vague likeness to the emperor. He even spoke differently, his voice higher and accented with the brisk twang of Guynm Province, though he hadn't changed his name.

"Shou, like the emperor," he announced, clasping Adar's arm as if they'd just met.

Llesho thought his heart would stop on the spot. The logical part of his mind knew that few of the emperor's subjects had ever seen their monarch, except in the ceremonial mask he wore on state occasions. But the battle-scarred part of him that sent Llesho skittering for cover whenever a servant dropped a tray reminded him that Markko's spies could be anywhere. At any moment he expected a pointed arm and a raised voice from among the camel drivers and hangers-on, exposing their true identities to the bustling crowd. Sento, Shou's personal servant and equally disguised guardsman, rolled his eyes behind his master's back, however, and the drivers and laborers smirked their sympathy.

"And I'm the Golden River Dragon," muttered a passing drover in a sarcastic aside. This was an old masquerade, then, taken up with the skill of a true caravanner at the emperor's need. His servants had heard the story many times, had grown weary of their pompous master's pride in an accident of naming, and even the other merchants who traveled this route knew the bragging of the Guynmer merchant.

"Where is that drover you recommended to me, healer?" Shou demanded of Adar. "I need someone who knows what to do with a camel or we will never leave the imperial city."

Before Adar could answer that he hadn't recommended anyone, it had been Master Den, a voice piped up between them.

"Right here, good merchant Shou." The Tashek drover, who had introduced himself by the name Harlol, wandered forward then, brushing straw and black mud from his hands. "Zephyr had a cut on her knee, but I've put a plaster on it and she should heal well enough on the journey."

"Zephyr?"

Harlol twitched a shoulder, dismissing the question with a bland, "She needed a name, and seemed to like that one. It suits her." The nomadic Tashek were bred to the camel, slept with their beasts and fed them with their own hands in the desert. A man who did not know his beast didn't survive. Hearing this young drover talk about a camel as if it could understand and even choose its own name convinced Llesho beyond doubt that the nomads were stranger even than reports had named them. Shou, however, seemed surprised only by the choice of names. "She never struck me as being that light on her feet."

The Tashek drover smiled. "Perhaps she was only waiting to be asked."

"We'll see ... What's wrong with you, boy?" The emperor turned the sharp edge of his tongue on Llesho, who jumped as if he'd been bitten by an adder. "Posing for a statue on my time?"

"No, sir!"

"Then get ready to move out! There're five hundred camels and as many horses in this caravan, and the front of the line is already halfway to Guynm by now. They are not going to wait for one daydreaming cadet!"

Chastised, Llesho snapped to attention, acutely aware of the short spear strapped to his back and the imperial militia uniform he wore. He turned with a will to hitching his pack to the back of his horse, just one among hundreds of militiamen hired out to guard the many caravans journeying to the West. Squads passed up and down the ranks, finding their places at the sides of their temporary masters. Old campaigners of rank, they took up positions in the parties to the front and rear of Shou's camels. Llesho recognized in their number several who had dined at the Moon and Star. They were elite imperial guardsmen, he suspected, and no more at home in their militia uniforms than his own cadre. They passed Shou's party with no acknowledgment, but Llesho felt a great pressure lift from his shoulders: the emperor did not rely on their band alone for his defense.

He was more than grateful for their presence when a handful of Harnishmen in the shaggy breeches and coarse shirts of the plains people rode by on their short horses. In their midst, a trader with the same look but much finer garb rode on a taller, more elegant steed. He'd known that small parties out of Harn sometimes traveled with the larger caravans, but hadn't considered the possibility that they might join this one. With a tight grip on the hilt of his Thebin knife he watched them make their way to their position at the rear. None of that party gave Shou a backward glance; they didn't know who he was, or they were skilled spies. Either way, Llesho figured he would need to stay on his guard. At their best the Harnishmen were mischief, at their worst, deadly.

The Huang agents had divided the caravan into parts: two units, each of a hundred camels and as many horses, had already departed. Shou's small party had drawn an inconspicuous slot toward the middle of the third unit. If raiders came at them from the front they'd have plenty of warning, but they were not so far to the rear that they would fall into the hands of bandits sweeping down on stragglers.

The emperor, disguised as a Guynmer merchant, offered Carina a pallet on the back of a camel, but she declined, insisting that she would ride. She wore the robes of a healer with a wide split skirt under and a thick swathe of veils that covered her from head to foot, protecting her from the sun and the dust. Adar had pulled a short veil over his eyes but left his face uncovered, as did the three Thebins in the full uniform of imperial military cadets. Master Den wore his usual loin wrap and an open coat that fell below his knees. In his right hand he carried his long staff with an umbrella stuck in it for shade, and over his back he carried a small pack which might double as a change of clothes, Llesho figured.

The call sounded for their party to move out, and Llesho scrambled into his saddle. He had expected Shou to ride horseback as well, but the emperor climbed onto the bent leg of the lead camel and slid effortlessly into a padded seat built up for him in front of the camel's pack.

THE PRIFCE OF DREAItiS Harlol stood ready. "Up, Zephyr. Up!" he shouted, and gave the camel an encouraging slap on its haunch. The camel rose, rocking her passenger who rolled with the motion as if he'd been born to it. A second camel remained on its knees. The Tashek drover scanned the crowd, cursing under his breath in a language thick with harsh consonants that Llesho did not understand. "You are certain he is coming?" he finally asked in Shannish.

Shou nodded, squinting in concentration as he looked over the sea of beasts and people. "There he is now—" He pointed, but Llesho saw no one paying them the least attention.

"Ah! I see him!" the drover's attention locked on its target, and Llesho followed his gaze to the most incredible figure he had seen all morning.

A dwarf in the exotic dress of Thousand Lakes Province struggled toward them through the milling press of food vendors and trinket sellers hawking their last-minute wares to the forming caravans. In one hand he carried a pair of cymbals, and on his back was strapped a quiver full of flutes. Behind him, he dragged a small stepladder. "Harlol!" the dwarf addressed the new drover by name, "You seem to have landed on your feet. I thought you'd be begging your way home!"

"A Tashek drover never stays unemployed for long." Harlol steadied the ladder against the waiting camel's pack, demanding, "What kept you? The master is growing impatient to be gone."

The dwarf climbed up and plopped himself in a small chair with arms and a gate that he latched across his front. When he had settled his instruments and fluttering garments about him, he drew a deep breath and nodded a signal for the drover to bring the camel to its feet.

"There was this maid from Sky Bridge Province who, noting the diminutive size of my visible parts, was curious about the size of my other parts." He explained his tardiness with a sly smile and a careless wave of his hand to take in his lower body. "I proved to her that small messengers can carry big packages, but she insisted I repeat the experiment, to be certain." The dwarf shrugged with mock innocence. "I could not leave the lady unconvinced, and in faith, she took almost more convincing than I had strength to devote to the debate."

"Tell that to the master when he takes a whip to your hide for holding up our departure."

As far as Llesho knew, Emperor Shou didn't own a whip. That doubtless explained why the dwarf showed no sign of fear or contrition, but laughed merrily at Llesho, as if they two shared some secret joke at the drover's expense.

Harlol latched the ladder to the camel's pack with a twitch of a smile that quickly vanished when the camel reached around on his long neck to take a nip out of his backside. Harlol gave her a sharp smack on the nose. "Behave yourself, Moonbeam!" he warned the animal, which offered an opinion of this new name in the wad of spittle it flung at Harlol's departing feet.

"Enough!" The drover made a rude gesture at her and turned on his heel to run down the row, checking the tether line that tied each of Shou's twelve camels to the others. Shouting in the Tashek language, which the beasts seemed to understand best, he prodded at their flanks with a goad that he carried for the purpose.

"Evil-tempered beast," the strange newcomer said, but he was watching the departing drover, and not the camel, as he said it.

Curious about the new addition to their company, Llesho settled his horse beside the camel on which the dwarf rode at his ease. As their party moved forward, he stole a glance upward, only to find the dwarf staring down at him.

"And who might you be, squirt?"

"I'm called Llesho, and I'm a cadet in the imperial militia," Llesho answered with his cover story. "And I think, sir, that you have no room to call another names that belittle his stature. What—who are you?"

"I am called Dognut, though my parents named me Bright Morning at my birth. And as you see, I am court musician to His Majesty's travels."

Llesho had no practice at subterfuge; a blind man might read the horror that slackened his face at the dwarfs words. The little man gave him a wink that, on the surface, said he played the same game as their neighbors in the caravan, mocking their master and his pompous affectations. The gleam sharpening his grin spoke of deeper knowledge and more dangerous ironies. They had not yet left the city wall behind, and already Llesho was tired of the joke.

"I have never met a man of your race before. Where are your people from?" he asked, trying desperately to change the subject.

"Like our employer, I am a king—king of the short people."

Llesho was about to commiserate with the shoddy treatment the little king received from his companions when a braying cackle, like a donkey in heat, erupted from the dwarfs mouth. Dognut held his sides and laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks and Llesho wished a lion would jump from the bushes and kill him just to put him out of his misery.

"My 'people' farm the Thousand Lakes Province, and surpass your own length, pygmy lad. My looks are a mere accident of birth—the bones of my arms and legs break easily, and refuse to grow, which the wealthy find amusing. When it became clear that this body had reached its full height before its hands could reach the plow, I was offered to the governor to be trained as an entertainer. Unfortunately, I did not live up to expectations in that regard either. With one thing and another, fate cast me adrift upon the mercy of our current master, who has no great ear for music and therefore prizes a musician with a similar lack of sensibility."

Llesho blushed furiously, feeling every word out of his mouth was another foot in the camel dung. "I'm sure you jest with me about your skill with your instruments," he stuttered in a lame effort to appease the situation.

His brother rode ahead with Carina and he kneed his horse to a faster pace to join them, leaving the laughing dwarfs ridicule behind. The two healers were deep in a conversation about poultices, but Adar paused with an expression of patient inquiry on his face. Llesho had no conversation to offer. Unfortunately, he had now reached the head of their party, hobbled to the slow but steady pace comfortable for camels and horses.

"Can't we go any faster?" he asked his brother.

"I don't know much about camels. The horses could manage a brisk trot for a little while, but on a trip this long, a faster pace would kill them."

Adar meant no harm, but his words dropped Llesho into the past as if it were all happening again. The sounds of the caravan blended into the memories of another journey filled with hunger and thirst and exhaustion, his people dying between one step and the next. Clammy sweat sprang out all over his body, chilling him to the bone, and he gasped as if he'd been shot with one of his own arrows.

"Llesho! Llesho!"

Adar's voice reached him through the fog in his mind. They had drawn to a halt while the caravan plodded by, drovers he did not know and guards he thought he vaguely recognized turning curious glances on him as they passed. Adar was on foot, his hand on Llesho's arm.

"What are you doing here?" Llesho looked at his brother, confused in time. "We've fallen behind, don't let the guards see—" But no, the Long March was over. They were going home. Llesho closed his eyes for a moment, centering himself; Adar's hand was like an anchor holding him in the present.

"Where's your horse?"

"He's right here. Will you be all right if I let go for a moment?"

Llesho thought about the question. He'd been impatient, embarrassed, and suddenly he'd found himself a thousand li away, crossing the grasslands again. He gripped his brother's arm, hard, couldn't let go for all the silk in the Shan Empire.

"Nine thousand died," he whispered. The Harnish raiders had driven ten thousand out of the holy city of Kungol. All but one thousand had perished on the forced march to the slave market in Shan. It wasn't the answer Adar was looking for, but it opened his eyes, blurring them with tears.

"Dear Goddess, Llesho. How did you survive?"

He hadn't told his brother how he'd wound up on Pearl Island, a continent away from his home in the mountains of Thebin. They'd scarcely found each other again when they were plunged into battle, and it had all seemed so far away. Now, however, something inside of him demanded release. He had to tell Adar, even if his brother never forgave him for what his life had cost them.

"I was their prince, and so they died for me. Starved to feed me, went thirsty so that I would have water. Carried me until they dropped, then passed me on to the next until he died as well."

He sighed and turned his anguished gaze into the blue, blue sky of Shan. "I wish I could turn into a bird and fly home right now." Llesho leaned forward in the saddle, his muscles bunched under him, poised to leap into the air with the faintest puff of wind. Nothing happened. He had expected that. Kaydu could have done it, but he didn't have her gifts.

"I'm sorry, Llesho. I wish I could do something to make this easier for you."

That sounded like forgiveness, or maybe even as though his brother didn't blame him at all. If he thought about it logically, as Adar seemed to be doing, there hadn't been much he could have done about it anyway. But if it wasn't his fault—the blame spilled from him like an open sore.

"I am the favored of the goddess, right?" Sarcasm oozed around the words. If this was favor, he could not imagine what it must be like to incur the disfavor of the gods.

"Believe it, no matter what has happened." Adar gave his arm a shake to fix his attention. "The goddess has some purpose for every step of your path, brother, the evil of the Long March, and even testing your patience with the pace of a caravan."

"As the goddess wills." Llesho held out his hand for his reins. He didn't believe it, and that scared him more than coming unstuck in his memories had. He felt the need to reach Kungol as an ache in his bones and a bitter taste in the sweat that crested his upper lip. The light touch of the short spear at his back mocked him with whispers in the voices of his enemies: "Going to die, going to die."

He had come to imagine himself as a great general, the liberator of his people, but distance and his own weaknesses set insurmountable obstacles in his way.

"I'm afraid we will be too late," he said. All of Thebin lay under the yoke of the Harnish raiders, and he still had four of his brothers to find as well as the pearls of the goddess' necklace.

"A husband must show great patience as well as the determination to battle fiercely for his lady," Adar began, but Llesho stopped him.

"I am no husband," he bleakly reminded. "I kept vigil, but the goddess did not come."

Adar's gentle laughter did not even startle his horse. "She came. Her mark is on you, Llesho. I see it in your eyes."

"She didn't come. I would have known."

The last of their unit had passed them, the following one approached out of the caravansary. Adar remounted with a final word of homely advice: "She came to me in the shape of a priestess I had known in the Temple of the Moon. I don't know how she came to you—perhaps you can ask her one day. But we will have to wait to find out. The gates of heaven are far from Shan, and the caravan will travel at the pleasure of its beasts, not its masters, or it will not travel at all."

With that they nudged their horses into motion, past the curious glances of strangers—the emperor's spies and the Harnish traders—and reclaimed their place in line. Master Den seemed not to have noticed their absence, but Lling and Hmishi exchanged a worried frown. Carina watched them return with concern in the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, but a little smile curled her mouth and her eyes never left Adar's face as they approached.

It hurt that Carina had picked Adar. The two shared so much in common, even temperaments, that he felt foolish when he thought about how little he had to offer. Embarrassed, he separated himself from his brother, choosing Dognut's company again. Let them have their discussions of powders to cure bladder irritations—he wouldn't wear his heart on his sleeve any more. The dwarf, however, continued to look at him like he was a lovestruck fool in search of a shoulder to cry on.

"It's going to be a long journey if you insist on wearing that face," Dognut commented, gazing down on him from high atop his perch on the camel. "I am not sure I have enough songs about broken hearts in my repertoire."

Llesho glared at the dwarf. Yes, he wanted Carina— or, wanted her to want him. But when he really thought about it, disappointment in love didn't haunt his soul. The Long March did. The truth was, now that they were actually going home, he couldn't shake the anger he'd been too young to understand the last time he'd made this journey. He wanted to weep, to scream, to tear at his enemies with teeth and claws and cut their hearts out to feed his subjects dying on the road. But there were no enemies near, just the warm sound of camel bells and the jostle of goods and men and animals settling in to the long trek. And there was nobody he could tell.

Suddenly, a voice sang out over the curses of the grooms and the bleating of the beasts. The emperor of Shan, sitting atop a camel loaded with bolts of silk and dangling brass pots off his sides, was singing a Guynmer hymn. Dognut drew a flute from his quiver and added its high, quavering voice to the simple tune.

