"I'm sorry." Balar let his head fall.

Llesho reached a hand to touch his brother's shoulder, as if he could somehow take the weight of desperate knowledge from him. So this explained the parched creases of Lluka's face. How long had he gone without water so that Llesho could drink? It reminded him too much of the Long March. He couldn't say that he liked these newfound brothers yet, but Lleck had told him to find them all, not just the ones who loved him. And he'd lost too many already—his people on the Long March; his teacher, Master Jaks, in battle; and now maybe Hmishi, too, sacrificed so that Llesho could complete a task he'd never asked for. He would not lose these brothers and the chance to know them again, to gain another day or two of life without them.

"If you die for me, I won't forgive you for it, ever," Llesho swore at his brother.

"I'll do my best to keep us all alive," Lluka assured him in return. "But the Dinha insists that you hold our fate in your hands, and in your dreams."

"And the goddess, your lady wife? What do you see with her gifts?"

"I see light reflecting off tears, and locked gates that have lost their keys." Lluka rose to his feet and offered him a hand up. "And maybe—after long seasons of searching—we have found the great key."

Llesho would have objected, but he had grown tired of making denials that no one believed anyway. He scarcely recognized this man whose voice managed to convey both irony and hope without letting any of his secrets go. Hard to remember that Lluka had been no older than Llesho himself was now when last they'd seen each other. His brother hadn't suffered the Long March, the battles, or the years of captivity to lay calluses on his heart, but his own hardships had changed him into this distant stranger with the farseeing look of the desert. Llesho missed the young idealist, the musician who glowed with the blessings of the goddess in his eyes.

"Do you still play the lute?" he asked.

"Often. I like to think the goddess accepts my music as the offering of a devoted husband. I hope that I give her some pleasure, and some peace, in these terrible times."

Llesho nodded, satisfied that this at least had not changed.

"You'd better rest while you can. Tomorrow we'll keep you busy performing miracles." The sun had set, casting the dragon cave into greater darkness, and Llesho felt the pull of sleep. Wearily he followed his brother to the back of the cave where Dognut sat watching with quick, dark eyes. As Llesho passed, he picked up a reed flute and played a simple lullaby, softly so that the sound barely reached beyond the niche where the stone staircase began. He wondered if the tune were meant to mock him in some way, but the dwarf looked troubled, and he finished with a sad smile.

"Sleep safely, young prince. Don't let the dreams steal all your rest."

Master Den had spoken with respect of the dream readers of Ahkenbad. Llesho had gotten the impression they were councillors of some kind, and his brothers' presence in the holy city inclined him to trust them. But Master Den was, in his true form, a trickster god, and his brothers had kidnapped him, abandoning the emperor of Shan to capture or death. So he answered, "I won't," and determined to stay on his guard even in sleep.

"No one will hurt you here," Lluka assured him with a glare for the dwarf.

Dognut gave no reply, so Llesho figured they were both telling the truth. He didn't know how that could be, but he followed up the stone staircase anyway, to the chamber that opened between the horns of the dragon.

There was no lantern, no plastered walls or paintings in the tiny cave, just a few rugs scattered on the rough stone floor and a pallet in the corner with his pack lying beside it. But the chamber seemed to glow with a faint light gleaming from the frozen crystals that pulsed like living veins in the rough walls.

"Sleep well. The Dinha will guard your dreams tonight. Not even Ahkenbad can promise safety beyond that. I wish . . ."

Llesho heard the unspoken good-bye. So this was his brother's secret, or part of it. The goddess had given her husband the gift of past and future. But in all those millions of tomorrows, Lluka saw himself in none.

"The spirit of our father's minister charged me to gather all of my brothers." Llesho gripped Lluka's shoulder and shook him, as if he could rattle some sense into him. "Without you, there is no hope."

Lluka smiled. "It shall be as the goddess wishes." The serenity of his expression seemed at odds with the blood that beaded on his cracked lips.

"Just make sure it's the goddess you're listening to," Llesho warned him. "We don't know what these Gansau spirits may want of us, or what they will do to get it." Superstitious fear kept the name of Master Markko from his lips. He would not bring his enemy into this holy place, although he feared the magician's hand in his brother's despair.

"Don't worry about me." Lluka left him with a bloody kiss at his brow. "Sleep in peace."

It didn't take a seer to realize the prince had made no promises. Deep in his troubled thoughts, Llesho dropped to the pallet, though he was certain he would not sleep. The conversation with the Dinha had sapped the last of his energy, however; his lids fell heavily, draping lashes like a curtain over his dreams.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SEEP drifted in layers through his clouded mind. In one dream, his brothers brought him to the Dinha, who questioned him and bade him sleep. In another, the searching gazes of two magicians crossed like knives in the dreamscape. One magician looked for him with concern turning into panic, the other cut through his resistance as he sought the images that would lead him to Llesho's hiding place. In his dreams, Llesho fled from the dark rage of Master Markko, but he couldn't reach Habiba through the sightless night thick with the sounds of captivity—Hmishi, weeping brokenly, and harsh cries with the timbre of Emperor Shou's desperate voice.

"I don't want to be here," his mind told him, and cool fingers touched his brow, fading the terror to nothing. In the darkness that remained, relieved only by the faint light of the distant stars, Llesho stumbled on a narrow path. This was not his bed. He felt his way with a hand pressed against the cave-pocked cliff rising up on his left. To his right the empty dark of a blind fall to the valley floor lurked in wait for him. As it had in the desert, the huge black pig entered his dreams unbidden. The night was too thick to make out the creature clearly; Llesho saw only a mass of darker shadows swallowing the night ahead, blocking the way. Little piggy eyes glittered at him with a hard black light, like the pearls of the goddess that Llesho wore at his breast. He nodded to accept the visitor to his sleep, and the pig dipped his head in acknowledgment. The massive bulk on the path flowed and reshaped itself, and the pig began the steep ascent.

Llesho followed ever higher into the hills. The caves they passed were hung with cloths that crawled with shadows in the dark, but the stillness from their depths was complete. Whoever had lived or worshiped here had fled long ago, leaving only the sad reminders of their passing in the tatters covering the entrances to the caves. After a while even these abandoned coverings fell behind. The blind and empty mouths of the deep upper caverns whispered to him with the ghosts of winds passing through unknown cracks in the mountainside. The cave city of Ahkenbad lay below, while above only darkness and the holy, hidden places awaited. Llesho climbed, following the pig who waited patiently on the path and led him forward again when he caught up.