In the shadow of the dark night I come to you When the wind sweeps the dunes of Gansau I huddle at your feet.

You who protect the camel and the date tree Can you do less for your child Lost in your desert?

Harlol gave Shou a troubled look, as if he was trying to decide whether the merchant mocked or believed. But Shou's servants had taken up the hymn, and after the first verse so did the new drover, raising prayer to the spirits whose believers had come out of the Gansau Wastes spreading word of the desert faith to Guynm Province. Even Master Den, the trickster god ChiChu in his human form, joined in singing the prayer to the foreign spirits:

We offer dates and honey

We sing praise and

Burn myrrh and incense

At your altar

You who protect the camel and the date tree

Lost in your desert

Can you do less for your child?

Gifts of gold and silver

We give you

With paint we decorate

Stone images of your faces

After a few verses,

Adar joined in, and soon all along the caravan the hymn had been taken up.

Drover of the sun and the moon

Spirits of camel and the goat

We ask your protection

In this great journey.

When the song finally came to a halt, a new hymn came down the line to them, a merry song to the trickster god, who joined in with great relish:

A farmer let a stranger in

And fed him rice and leavings

The stranger shat upon the hearth

And left the goodwife screaming.

When strangers come up to your door

And ask for food and liquor

Treat them as you wish yourself

For ChiChu's sake, the trickster.

A trader took a stranger in

And sold him shoddy trinkets

The stranger slipped out late at night

Taking all the blankets.

From his place at the side of the emperor's camel, Master Den grinned at Llesho, inviting him into the trickster's sly enjoyment of his secret identity. Llesho returned the smile, though his own felt forced. The wink that followed was all ChiChu the trickster, reminding him: "This is not the Long March; stay in the now."

Llesho returned a quick nod. But it was hard to be cheerful when Carina's eyes, bright and adoring, fixed on his brother.

When the laughter died away after the trickster prayer, the Harnishmen at their rear began a Harnish anthem. Only a scattering of voices added to the song, but angry muttering thick with the threat of bloodshed rustled through the caravan. Then Shou raised a competing voice, carrying a Harnish hymn of thanks to wind and rain and earth, the Harnish natural deities, with no challenge or boast in it. Dognut gave Llesho an uneasy shrug, but raised his flute to strengthen the melody line. Grudgingly the Harnish traders gave their own voices to it. Few others along the length of the caravan joined in, but the blood had gone out of the moment. Only the wary tension of an oncoming storm remained. When the hymn had ended, Dognut put away his flute, and the caravan returned to its private chatter. The singing was over, and Kungol was still very far away.

C HAPTER S IX

THE round, full light of Great Moon Lun hung low in the sky—Lun chasing her smaller brothers Han and Chen, already touching the zenith. Habiba moved about his workshop with precise, studied motions. The magician once had told him that Lun was no moon at all but a dying sun smoldering in the dark, and somehow Llesho knew that he was waiting for Lun's faint light to shine more fully through the window that overlooked the workbench.

He took a shallow bowl of polished silver from a shelf and carefully wiped it clean with a soft cloth. From an earthen pitcher he poured pure, cold water, filling the bowl to the brim.

"What's that for?"

The magician bent over so that his nose almost touched the water in the bowl but gave no answer.

"Habiba?"

Llesho wondered briefly how he'd come to be here, and why Habiba didn't seem to hear him or even notice his presence, but the youth couldn't seem to muster much worry about it. He stretched on tiptoe to peer over the magician's shoulder. As Great Moon Lun rose, its glow filled the sky in the silver bowl with pearly light. It overpowered the lesser shine of little Han Moon, which floated like a black pearl in the reflection. The pattern from the silver bowl drifted on the water, so that the pearl of Han seemed to hang suspended from a silver chain.

"Ah! But where are you?" Habiba asked the image in the water. The magician was looking for the String of Midnights, the pearls of the Great Goddess lost in the attack on the gates of heaven. Llesho had three of them; it seemed that Habiba had found another.

As if some spell had taken control of his body, Llesho's hand reached out for the dark moon-pearl floating in the bowl. Part of him expected to close his fingers around the pearl while another part braced for a cold wet hand.

Instead, he fell headfirst through the water, which parted like a mist around him.

"Help!"

"Grab hold!" a voice answered.

Llesho reached out and grabbed onto the wide silver chain he was passing as he fell. The chain pulled him up short and he swung for a moment over an abyss before he managed to wrap his legs around the broad flat links and pull himself up on them.

"Who's there?" he asked. It wasn't Habiba's voice, or Kaydu's. He might have expected ChiChu to show up at a moment like this, but it wasn't the voice of the trickster god either.

"It's me." The moon swimming in Habiba's silver bowl began to jump like a fish on a hook, nearly dislodging Llesho from his perch. He peered more closely: the moon was no pearl at all, but almost manlike. Round in the body and naked, his skin was black as pitch and gleamed like the pearls Llesho carried in the pouch at his breast. The pearl-man sprouted tiny arms and legs that he flailed in his effort to escape the chain that ran through a hook set in his back. The creature snuffled through a round, upturned nose that was pink around its flaring nostrils. His mouth, lined with pearly white teeth, shouted, "Get me down from here!" in a voice far too large for its pearly head.

"Stop that!" Llesho shouted as the chain that held them both swayed dangerously. "How can I get you down anyway? I'm stuck here myself, and about to fall if you don't stop rocking the chain."

"I beg your pardon," the creature apologized politely. "I let my anxiety overcome my good sense."

"Pardon given," Llesho returned with equal grace and added, when curiosity would allow silence no longer, "What magical creature are you? And," he thought to ask, "why are you hanging around like this, naked like a pearl from the goddess' jewel chest?"

The creature sniffed indignantly. "My name is Pig. I'm a Jinn in the service of the Great Goddess, chief gardener in her heavenly orchards." The pearl-man, who called himself a Jinn, stopped struggling and allowed his body to swing slowly on its chain. The whole situation should have disturbed him more, Llesho thought in passing. But the Jinn was waiting patiently to tell his tale, so he tucked his left foot into the open loop of one of the links and grabbed hold of another with his right hand. Securely anchored against a fall, he settled in to listen.

"Ever since the demon invader laid siege to the gates of heaven, I have searched for a way to escape and seek help for my lady, the Great Goddess. Finally I devised a plan; I would make myself small as a pearl from her lost necklace and slip through the cracks, so to speak. I thought to fall to earth far from the gates where our enemies lay in wait, and then I hoped to raise an army and march to the rescue."

"Doesn't seem to have worked out that way." Llesho felt it needed to be said.

The Jinn puffed out of his cheeks and gave Llesho a sour glare. "I didn't need you to tell me that. Now, if you will just release the pin in my back, I can go about my business. Heaven can't wait forever, you know. There's planting to be done."

"You should have thought of that before you turned yourself into a pearl. What if you're lying to me?" The question added an unwelcome note of reality to the situation. Jinn were a notoriously untrustworthy caste, which even Pig had to recognize.

"You can make me promise to give you wishes," Pig suggested with a trustworthy smile. "You can use your wishes to make me tell the truth." His efforts to look dependable were thwarted by the way he swayed hypnotically, like a pendulum, which made Llesho very dizzy.

Pig's present state suggested that ideas were not, perhaps, his strongest game. This one seemed fairly simple, though. Foolproof, even.

"I'll do it." Llesho stretched over the abyss to grasp the pin in the Jinn's back, but Pig wriggled out of reach.

"I have to promise first."

"You just did."

"No, I said I would promise. You haven't asked me to do it yet."

Llesho was growing more annoyed with the strange pearly creature by the minute. When he stopped to consider this strange situation, none of it made sense, least of all his own patience in dealing with the captive Jinn. He was in it now, however, and could see no way out except through to the end.

"Promise me three wishes," he insisted, and started pulling himself closer on the chain even before the words "I promise" left Pig's mouth.

Suddenly, a hand big enough to hold Llesho and the Jinn together in its palm swept him off the silver chain and held him up to the face he most dreaded in the world. "Welcome home, Llesho."

"Master Markko!" he shouted, and woke up in a cold sweat, with a hand clamped over his mouth. Struggling against the strong arm holding him down, he almost missed the words whispered in his ear.

"You were calling out in your sleep."

Hmishi. Friend, then. When he thought about it, all the signs of a dream were there, but he hadn't questioned anything while it was happening.

He nodded once, to show that he was awake and paying attention. Hmishi removed his hand and sat back on his heels, waiting for Llesho to return to the present.

He remembered now. They had stopped at a way station with one small inn at the far end of a staging area for the caravans. Long, open stables flanked the square on either side. Adar and Carina had gone to the inn with Shou, as would be expected of persons of their apparent rank, with Dognut the dwarf as their entertainment. Lling had accompanied them to stand first watch over their master's sleep, maintaining the ruse that they traveled with Shou's party as guards for hire. The rest of their party bedded down with the travelers of lower station among the animals in the stables.

Nearby, sharp eyes gleamed with curiosity out of the late-night darkness. Harlol, the Tashek drover, had kept to himself during the day's travels. Now, he propped his chin on the palm of his hand and watched the Thebins.

"It's nothing," Hmishi assured the man, an undercurrent of threat a low rumble in his voice.

The drover took the hint and rolled over in his blankets. He only pretended to go back to sleep, Llesho figured. The veterans working as paid guards, who lay scattered among the sleepers for their protection, were doubtless fully alert behind their closed eyelids as well. Nothing like an audience when nightmares decided to make a performance of his sleep.

"You were calling out Master Markko's name," Hmishi whispered. "What was that about?"

Llesho shook his head. "Not here."

Thinking about this particular dream sent a shiver through his body. The logic of it fell apart in the light of his waking mind, but a seed of truth at its core worried him. What did it mean?

"Where is Master Den?"

"Privy, or maybe the pump," Hmishi answered. They both knew that could mean anywhere.

Llesho rose and gestured for Hmishi to follow. They made their way quietly past the huddled sleepers and those whose bodies lay unnaturally still as they listened. A cool breeze soothed their heated skin when they passed out of the stable under one of the many elaborate arches that pierced its long face. The cloud-streaked sky gave them no stars to see by, but enough light from one moon or the other filtered past the drifting tissue strands of mist to cast the long row of arches into darker shadows crossing against the night.

The Huang caravan had stopped at a reputable resting place inside the borders of Shan Province, but Kaydu had trained them well. Both of the young Thebin soldiers scanned the great echoing square for stealthy bandits and sneak attack. Shoulder to shoulder, hands at sword belts, they peered as deeply into the shadows as they could see. When a hulking clot of darkness detached itself from under one of the stable's great arches, Hmishi stepped between his prince and the approaching threat. Both drew their swords, but Llesho's blade shook in his hands.

"You are greatly troubled." Master Den's voice issued softly from the darkness before them. He moved a hand and the clouds parted before the great moon's glowing disk, pushing back the shadows.

"A dream, Master."

Master Den nodded and motioned him to a bench that curved around an ornate column holding up a gracefully curved arch. Master Den urged him to sit, then asked, "Tell me what you saw."

"It was more than a dream, wasn't it?" Llesho risked a glance at his teacher, but Master Den gave one of his typical shrugs, offering no useful advice, but demanding much of his supplicant.

"You could be suffering the ill effects of a dinner left out too long in the sun. Only a dream reader can tell for certain. The Tashek have the most revered dream readers, but I don't expect to meet up with one on our journey."

"Has anyone ever seen a Tashek dream reader?" Hmishi asked, "I thought they were a myth, like the Gansau Wastrels, used to scare little children."

"They are real," Master Den confirmed. "But they are a religious caste, and enter the dreams of sleepers only when invited, to give aid to the troubled. They are not, as the tales suggest, the cause of night terrors."

Hmishi blushed, and Llesho wished he knew what they were talking about. He'd seen Tashek drovers in the streets of Kungol, had even watched, from a hidden corner of a balcony, when Tashek tribal chiefs had paid their respects to his lady mother. But servants did not frighten the palace heirs with stories of mythical monsters. Sometimes he thought that a great fault in his education. He might have fought more wisely as a child if he'd known of such things as Harnish raiders and their hunger to snuff out life. And he might even know what Hmishi and Master Den were talking about.

"Not a myth," Master Den informed them, "though we are not likely to find one to advise us on our present road."

"If it wasn't just a dream, what was it?" Llesho trusted Master Den's opinion more than he would a stranger's anyway.

"I won't know until you tell it, now, will I?"

"No." Taking a deep breath, he pinned his gaze to the pale disk of Great Moon Lun so that he didn't have to look at Master Den while he spoke, but that reminded him of the dream. Han and Chen had set while they were talking, and Lun had followed past the zenith.

"I was watching the magician, Habiba, catch the moonlight in a silver bowl filled with water. He was searching the moons' reflections for the black pearls of the goddess. I looked over his shoulder and fell in. That's when I met Pig."

Master Den settled a listening expression over his human face, but he offered no encouragement beyond his puckered frown as Llesho told the tale of his dream. When the telling had wound down to the last chilling words, Master Den nodded.

"Did you recognize anything else? Anything in Master Markko's surroundings that will give us a clue about where he is now?"

Llesho shook his head. "I saw Habiba's workshop well enough. I think he must have been in the imperial palace—I'm pretty sure I recognized the view out his window. Once I fell into the water, nothing seemed real. All I saw, beyond the chain and the Jinn who calls himself Pig, was Master Markko himself.

"There was something strange about him, though." Llesho paused, staring at Great Moon Lun while he tried to recapture the feeling of the dream. "Markko talked to me, and I talked to the Jinn. But Markko didn't seem to notice the Jinn or the silver chain, and Habiba didn't see me. It was like our dreams had touched, but only at the edges."

"If we are very lucky, you are correct," Master Den agreed. Llesho would have preferred an answer that didn't confirm his own suspicions.

"But it was a dream, right?"

"I know this Jinn," Master Den said. "Pig has served the goddess through many ages, and has been her favorite for most of those lifetimes."

"It seems a strange name for someone loved by the goddess."

Master Den's fond memories crinkled a smile at the corner of his eyes. "Not at all. Pig really is a pig. He was, in his mortal life, a great hunter of truffles. The goddess invited him to heaven and offered him any shape he wished, just so that he would provide the heavenly table with truffles as wonderful and pungent as those he had sought out in the mortal realm. He agreed but, being a pig, could imagine no greater calling than to be what he was. So the goddess raised him up on two feet, and gave him speech, which he finds amusing, and the rank of chief gardener, which he takes very seriously. In all else, however, he remains a pig. As for names, like his shape, he seems to feel a need for no other."

Llesho shivered. When he was a slave on Pearl Island, Master Markko had threatened to feed him to the pigs, and he could not help but find an omen in the dream. Master Den had also served on Pearl Island, however, and followed Llesho's thoughts with sorrowful ease.

"He is my friend," the trickster god reminded him. "Pig has never, to my knowledge, eaten either frightened slave boys or weary old men, no matter how hungry he might have been."

"You must think that I am a fool."

"A fool knows no fear, and needs no courage to go forward," Master Den corrected Llesho with wry humor. "A brave man understands his fears, but does what he must in spite of them."

"Then I must be the hero of this tale," Hmishi complained, "because I am terrified most of the time, of just about everything."

Master Den laughed, as he was meant to do, and slapped a hand on the back of each Thebin boy. "Go back to sleep," he ordered them as he might two mischief makers.

"Not me," Hmishi grumbled. "It's time I relieved Lling on guard duty anyway."

When he had gone, Llesho took a minute to ask a final question. "Whose dream was it? Was I in Habiba's dream, or he in mine?"

"Perhaps you dreamed each other." Master Den gave Llesho a comforting pat. "We'll figure it out. In the meantime, try to get some rest. I want you up early for prayer forms."