"You can't exactly lose me," Llesho complained. "There's no place to go except up this merciless goat track."

The pig, not surprisingly, said nothing, but trotted ahead, until they came to a turning where a date tree clutched desperate roots into the hillside. The creature pushed at the roots of the tree with his tusks, then gave Llesho a speaking look.

"You want me to dig?" Llesho asked, and when the pig continued to stare at him, he fell to his knees and cast about him for a stick or flat stone with which to dig. He had no need for tools, however. As he leaned into his search he felt his back twist and stretch, his fingers grow together until, looking down at them, he discovered that his hands had become the pink feet of a pig with sharp hooves at the ends.

'What is happening to me?' he tried to say, but the harsh oinks and squeals of a pig came from his throat.

Dropping his head in misery at the foot of the date tree, he moaned in mournful piggy tones while his guide stamped at the ground above him.

"What do you want?" The words came out in pig grunts, as Llesho feared they would. The creature seemed to understand, though he said nothing in return. He stared deeply into Llesho's own piggy eyes, and pawed the ground again.

"All right!" Llesho snuffled around the roots of the withered tree, seeking out a hint of a scent. There, right there—he pushed his snout into the dirt, trying to get closer to the elusive smell, and tusks at either side of his mouth drove deep gouges into the baked ground. He dug at the root with his hooves, snuffling his snout under the tree when he had cleared space enough. There . . . there . . . trapped in a hole beneath the date tree, he found the black pearl bound in silver wire he remembered from his dream on the road, and nudged it free with his broad flat nose. He reached for it; his forehoof stretched, became fingers again, and he snatched the pearl up in the palm of his hand and clutched it tight in his new-made fist. The smell he had followed was stronger now. Water. He'd found water, could hear it maddening him with its call. When he tried to bring a handful to his mouth, however, he woke to find himself still on his pallet in the cave of glowing crystals.

"Lluka!" he called.

When nobody answered, he struggled onto his feet and staggered to the staircase, determined to find the path of his dreams and uncover the sleeping pearl. Cross-legged on their pillows, the dream readers remained as they had been, staring into their mystical visions with eyes that saw past the material world. Llesho gave them only the briefest glance as he headed for the entrance. When he pushed the silk curtain aside and wandered out onto the road, he discovered that dawn had come to Ahkenbad, and with it a stir of excitement and hope that he had not seen on his arrival.

"Llesho! Wake up!" Lluka tapped him cautiously on the shoulder.

"Where am I?" Llesho blinked, embarrassed, and squinted into the sunlit road.

"Ahkenbad. You were walking in your sleep."

"Now I remember." But it didn't feel like a true memory at all. How much of it had been a dream?

Balar was walking carefully toward them, a plain earthen cup in his hands and a broad grin splitting his lips.

"Water!" He held up the cup for Llesho to see. "The spirits of the desert favor you. The holy well has begun to flow again. Drink!"

Water. Aged Tashek mystics wandered out of their caves, giving praise to the spirits of the Wastes for the return of the holy well. The smell of it reminded Llesho of his thirst. He hadn't had a chance to drink at the spring above the city, and he reached for the cup only to discover that his hand remained clenched in a fist pale as a pig's hoof. Dried dirt crusted his nails and plastered the cracks between his fingers.

Balar rubbed the pad of his index finger across Llesho's nose, bringing it away again with mud on the tip. "Where have you been roaming in your sleep—" He frowned, staring thoughtfully at his finger, then his head came up abruptly, eyes wide and his mouth round as he gasped, "Oh!" Lluka glanced from one brother to the other, then took Llesho's clenched fist in his hand and carefully pried open each finger. There, on Llesho's dirty palm, lay a black pearl.

At Lluka's gasp, the Tashek passing nearest them came closer and when the brothers dropped to their knees, the Tashek did likewise.

"Get up!" Llesho colored like a berry, overcome with embarrassment. "This is ridiculous!"

The brothers stood, but they seemed only to be humoring him. The Tashek came more slowly to their feet. Whispers spread out from their center, and the crowd of devotees grew around them as Llesho explained. "The black pig led me to a date tree up in the hills. The pearl had blocked a spring at the base of the tree. I thought it was a dream, but I must have walked in my sleep." He did not mention turning into a pig. They would probably believe it, and he wasn't ready for that.

"There are no pigs in Ahkenbad," Balar informed him. "And no date tree in the hills."

Lluka nodded, rejecting Llesho's effort to make sense of the pearl in his hand. "I watched through the night, and you never strayed from your bed in the acolyte's cavern until just now, when I woke you," he insisted. "If anyone had come in or gone out, the guards would have alerted me."

Llesho remembered fingers on his forehead, but said nothing about them. He reached inside his shirt instead, and drew out the pouch in which he had carried the black pearls since leaving Shan. All three lay inside it. Neither of his brothers looked particularly surprised, but it bothered Llesho. It was one thing to dream of a place and find it afterward, and quite another to bring a pearl out of a dream and into the light of day. And, if he could believe his dream, he held no pearl at all but the transformed person of Pig, the beloved gardener of the Great Goddess' heavenly orchards.

"Let me through!"

Reprieve! Harlol blustered his way through the crowd, drawing up in front of Lluka. "The dream readers of Ahkenbad have awakened," he announced. "The Dinha requests the presence of the Thebin princes."

Llesho shook his head, seized by the notion that the mouth of the Dragon Cave would snap shut and swallow him up forever. He didn't have a rational explanation for the feeling, so he mumbled something instead about being hungry to divert their attention.

It didn't work. Lluka had grown more determined in the years since his childhood in Kungol. "The Dinha will feed you," he insisted, and drew Llesho away from the curious Tashek who followed, tugging at his coats as he passed.

"Why are they doing that?"

"They believe your touch will confer blessings, even healing, on their families." Balar looked as if he ought to know this, but Llesho didn't know why. Thebins didn't put much stock in talismanic magic, and certainly no one in Shan had looked upon his person as sacred. It might have saved him a few nasty practice sessions with knife and sword if they had.

"They've got the wrong brother," he grumbled. "Llu-ka's the mystic around here. If they need a healer, you should have rescued Adar instead of me."

"They needed a dreamer to bring back the water," Lluka reminded him, "You saved them—all of us, actually. The dream readers of Ahkenbad wish to thank you, no doubt."

"Nothing to worry about—" Balar clapped him on the back, but Llesho didn't find it reassuring. "The dream readers of Ahkenbad are perfectly civil when they're awake. They'll probably pinch your cheek and cluck at each other about what a fine young man you are. It likely won't make a bit of sense, but it will keep them happy. Once they've checked you out, you can ask them questions if you want."