"Yes, Master." Llesho rose and bowed his gratitude to the trickster god. In simpler times he had learned the prayer forms and their defensive counterparts as combat forms. Master Den's reminder soothed his fretful soul: even on a caravan, far from anything he knew, he carried the ordering of his own existence within him.

Lesho was not so pleased when Hmishi shook his arm to rouse him from his too short sleep well before the sun had risen. "Master Den is waiting for you in the courtyard. I get a free pass today, because I've just come off duty, but he wants you up and out on the double."

Llesho groaned and rolled out of his blankets as Hmishi fell into his own. Lling was nowhere in sight, her pack already stowed for the next stage of the journey. Llesho followed her lead, and stumbled into the square just as the gray false dawn of the little sun washed the straggling line facing Master Den.

Lling was there, and Dognut, of all people. The dwarf stood at rest with his feet settled apart on short, bent legs and his equally shortened arms clasped around his belly. He almost appeared comical, until Llesho looked into the centered calm of his eyes. Then he found himself wondering what role the little man actually played in Shou's court.

Carina had cast aside her veils and joined them in her long split skirt. Adar stood with the emperor in disguise and a small cluster of senior guardsmen who gathered in front of the inn. A handful of merchants paused in their preparations for departure to watch as well, while a denser knot of the lower ranks looked on curiously from across the courtyard. A lesser number of Harnish merchants stood among the onlookers with their own guards in the dress of raiders.

Ignoring the curious audience as much as possible, Llesho took his place next to Carina. He shook his arms to loosen his muscles; perhaps he could impress the healer with his skill at the exercises, since nothing else seemed to be working for him.

Master Den gave the ritual bow, and their little line returned it. Then the laundryman and trickster god called out the first of the morning forms. "Red Sun."

Llesho moved his body into the gentlest of fire signs to greet the dawn. Each bend and stretch reminded him of all the times that he had performed the prayer form in the past. Warm as sunlight, the faces of companions lost or left behind came to him in his prayer: Bixei and Stipes, and Kaydu, alive and training their troops on Sho-kar's farm. The gladiator Radimus, sold to the enemy to pay a dead man's debts. Madon, who had sacrificed his life to stop a war and Master Jaks, who had given his life in fighting that war anyway. Lleck, who had grown old and sick in the service of the kings of Thebin, following Llesho into slavery to keep faith with his duty. Out of a storm-tossed life, memories of passing comforts squeezed his heart with a desire to see his comrades again.

The form brought them back to rest, and several of the guardsmen joined them. A groom or two followed, and even a few of the merchants abandoned their coats to servants and joined the ranks of those in prayer.

"Flowing River," Master Den called.

Personal memory emptied into a greater consciousness as muscle flowed into muscle. The Way of the Goddess, the exercise taught, did not resist, but pursued its course with unrelenting gentleness. Only now exists; time is the present in motion. The past flows into the future like the river which flows eternally yet remains always in the present.

"Still Water," Master Den looked to Adar when he called the next prayer.

Adar acknowledged the summons. He moved away from the inn and joined the teacher in front of the now-substantial rank of worshipers. With a bow to the mortal god, he took a stance and returned the trickster's welcoming smile with a grin of his own, as though they shared a secret. Master Den raised his arm, and Adar, facing him, mirrored the movement so that their upraised THE PRIHCE OF DREAPH hands almost touched. Adar bent deeply into the opposite knee and brought his free hand forward in a sharp, taut move that stopped just short of Master Den's hand reaching to meet it. The form passed through a series of sharp movements each poised in stillness before moving to the next, and each restrained a hair's breadth from its reflection in his partner.

Llesho followed the moves with a scattered few who practiced the advanced forms. None but the two masters completed the "Still Water" form with a reflecting partner, however. Llesho gave up on the idea of impressing Carina. Though he hadn't known of it, his brother's mastery did not surprise him. Adar had received the favor of the goddess as one of her spiritual husbands. Her gifts had included Adar's great skill as a healer. He wondered how his brother could believe the goddess had likewise come to him, when he was clumsy and unskilled and had received no gifts at all on his vigil night.

When they completed the form, Adar bowed his whole body into a deep obeisance, as if the form had been meant as a rebuke.

"Butterfly," Master Den called, but a second voice challenged him.

"The journey to the West requires stronger gods than these." Harlol, the Tashek drover, swaggered into a cleared space in the square, pacing back and forth in front of the massed crowd of grooms and drovers and lesser guards.

Llesho felt a jab at his hip and looked down to see a troubled frown on the dwarf's face. "The master has been too long away from the caravans," Dognut whispered. "I hope he doesn't pay dearly for taking up with strangers for this journey."

Like the dwarf, Llesho had a very bad feeling about this.

Having made his challenge, the Tashek drover began to sway in a desert dance. Soon he was whirling madly, his heavy coats flying out around his ankles. From somewhere in the crowd a sword flew at him and he plucked it out of the air. Another, and he likewise grasped it, swinging both in counter circles as he twirled like a madman. Bending low, then leaping high into the air, he jabbed and thrust with both swords, and twirled them over his head in a choreographed dance of death. When he finally came to rest, his lungs blowing like bellows, the swords rested on Adar's shoulders, crossed in an X at his throat.

"I am a healer." At first, the Tashek seemed to take the words as a plea for mercy, and his lip curled in contempt. Then Adar finished his promise—"I won't hurt you."

"Read your fortune in the fire of the blades, healer."

Adar smiled at him, a warm crinkling welcome;, the swords on his shoulders rose and fell when he shrugged. "I don't think the goddess wants me today. But if she does, she can have me."

Llesho came to the immediate conclusion that his brother had lost his mind. He wondered if the emperor had done the same, letting the trickster god persuade him to hire on a madman as a drover. Would Shou really let a common drover murder a healer-prince in cold blood, and right in front of his eyes?

"No!" Llesho was so busy damning the lot of them to the outer reaches of hell that he didn't realize he had drawn his knife and sword until he stepped out of the line.

"No," Shou agreed, in a hushed voice so that only Llesho could hear. He took Llesho's sword from his hand, and Lling's, and approached the drover with both weapons held in a loose, easy grip.

"I know this dance." The emperor of Shan stood in front of his drover, his plain but rich clothes a reminder that this character he played studied the Guynmer version of the Tashek religion. He stamped his foot once, twice.

"Come, Wastrel, dance with me."

The term "Wastrel" was a complex one to turn on a Tashek. Outsiders used it as an insult, to mean that the race had neither ambition nor any inclination to work when they might beg or steal or trick a mark out of a day's bread. To the Tashek who came out of the Gansau Wastes, however, a Wastrel was a holy wanderer and, above all, a survivor. Shou could have meant either, or both. Neither tone of voice nor expression of face or body gave up his meaning. So a Gansau Wastrel would have done it.

"As you wish, merchant." Harlol drew his swords away from Adar's throat, leaving a thin trail of blood as a reminder, and turned to face the emperor-in-disguise. Stamping his own foot twice in the dirt, the Tashek accepted the challenge.

Gazes locked, the two men circled each other. Swords flashed and clashed in time to feet beating out the pattern of the dance in the dust. Whirling, leaping, dropping to the ground again, sweeping out a leg to upset his dancing opponent, the emperor met the Tashek move for move. The dance had a ritual meaning; swords flew and slashed about the body of the dancer who held them or met over the heads of the combatants. The worship form meant no harm to its practitioners, although accidents could prove fatal at the level these two prayed. A slip of the foot, a lapse in concentration for a fleeting second, could bring death to either man.

Feet beat a faster rhythm and the dance picked up speed. Shouts from the crowds encouraged first one champion, then the other. Shou was older, the Tashek sword prayer one of many forms he had learned over the years of his travels through his empire, though only Llesho's party among the crowd could know that. Harlol seemed much the favored dancer; he had the endurance of the young and the single-minded purpose of one who danced the only religion he believed. Shou had set his life against a thousand contests, however, while the Tas-hek drover had danced only for bragging rights among his age-mates.

Gradually, Llesho noticed a change in the pattern of the contest. Like the prayer forms of the Way of the Goddess, the dance had a combat style that dealt murder in every pose and action. So Llesho was not surprised when Harlol reached out with his swords aimed at his opponent's heart. A glance at Dognut's tense, watchful expression confirmed his suspicion: the Tashek drover had adopted the deadly style.

Llesho held his breath in a turmoil of indecision. He saw in his mind a vision of Shou dead in the caravanserai square, his blood spilling into the dust as his empire came apart like bricks in a wall without mortar. Harlol had dictated the shape of the combat, but Llesho blamed Shou for the aftermath his death would bring. The drover thought he was fighting a Guynmer merchant and certainly could not anticipate the destruction he called down on his people if he unwittingly murdered the emperor. But any move Llesho made to help might distract the very man he wished to save.

He took half a step forward, not certain what he would do next, and a hand fell on his shoulder. Master Den held him fast in a tight grip.

"He had a good teacher," the trickster god reminded him. Den himself, that was.

He would have objected, that Master Den taught the prayers and combat of the seven mortal gods, the forms that shaped the Way of the Goddess, and not this savage game of press and thrust. But even without any training in the Wastrel's dance, Llesho had seen when the prayer had turned deadly. Shou had seen the same, and moved seamlessly to adapt to it. A slash, another, and the drover lay at his feet, breathing raggedly and bleeding from cuts in his arm and leg.

"Dawn," Shou noticed, his voice steady and his breath calm. Great Sun had come up while they fought. "Friend THE PRIriCE OF DREATO Adar, can you help my drover? And I will need someone to take his place on the journey."

"I won't hold you back." The Tashek drover staggered in Adar's grip, but managed to hold himself upright. "I need just a stitch or two, and I will be back at my post by midmorning. Who will you find in a place like this to learn your ways as quickly?"

"I have certainly invested more in your education already than you deserve," Shou commented acidly. He returned the swords he had borrowed and raised a questioning eyebrow at Adar.

"The young have amazing recuperative powers of the body," the healer prince gently cuffed the ear of the wounded man he supported. "One wonders if his brains have not been addled in the sun, however."

"Dress his wounds, then, and pay for two days' keep." Instructions for the Tashek's care disposed of, Shou addressed his next order to Harlol: "Rest. You can join the caravan again in Durnhag when your leg will support you. In the meantime, we have need of additional hands, or we will never be ready to leave with the rest of our caravan."

Satisfied that the Guynmer merchant had settled accounts for the foolishness of a boastful young drover, the crowd broke up into small clusters of gossip before moving on to the day's work. A stranger with a family resemblance to the injured drover left one such knot to present himself to Shou.

"I'm Kagar, Harlol's cousin. For the honor of our family, I offer myself to take his place in your service, sir." Kagar bowed very deeply, shamed by the dishonor Harlol had already brought on his house.

"Is this some plot against my camels?" Shou demanded with all the indignation of a merchant who feared thievery and none of the censure of an emperor foiling an attempt at assassination. "Did you follow your cousin hoping to plunder my cargo between you?"

Harlol glared at the youth who had declared himself a cousin. "By my honor, I have no such intention, nor does my cousin, who is guilty of bad judgment only."

"I did follow you," Kagar admitted, "but not to steal from you. I had hoped that I might persuade you to take me on as a groom to assist with the horses. I did not expect my cousin to disgrace our family. Now I wish only to repair the damage he has done on this field of battle."

Kagar stood very erect, with only a scathing glance for the humbled drover. "I beg you, kind merchant—I ask no payment but the repair to our good name."

"Free is a good price," Shou agreed. "Though you will need to be provided food and shelter." He passed a thoughtful frown from the Tashek youth to Master Den, who gave no sign what he should do about this most recent supplicant. "Very well," he finally decided, "but if you make me regret my decision, I will leave you behind—even if that means abandoning you in the desert."

The young groom bounced a little on the balls of his feet, suppressing a grin with great effort. "Yes, sir!" he said, and with a final bow made a dash for the stables.

Llesho would have liked to leave them both behind. He was glad they were abandoning Harlol, at least for the present, but wondered why the emperor hadn't discharged the man who had tried to kill him. At the moment, however, Shou had turned his wrath from the Tashek who had attacked him and was targeting it on Llesho instead.

"I am capable of protecting my own guests against upstart challengers," Shou informed him with the steel of a blade in his voice. Llesho heard the silent rebuke that would have broken their cover identities if spoken aloud. Others could have rescued Adar. He was too valuable to Thebin to risk in a plaza brawl.

Which was fine, because Llesho was just as angry right back. He had the advantage of the emperor, however, that he was right in their true identities as well as by the parts their disguises gave them.

"My good sir." He bowed, rigidly formal as one accustomed to parade manners might to a merchant—with no great respect but with attention to the forms. "Please remember that your life is worth more than the guards who are paid to protect you. Let us do our jobs, for our reputations if for nothing else."

Shou saw the fear in his eyes, not of combat, but of losing the emperor of Shan in a stupid street challenge. "He wasn't that good," he assured with a grin, but promised, "I'll take your advice in future." The crowd had dispersed, giving the merchant and his guard no more than passing interest. No one would have noticed the narrowing of Shou's eyes when he added for Llesho alone to hear, "If you had fought him, you would have died. I couldn't allow that."

Apparently the Tashek drover was that good.

"At some point you will have to trust me to live or die by my own skills," Llesho countered. He was right, they both knew it, but Shou's struggle to accept it churned in his eyes.

Llesho nodded to acknowledge the conflicting emotions the emperor revealed. "That's how I feel when you do something as stupid as answer a challenge to mortal combat from a hotheaded drover," he said. With a sharp salute that belied the heartfelt nature of their disagreement, he turned and walked away.

C HAPTER S EVEN

HOW do you transport two deposed outlander princes through an uneasy empire and enemy territory, and into the heart of their captive nation? Llesho asked himself. How do you sneak past forces that would see those princes dead or captive at any cost? According to Emperor Shou, you made a public spectacle of yourself as a merchant with more self-importance than means, and added those princes to your already eccentric caravan. You identified three callow cadets as your only visible means of protection. Then you paraded said princes before a cheerfully mocking crowd who would never imagine the movers of empire could be so stupid.

The emperor had great skill as a tactician in battle, and he'd shown equal competence as a spy. Even the mortal gods favored Shou. From Shou's very throne SienMa, the goddess of war, guarded his empire. ChiChu, the trickster god, traveled at his side. Llesho had serious doubts about Shou the strategist, however. Only a trickster could love the current plan; Llesho had the uncomfortable feeling that he was walking around with one of Lady SienMa's archery targets on his back.

The plan had worked so far, of course. With his songs and hymns Shou had declared himself a practitioner of the Gansau religion, so no one had seemed particularly surprised when he accepted the drover's challenge in the sword dance ritual. Few among the Tashek themselves had the skill to recognize how expertly Shou had moved from prayer to combat form as he responded to HarloPs attack. The attack had been no accident, however. No simple drover working for a minor merchant would have such skills of mortal combat. Harlol had brought the subtle craft of a warrior and a spy to the contest, and whoever had paid the young groom to maim or murder Shou must now wonder how the emperor would react to the attempt on his life.

Their neighbors in the caravan readied their camels for the next stage of the journey with an equal, though less lethal, curiosity. What would the Guynmer merchant do next? Shou didn't leave them in doubt very long. With a nod of his head, he signaled Dognut, his dwarf musician, and began to sing. The lively hymn recounted the droll tale of the first Gansau Wastrel to bring the sword dance to the faithful of Guynmer. At the chorus, the wary caravanners joined in as if the hymn were a drinking song, their worry about a vendetta on the road set aside. It seemed natural that the party ahead of them should answer with the long and ribald chant about the exploits of the trickster god. Llesho sang along when a clash of Dognut's cymbals marked the chorus.

By the time they had reached the end of the tale, with a stolen fig and a Jinn named Pig in a tree pelting the trickster god with rotten fruit, the camels were bellowing their mournful counterpoint to the raucous drovers. Even the Harnishmen had entered into the laughter, though Llesho couldn't tell whether they joined the spirit of the song or jeered at the foolish Guynmer merchant at the heart of the singing.