"The Dinha's answers didn't sound very useful last night," Llesho reminded him, to which Balar nodded enthusiastic agreement.

"Oh, the answers won't make any sense when you hear them. When it's too late, you'll realize what you should have done, if they'd been more straightforward about their warnings in the first place."

It sounded like every bit of advice he'd ever gotten— straight-forward enough until it turned out you hadn't understood it at all.

But Lluka was looking at him as if he'd grown a second head, and it was speaking in tongues. "Be quiet, Balar! He didn't see the Dinha last night."

"What? Oh. No, the dream readers haven't woken in weeks," Balar agreed. "You must have the Dinha confused with one of the acolytes, though that hardly seems likely. Of course, if you haven't met the Dinha, you wouldn't know that."

"She was old," Llesho said, "and blind. And you, Lluka, led me to a chamber above the cave of the dream readers, lit by seams of natural crystals running through the walls."

"The Dinha is not blind, though it is said that dreaming, her eyes turn inward." Lluka searched his face, as if he could pierce Llesho's soul and spy out the mysteries hiding there. "You had a dream, and in your dream, you had another dream, and in that nested dream, you saved all our lives."

The mystery is in my hand, not my eyes, he thought. The gifts of the sleeping world were supposed to vanish with the rising sun, but the black pearl still lay in the palm of his hand.

His brothers did not speak for a moment, though they said much to each other with glances. Gifted with the sight of past and future, Lluka did not look pleased when he admitted, "The futures I've seen are unclear. That doesn't have to mean anything, of course. Seeing the future is an imprecise art; but this, I did not see at all."

"Sounds like a pretty useless gift to me." Llesho wasn't really asking—the answer to his own question was plain in his tone of voice, that they were not gifts at all, but a major inconvenience. Shokar thought so, too. He'd received no gifts, and often declared himself the happier for it.

Lluka raised a wry eyebrow. It was hard to deny the charge, after all. "The gifts of the goddess are like a garment cut to the shape of our older selves. As we grow in the spirit, time and the use we make of our gifts improve the fit."

"And you, Balar, have you grown into your gifts?" Llesho wanted to know.

Balar shook his head. "Sometimes," he said, "I think that they are not gifts at all, but a madness that comes of approaching too closely matters that are beyond our comprehension."

"Sounds like a husband to me," Lluka commented tartly. "The Dinha awaits us, however. I suggest we do not leave her to cool her heels like a supplicant while we debate family history."

"I have plenty of questions for the Dinha, like why they sent you to steal me from my quest and drag me across the desert. And why we abandoned Adar and our companions to the enemies who wish our whole family dead."

Lluka tried to stare him down, but that hadn't even worked for Master Den, who was himself a god. It surely wasn't going to work for his brother, however much a mystic he had become.

"If you really see the past and the future, you know that glaring at me never changed my mind or my course of action."

"Use caution, at least. You cross the dream readers of Ahkenbad at your peril." Lluka's warning clashed discordantly with Balar's assurances, but Balar was the brother who looked uncomfortable.

"They won't strike you dead or anything," Balar protested, but had to concede, "but they can make you squirm like an ant under a lens if you try to hide the truth from them."

"Some secrets are worth even my life to keep."

Lluka shook him roughly by the shoulder. "Don't even think it, little brother. Yours may be the only life we can't afford to lose."

"You don't know that."

He'd faced death and wonders alike in his journey, and apparently he'd learned a thing or two from his masters about glaring. Lluka dropped his sleeve and took a step back, which brought a pleased smile to Balar's lips. "For my sixth natal day, I asked the goddess to gift me with a new wonder every day. She hasn't disappointed me yet."

Llesho suddenly found himself in common cause with Lluka—the two of them glared in unison at their brother. Then Lluka turned on his heel and followed Harlol a short distance up the Stone River Road, toward the cavern where the Tashek dream readers awaited them.

Harlol stepped aside as the brothers entered the dragon's head cavern between the stony dragon's teeth. Then he took up his position as guard, exactly as he had the night before, with his hands crossed on the swords at his waist. The Dragon Cave looked the same, the spirits painted on the walls even more lifelike in the filtered light of the Great Sun than by lantern. Dognut still slept in the corner by the stone staircase and Lluka again took the cushion at Llesho's left, with Balar to his right. Unlike in his dream, however, busy acolytes brushed by with whispered apologies to set up low tables and load them with food and drink. As Balar had said, most of them, dream readers and acolytes alike, were women, though a few were men. He recognized a boy his own age who had offered him an inch at the bottom of his jade cup to drink in his dream. The flick of a glance told him that the servant shared the memory.

"Welcome, Prince of Dreams." The Dinha gestured with a jut of her chin at the waiting food spread out before them, "Join us, please, in breaking our fast while we talk."

Llesho recognized the Dinha immediately from his dream. She looked the same except that her eyes were brown, with glints of amber that twinkled her amusement at him. He wanted to deny it, to pretend he didn't know this woman, this place, but the black pearl clasped in his fist gave physical proof of the impossible and no comfort at all.

The Dinha seemed to follow his thoughts. She reached to touch the jewel, and Llesho clenched his fingers more tightly, drawing it reflexively to his heart. Around them, from a noose of lives, rose a single breathless gasp.

"My lady." He bowed a deep apology, but found himself at a loss to explain his unwillingness to open his hand.

"I beg your pardon, young prince. It was ill thought. No one will take the pearl from you."

"What do you want of me?"

"We would only honor your gift with one of our own. Weightier discussion can await a full stomach, however." At a gesture, a young Tashek knelt before him with a basin.

"You will want to wash."

Drying mud still clung to the pearl in his grubby hand. He saw no head, no tail, no piggy feet, but felt a superstitious dread of drowning the goddess' gardener in his own bathwater. The Tashek acolyte seemed to understand his problem. She dipped a cloth into the basin, and wiped the back of his hand carefully with it, until he took it from her and cleaned the pearl with equal care. When the mud was gone, a fine tracery of silver wire was revealed, wrapping the familiar black sheen. Each threadlike curl led to a central keyhole loop: a setting for a jewel or a prison for a Jinn? Dreams and reality had tangled themselves so closely together that he scarcely knew one from the other any more.

The dream readers of Ahkenbad nodded approval in unison, and one of them, an old man whose knees squeaked when he levered himself upright, came forward with a silver chain offered in his outstretched hands.

"I know this chain." Llesho shuddered, and clutched the pearl more tightly in his hand. "In dreams, it hung around the neck of my enemy."

"A warning," the Dinha agreed. "But did you fear the chain, or the enemy who held it?"

Both, and more. Memories of other chains tangled themselves in the silver links: Lord Chin-shi's chain in Pearl Bay, his imprisonment in Master Markko's workshop, and Farshore's lighter bondage. He would have refused the gift if it hadn't echoed in all his dreams, like fate. But Llesho had no intention of sharing that with strangers. He let the old man slip the chain over his head, but hid the pearl itself in the pouch with the others he had collected.

After waking to find all his memories of Ahkenbad were dreams, and then sparring with the Tashek Dinha over the meaning of the pearl he had discovered on the mountain, breakfast seemed a mundane letdown. But Llesho had spent the greater part of his recent journeys on a diet of unidentifiable boiled fodder for humans that made him wonder if he wouldn't do better to forage with the camels. With its supply of water refreshed, Ahkenbad dug into its store of supplies to feast the visiting prince, and the wonderful smells drew him to the table as if a spell had been cast on his taste buds.

Vegetables, cooked just enough to bring up their colors and their aromas, dominated the spread, with a variety of pickles served over a millet dish cooked to tenderness but not to mush. Some dishes the acolytes served warm, and others came to the tables cooled by the waters of the Holy Well of Ahkenbad. Flatbreads and other grains supplemented the main dishes.

The lay of the table jogged a memory from deep in Llesho's childhood. It drifted out of his past with the image of his mother's reception room so sharp in his mind he thought he could reach out and touch her chair. He had sat at her feet and quietly watched and listened as a delegation from the caravans out of the Gansau Wastes had stopped to pay its respects. When his mother had called for refreshments, she'd explained that the religious among the Tashek would eat only cooked food. The most holy castes among them took only plant material, never animal.

He'd seen Harlol eat meat when they'd had it, and with gusto, of course. Perhaps there were different rules for Wastrels, or spies. Whatever recipes those dancing gods on the walls demanded, the Tashek had made the best of them, however. The food gave up wonderful smells, pungent and sweet, that brought water to the desert of Llesho's mouth. He filled a bowl with vegetables and round slices of pickle, and gave only half a glance at the young woman who approached him with a tray on which sat an elaborately wrought urn of tea and his own jade cup taken from his pack. When she set the tray down in front of him, a flash of eye, an ironic twist of the lip drew his attention for a second look. Kagar!

"You're a girl!" he whispered, trying to keep the secret in spite of his shock.

"Since I was born," Kagar whispered back her admission.

The acolytes who attended them gave no sign of hearing the hushed conversation, but the Dinha drew away the veil of illusion with a wry smile. "Tashek women do not wander in the world as Wastrels. Though called to the dream readers' cavern, our Kagar wished to challenge the ordering of such things."

"I did it, too. No one ever suspected, except Lling, who kept my secret."

Llesho wasn't sure he was more surprised by the idea that Kagar was a girl or the notion that Lling had kept such a big secret from him. He consoled himself that it hadn't been her secret to tell, but he still felt like a fool for being the only person in the room who couldn't tell a girl from a boy.

"Now you are home," the Dinha continued with a gentle smile, "And a better acolyte for your experience of the outside world, I trust."

"Until the next time."

Kagar gave the promise that the Dinha seemed to expect, but the dream reader's smile faltered.

"Until the next time," she agreed. Her eyes became suspiciously bright, and Llesho wondered if only the parched weeks without water kept the tears from falling.

But his brother's awed, hushed tones drew his attention to the table, where Lluka reached hesitantly to touch the cup Kagar had set in front of him.

"Surely wonders have returned to walk among us," Lluka whispered with a shake of his head.

Balar's gaze quickly followed. "Have you lost your mind?" He took the bowl carefully in his two hands and lifted it for a closer look, his face paled and suffused with dark blood by turns. "Do you know what this is?"

"It's a bowl." Llesho felt an ages dead self looking out of his own eyes. The world he saw differed little from the one he had known many deaths ago, and he lowered his eyelashes to hide that knowledge from his companions. He wondered if that long-gone self had ever been wiser than he was now, and felt an echo of laughter skitter along his nerve endings. Who was to say what was wise, his past self asked him, and he had to admit he didn't know.

Llesho thought he had moved quickly enough to hide the lives that echoed within him, but his brother dropped his head in awe, and held out the bowl like a supplicant. "The universe turns on the head of a pin," he prophesied, "and you are that pin. Tell us what to do."

"Try not being an ass," Llesho advised him in a tart whisper, "and let me have my tea." He retrieved the bowl and held it out to Kagar, who filled it with a dare in her eyes. The drover warranted more thought, but not now, with his brothers asking questions and the dream readers of Ahkenbad watching every move he made.

"Where did you find it?" Lluka asked.

"A gift," he said, and sipped from it before setting it aside in favor of a plate of food.

"There is a room above this chamber." Between bites, Llesho pointed to the staircase at the back of the cavern, and the Dinha nodded to confirm the memory.

"I slept there last night, and dreamed of the black Pig-"

"You slept in the guest quarters on the outskirts of Ahkenbad," the Dinha corrected him gently, with a smile. "Sleeping, you joined the dream readers of the holy city. And in your dream, you had a dream in which the honored Jinn led you to the hidden spring that feeds the Holy Well of Ahkenbad."

"That's what I thought." Llesho licked the sticky pickle sauce from his fingertips. "You said you wanted to help me," he reminded the Dinha. "What did you mean?"

"We are the Tashek dream readers," she began, needlessly at this point. "From your brothers we understand that young bridegrooms who receive magical gifts of your goddess find their own way to mastery. This was not always so, however. The royal family of Kungol once received tutors from all the lands that made use of, Theb-in's high passes. Although the passes are now closed to us, the dream readers of Ahkenbad offer themselves as tutors to the princes of Thebin, a post they filled for your father's father, many summers past and which they have filled for your brothers since the fall of Kingol. Stay with us a while, until you learn the art of your gift."

Llesho helped himself to a serving of dates and figs in honey while he considered the offer. "You haven't helped my brothers much," he pointed out.

Balar pinched him, a reminder of royal manners. But it was true, and the Dinha took no offense.

"We have taught your brothers patience, and a mastery of their own minds, but their gifts are not those of Ahkenbad. You are ; in gentler times, our tutors would have sought you out in your own holy city. Now, we have but a brief reprieve to do our duty before you must continue your journey."