The hundreds of li they traveled had shaken loose the tightly ordered structure of the caravan, however. Boundaries of ownership and hire bent to loyalties seen and unseen. Hmishi and Lling ranged up and down the line, a hundred camels linked nose to tail in gangs that told the numbers of each merchant's wealth: Shou's twelve, led by the Tashek, Kagar; the Harnishmen's twenty-five at the rear; fifteen between; and another fifty or so ahead that belonged to a rich merchant of Thousand Lakes Province. According to Hmishi, the Harnish-men at the rear rode with one eye ever looking behind them, but seemed more nervous than scheming. Perhaps they worried that the emperor would reconsider the mercy he had shown to the merchants who had not participated in Master Markko's raid on the imperial city, and that he might yet send soldiers to stop and kill them. Or, perhaps they awaited their own reinforcements before murdering their fellow caravanners. Hmishi couldn't tell Llesho which was more likely.

Llesho tried to stay alert, but the regular clang of the caravan bells and cries of the drovers, the warmth of the sun overhead, the smells of camels and leather, of spices and incense and horses of the caravan, all lulled him with the joyful memories of his early childhood. The land reminded him how far he was from home, however. As the days passed, the water-rich fertility of the Shan Province gave way to gently rolling downs furred over in tough, gray-green grasses.

"What do you think of your first caravan journey, young militiaman?" Dognut asked him from his superior position atop the camel Harlol had named Moonbeam.

"I thought we would be crossing desert," Llesho admitted.

"Not yet. We've come what? Three hundred li? No more, give or take a day. Even when we reach Durnhag, the seasons will disappoint you. In the winter, when the rains come, the grasses grow thick and green, and the whole floor of the Guynmer track is afire with flowers. It's still early in the dry season. As the days grow longer, however, the water will grow more scarce, until you will find little enough to sustain a caravan of this size. The grasses will shrink back, leaving nothing but scattered patches where hidden springs survive the summer underground.

"At the height of the dry season there is more life than meets the eye. Where there is water there are living creatures, hiding sensibly in their burrows through the heat of the day. The farther south we go, however, the shorter the water season, and the more violent and poisonous the life that survives there. Once we have passed Durnhag, take a care to your shoes and blankets!"

"Will we pass close to the Gansau Wastes?" Llesho asked, his gaze crossing the landscape that was not as barren as he had expected it to be.

"Not this trip." Dognut trilled a few notes and, satisfied, put the flute away with the others in its quiver. "The water has retreated into the depths and the oases have dried up by now. Even the Tashek will have moved on," he said with a sharp sweeping glance that took in the flat land to the east. "No one will return to the Waste until the monsoons come in the fall."

Llesho's gaze fixed on Kagar, who was swearing at the lead camel while he dragged at the creature's head with a thin but strong arm. In summer, the Tashek migrated into Harnish lands. Some years they fought, but mostly they pretended not to notice each other. He wondered what they were doing this year, and what it meant to the Harnishmen traveling in their caravan, the Tashek drovers riding at their side.

Near nightfall their guide called a halt at a small byway. No more than a well and a rough corral for the animals, it would serve while they awaited the rise of Great Moon Lun to go on. As they moved toward hotter, drier country, they would begin to take their rest by a different set of customs than the towns: in the heat of the day, and in the deep dark between the setting of the true sun and the rising of Lun. Since they would be moving on after just a few hours, they left the tents in their packs, but broke out the cook pots and the blankets.

While the rice for dinner simmered over a low fire, gossips passed among the parties offering their wares in trade for a cup and a story in return, or an opinion if the merchant had no tales in stock. It surprised Llesho that Hartal's attack upon the "Guynmer merchant" had caused very little concern. Most cup-gossip said that Har-lol had let the bravado of youth overcome him. In this version, the jovially bombastic Guynmer merchant had simply turned an inexpert display of the sword dance into a lesson from the drover's elder and social better. Few in the camp had given a moment of uneasy sleep to the Tashek grooms and drovers bedding down with their camels. Of course, the scoffers didn't know the true identity of the merchant in question. They couldn't move against the Tashek drovers or the Harnishmen they suspected of hiring the attack without exposing the emperor, however. Llesho was pretty sure that the senior militiaman in the employ of the Thousand Lakes party shared his concern. He pretended not to recognize the officer who had kept a sharp eye on the public room at the Moon and Star, and who always seemed to be nearby when trouble brewed. He'd bet this one twitched at the feel of Tashek eyes focused between his shoulder blades, though.

"I'm Captain Bor-ka-mar, released from the emperor's service and hired on, like yourselves, to provide safe passage for this caravan." The soldier squatted in front of Hmishi, addressing him as their leader, though he stole quick glances at Llesho out of the corner of his eye. Lling nudged up against Llesho's side, her hand on the knife at her belt, but left the next move to her companions.

"Well met, Captain." Hmishi clasped the captain's arm in friendship, accepting the charade that took the attention of strangers and enemies away from the prince traveling among them. In Shou's personal service as a captain of the Imperial Guard, Llesho guessed, and not released from that service at all, but he took the man's arm in his turn and waited for Lling to do the same before Bor-ka-mar explained his presence at their cook fire.

"This plodding pace is making my men lazy," he began. "We need a bit of exercise to keep us sharp. You three are welcome to join us if you've a mind. And who knows—you might even learn something." The man's grin revealed several levels of meaning in the statement. He meant by that not only hand-to-hand combat training and weapons craft, but the lay of loyalties in the camp, and the intelligence of Shou's military spies.

Llesho looked to his companions, who were waiting for his decision. "We might at that." He threw a pat of camel dung into the slow flame of their campfire, letting his own many meanings sink in.

Then he stood up, leaving the task of cooking a supper to the grooms and Master Den, who puttered about the camp on errands suitable to his disguise as a lowly servant. After only two days in his new identity, Llesho was taking the god's service for granted. He couldn't decide if he committed sacrilege against the trickster ChiChu or betrayal of his teacher's honored place in his heart. Master Den would call it spycraft, of course, but it still made Llesho uncomfortable.

Hmishi and Lling accompanied him with no questions. They took their positions with unthinking attention to his safety—Lling in front and to his left, with Hmishi following at his right like an honor guard.

"Your friends are telling your enemies which among you is of value." Bor-ka-mar slapped Hmishi on the back with a hearty laugh to mask his businesslike comment.

Lling took his meaning at once and flung an arm around Llesho's waist. Tucking herself in all along his side, she protected him with her body while giving the impression that she had more seductive plans on her mind. Hmishi scowled at the two of them.

"Better," Bor-ka-mar muttered under cover of a lewd grin. "Though it would have more effect if you would at least pretend to enjoy the lady's seduction, Llesho. You look more in need of rescue than a private place for love-play."

Llesho blushed a deep mahogany right to the roots of his dark hair, but flung his arm around Lling's shoulders as they walked. He'd have apologies to make later, he figured. Hmishi knew it was an act, but if things had worked out differently he'd have meant it enough to make apologies necessary.

Captain Bor-ka-mar led them to a bit of pasture land marked off as a makeshift exercise yard by half a dozen torches thrust into the red marl soil. Clumps of grass threatened to trip them up, but real battles seldom took place in an arena with sawdust underfoot. News of the practice had spread, and a small crowd had gathered to watch, ready to trade wagers and cheer on their champion of the moment. Llesho recognized the dress and countenance of several Harnishmen wandering the edges of the circle of flickering torchlight, but he let them slip to the back of his mind.

At the center of the exercise yard, two hands of guardsmen tried their hardest to look less experienced than they were. Their battle-ready postures, so much a habit that it must have become instinctive long ago, gave them away, at least to Llesho and his companions, who fell into the same stance as they waited to begin. He wondered if any of these men had fought in the battles against the magician, Master Markko, that had deviled his journeying since Pearl Island. Shou would have his head if he asked; knowing the emperor trusted these men with all their lives would have to be enough.

The captain separated the cadets and matched each with an older partner. He ignored the short spear Llesho carried on his back as if someone had warned him not to draw attention to it. Instead he tapped the sword at Llesho's side and motioned that he should take up a fighting stance against a battle-scarred veteran who gave him a wink as he hefted his own sword in a callused hand. Then the workout began. Bor-ka-mar called out the weapons formations, simple, basic skills that shook off the worst of the rust but would scarcely compete with a lesson from Master Jaks or Kaydu.

"You have a good arm, young cadet." Llesho's partner countered his move and returned a smart follow-through of his own.

"And you, good sir." Gliding around a clump of coarse grass, he pressed the fight with a quick jab that Master Jaks had taught him. The soldier deflected the point of his sword with no great skill apparent to the onlookers, but they both knew what it took to counter that move. Something about the man's style of fighting reminded Llesho of Madon, the gladiator who had died at the hands of his allies for the honor of a broken lord. The memory hurt too much to think about for long, though, and the fight gave him no time for brooding. There was a message in the pairings, however. Shou's guards assessed the skills of the young cadets and they, in turn, judged their safety in the hands of the soldiers they traveled with. These were Shou's picked troops, hidden in plain sight. That notion would offer more comfort, however, if the emperor hadn't taken on his own Tashek drover in a one-on-one sword battle. Much good his guards would do any of them if the emperor got himself killed maintaining his disguise.

When Captain Bor-ka-mar decided they had had enough, he called a halt to the exercises. The onlookers dispersed to settle their wagers, leaving the soldiers to straggle, gossiping, back to their cook fires. Someone had heard that Harnish camps were massing on the border that divided the Shan Empire from Harn, they said. Just gossip, but given the source Llesho figured they could take it as army intelligence. Rest did not come easy after that.

C HAPTER E IGHT

ONE day was very like another on the trail: waking at false dawn to prayer forms and breakfast, slogging forward, li by slow li, until the caravan broke in the heat of the afternoon to rest and graze the animals. Then up with Great Moon Lun for weapons practice while the camp packed up, and on again until the moonlight failed them. Shou hadn't been the only merchant with musicians in his train, and the players came together by the light of the cook fires for a song or two before they all tumbled, exhausted, into their bedrolls.

The caravan had grown more tense since they had passed over the border into Guynm Province. Gossip and rumor swept through the caravan as regularly as the tides in Pearl Bay. If Harn wanted to take the capital city, their massing hordes would have to sweep through Guynm to do it. And the Huang caravan stood directly in their path. The audience for weapons practice grew as the caravanners sought reassurance over entertainment.

"Mind on what you're doing, boy!" Bor-ka-mar's commanding voice latched hold of Llesho's wandering attention and pulled him up sharply to discover his sword resting at Sento's throat.

"Easy as you go, there." Sento took a wary step back.

Shou's servant never tried to hide his military background and regularly took weapons practice with the soldiers on private contract. Those who gathered to watch weren't likely to notice, but he could hold his own against their best, one of two or three Llesho figured he wasn't likely to kill by accident. Looked like maybe he'd figured wrong.

"My apologies." Llesho dropped the point of his sword and bowed humbly, trying to mask his confusion. He'd let his mind drift and his sword arm had carried on without him, not a matter of skill but of battle experience. Muscle and bone continued to act long after the mind had grown too numbed and broken to rule them.

"Accepted." The man discreetly did not inquire where Llesho had picked up such reflexes, but handed him a water bottle to share along with the most recent intelligence. "Have you heard the tale told by the Harnish merchants?" he started in a bland voice that suggested nothing more than gossip. "They say that the Harn have an ally, a terrible magician who searches for his familiar, a small boy lost in the desert. Some add that the ground bursts into flame beneath his feet, others that it means death to look on him." He gave a shrug, as if not really believing the stories. As Shou's servant, of course, he knew full well who this unnamed menace was and so his next statement had more meanings than it seemed.

"Whatever lies behind the stories, it frightens the Harn among us as much as it frightens their neighbors."

So the Harn among them did not, on the surface, share an allegiance with Master Markko's followers. "There's always something behind stories like that," he agreed. Llesho knew it from his dreams, but Sento confirmed that those followers were still looking for him.

"Always," Sento warned him before leaving to find his own bivouac.

For Llesho, the stories confirmed what his dreams had told him: Master Markko was still out there. That the Harn of their caravan feared the magician didn't necessarily mean anything. The raiders who had invaded Thebin hadn't needed the magician to goad them into action; the promise of wealth without effort had been enough.

"What news?" Lling joined him, wiping the sweat of her own mock battle from her brow. Absently, she swung her sword in lazy circles with one hand while she reached for the water bottle and drank with the other. When she was done, she wiped her lips with the back of her wrist and handed the bottle off to Hmishi, who was still blowing like a bellows from his own practice.

"The Harn at the back of the caravan grumble at their position in line."

"So I hear," Hmishi confirmed when he had drunk his own fill.

Strolling easily through the resting caravan, they weighed how much trust to give anything the Harn said in the hearing of others. Lling had come to the conclusion they shared and voiced it: "They have their own reasons to be where they are. I think Bor-ka-mar expects they will attack before we reach Guynm."

"Are they working with the Tashek?" Hmishi asked. "That's what I'd like to know."

The tribesmen out of the Gansau Wastes were scattered throughout the caravan, which made Llesho wonder if they didn't plan some assault independent of the Harn. Harlol hadn't given Llesho any reason to trust the Tashek even before he attacked the emperor. Kagar, who had replaced his injured kinsman in Shou's service, hadn't pulled a sword on anybody—yet. He did his job with the grim determination of one who wished himself in other circumstances.

"It's like he had his own plans and Harlol made a mess of them." Llesho explained the feeling he had about the groom. "Now, he seems to be trying to work the situation he's stuck with."

"I don't trust him." Hmishi ran a thumb thoughtfully along the edge of his Thebin blade. "Don't know that I trust that dwarf fellow either."

Lling snickered at him. "You don't trust anyone who rides that close to Llesho."

Hmishi ducked his head, embarrassed to be that easily read but not at all ashamed of his devotion to his prince. Lling felt the same way: they would protect him with their lives, and even their reputations.

The easy camaraderie between his two companions reminded Llesho of the old days in the pearl beds, but then he'd been part of that bond. Now he was its purpose, but outside of it. That hurt, but it would hurt his friends more to let them see the ache in his heart. He left them with an easy joke to find the slit trench before he gave himself away.

Play some music, please, Dognut! I'm about to fall asleep in my saddle here."

Llesho adjusted his seat impatiently and pulled the desert veil over his eyes to filter the dust and the light. The climate had grown hotter and drier the farther south they traveled. And more boring: no trees, clumps of dusty grass so sparsely scattered that for a while he'd entertained himself by counting them. Nothing but brown dirt below a sky pale with dust. Caravan life, he had discovered, came with all the hardships of a military campaign, but with none of the basic terror. He didn't miss the fear, but would have welcomed anything, even Dognut's songs, to occupy his mind. The dwarf was sleeping, however, and answered Llesho's plea with a gargling snore before settling back into his cushions.

So wrapped up was he in the complaints he muttered under his breath that he almost missed the subtle shift in the gait of his horse. But he heard it, the clop of hooves against stone.

"Dognut! Wake up! We're there!"

"What? What?" The dwarf's head shot up on his fragile neck and he stared all around him for a minute before subsiding again into his chair. "I thought we were under attack!"

"We've arrived!" Llesho explained. "Beds and baths and fresh food!" They had finally reached the outskirts of Durnhag.

"Oh. Well, that's different." The dwarf sat up, observing their surroundings with sharp interest. Quickly, however, his excitement turned to nose-wrinkling dismay.

Llesho agreed with the silent judgment. He hadn't envisioned anything as opulent as the Imperial City of Shan. As the center of trade and governing for Guynm Province, however, Llesho figured Durnhag would be at least as grand as Farshore. He'd hoped for something more exotic as befit its place along the caravan route, but at the least had assumed they'd find a decent inn with good food and mattresses free of bed ticks. First impressions didn't promise even that much.

A jumble of mud houses and tin sheds settled drunk-enly against one another on either side of the road dusted with sand by the wagons that carried trade wares in and out of the city. As they passed, the inhabitants of the ramshackle dwellings ran after them, grabbing at their packs, stealing brass lanterns, tin pots, anything that they could snatch or cut from the pack strapping. "It's not what I expected," he muttered.

"I think Shou did, though." Dognut looked worried.

Before he could say anything more, a mother swathed in veils that covered her hair grabbed onto Llesho's stirrup with one hand. With the other she held up a starving baby for his inspection. "My baby!" Her dark eyes bled her despair as she cried to him, "Help for my baby!"

Llesho slipped her a copper coin and was instantly besieged by beggars who cried out in half a dozen languages for food, or money, or milk from the udders of their camel mares. Street toughs intercepted the mother and stole her coin before she could escape the crowd.

Here was the point of the story Master Den had told him at the beginning of their journey. The emperor would never allow something like this in the imperial city, and he didn't look pleased to find it in Guynmer. Shou grew quieter, more brooding as they neared Durnhag proper. He scarcely looked up when the camel drovers, screaming at their beasts and slashing with their camel goads, joined the soldiers to push back the beggars.

"There's going to be trouble." To emphasize his words, Dognut gave an eerie trill on a flute not much bigger than his hand. He didn't seem surprised when, passing a dark and ill-favored inn that marked a divide between the shantytown and the lowest accommodations the caravansary offered, Shou called a halt and pulled his party out of the caravan. Llesho wondered what the dwarf knew about this place that the rest of them didn't.

Captain Bor-ka-mar, forced to break his cover or leave Shou to the protection of three cadets, gave his emperor a sour glare. Shou offered him no encouragement, but signaled him to continue with the party his cadre had hired on to protect as a cover for their real mission. Bor-ka-mar seemed almost on the brink of mutiny, but the emperor silently turned his back, closing the subject.

Out of Shou's hearing, the captain's vocabulary demonstrated a knowledge of swearing both wide and deep, in languages rich in obscenity and in others Llesho would have sworn had no such terms at all. But the soldier followed orders. He nudged his horse into motion with his knees and followed the caravan as it moved away from the man that Bor-ka-mar, like all Shan's imperial guard had sworn on his life to protect. Llesho felt an overwhelming urge to call him back, but he kept his peace and followed the emperor. Shou had a plan. Again. Which comforted Llesho not at all. He discovered that his own unsavory vocabulary had developed depths he didn't know he had.

At the door to the disreputable inn, Master Den abandoned them as well. The trickster god gave Adar a little bow in keeping with the role he played as servant.

"If you'll lend me a guard, I'll check out the stables. We'll bring the travel packs back with us," he declared in a voice loud enough for the innkeeper to hear. Harlol hadn't caught up with them yet, but Kagar still warranted watching. Shou sent Hmishi and together they followed the Tashek groom back out into the dust.

Desperate to understand Shou's reckless action, Adar looked to Llesho for an explanation or an argument that they continue with the rest of the caravan to the city. Llesho didn't have one either; he shrugged, and entered the inn after Shou.

Inside the thick mud walls, the inn was dirty but surprisingly cool. A small fire burned in the huge hearth at one end of the rough-timbered dining hall, with a teakettle hanging over it by a metal arm. A tripod next to the kettle held a cauldron that bubbled like a potion and released odors almost as foul. Llesho hoped some medicine was cooking, but he had a bad feeling it was dinner. Not surprisingly, the room was nearly empty, so there were more than enough benches for their company to sit together at one of the long plank tables. Shou led them to a place in a corner, with a wall at his back and a window to the side. They could watch the street as well as the innkeeper from here. He nudged Llesho in first, and drew Lling after himself, lounging back against the wall while Adar helped Carina to a seat facing them and Dognut settled his bag of flutes at his feet.

A barkeep with no belly to speak of wiped his hands on a dingy gray rag and approached their table with the rag slung over his arm. Close-up, they could see that the corners of his mouth turned down almost to his chin in an expression that appeared sour by habit.

"What can I get for you, sir?" He addressed Shou with a quick knowing scan. He didn't need to recognize Shou to know what a modestly dressed Guynmer merchant would want with his establishment.

The emperor set a worn purse on the table. "Whatever you are serving this evening, for myself and my companions."

The barkeep barely stifled a sneer at the thinness of the purse, but motioned to a sooty young girl at the hearth to bring plates for the customers. Llesho had hoped against good sense that a real kitchen with roasting fowl and fresh bread hid behind the door in the rear. They would never find out with the purse Shou had offered, however. While the girl was dishing lumpy gray goo from the pot over the fire, the barkeep turned his attention back to his customers.

"We'll be staying the night," Shou said, "If you can meet our needs.

"I think we can manage that," the barkeep said with a smirk. "We have one room to let upstairs. The bed is sturdy and large enough to accommodate the gentleman and his pleasures, male or female."

Llesho doubted that the inn had anyone else staying the night. What money the beds brought in came from hourly rates, and he didn't even want to think about the condition of the blankets in a place like this.

With a glance up at the railing that ran the length of the gallery, the barkeep continued. "Our boy is so skilled that poets have written odes to his name, and our girl is a true find, hardly used at all. Was a servant in the great house in the city, so her manners are city-bred. Got herself turned away for refusing to do for free what she asks good coin for here on the paying side of the city towers. The governor's loss is your gain, good sir."

A servant in the governor's palace. That went a good way to explaining why they had stopped in this place. Llesho'd had enough experience with Shou's spies so that the realization never reached his face. When he followed the direction of the barkeep's gaze, however, he couldn't take his eyes away. A man and a woman well past the bloom of youth advertised by the barkeep perched on the railing. Except for the open robes thrown carelessly over their shoulders and the tall wooden shoes with high, thick heels on their feet, they were both naked.

Llesho had seen naked women working in the pearl beds—had seen Lling that way most of the days of their lives. Modesty had prevented him from thinking of them as anything but workmates, but this was completely different. The woman noticed that he was looking and nudged her partner in the ribs, sharing a joke at his expense. Holding his gaze, she opened her robe further and circled her hips in a lewd dance. Llesho felt the heat of her body in spite of the distance between them. He blushed. With a grin and a wink, her male companion leaned over and licked her belly, then blew him a kiss.

"For a modest fee, your help can sleep here on the floor once the tap patrons have gone home." .

Tearing his eyes away with an effort, Llesho found the innkeeper looking speculatively from Shou to Carina. Adar wrapped an arm protectively around her shoulder, and the man moved on to the three young Thebins in their cadet uniforms. He smirked before adding, "Though perhaps the gentleman prefers the young ones warm his bed."

The emperor played the part of his disguise. With a careless shrug, he flicked a glance over the pleasures displayed above them on the gallery. "Send both your people to me after our supper. Perhaps they can teach my pets a trick or two."

So, not just the woman, but the man as well were the emperor's spies. The barkeep seemed unaware of what covert negotiations he might be transacting, or with whom, but called the girl from the fire.

"My girl will air the room, good sir."

"Good. We'll want to retire early." For emphasis, Shou ran the tip of his thumb down the side of Llesho's face. They'd played this masquerade before, but this time Llesho felt a less accommodating reaction was called for. He shuddered, pulling his head away with just a touch of fear in his eyes.

"Good boy." The emperor smiled indulgently at Llesho. He approved the way Llesho had played the part.

The innkeeper said nothing at this exchange. Guynm Province kept to a strict religious code, but the poverty on the outskirts of the caravansary and this inn on the edges of the city proved that Durnhag had come to terms with its own corruption by moving it out of sight. He understood his patron's vices now, or so he believed.

Adar hadn't known the emperor very long, however, and didn't share the innkeeper's worldliness. He neither accepted nor trusted this disguise. Shoulders pulled back, his spine snapped to rigid attention, but he kept silent. Protective instinct warred with the caution any slave learned in order to survive. He wasn't a slave now, though, and Llesho held his breath, afraid that his brother would take no more from the emperor or the trickster god himself if it came to Llesho's safety. Adar had always been sensitive to the mood around him, however, and Llesho's tension seemed, paradoxically, to calm his brother. Or to put him on his guard, as Llesho wanted him to be.

Shou answered the healer's indignation, and his protective arm around Carina, with sophisticated boredom belying his modest Guynmer costume but not surprising the innkeeper, who had seen the same many times before. "I'm not a greedy host. You can have her if you want her.

"I ask only for your services as a healer to return my property to good working order when I am done with them," Shou added. "It's sometimes difficult not to break one's playthings."

Memory of his battlefield dead passed behind Shou's lidded gaze, and Llesho thought that some truths were worse than the masquerade. Dognut, however, seized the moment of Adar's stunned silence to rest a small hand on Lling's breast. He waggled his eyebrows and leered at her. "Pretty soldier. Want to see Dognut's blade?"

Lling gave him an icy smile and drew the long Thebin knife from the sheath at her hip. "Would you like to compare?" she asked, all teeth. When she wiped a speck of blood from the blade on a corner of his blouse, Dog-nut removed his hand. When Lling's knife disappeared into its sheath, the innkeeper gave the dwarf a wink.

Llesho still worried about Adar. When it came to his youngest brother, the healer-prince didn't trust Shou and might ruin whatever plan the emperor was hatching with a misguided attempt at a rescue. But slowly, soundlessly, Adar brought his reactions under control. Maybe he'd figured out there was more going on than he understood, or maybe he was biding his time. For the moment, at least, disaster was averted. Shou beamed at the healer as if he had performed a trick his master had despaired of teaching him. Llesho closed his eyes in silent prayer that the two men would not come to blows before they had deposited the emperor at the palace of the governor.

"Now that we have settled the arrangements, I am in the market for information." Shou turned his attention to the innkeeper. He'd get a complete report from his spies soon, but never gave up the opportunity to sound out the locals on conditions under their daily view.

"What did you want to know?" The innkeeper gave a doubtful look at the purse on the table.

Shou shrugged in the vague way of one who preferred not to speak his business aloud and emptied the purse onto the table. The innkeeper's eyes widened at the coins that spilled out. Small, but purest gold, the coins were worth ten times the man's earlier estimation and went far toward calming his suspicious nature.

"Strangers coming by in the past fortnight or so?" Shou prodded.

"Besides yourselves?" The innkeeper counted the value of secrets in the gold coins on the table and substituted another question. "Such as?"

"Dangers to a merchant on the road again with the sun?" Shou gave a wave of the hand, as if it went without saying, but the coin between his fingers ended up in the palm of the innkeeper.

"Too many Harn." He growled out the name as if he would hawk it up out of his throat. "And the Tashek have been sneaking around, looking over their shoulders at every creak of a floorboard."

"Trouble brewing." Shou didn't quite ask.

The innkeeper took a deep breath and reached back to rub at a tight spot at the base of his skull. "I reckon so," he admitted, and bit into the small gold coin to test its purity. Purer than the man could imagine, Llesho suspected, and straight from the stamping yards of the emperor who sat in disguise in his very inn.

"Safest to keep your head down and stay clear. There's going to be action between 'em, I'm betting, what with the dry season come on early, and Harn on the move." The innkeeper stepped away with a second coin and a nervous backward glance. Llesho found he had lost his appetite—just as well it wasn't a roasted fowl in front of him.

Stretching out with a catlike sprawl, Shou draped one arm across Llesho's shoulders and the other around Lling. "Jung An is a servant of her ladyship," he muttered into Llesho's ear with a tilt of his head to signal the woman, who moved back into the shadows of the gallery.

Llesho had figured the spy part on his own and wasn't surprised to find the hand of the mortal goddess of war stirring this pot. "Was it Lady SienMa's idea to send Bor-ka-mar away with his men and meet with your spies alone in this den of thieves?" he asked, keeping his words low so that their import didn't pass beyond their table. The resistance in his tone carried anyway.

Shou got him by the hair and shook him, a warning both real and acted out for their small but avid audience. "And how much attention would a squad of veteran troopers draw in a house like this one? Learn a lesson. It's safer to play a small man with large vices than a powerful man on a mission." He let go with a final shake and a reassurance given like a threat: "When I've taken Jung An's report, we can get out of here."

"If we haven't run out of time already."

Hmishi and Master Den should have joined them by now; the hairs on the back of Llesho's neck were standing up like the gods were passing at his back. Trouble.

Shou was dragging him from the bench, however, and didn't seem to hear. "We'll have that room now, and—"

The front door opened. They had time only to register the voice, "I heard there were Thebins—"

"Balar!" Adar rose from his place at the table, a broad grin on his face and fell on the newcomer with a crushing embrace that nearly cracked the three-stringed lute Balar carried on his back.

They had no more time for greetings. A shout from a table at the rear alerted them seconds before Harnish-men came pouring in through the back door. At the same time, raiders burst through the front. More had entered through the upstairs windows and they now joined the attack, rushing down the stairs and leaping from the gallery. Her ladyship's spies had disappeared from the railing, but blood dripped to the hall below giving evidence of their fate. Llesho drew his sword and fended off his attackers, trying to make his way to his brothers who stood unarmed at the center of the swirling battle.

Balar swung his three-stringed lute about him like a stave, sweeping the legs out from under a Harnish raider but breaking the neck of the instrument. He dropped the pieces and fell into a fighting stance that Llesho recognized. Master Den had taught him the same moves in Lord Chin-shi's gladiatorial compound, a lifetime ago it seemed. Master Jaks had shown him that he'd already known some of it from early childhood, but Balar, for all his gentleness, brought the grace of the dancer to the deadliness of one who had trained long in the Way of the Goddess.

The battle closed in around him then; Llesho lost sight of his brothers, lost count of his attackers, knew only the rise and fall of his weapons. He felt unstuck in time, fighting for his life in the Palace of the Sun while he did the same, again, on the road from Farshore, and again, in the market square of the imperial city. Fighting with all his skill, he found the place inside where action replaced thought and move followed move like instinct. He would not die, would not be taken prisoner in some grimy inn. But the Harnish raiders kept coming.

He was scarcely aware of the strange wailing cry that had joined the din around him, but he felt the strike of a hilt against the back of his head, and he was falling, falling, into a black pit that closed over his head like Pearl Bay.

PART TWO
HONORING

C HAPTER N INE

flMISHI was screaming. From the raw sound of it, like sand caught in a mill wheel, he'd been at it for a long time. Llesho's head beat with each cry as if it were going to split his skull open.

"Lling?" he whispered, but even that slight movement jolted a searing stab of pain through his head—just a dream, except that it felt real. Somewhere, Hmishi was being tortured, and it was his fault, because he'd gotten away. But how? And where was he? He blinked a moment to clear his vision and wished he hadn't—the ground was surging like a restless ocean.

"Are you awake, Llesho?" Dognut's voice called from above his butt and Llesho realized that he was the one moving, not the ground, and that Shou's dwarf musician was the traitor among them.

Someone—it had to be an accomplice, because the dwarf couldn't have managed it on his own—had trussed him up and slung him over the back of a camel. He had his backside in the air, his face pressed into the flank of the animal, and a pair of elbows digging into his kidneys. When he tried to right himself, he discovered that his captors had tied his arms and legs to the pack strapping that wrapped under the animal's belly. When he opened his eyes, he saw camel. When he took a breath, he smelled camel. Which would have been bad enough without the camel bouncing him like a juggling ball.

Running. The camel was running. He'd seen camel races a few times as a child; he'd wanted to go right out and try it himself. Khri, his bodyguard, had put an end to his aspirations with a firm hand on the back of Llesho's court coat. His plans back then hadn't included traveling like a bedroll, but he wondered why camels moving at high speed had ever seemed like a good idea. This one was making him very, very sick, and he groaned before he could stifle the sound.

"He's awake!" The elbows shifted from his back and presently Llesho heard the sound of a reed flute, trills and whistles only, since it was impossible to play anything recognizable on a camel at full gallop.

Llesho pretended to be asleep while he tried to figure out where he was and who had taken him, and why. Dognut was having nothing of the pantomime, however.