Llesho wondered what she meant by a brief reprieve. Master Den had advised that he needed a dream reader, but that was before the Harn had taken their company prisoner. Even if he accepted that his dreams had more meaning, more power, than he knew, how could he abandon his friends and brother to the tortures of Master Markko while he developed his inner gifts? And Shou was himself a favorite of the mortal goddess SienMa. She would doubtless take offense if he allowed the Harn to murder the emperor, whose death would also plunge the Shan Empire and its neighbors into chaos. As his first act of statecraft, making an enemy of her ladyship while unleashing havoc upon the civilized world seemed a poor choice.

"The times do not call for patience," he pointed out.

"I understand." The Dinha bowed to acknowledge the truth of his words. He suspected that the dream readers understood more than he would have liked. The Dinha gave him a rueful smile, as if she read his mind. "We cannot regret the good you have done for Ahkenbad, however, and would repay the service you have done us. You have seen one in your dreams, a magician on a white horse—"

"Habiba," Llesho agreed, while an acolyte poured water over his sticky hands and offered him a soft cloth to dry them.

"You are right that he can help you, but so can the dream readers of Ahkenbad. Soon you will need us both. Don't reject our aid because you don't like the manner in which you were brought to find it." With that the old ones closed their eyes.

"We've been dismissed." Lluka rose effortlessly to his feet, something Llesho did with considerably less grace. Balar followed, and together they made their way out of the cavern of the dream readers, and found themselves once again bathed in the heat and light of the Stone River Road.

Master Den's words in the dark of a caravanary carried the force of a prophecy. "The Tashek have the most revered dream readers," the master had said. But had he spoken as a wise teacher or as trickster? For the good of the dream readers or for Llesho's own quest? The universe seemed to turn under him in the yellow dust, tumblers falling into places he still couldn't see. The almost-vision of it made him dizzy.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"ARE you all right, brother?"

Lluka tightened a hand on his shoulder. He brushed it aside and wandered farther into the road, staring up at the cliffs where waves of color broke against a sea of sandstone bleached pale in the sun. Somewhere beyond the cliff city a presence wandered; he cocked his head and listened for a change in the wind that would tell him the storm was coming. The wind stayed quiet. Llesho dug deeper, into the place where dreams and hunches lurked, for an explanation. Not the dark oppression of Master Markko's questing eye; he'd recognize in an instant the magician's pressure on his mind. A little thrill of anticipation ran through him. Llesho walked out to meet it. Troubled, his brothers stayed where he left them, but Harlol was right on his heels, nervous, with his hands on his swords' hilts.

"Where are you going?"

"To meet my destiny," Llesho gave him the flip answer. He hadn't figured out what was drawing him into the desert, and likely wouldn't have told the Tashek warrior anyway. He just knew he had to go out to meet it, whatever it was.

Harlol fell in step beside him.

"Why are you following me?"

The Wastrel cut him a sideways glance, indicating with a raised eyebrow that he didn't, in the strictest sense, follow Llesho. Having made his point, he answered the spirit of the question. "It's my job. The Dinha charged me to defend , so where you go, I go. It would be a lot easier on both of us if you would just stay put."

"Not going to happen," Llesho advised him. He didn't slow down.

"You could at least tell me where we're going." "I would if I knew." Llesho kept walking. "Then you'll probably need this—" Harlol didn't expend his energy on argument. He reached into his coat and drew out Llesho's sword. "If we will need more than our blades, an army, for instance, tell me now."

"It's enough, thanks." Llesho attached the weapon to his own side. Then, pulling hoods and veils over their heads to protect them from the elements, they marched in step, out past the cave city and into the desert.

They walked for an hour or more in companionable silence. Sweat beaded at Llesho's pores and dried before the drops could fall, but the call across the wide expanse of desert kept him moving. During a pause to catch their breath, Harlol offered a waterskin. "I hope this is more than a whim," he said. "Something is out there." Llesho jerked a shoulder in the direction they walked, away from Ahkenbad. His companion did not look pleased with the answer.

"Ahkenbad has protections against strangers, but we are about to pass beyond their reach. If we don't turn back, whatever you feel out there will find us."

"Perhaps I want to be found." Llesho's step suddenly felt more buoyant. Sunlight found a corner of his heart that had lain in dreaming shadows. They had passed outside of Ahkenbad's defenses.

Harlol glared at him. "The likelihood that good will come out of the desert looking for you in this exact spot is vanishingly small. Our enemies, however, have the power to find a single pebble in the gravel pits of Dhar."

"You underestimate our friends," Llesho assured him with a sudden grin. He knew this consciousness pressing toward him. When the cloud of dust appeared on the horizon, he ran to meet it.

"No!" Harlol grabbed his arm and swung Llesho around to face him. "Distance in the Gansau Waste is deceiving. The heat reflects the image of what you see like a mirror, over many li. Your friends may be coming this way, or they may be on a different heading altogether. But even if they sense your presence, as you sense theirs, they have a long way to go before they reach us. Hours still, and they have horses while we are on foot." He gave Llesho a shake, snapping the hypnotic grip of the dust cloud on the horizon.

Llesho shook off his arm, took another step. But Harlol was right. Between them they had no provisions—the Wastrel, in desert fashion, had carried a bit of water for emergencies. That was almost gone, and neither had picked up food before they left Ahkenbad. They were ill prepared to go any farther.

If the newcomers didn't change course, they would ride right into Llesho and his companion, anyway. Better to conserve strength and wait. "We will stop here," Harlol repeated, "make a tent of our coats, and wait."

"A tent?"

"If you don't want to bake your brains out in the Gansau Wastes, we will make a tent, yes." Harlol gave him one of those superior Wastrel looks, like the one he'd given Shou before he'd tried to slice and dice him. "It will take both our coats. And your sword."

He undid his own scabbard from his belt and began to undo the ties on his coat, so Llesho followed his example. Letting his coat fall to the dust was easy. He held onto his sword long enough to try the Tashek's patience.

"You still mistrust me for the fight at the caravansary.

I told you before, I never intended to hurt the healer, Adar. I didn't hurt him, you know."

"And Shou?" Llesho asked.

Harlol shrugged, the color rising in his face. The Wastrel was embarrassed, Llesho realized, and he knew how that felt. "I meant it as a test, of sorts. He shouldn't have been able to counter the prayer moves." Harlol sounded indignant. "When he did, I had to see how deeply his skills ran. I was just . . ."

"Showing off?"

"Yes." The air seemed to leave the Wastrel like a punctured bubble. "I underestimated him, badly. The next thing I knew, I was fighting for my life, or so I believed. He could have killed me at my own discipline. I would have thought no outsider could do that."