"The question was a courtesy," he said, smacking Llesho soundly on the butt with the flute. "I know you're awake in there."

He stirred, wriggled, but there was no way of getting comfortable. "Where's Hmishi? What are you doing to him?" Pointless to ask. He knew it had been a dream, but maybe they were in the same camp, or part of the same force. He could tell them what they wanted to know and they would leave Hmishi alone.

"The boy isn't here. What do you remember?"

A fight. Someone hitting him on the head. If Hmishi wasn't here, where was he? If Dognut had known the answers, he wouldn't be asking questions.

Llesho didn't know anything, except, "I'm going to vomit."

Fortunately, Dognut was pulling on the reins of the beast they rode, and calling in Tashek to someone over his shoulder. So, the dwarf was in league with—

A drover leaned over and grabbed the bridle of the skittish camel, bringing the beast to a halt. Llesho turned his head enough to see—

"So you found us after all. Traitor!"

Harlol glared back at him, and they both tensed for action, though Llesho was in no position to move, let alone attack.

"Don't."

Goddess, what was he going to do now? That was his brother Balar's voice snapping at him from somewhere out of sight behind his right ear. Llesho didn't want to believe his own brother had sold him into captivity, but it was hard to ignore the fact that he was trussed up like a pig for the fire pit.

"How much did the magician pay you?"

"Nobody paid me anything." Balar shook his head and stooped low to cut the strap that looped under the camel's belly, securing Llesho's tied ankles to his bound wrists.

"Right. That's why I'm hanging upside down from a camel with my head ready to explode." Llesho wasn't surprised when his brother let him slide off in a heap. Traitor or not, Balar was really angry.

Hands planted on hips, his brother watched him pick his face up out of the sand- -definitely sand. Where were they, anyway? Llesho rolled over, which gave his brother some signal to go into full rant mode.

"A full complement of imperial militia traveled on private contracts with that caravan. If your damned Guyn-mer merchant had gone on with the rest, you would have been perfectly safe. We'd have had our happy homecoming at a decent inn, played a few songs, and we could have gotten you away from there before the Harn knew what we were doing. But he didn't. The fool left himself fully exposed in the most disreputable fringes of the city."

Shou wasn't, generally, a fool and you couldn't figure his motives based on his disguises. Their stop on the outskirts of Durnhag was about trouble in the city and her ladyship's spies, not about saving a few tael on lodgings, though the emperor wasn't here to support his claim. Neither was Adar or Hmishi or Lling, or Master Den. He had no intention of telling the brother who had kidnapped him any of that, however, which left him to listen as Balar lost his temper.

"The Uulgar had spies among the Harn in the caravan, of course, and they were looking for you."

"Who are the Uulgar?"

"The Harnishmen from the South. Your caravan had a group of Tinglut, Eastern clans. Not friends of the empire, but not under the magician's thumb either. The Uulgar, however, have a general order to take Thebin males of your age and let the magician sort you out."

"Is that where we are going now? To Master Markko?"

"Don't be more of an ass than you can help." Balar glared at him, as if Llesho were somehow responsible for the position he found himself in. Llesho glared right back.

"Fortunately for you, little brother, the Tashek have spies as well. Kagar got word to Harlol that you had stopped at that damned cesspit of an inn, and what was supposed to be a warm family reunion turned into a mad attempt at a rescue.

"We had to get you out of Durnhag, but you were fighting like a demon. Kagar tried to attract your attention and when that didn't work, ... he ... hit you over the head."

Now that he could actually see around him, Llesho noticed the Tashek groom lurking on the far side of the camel.

"He panicked," Balar continued, "hit you too hard, and maybe cracked your skull. It was the best we could manage under the circumstances. If the Harn hadn't divided their efforts between you and the other boy, we wouldn't have had a chance at a rescue."

If that was the truth, it didn't bode well for Hmishi. As bad as it was to be the object of Markko's search, how much worse to face his wrath as the wrong hostage? The memory of his friend screaming sent a fine tremor shivering through Llesho's body. Just a dream. But he knew it was more than that.

"By the time we pulled you out of there," Balar finished, "you were in no condition to ride, so we did the best we could."

Llesho cocked an eye at Dognut, who rode at his ease on a secure chair on the camel's back rather than tied down like a saddle pack.

"It seemed the easiest way to haul an unconscious body," the dwarf explained.

If Balar was lying, well, he wouldn't be the first prince in history to sell out his birthright, though from the look of him he'd made a poor bargain of it. Llesho probed for the lump on his head with his bound hands, winced when he found it.

"I'm not unconscious now," Llesho argued. "But I'm still tied up."

Balar had the grace to look embarrassed. Then he pulled his Thebin knife—a weapon which, Master Den had once told Llesho, a Thebin royal drew only to kill. So. Treason and murder it was. Llesho waited until his brother leaned over, blade poised, and then he kicked with all his might.

"Oof!" Balar didn't fly through the air as he should have, had Llesho been in better shape, but he did drop to his backside in the dust. And the kick knocked the knife out of his hand. Since his legs were still tied together, Llesho was no closer to escape, but it felt good to strike a blow in his own defense. Or it did until Kagar flung himself belly first over Llesho's legs and Harlol ground his shoulders into the sand beneath him. He gave up the struggle then. If he were going to be skewered, at least it wouldn't be on his brother's knife.

"I wish I had a stylus and paper." From his perch on top of the camel's pack, Dognut peered down at him with an avid grin. "I feel a comical song coming on."

"Traitor!" Llesho struggled to escape his captors.

Common words, like "betrayal," covered the actions of the Tashek drovers and Shou's double-crossing musician. His brother's actions went so much deeper that it almost didn't matter what they did to him next. Balar had already done the worst there was.

Brushing the dust from his robes, Balar cast about for his knife, but he put it away without making any further threats with it. Well out of Llesho's reach, he dropped into a Tashek squat, his elbows on his knees with his hands hanging loosely between them.

"No one is going to hurt you, Llesho."

Llesho snorted in disbelief. They'd already cracked his head or he would be giving them a decent fight, and his brother had just come after him with a knife.

Balar read the look he cast at the sheath on his belt. "I don't know what they've told you, but it's not magic. It's just a knife. I'm careful in a sparring match, but it cuts my beard—or a knot—just fine."

He knew that, and it reassured him more than it should have, that truth from his brother.

Balar gave him a lopsided smile. "You were in a battle fugue, fighting like a madman—or a god—"

They both understood the irony of that statement. All of the princes of Thebin shared in the divinity of the royal family. But as seventh son of the king, himself the seventh son of his own father-king, Llesho was, to his people, a god indeed.

"I'm sorry we had to hit you, but I can't apologize that you're here, with us, and not on your way to Harn." Balar drew in a deep breath and visibly calmed himself.

"Let him go." He reached out then, rested a hand on Llesho's knee, and gave a nod as a signal. "Kagar is going to cut your legs free so that we can get you on your horse."

Kagar drew his knife and slashed through the leather strap that held Llesho's ankles together. Oh. Not murder, then. Llesho had the humility to blush as his brother grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to his feet. At least, Llesho supposed he was standing. He couldn't feel anything below his knees and his legs bent under him like young bamboo. The two Tashek took his weight at shoulder and knee, and between them, they flipped him into his saddle.

"Harlol will tie you onto your saddle for your own protection," Balar explained in low tones that were meant to be soothing, but just made Llesho angrier. "Tomorrow, or the next day, when your head is a little clearer, you can ride without restraints. Until I'm sure you can manage without landing in the dirt, we'll do it baby-style."

Llesho remembered that reassuring smile, almost remembered the words. No more than a year or so old, he'd ridden his first pony strapped into a training saddle, much as he did today. But he knew treachery when he saw it. Harlol, the man who tied him onto his horse, had attacked the emperor's person, might have killed Shou if he'd been a better fighter. Where was Shou now? Or Master Den, for that matter, or—

"Where's Adar?"

Balar didn't answer right away. He mounted his own horse, staring out into the desert as if he could see something Llesho couldn't, which was likely given his gifts. "Adar will be all right. He was fully grown when the Harn attacked Kungol, and he didn't make the Long March." Guilt stirred in eyes grown damp with some old regret when Balar looked back at Llesho.

"He'll survive until we free him. You." He shook his head, unable, for a moment, to continue. Then he seemed to gather himself together for a last effort.

"The dream readers were not all agreed that you would survive the Harn again. They were afraid that you would throw your life away, fighting past hope until the raiders killed you. And that couldn't happen."

They were using the high court dialect of Kungol to keep their conversation private, and it took Llesho a moment to process the meaning out of the old, almost forgotten words. When he did, he gave his brother an icy glare. "I'm not that fragile." Or hadn't been, until Kagar had whacked him over the head. He was still unsteady from the blow, which made him sound less than convincing even to himself, but he wasn't about to let Balar treat him like a child. "The Harn took them, didn't they?"

Balar wouldn't even look at him, and Llesho remembered the sound of Hmishi screaming in his dream.

"Are we following them?" Pressure at his back told him no, but he waited for his brother to answer him. "We have to get them back."

"We are taking you to Ahkenbad. The dream readers will decide what to do next."

"Not good enough." Llesho wheeled his horse around, though weaponless and bound he could do nothing but make his brother chase him. "Master Markko will kill Hmishi out of spite, just for not being me. And you don't know what he will do to someone like Adar." Markko would take him apart, dissect him looking for the organ where the healer's gifts might reside. Llesho didn't say anything about Shou. Only the truth might move his brother to action there, and he still didn't know if Balar was his betrayer or the savior he claimed to be.

"We'll find Adar." Balar looked away, but not before Llesho saw the guilt fleetingly cross his face.

"What have you done?" he asked, determined to know the worst. His hands were still bound in front of him, his reins held on his right by his brother on horseback, and on his left by Harlol on foot. Kagar had taken his place on the camel, at ease on a pad of cloth folded into a seat in front of Dognut, who perched atop the creature's hump. Like the others, he furtively turned away when Llesho looked to him for answers. Dognut answered his question with a little dirge he played on his flute, but no one appreciated the humor. The mournful tune faded away into an uncomfortable trail of random notes, and the dwarf found something fascinating about the fingering of his instrument to study.

"Balar! Look at me!"

The musician prince gave a guilty start, but composed his features and faced his brother. "What do you want to know?"

"Why are you dragging me across this goddess-abandoned waste if this is not the direction they have taken Adar? And don't start babbling to me about dreamers and mystics. I've had my fill of the lot of them and I won't sacrifice the brother I have only just recovered to chase after some old hermit with a crystal ball."

"A powerful magician is looking for you—"

"Master Markko, I know. We have danced this dance many times. What of him?"

"Do you know why he wants you?"

"He thinks I have powers. I don't. So he's in for a disappointment either way it goes."

"You do, actually." Balar gave him a cool, appraising look.

Llesho smirked annoyingly at him, daring his brother to find any magic about him. When the dreams flitted through his mind, he banished them, refusing to believe they were anything more than a bad mix of anxiety and old memories rising out of his sleeping mind.

"I don't see it either." Balar shrugged. "But the dream readers swear it is true. This magician, they believe, will offer to free Adar if you set yourself in his place. He may include others of your companions in the trade if he must. They felt certain that you would exchange yourself for Adar, possibly for this Shou, definitely for the old servant who travels with Adar. To prevent your foolhardy sacrifice, I will take you to the dreaming place, bound if I must. When you are safely stowed, the dream readers will decide what to do about Adar."

"I'm not going to leave my brother's life to the visions of a stranger. He doesn't have time for that."

/tfliS Harlol might have objected, and Llesho belatedly remembered that the drover practiced the religion of dreamers and Wastrels. Balar spoke up first, however, his eyes pleading, his expression ashamed.

"I'm not a soldier, Llesho. I know the forms; all the princes learned the Way of the Goddess, but I never used them to hurt a man until I had to pull you out of that inn. I just can't do what you expect of me."

Grumbling, Llesho gave in. He couldn't do much either, with his head swimming this way. Balar didn't have much to say after that, which left a lot of time with nothing to do but think.

"Adar is a healer. Balar centers the universe. Lluka sees the past and the future." He'd said those words to Kaydu, explaining his painfully failed vigil at the start of his quest. Six of his brother-princes before him had spent the night of their sixteenth summer waiting for the Great Goddess to show herself. Three of his brothers she had rejected, leaving each to his life of lesser gifts and no great destiny. Three she had found worthy: Adar and Balar and Lluka she had showered with gifts of the spirit, but none of them had been a soldier.

Llesho had ended his vigil with more destiny than he could handle, and no gifts to help him. Out of the blur of memories, his aching brain latched onto one unquestioned truth, however: Balar centers the universe. Was that what this trek across the desert was about? And, if so, why? He already had more quests than he could handle. The universe was just a bit more than he felt ready to take on for a Tashek hermit's dream.

On the other hand—which was still tied to the first, he balefully reminded himself—Master Den had said he needed a Tashek dream reader and here he was, suddenly off to see one. He'd never explained what the dream readers were, or why they might be important, but Balar, who centered the universe, seemed to think they were important, too.

"Who are these dream readers anyway, and what do they have to do with me?"

Balar gave him a sideways glance, not trusting this reasonable conversation.

"The dream readers are the holy seers of the Tashek people. In their dreams, they move freely between the world of their people's dreams, where time and distance run differently, and the waking world. When they awake, they bring the knowledge of their dream travels into the day, to guide the Tashek people. Lately, though, dreams about a young Thebin prince have spread throughout the camp, and with them the Great Goddess has sent a compulsion, to find the prince, her husband.

"You have to understand, they do not worship the Great Goddess here, and the intrusion of a strange deity into the dreams of the Tashek mystics has upset them greatly. I don't understand all of it, but it has something to do with her gardener, the Jinn."

"Pig. I know. Your dream readers are not the only people currently plagued by visions of talking pigs."

Balar nodded as if Llesho had just confirmed a suspicion he hadn't yet spoken aloud. "The Dinha has seen this magician, Markko you say his name is, searching for the gardener of heaven. But in the dream, the gardener he seeks is not Pig, the Jinn, but a great black pearl on a silver chain around the throat of that prince."

Llesho didn't know what a Dinha was, but raised his bound hands and looped a finger over the neck of his tunic, tugging the fabric out of the way to expose his throat. "No silver chain," he pointed out, though he knew the chain his brother spoke of, had seen it in his own dream.

"No chain," Balar agreed, "but three black pearls."

They had searched him while he was unconscious, which he should have expected. That he still had the pearls on their cord around his neck surprised him.

Llesho shrugged in mock indifference. "I'm collecting them. It's part of the quest.' Lleck's ghost gave me the first one when he sent me to find my brothers. He stole it from the dragon queen who lives in Pearl Bay with her children, which turned out all right. She would have given it to me herself, she said, if I didn't already have it. Lady SienMa, mortal goddess of war, gave me the second."

He did not mention the other gifts he had received from the mortal goddess; he wondered if he had lost those relics of his past self in his brother's harebrained kidnapping. "The third I received from the healer Mara, beloved of the Golden River Dragon, and aspirant to the position of eighth mortal god. And mother to Lady Carina, apprentice to our brother, Adar."

He did not need to tell his brother the consequences of leaving Carina in the hands of the Harn. Balar had grown quite pale.

"I'm supposed to find them all—the pearls, not the gods—but no one bothered to tell me how many there are. I've collected three brothers as well, but I'm not as good at keeping my hands on the Thebin princes as on the pearls."

"You travel with such creatures and receive gifts of the mortal gods, and still insist you have no magical gifts?" Balar demanded, wary in his turn. "I think, perhaps, you do not listen to your own tale. But I am one brother, and Adar is a second. Who is the third?"

They were Balar's brothers, too. Llesho didn't see any reason not to answer. "Shokar has a farm in Shan. He was raising crops when I found him, but when I left, he had changed his agronomy to soldiers, and now raises troops."

"Make that four, then."

It was Llesho's turn to show both his pleasure and his surprise. "Who?"