"I know exactly what you mean," Llesho admitted. And he did. "Shou is full of surprises,"

They were alike in a lot of ways, and it was easier to forgive the warrior, not much older than he was himself, for doing his duty than to make sense of his brothers' part in his abduction. He had a feeling that was all going to be irrelevant when the cause of that dust cloud arrived, however. Llesho handed over the sword.

With a quick, sharp, downward stroke, the Wastrel drove the points of the scabbards into the dry ground, so that the swords stood upright, separated by the span of his arms. One coat he looped over the pommels and draped facing east, and one he stretched from the swords in a westerly direction, creating a small tent with the swords as low tent poles. They had no pegs to hold the ends in place, but Harlol crawled inside and reclined, his shoulder pressing down the edge of one coat tent cover. Llesho crawled in beside him and sat, hunched over his own crossed legs.

"The dream readers believe in your ability to foretell the future," Harlol said once he was settled. "I honor your gifts with our comfort, since we would be hard-pressed to defend ourselves with our swords tangled in our coats like this."

Llesho didn't think they were very comfortable, but he wasn't worried about the oncoming dust cloud. If Master Markko pursued that closely, he would feel dread like a trickling poison. He had no such foreboding now, and he realized that included Harlol. Whatever the Wastrel's part in all of this, he didn't mean Llesho any harm. Unfortunately, he already showed signs of boredom.

"So tell me," Harlol prodded, "what brought you to the Moon and Star Inn on the Imperial Road?"

"The Ham conquered my country. I am on my way home to take it back."

Harlol looked, of all things, offended. "I am not unschooled," he sniffed, "but we have a long wait, and I saw the way you handled yourself in Durnhag. You've fought in combat before. I thought the story might pass the time."

"I work hard at not remembering." Llesho didn't want to relive his past with this young and inexperienced warrior, but Harlol reacted with shock to his admission.

"Other people give us our names," the Wastrel admonished him. "Who we truly are is recorded in our histories. To give up your history is to give up your self."

"You didn't make that up yourself." Llesho meant it as an insult, but Harlol solemnly shook his head.

"The Dinha sows wisdom in the desert soil of a Wastrel's heart," he said, "and, sometimes, her wisdom takes root."

Llesho figured he had a choice: tell the Wastrel his story, or listen to him preach the word of the Dinha on memory. Better to do the talking than the listening, he decided and began the tale.

"The Harn attacked during my seventh summer. They'd come into the holy city with the caravans, and sneaked up into the palace through the kitchens. One of the raiders killed Khri, my bodyguard, but he didn't see me hiding on a chair behind the curtain. While he was cleaning his sword on Khri's uniform, I pulled my knife. I wasn't strong enough for a killing stroke, but I fell off the chair, the knife slipped between his ribs, and the raider died. Later, when they caught up with me, I threatened to do the same to their leader. They were killing the children—too much trouble on the march— but my threats amused them, so they kept me alive for the slave pens."

"I heard you tell your brother that you made the Long March," Harlol said, and Llesho nodded.

"We left our dead on the wayside across half of Thebin and all of Harn, into the heart of Shan. In the slave market of the imperial city I heard the overseer tell the Harnish slave trader to slit my throat. "Too young for hard labor, too old for begging," he said, "and not enough endurance left to satisfy the perverts—I'd never earn back the cost of feed." I didn't know what any of it meant until later, except the throat-cutting part. By then I was grateful that Lord Chin-shi had come to the market looking for Thebin children to dive in his pearl beds."

"That's how you became a pearl diver?"

As he told his story, Llesho had fallen more deeply into the spell of his own past. HarloFs question tugged at him like a lifeline, and he followed it back to the present.

"Yes. Pearl Island wasn't too bad, really. There were people my age; that's where I met Lling and Hmishi. And old Lleck came later. I had known him at the palace, and he helped me."

"But you left the pearl beds."

"Lleck died. His ghost gave me a black pearl, and told me to find my brothers and save Thebin. I couldn't do that at the bottom of the bay, so I became a gladiator in Lord Chin-shi's stable. I had passed my fifteenth summer by then. I was wiry and strong, and my natural stamina had returned. Master Jaks and Master Den knew who I was from the start. They brought the Lady SienMa from Farshore Province to test me, and she warned me to keep my identity secret. Master Markko guessed something as well. He was a slave high up in Lord Chin-shi's house, his overseer. When I look back, though, I think he was working against his master even then."

"Master Den was your teacher for the arena? So how did the healer Adar come to have as his servant a training master of gladiators?" Harlol asked with a mind to the trickster god's most recent disguise. He had curled his legs up under him, and listened avidly. Llesho wanted to hit him for treating his painful past like a campfire tale, except that it didn't hurt as much as he had expected. The words seemed drawn out like an arrowhead cut out of the flesh so that the wound could heal. But Master Den's story was his own to tell.

"It was a disguise. Master Den has many of them. Even I have never seen through all of them, and he has been with me as my teacher since Pearl Island."

Harlol seemed on the verge of making a comment, but something of what Llesho was thinking must have made it to his face, because the Wastrel said only, "What happened next?"

Llesho shrugged. "My first fight in the arena was my last," he said, taking up the story where he could. "The pearl beds failed, and Lord Chin-shi had gambling debts. Habiba managed to purchase some of us for Lady SienMa; the rest went to Yueh." Madon, a friend, had died at Habiba's hand that afternoon, a wasted sacrifice to stop a war that came on them anyway.

"Her ladyship kept no slaves. Under her direction, we became free soldiers. She gathered my friends and teachers, added Kaydu as our captain, and when Master Markko attacked, we were ready. The lady gave me the gifts that you have already seen—the short spear and the jade cup—and took her household to her father at Thousand Lakes Province. Our small cadre—me and Hmishi and Lling, and Bixei and Kaydu whom you haven't met yet— ran for the imperial city. On the way we met dragons and healers and gods and bears and we fought. Lleck is dead twice, and Master Jaks is gone. In the imperial city we battled in the streets and put an end to the slave trade in Shan, and discovered that Master Markko is himself aligned with the Harn, but I don't know why." He gave a helpless shrug. "I haven't been at this 'intrigue' thing very long, but the beings I've met along the way all seem to be pointing me at Thebin. In Shan I received more gifts of pearls which I am charged to return to the goddess who lost them. And to bring the tale back to the beginning, to do that I have to free Thebin."

He said no more about the "String of Midnights," the necklace of black pearls stolen from heaven. He needed to return it to the Great Goddess so that night could return to heaven, but he didn't trust the Wastrel with that much truth.

"For a short life, you have seen more battle and intrigue than the old men who chew their stories under canopies in the sun." With that brief comment, Harlol gave the tale a moment of silent contemplation before he asked. "Is that why we are out here waiting for an approaching dust cloud to resolve itself into friend or foe?"

"Friends, definitely friends." Llesho yawned deeply. Telling even a part of his story had exhausted him, but it had made him feel better, too.

"If that's the end of your story, you might as well take a nap," Harlol advised. "It makes the waiting pass more quickly." With that he tucked the tent coat under his hip to hold it in place and promptly went to sleep.

A nap sounded good, but the heat beating on their makeshift tent seared his lungs and the approaching party tickled at the corners of Llesho's mind. Not evil, certainly not Master Markko, but a mind he'd felt before and knew the texture of was out there looking for him.

And Harlol snored.

Llesho nudged at him with his foot, and the Wastrel snuggled down deeper into the small depression he'd dug with his hip. Llesho nudged a little harder, and the snoring broke, became a grunted snort, before resuming again. Llesho wondered how a man who slept like the dead, but more noisily, expected to survive as a wandering warrior. He reached a foot out to kick again.

Fast as a striking snake, Harlol grabbed his ankle. "Take a nap."

"I can't sleep. It's too hot, and you snore."

"This is going to be a long afternoon," Harlol moaned to himself. "All right. You go to sleep first. Then, you won't hear it if I snore."

"I told you my story." Llesho pushed out his jaw, belligerently. He was beginning to feel foolish for revealing so much in his tale, and their close quarters, separated only by the swords they used as tent posts, were making him nervous. "So what is a Wastrel anyway? Are you allowed to tell, or is it a sacred mystery?"

"You're not going to let me sleep, are you?"

Llesho shook his head. "I have a lot of questions, but 'What is a Wastrel?' is top of the list."

Harlol propped himself up by his elbow, with his chin in the palm of his hand. He didn't look sleepy at all, and Llesho figured the snoring had been a ruse, to avoid this confrontation.

"A Wastrel is a warrior-priest, sworn to the desert spirits. We don't choose, but are dedicated to the Dinha at birth. Those who survive the training and the trials of thirst and fire and solitude become the eyes and ears of the dream readers in the waking world. We go where the wind takes us. When our paths follow the caravan routes, we work at the common labor available to our kind. Other times, we wander as the stories tell, seeking out the lost places in the desert. We are the protectors of Ahkenbad. Always, however, we go at the will of the Dinha."

"Is Kagar a Wastrel now as well?"

"No." Harlol laughed. "Kagar is no Wastrel, but my true cousin, the child of my mother's brother. We owe each other much filial love, and so I kept her secret until API I could bring her safely home. But sometimes Kagar can be very annoying."

"That makes two of you," Llesho muttered to himself. "Why did you attack Adar?"

"The Dinha told me to protectat any cost." The typical Tashek shrug came off as ungainly in a reclining position, but Harlol didn't seem to care. "You didn't travel as princes—or as brothers. Adar looks not at all like the princes I knew. When I saw him pray the Way of the Goddess with the master, I knew he could ruin all our plans if he chose to fight against Balar in Durnhag. I meant only to test him, perhaps to injure him so that we could leave him behind. I would not kill any man unless he threatened you."

He wanted to resent the man, but couldn't. Harlol was too much like himself, in age, and even in the way his gods ran his life. Llesho would have seen it sooner if he'd been paying attention, the way Shou evidently had. For all his training, Harlol had seen far less of battle than Llesho's own cadre. He was a priest who spent much of his time alone in the desert or traveling with the camels, and hadn't crossed a thousand li of battleground to get here. So Shou hadn't killed him even after he had turned from prayer to battle forms in mid-demonstration.

"Had you ever used your training to deliberately harm another before that morning?"

"I am trained—" Harlol dropped his gaze. "I would not shame my training."

"Of course not." Quick as a thief Llesho had his knife out, point pricking just below the Wastrel's voice box. "I, on the other hand, killed my first Harn raider while still in the training saddle. I have seen men die at the hands of an ally for the honor of a shamed lord, and I have fought every li of the way from Pearl Island to Durnhag. Do not presume to understand those with whom I travel, Wastrel, and don't hasten to add my nightmares to your own sleep."

Harlol ignored the knife at his throat and met Llesho's eyes with a level gaze that reflected no fear, but bragged not at all of Tashek bravery. "My life is a tool of the spirits. I will do as the Dinha requires in their service. Are you going to kill me now, Prince?"

"Of course not." Llesho put away his knife. "If I planned to kill you, I wouldn't warn you. And I am warning you. I know the mind that approaches. Don't put yourself between us, don't speak, don't draw a weapon."

"Who is it?" Harlol was pulling himself upright, taking apart their tent with the knuckles of one hand white around the scabbard of his sword. They could feel beneath their feet the rumble of the approaching horses.

"The Dinha told us at breakfast. It's Habiba." Llesho flashed a predatory smile and settled onto his side. "He is a magician, and the right hand of the Lady SienMa, mortal goddess of war."

Harlol paled, but his fear seemed reserved for Llesho rather than the approaching riders. "Surely you walk among miracles, my prince."

"It's not all it's cracked up to be," he assured his companion. The Wastrel's shock should have been a victory, but Llesho just felt tired. Together they stood, waiting for the horses to come to a halt in front of them.

Habiba remained in his saddle, his tall white steed still as a statue. Behind him, his army worked to control their skittish horses. At his side, three dressed as officers slipped from their mounts, drawing off their desert headgear so that he could see who they were.

"Kaydu!" With a grin he ran forward and grabbed her hands. At the sound of his voice, the pack on Kaydu's back began to wriggle, and out popped a small head, followed by a tiny body in the uniform of the Imperial Guard.

"Little Brother!" Llesho greeted the monkey, who climbed out of his pack and chattered ferociously at him. With a chuckle, Llesho stood still while the creature clambered onto his head, exploring for wildlife before returning to his mistress.

"What wonders are these!" Harlol whispered at his back.

"It's a monkey, Kaydu's familiar."

"I have seen monkeys before." Harlol drew himself to his full dignity. "But they are known to be fickle creatures. I had thought they would make poor soldiers."

Kaydu let it seem as though his words had caught her attention, but Llesho knew she did her father's bidding, drawing out the stranger while Habiba watched carefully from the distance of horseback and wizardly silence. "Little Brother is a paragon among monkeys. I would not count on any other to defend my back."