"Lluka awaits our return among the dream readers of Ahkenbad."

Lluka was the third husband of the goddess, and had received the gift of knowing the past and the future, so he probably fit right in with the Tashek mystics. Llesho wasn't certain he was ready to hear about his future, though, even if it did insist on cropping up in his dreams. Especially since that future seemed to be taking him into the Gansau Wastes. Even the desert-hardened Tashek had fled into the Harnlands to survive the dry months. Or so Dognut had said. Dognut, of course, had lied about many things.

Balar seemed to read the doubt in his face, though he had no way of knowing the cause. "The Holy Well of Ahkenbad is no myth."

"Holy Well?"

"It is the most sacred place in all the Gansau Waste," Balar explained, "and whether the water flows because the Tashek dream it so, or the dream readers dream because the water flows, even the dream readers cannot say. You can ask Lluka about it when you see him."

A holy well in the desert. No wonder the people of Ahkenbad had strange dreams. Master Markko could probably tell them exactly what poison had seeped into the water from the surrounding soil to give them their visions. Then he'd torture them to death studying its effects.

"I'd rather know where my pack is," Llesho replied tartly. "I need my weapons. Kagar and Harlol might as well be riding backward for all the attention they are paying to the road ahead. The raiders won't be happy that you stole their prize, however wrongheaded they are to put so great a value on my hide. I don't give much for my chances if I'm unarmed and tied to my saddle when they catch up to us."

"We brought your pack." Balar gave him a penetrating look. "The spear you carry in it burns me when I touch it. Kagar suffers no such rejection and has taken your possessions in safekeeping."

His jade cup, his spear. He found himself growing suspicious and defensive when they were out of his control. "I want to check my property."

"The Tashek wouldn't steal from you, Llesho; they think you are their personal savior. I couldn't even if I wanted to, so whatever you have in there is safe. But if I return your weapons, will you give me your word as a prince and brother not to run?"

The sun rained hammer blows on Llesho's head in spite of the covering someone had flung over his brow for the desert crossing. He looked out through the protective mesh, stained now to the dun color of the sand, into the sand-clouded sky.

"Have we been on this trek minutes or days while I slept on my belly over Shou's stolen camel?" Laughing bitterly, he surrendered, biding his time. "Is there any direction to run in this hell that doesn't end with me dead of thirst?" Water, he dreamed, in a jade cup green as the sea.

Balar gave an uneasy look behind him; Llesho felt the pursuit as well, like heat pressing against his back. Har-nish raiders of the Uulgar clans thundered at their heels, goaded into the desert by the devouring hatred of the magician.

"If it comes to that, kill me," Llesho said. He wouldn't be a prisoner of the Harn or the subject of Markko's experiments again.

"If it comes to that, I won't. So don't let it come to that." Balar gave a sharp whistle between his teeth, and Kagar trotted up beside them.

"Give him his sword and his knife. Hold onto the bow and arrows, and especially the short spear. Lluka will want to look at them."

"You are speaking of the gifts of the Lady SienMa," Llesho warned his brother. "She will not take kindly to their theft."

"Theft again, Llesho? Is that what you think of your brothers?" Balar's stare burned his skin more surely than the sun, but finally he gave a fractional lift of his shoulder. He reached over with his knife and cut the bonds that tied Llesho's wrists to his saddle. "Return these gifts, then. We don't want to anger the goddess of war."

Kagar reached behind him and unlashed the pack resting on his horse's haunches. He took out the sword, the knife, and handed them over. Attaching them to his belt, Llesho held out his hand for the short bow which he strung and tested before sliding it into the saddle-scabbard behind his right leg. The quiver of arrows with her Ladyship's own fletching he settled across his back. When Kagar drew out the short spear, Llesho shivered, suddenly cold in spite of the sun. Pain cut deeply into his breast, shadow-memory of past deaths, but he refused to give the weapon power over his present.

"Give it to me," he commanded softly Moving like a sleepwalker, Kagar held out the spear. "The cup is safe, Holy One," the Tashek groom offered in a high, light whisper.

Llesho took the spear with a nod to accept both the assurance and the weapon. The groom trembled, wide-eyed with terror, but his hands were unhurt. Adar had blistered when he'd held the spear; Llesho didn't know how, but the weapon must be able to recognize the blood of a Thebin prince, and would accept only the chosen one.

"You travel with wonders about you, Llesho." Dognut the dwarf gestured at the spear with a twist of distaste around his mouth. "And they don't like you very much."

The dwarfs comments murdered any hope Llesho had that the connection he felt to the spear came from his own imagination. Kagar had felt it, but only when he touched it. Dognut hadn't needed the contact to be affected by it. Llesho resolved to pay closer attention to the dwarf.

Balar watched him expressionlessly, waiting for an answer that Llesho didn't understand himself. He said nothing, but nudged his horse into motion. "How long until we reach this holy well?"

"Too long," Balar admitted, and urged them to a faster pace.

C HAPTER T EN

WITH the sun on their backs like the ever-present fear of pursuit, they pressed deep into the Gansau Wastes. Maybe the blow to his head had done more damage than he'd realized, or the spear whispering at his back had driven him mad. It seemed to Llesho that the desert itself, growing more impossibly bleak with each passing day, had bled his thoughts dry, leaving nothing but the dreams growing steadily more powerful that plagued his sleep: Hmishi screamed as though his captors had torn out his liver for the birds while Lling, pale and dreadful, looked on and Shou rattled his chains in helpless rage. Habiba followed on a great white horse, with an eagle perched on his pommel, but even his subtle powers could not show him the way. Master Markko appeared in none of these visions, but his presence filled them like a poisonous vapor.

Llesho grew to dread any rest. When he refused to sleep, however, the twilight dreamscape spilled into his waking mind like a hallucination, and he felt the anger and terror of the Harn in his own heart. Images assailed him, and he knew that the Harnish raider whose mind leaked into his both loathed and feared the magician whose will drove them from a distance. For the power of his clan, however, and in dread that Master Markko would kill them all if they failed, the man followed his chieftain deep into the desert. The Harnishman feared the Wastes as well, for the myths that Hmishi had talked about—the Wastrels, and the dream readers and the spirits that walked the deep desert. Equally he dreaded that they had lost their way in the parched wastelands. When they ran out of water, the sun would bake the flesh from their bones while their brains boiled in their skulls.

The raider's thoughts were so like his own that the distinction between them blurred. Llesho felt the pressing fury of the pursuer, only dimly aware that he was the focus of that rage. The Harnishman didn't resent the chief of the Uulgar clan who had led him into the Wastes, but hated the prey that drew him more deeply into the land of his nightmares. The man pictured in his head the tortures his raiding party would inflict on the Thebin prince when they caught him, and Llesho cried out in his dream. The imaginings of the raider raised bruises and welts on his skin, as if the blows were real. They would make him talk and turn him over to their master a broken, beaten slave.

Llesho pulled on the bonds that tied him to his saddle, lost between the torment of the dream and the throbbing unreality of his own trek through the desert. Dimly, from a distance he could not cross, he thought he heard Balar calling to him, but this time he couldn't escape the tortured visions that circled in his aching mind.

"Llesho! Wake up! It's just a dream!"

They had come to a halt, or Llesho thought they must have since Balar was standing at his side.

"Drink, please!" A waterskin, evil-smelling and nearly empty, poked at his chin. He remembered a caution about poisoned wells and pushed it away, at the same time doubting everything he saw—the waterskin and the dead oasis long gone to sand, and the failed shade of dying date palm where they had stopped for rest.

"You have to drink, Prince Llesho, or you will die!" Dognut urged him, still atop his snappish camel.

"Please, brother." Balar lifted the waterskin again.

Llesho gave him a shove, "You're not real!" he cried, surprised at how hoarse his voice had become. The skin fell, water drooling into the sand. He could smell the moist promise of it with a desperate desire. Even a hallucination could tell the truth once in a while, and Dognut was right; he was going to die if he didn't drink.

Harlol, who had tried to kill the emperor, snatched the skin up again before too much was lost. "Damn it, Kagar, did you have to hit him so hard?"

"I didn't!" Kagar insisted. "It's the dreams. They've addled his brainpan!"

"Tell that to the Dinha when she asks us why we've come home with the dead husk of ."

Harlol was angry. Good. Well, not good if it meant Llesho was dead, but at least the Tashek had begun to show his true colors. They had kidnapped him to give to this Dinha. Balar said to trust him, but maybe he'd been duped.

"The prince won't die," Balar grabbed the waterskin and Harlol grunted a noncommittal answer before going off to check the feet of the camel.

He had no intention of dying. Llesho could have told them that, but he didn't trust them with the only truth he clung to: the minions of his old enemy, Master Mar-kko, had taken Adar. He would stay alive, whatever it took, until he got his brother back. If they chose to poison him, well, their dream readers survived it and so could he. After all, he'd been through it before with Master Markko.

"Please, Llesho. You've fought so long, don't give up now." Balar poured water into his hand and offered it like a supplicant. "Drink."

This time, he drank. It tasted stale, and a little bit like leather and Balar's dusty hands, but otherwise untam-pered with. That didn't mean he could trust them; it just meant they wanted him alive for the time being. He could deal with that.

"Good boy."

Llesho would have hit him for the condescending approval, but it seemed like a waste of effort to punish a hallucination. "You're not real." He'd already said that, but couldn't figure out anything more original to add. It must have worked, though, because Harlol cursed imaginatively as he climbed onto his horse. Balar said nothing, his expression closing in around his bleak desperation. Then they were moving again, and Llesho lost himself once more among the worlds of his dreams.

When the pressure eased, he thought that he had died, or that he would waken to discover that everything since the vigil of his sixteenth summer had been a dream. Afraid of what he'd find when he did so, Llesho opened his eyes to find himself in her ladyship's orchard in Far-shore Province. The mortal goddess SienMa had taught him to shoot a bow here, by taking aim at the stems that held the peaches to her trees and afterward they had dined on the fruit he had plucked with his newfound skill. In the dream, he woke to the green pattern of leaves overhead and the prickle of grass beneath his backside. The smell of peaches filled his nose with memories of his last moment of peace, and he would have wept, except that he didn't believe in any of it, not even for a moment.

"My gardeners cannot reach the top of the tree, where the best peaches have ripened—can you shoot them down for me?" The goddess SienMa nudged his shoulder, and Llesho peered out at her through an eyelid slit-ted open in the hope she wouldn't notice that he was looking.

"I know you're awake, and I'm hungry for that peach."

"You can't be real." He surrendered to the dream, drawing himself up so that his spine leaned back on the slender trunk of the peach tree. "Master Markko burned this orchard to the stone."

That was when the killing had started in earnest— Llesho's first true battle, but not the last. He'd forgotten the beauty of this orchard, though her ladyship was as he remembered her: beautiful and terrible at the same time, with a smile colder than the snow in the mountains high above Kungol.

"Even a dream can get hungry. I'd really like that peach." She was, he reminded himself, a mortal goddess and the patroness of wars. And Shou had left her on his throne to defend the Shan Empire in his absence.

"Is there trouble?"

"Of course there is trouble. The emperor has got himself captured by his enemies along with that trickster ChiChu, and I still don't have that peach."

Llesho considered for a moment. He couldn't do much but apologize for the one, but his dream self knew how to bring down a peach. He stood and bent low from the waist in respect. When he thought of it, his bow appeared in his hand, and he drew, aimed, sent his soul flying into the treetop, and opened a hand to receive it just as the peach fell. "My lady."

"Thank you." She took the peach from his outstretched palm and began to eat. Her lips barely seemed to move. Llesho saw not even a glimpse of her teeth or any juice of the peach on her chin, but still the fruit was disappearing. When the yellow flesh was gone, she flipped the stone into the grass and settled her eyes on him again. Llesho found her full attention daunting but felt he owed her more than one of her own peaches for all the trouble he'd caused.

"My lady," he repeated. With a graceful nod of her head she gave him permission to continue.

Llesho took a deep breath. "I don't deserve your forgiveness, but I beg your pity."

"For what, boy?"

"It was my quest, but the emperor has suffered for it, and with him his whole empire. Master Den is a prisoner as well, and Adar, and Carina, whose mother aspires to be a mortal god." He gave a bitter smile. "I have angered more gods than I ever imagined I would meet, and at least one dragon as well. As quests go, I couldn't have made a bigger mess if I'd intended to screw up from the start."

Everyone who ever tried to help him had suffered or died for it, including the goddess whose orchard had burned in Markko's pursuit of him.

Her ladyship tilted her head, as if she needed to study the problem of Prince Llesho from a different angle. "You are assuming that yours is the only quest on this journey," she finally pointed out. "Shou also has trials to suffer and lessons to learn."

"But Shou is old!"

"Not so old."

The protest had escaped him before Llesho could stop it. At the goddess' wry reply he blushed and fidgeted, trying to keep his mind away from questions like, "How old is a mortal goddess anyway?" and "What are you testing Shou for?" On consideration, he figured Shou could probably use some lessons at that. The emperor showed great bravery and daring in matters of battle and espionage, for which Llesho took him as a model and teacher. But he didn't seem to spend a lot of time on statecraft and diplomacy, which Lleck had always told Llesho were the trusty tools of a great king. That was before the old minister had been reincarnated as a bear, of course, back when he had advised Llesho with greater subtlety and better pronunciation.

So, giving Shou a quest made sense. Maybe so did leaving him to figure it out for himself, though doing it as a prisoner of the Harn made it a whole lot harder. It left Llesho with a problem, however. Master Den had followed Shou to teach those lessons, he guessed or, knowing the trickster god, to keep the emperor alive while he learned them on his own. It didn't help Llesho.

After giving it enough thought to make his head ache even in his dream, he admitted, "Master Den was my mentor. Without him, I don't know what to do."

"Look around you." The mortal goddess reached into a bowl that Llesho hadn't seen before and pulled out a plum, which she handed to him. "There are many teachers in the world if we pay attention, and none at all if we don't."

Llesho was pondering the meaning of that when he noticed a huge pig rooting at the base of a peach tree. He remembered another dream with a pig in it, and he reached for the three black pearls that hung at his breast. "Is that—?"

Before he could finish the question, Lady SienMa answered it with laughter in her voice. "Not a teacher, but possibly a guide." Then she called the creature to her, "Master Pig!"

"Not 'Master,' my lady, as you well know. Just Pig." The Jinn stood on his hind legs and bowed politely, then swiped another plum from the lady's bowl. "We've met." He grinned at Llesho around huge, sharp tusks, then gobbled down the fruit, pit and all, in two powerful snaps of his teeth. "You're going the wrong way, you know. You'd have done better to stick with Shou—at least the Harn are carrying him closer to the gates of heaven."

"Closer to Master Markko as well," the lady added.

"And I have brothers still to find, and pearls."

"Ah, well. You have a point there." Pig's nose twitched and he gave the ground a sharp glance. "Still, we'll find a use for you, I suppose." Sniffing attentively, he wandered away with the words, "Keep in touch," tossed over his shoulder.

"How am I supposed to do that?" But when he turned back, Llesho discovered that the mortal goddess of war had disappeared and her orchard lay in ashes. He awoke with a start to the realization that a barely sensed pressure between his shoulder blades had not returned. The Harn no longer followed them.

It took a moment for Llesho to realize that something had actually wakened him. They had left the desert sand for a road winding between hills stripped clean to the rocky bone. High on either side cliff faces rose above them, layers of soft stone folded in on themselves like the leaves of a hastily abandoned book or stacks of broken plates. Color slashed across the dun layers, rust-red and gray, with veins of lichenous green and sulfurous yellow running through the cave- pocked sandstone. He wondered what forces had cracked the hillside, and how a road had come to exist between.

"Welcome to the Stone River of Ahkenbad, boy." Dognut waved a flute at the cliffs on either side.

"River?"

Dognut waggled his eyebrows in a display of mock amazement. "Did I say river? Yes, I did! The Gansau Wastes weren't always a desert. That was before the time of the Tashek and their nomad cities, of course. Now the riverbeds make fine roads in a place nobody wants to go."

"What happened to it?" Llesho stared about him with amazement. Some giant hand might have taken hold of the earth and ripped it from its moorings here.

"Many things. Ages laid the stone, and ages more the great river wore the stone away."

"But where did the water go?"

"Ah, well, there was a dragon. Isn't there always? There used to be a song—"

Llesho didn't know about real life. In all his seventeen summers he'd only met two dragons, and those had been under extraordinary circumstances. He had to agree that dragons showed up in an awful lot of songs, however.

The dwarf drew out a flute no bigger than his thumb. He played the first few measures of a tune, and when he was satisfied that he'd set the melody in his ear, he began to sing:

Now when the summer reeds grew tall and sun shone on the water

Lord Dragon sallied from his hall

The fisherfolk to slaughter.

"My hall!" he cried, "is not for men, Their nets, their lines, or sinkers And if I must warn you again I'll stave in all your clinkers."

Llesho's confusion must have shown on his face, because Dognut paused to explain, "Clinker-built is a way of making the bottom of a boat so that the water can't get in."

"Like Master Den's traveling washtub," Llesho remembered out loud.

"Exactly." The dwarf swept his explanation past the point before Llesho could ask how he knew about battlefield laundry tubs. "The dragon was threatening to sink the fishing boats."

The farmers of Golden Dragon River lived in peace with their monster. They revered the worm beneath the water and respected his right to the fish that swam in the silty currents. He had a bad feeling about the Stone River, though.

When he nodded that he understood, the dwarf picked up the song again, and Llesho found himself drawn into the tale of a Gansau that was no waste at all, but a fertile land where rivers used to flow and lush jungles grew on the hillsides. In spite of the wealth the river brought to the land, however, the fishermen wanted the fish as well. Unfortunately, so did the dragon. When they couldn't come to an agreement, the fishermen hired hunters and mercenaries to rid them of their dragon. At the height of the story, with murder hinted just ahead, Dognut ceased to sing.

"You can't stop now!" Llesho protested, and he noticed that Balar and their Tashek guides had likewise turned to the dwarf for an ending to his tale. "What happened next?"

"That depends on who tells the story. Some say the fishermen succeeded in murdering the dragon, and the mourning river refused to flow. Some say the dragon grew tired of the harassment and left, taking his river with him. In that version of the tale, Lord Dragon found a new ground to water and a new bed to sleep in where the people knew how to honor a river. As for the fishermen, well, some say they died, and wanderers took their place in the waste they left behind. Others say they remained, clinging to the wells and oases until their children had forgotten that any river ever flowed here, or any fish swam in it."

The dwarf made a sweeping-broom gesture, a past to be brushed aside. "The only truth that matters is that no river flows here now."

Llesho figured the story might be true, but Dognut's conclusion likely wasn't. His own experience of dragons had proved them difficult to kill, hot-tempered but of a legalistic temper. And they didn't like to stir from their homes much. Thoughtfully he slipped from his saddle, wanting to feel the land through his own feet. Did it shift under him like an old dragon stirring in its sleep? Or was that just the beat of the horses' hooves on the drum of the road?

The heat, he decided, had driven out logic and left only fancy and a dry drift of yellow dust blurring his senses. Somewhere in the hills, he felt the presence of people he could not see and water, like a siren call, stirred deep beneath his feet. Light blazed in the distance, but he stood in a place of darkness. Lifting the gritty veil from his eyes didn't help.

"Am I blind?" he asked himself, and only realized that he'd spoken aloud when Balar answered him.

"It's just the dust," his brother assured him, but that wasn't it. He could see well enough, but what he saw seemed at odds with what he felt around him. A veil lay across his mind, not his eyes, and he shook his head, determined to clear his clouded thoughts. And he saw it, the gritty corner of a sandstone ledge jutting from the cliff face. Focusing down on the individual grains of sand fused into stone, he forced the haze from his mind.

Ahkenbad. Somehow, they had entered the city itself and stood in the shade of a rocky overhang. Llesho blinked, a cry of surprise escaping—

"How?"

His mouth was hanging open, and he closed it with a snap of his teeth. Ahkenbad was like no city he had ever seen. For one thing, it seemed to be no city at all—he saw no buildings, no walls like those that made the cities of Shan or Farshore, no gardens. Rather, artisans had carved the whole city into the towering cliffs that rose high above the riverbed that wound between them. Set along narrow paths that zigzagged to the top, the mouth of cave after cave gaped down on them between glinting streaks of jade and lapis fused in tortured waves that rippled across the cliff face.

Simple carvings of pillars and trailing vines that drew the mineral colors into the designs outlined the openings into the caves at the heights. Rows of heavy curtains hid the chambers behind heavy embroidery worked on red cloth: elaborate twining vines, and nests with brightly feathered birds standing guard over huge eggs stitched in blue and yellow. Flanking the road at its own level, the caves of Ahkenbad were larger and more elaborate. Figures carved in bas-relief seemed to writhe in sinuous dances around each entrance—strange, stern desert spirits glaring over an abandoned marketplace that lined the road with just a few tattered awnings draped on poles. Beneath the faded canopies, among the empty bins and broken bits of oil jars, aged Tashek nomads stared into a distance that had nothing to do with the handful of paces between themselves and Llesho's party.

"The chamber of the dream readers." Balar directed his attention to a cave with an entrance more elaborately decorated than the others. With an effort, he let go of his tense contemplation of the Tashek elders who lined the streets more terrifyingly than the great stone dancers, and looked where Balar pointed.

Set at the very center of the mountainside, a jagged cave entrance stretched like the gaping mouth of a monstrous dragon out of Dognut's songs. Around the yawning arch of its mouth, open wide as if to swallow the road, artisans had carved the stone into sharp, curved, dragon teeth. A broad flat nose flared over the mouth, the smoke of fires perfumed with sandalwood and cedar drifting from its deep nostrils. The plates and horns of a dragon's ruff made a halo around the entrance. On the top of the carved head, great horns rose like columns flanking the entrance to a cave that opened atop the dragon's head. Great eyes had been carved in the half-closed position of a sleeping dragon, with deep blue flashes of lapis just hinted at between the lashes. They reminded Llesho too much of the Golden River Dragon's impersonation of a bridge, stirring a creeping terror in his heart.

While he stood transfixed, wondering if he would survive a meeting with yet another legend, someone pushed aside a cloth of heavy silk and came toward them out of the dragon's mouth.

"Balar, did you find—"

Except for his shaved head, this man could have been Llesho himself in another ten years. They were of equal height and had the same dark coloring, though he paled when he saw Llesho.

"Sweet heavenly Goddess, you have found him."

To Llesho's consternation, his newfound brother fell to one knee and bowed his head at Llesho's feet. Then, all along the road they had travelled, the aged Tashek mystics followed his example, bending aching joints to kneel in the grit, their heads bowed to the young prince.

"Lluka?" he asked in disbelief, "What are you doing down there?"

C HAPTER E LEVEN

Lluka stood slowly, his glittering eyes dry in his weather-pinched face. A strange mix of calculation and emotion seemed to pass behind that searching gaze.

In the slaver's office, where they'd met to rescue each other, neither Adar nor Shokar had succeeded in hiding their anguish and the love they felt for their youngest brother. In the fleeting moment before the Harn attacked the inn at Durnhag, Balar's joy at finding his brother had shone in his face. When he stared into Lluka's eyes, however, Llesho felt only the slow glide of secrets rising out of darkness. Lluka wanted something from him, and he wasn't sure Llesho would give it.

"I don't understand—" He turned to Balar for his answers, trusting at least his own powers to read the man who'd kidnapped him and dragged him across the desert.

"The Dinha said to bring , so I did." Balar shrugged, clearly hiding something.

"And Lluka is the Dinha?"

Balar shook his head. "No. We are both simple students in the service of the Dinha."

That answer didn't satisfy him at all. He scanned the crowd, looking for a less guarded source of information. Harlol had stopped to embrace an aged crone with a wrinkled, leathery face. She handed him a pair of curved swords suspended from a tooled leather belt and he buckled them under his coats, low about his waist. He stood taller, balanced over his knees like a soldier, and met Llesho's gaze steadily.

"The merchant Shou called you a Wastrel," Llesho answered the challenge. They both remembered when Shou had taunted the Tashek drover over poised swords.

Harlol dropped his head once in acknowledgment. "The Dinha sent Wastrels to bring you here before the Uulgar Harn could take you to the magician. I had the advantage of our Harnish friends, however. Lluka and Balar have studied with the Dinha for many years; the family likeness stamps you like a coin. Adar, I was not so sure of. I meant to test him, but I would not have killed your brother."

"His blood stains the blades you drew on him." The memory squeezed like a fist around Llesho's heart. So much he might have lost on that morning—a brother, a friend. The emperor of Shan. The world had almost come undone. "Did you know that our host would answer your challenge? If not Adar, did you plan to murder Shou?"

"Your merchant should have stayed out of it."

Stubborn. Llesho was unimpressed. "And for defending his guest, you would have killed him?"

"I might have tried." Harlol laughed softly. "I hoped only to scare him a little, but there is more to our pompous merchant than he seems."

He wasn't laughing now, but settled those uncanny sharp eyes on Llesho, as if he could find his answers in an unguarded emotion. "He fights like no fool but rather like a man whose life has dangled on the point of a sword many times. And I had worried him. Among the Tashek I'm considered one of the best, but I count myself lucky to have survived the encounter."

"And your Dinha wished this because . . . ?" Llesho sidestepped the question of Shou's identity, referring instead to the testing of Adar, and his own kidnapping.

Lluka interrupted before Harlol could answer. "If you will come with me, she'll tell you herself." With a clap of his hands, he called out, "Shelter for our guests, and water—"

Several of the Tashek scurried to do his bidding, with the dwarf's grumbling from atop Shou's stolen camel only adding to the general commotion. "About time," he muttered, and grumbled at Kagar to: "Let me down, before my legs fall off up here."

As if released from the spell of Ahkenbad, Kagar raced to Dognut's side and unhooked the ladder from the saddle pack. When the dwarf had made his painful way to the ground, complaining with each step about the sting of returning life in his legs, Lluka gathered them up in the sweep of his arm.

"Come in out of the heat. You are safe now—from discovery, at least."

"The Dinha wants to ask you some questions." Balar fell in beside him with wry gloom written on his face.

Llesho nodded. The exhaustion he had fought for so long would have felled him if his brother hadn't taken him by the arm. "Some great power muddies the flow of dreams. She thinks it may be you."

With more effort than he had to spare, Llesho mustered a retort. "I didn't do anything. The Dinha would do better to concentrate on Master Markko. If he finds us unprepared, we are doomed."

"The magician failed, at least in this—the magic of Ahkenbad turned his forces aside. You, however, found the hidden city in spite of all its protections. If nothing else, it proves the city wants you here."

"I just followed you," Llesho objected. "I didn't even control the reins of my own horse for most of the journey."

"Ah, but we didn't know the way." His voice kept very low, Balar murmured for only Llesho to hear. "We followed you."

"You live here, and so do Harlol and Kagar. Of course you knew your way back."

"We couldn't find the way." Balar gave a little shrug, accepting the strangeness of it. "We'd still be lost in the desert if we hadn't followed you."

He didn't believe it for a minute, and suspected that Lluka didn't either. Balar did, though, so there wasn't any point in arguing it with him. "And what was that bending and kneeling about anyway? The last time I saw Lluka, he refused to speak to me because I broke one of the screws on his lute."

"He has his moods, but he loved you. More than that I will leave for the Dinha to explain."

Llesho felt the past tense of that like a sharp cut. He said nothing, however, but followed his brother into the mouth of the dragon.

Whatever he had set himself to expect, it wasn't the dim but opulent chamber that he discovered there. A single lantern rested on a table fashioned from a rocky outcropping at the center of the massive cave. Skilled artisans had plastered the soft rock of the walls and ceiling until they were as smooth as fine paper. They'd decorated every surface with elaborate paintings of date trees with birds nesting in them and curious spirits with tongues of fire dancing above their heads. In the flickering lamplight, the spirits seemed to nod their heads at one another, their eyes reflecting the lantern's flame with otherworldly purpose.

Amid the spirits dancing on the walls at the back of the cave, a staircase carved from the living stone of the mountain ascended into the darkness. The floor was covered in a thick layering of carpets, and cushions lay scattered about for people to sit upon. Most were taken up by silent figures who sat perfectly still with their eyes open but unseeing, like the dead. For a brief, irrational moment, Llesho imagined that life had fled those human shells to take up residence in the more lively gazes of the spirits painted on the walls above them. He shivered even as he rejected the notion. No mystical transference of life essence, but the skill of the artists and his own imagination brought those images to life. Or so he hoped.

Several old Tashek trailed them into the cavern and found their own places on the floor. Lluka directed him to an empty cushion and Balar took a place at Llesho's right. Dognut settled himself in a corner that seemed to be fitted out for his special use. Harlol, the last to enter, took up a position as sentry at the entrance to the cave.

Llesho found that he was sitting across from a crone who slept, barely breathing, sitting upright with legs bent in the lotus. Her eyes were open, like the others of her kind, but covered by cataracts that turned the orbs in her head to milky pearls and he shuddered with some supernatural dread. Even blind and asleep, the old Tashek woman seemed to be studying him. It felt like she'd stripped him naked in front of all the gathered company.

With a touch on the shoulder, Balar distracted him from his momentary discomfort. "Dinha," he said, dropping his gaze in a respectful bow, "I have brought my brother-prince, as you spoke the dream."

"You have done well, my child."

Llesho trembled at the shock of her raspy whisper. "I thought you were sleeping."

"We are," she answered, "sleeping. You are our dream."

She smiled at his consternation, though how she saw his frown remained a mystery to him.

Lluka handed Balar a plain silver cup, but to Llesho he held out the jade cup of the Lady SienMa before seating himself at Llesho's left. A Tashek youth followed with a tall pitcher in his hand. He knelt before them, carefully pouring a scant inch of water into each cup. No one offered refreshment to the old Tashek dream readers seated together in the dragon's mouth, although each sat dust-covered and with parched lips.

"As you see, however, even the holy city has little hospitality to offer." The Dinha gave a nod in Lluka's direction, and the prince accepted permission to speak.

"Too much has happened since you left us, Balar, and little of it has been good."

Balar sighed and drank his scanty portion. "The situation outside is worse than we thought as well," he warned the gathering. "Our enemies are close behind us. We lost them as we approached the city, but they will not have gone far."

Llesho cocked his head, looking within himself for the sensation that had lately preyed upon his mind. He found nothing.

"They're gone," he said.

"Who?" Lluka asked as Balar pressed, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Llesho insisted. "For now, at least. I felt it when they lost our track, like a stone lifted from my heart, but waiting to fall again."

He did not say, "It was during a dream about a pig in her ladyship's garden," but he thought perhaps it would not surprise the Dinha. "Now, the stone has turned to dust. Something turned them away."

Silent but watchful behind her unseeing eyes, the Dinha listened carefully. Then, with a languid gesture that seemed to arise out of dreams, she raised a hand to halt the questions. "Our guest needs rest."

She subsided again into trance, while Lluka took up duties as host. "You will want to sleep. I regret that we have no bath to offer you, but the spirits of the desert have struck Ahkenbad a terrible blow."

"Then it has happened—" Balar frowned. "The holy well no longer flows?"

"It fell to a trickle soon after you left us, and for days now the bucket has brought up only sand. We have a day or two in reserve, if we are cautious, but not enough water to hold Ahkenbad against the dry time, nor sufficient to take the old ones out of the desert. That supposes they would leave or had a safe place to go if they could travel. The dream readers of Ahkenbad have withdrawn into the dreaming way. They've given their share to the acolytes who stayed behind to serve them, but their sacrifice gains us just a few hours."