She made it sound like a joke, though Llesho remembered a time when Little Brother had saved all their lives, carrying a message to the Lady SienMa when Markko's forces had threatened them on the road. Some things would take too long to explain, and even longer to believe, so he laughed with the others, content to let the tension ease, if only for an hour. Soon enough they'd be back in the fray.

"So much affection for a cowardly ape, and not even a greeting for your brothers in arms!" Bixei, Llesho's onetime enemy and more recent ally, stepped away from his horse and received a companionable slap on the shoulder.

"Bixei! What are you doing on the march? You're supposed to be in Shan, helping to train a Thebin army. How is Stipes?"

"I am very well, Prince Llesho." Stipes himself came forward, letting Llesho see him. He wore a leather patch over his damaged eye, but otherwise looked sound and hearty. "And you see a part of that Thebin army before you, though we could not stop the emperor's own imperial guard from accompanying us."

Llesho glanced over the small company bristling with weapons. Fifteen Thebin faces stared at him in wonder as they sat the small hill horses like his own, while thirty tall warriors at the rear rode the warhorses of Shan. Scattered among them, Llesho recognized the mercenary garb of his childhood bodyguard, the same worn by the weapons master who had died to protect him in the war against Master Markko's villainy. He would have sent them home, the debt their clan owed a dead king long paid, but he knew they would not go.

"How is this possible? I left you only weeks ago—"

Bixei grinned wickedly. "With the Lady SienMa's assistance, and the fall of the slave trade in Shan, many potential allies found themselves at loose ends. And no few of them have trained in secret and waited for the chance Shokar offered them."

"With the arena in turmoil, your brother had his pick of trainers," Kaydu explained. "Now he raises armies, and husbands a bumper crop."

She gave a little shrug. "He has given the emperor the loyalty a guest owes his host, but trusted this particular plan of Shou's not at all. So he took the harvest of his labors to Durnhag. He was right. We arrived at Durnhag too late to prevent the attack, but Shokar tracked the raiders, who were heading toward Ham. We followed the signs of your passage into the Gansau Wastes until yesterday, when the desert seemed to swallow you up. We thought we had lost you. Then, suddenly, there you were again and here we find you in the empty desert in the company of one lone Wastrel."

"We are not as far from civilization as we seem." Llesho answered Kaydu's unspoken question, but he looked to her father as he did so.

"So you have found Ahkenbad." Habiba bowed his head in a thoughtful nod. "And you can find it again?"

"Waking or sleeping, whether I wish to go there or not." The magician understood Llesho's wry smile. "The dreams don't ask permission," he commented. To which Llesho added, "Neither does the Dinha of Ahkenbad."

"Respect, if you please." Harlol raised himself up to his full height, his hands resting on his sword hilts in the way Llesho had come to recognize as readiness for battle.

"With understanding," Llesho countered. He did respect the Dinha; he just didn't trust her to put the will of a young Thebin ahead of the needs of her own people.

Habiba interrupted before the Wastrel could respond with a challenge, however. "We have traveled long and ridden hard. If Ahkenbad is as close as you say, perhaps we can finish this discussion out of the sun—"

"Of course." Llesho gave him a formal bow, but cast an uncertain look back toward the cave city. He had come out ill-prepared to accompany an army on horseback. Kaydu saw his indecision and offered a hand when she had mounted her own horse. "She can carry two, if it isn't too far."

"I'll take the Wastrel with me," Stipes offered. Bixei's glare changed his mind. "Or, Bixei will ride with me, and the Wastrel can borrow his horse?"

Bixei leaped onto the horse's rump with a surly growl and gave his partner a pinch under cover of securing a grip. Smothering a chuckle, Llesho shook his head when Harlol looked to him for guidance. The Wastrel knew nothing of his companions but their names, mentioned in passing as they shared stories to help the time pass. He wouldn't have understood the byplay, but he mounted the offered horse and let Llesho take the lead.

Kaydu nudged a little away from the others so she and Llesho could talk without being heard. "Where are Lling and Hmishi?" she asked, the pleasure of meeting falling away as the business of guarding a prince took over. "I trained them better than to let you wander off alone."

"We were betrayed." Llesho stared out into the desert, remembering a dream of anguish and despair. "The Ham have them."

"Damn. I'm sorry. But we'll get them back," Kaydu assured him, all levity now gone.

The pressure of Master Markko's search had not returned, but a superstitious dread of being overheard by magical means kept Llesho from saying anything more. Llesho's nemesis might not yet know what prizes his raiders held.

Kaydu turned in her saddle with a worried frown, but she said nothing more. Llesho could tell by the faraway look in her eyes that she, too, tested the air for more than the taste of dust. After a journey the longer for the exhaustion of the horses, they passed through the dream readers' barrier that blinded the eye to the presence of the cave city of Ahkenbad.

"By the Great Goddess, that's a trick," Kaydu muttered when the carved cliffs of the cave city appeared around them.

Inside the warding defenses that protected Ahkenbad from her enemies, Llesho braced himself for another confrontation. How was he going to explain to Habiba that he'd lost the emperor?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THEY had come to the gaping stone mouth of the Dragon Cave. Worried acolytes and servants surrounded them, stirring up the dust with their feet. He recognized Kagar among them. Her avid, envious eyes locked briefly on Kaydu before she slipped into the chamber where the dream readers gathered. The Dinha trusted her; Llesho didn't. He still had the lump on the back of his head to remind him why that was a smart thing, but his brothers presented the more immediate problem.

Lluka and Balar stood side by side in the very teeth of the stone dragon as if they could hold off Llesho's new forces with their persons. From Llesho's seat atop Kaydu's horse, his brothers looked very small. He shook his head to rid it of a fleeting image: the jagged stone teeth snapping shut, the bloodied faces of his brothers ground against sharp edges come to life. Not a wish, but a worry— What part did the sleeping dragon of Stone River play in the dreams that tied the princes of Thebin to this place?

They could not know where his thought had taken him, of course, and watched their rebellious younger brother with matching stern frowns. "Only a fool goes into the desert unprepared," Lluka scolded him. "When you didn't come back, we thought you must be lost, or dead. You will have apologies to make to the Dinha, and to the search parties when they return."

"Harlol was with me," Llesho reminded his brother, but that answer just earned the Wastrel a scathing snarl of contempt.

"You move through the world wrapped in a no-sense zone, Llesho. It warps the judgment of anyone who comes in contact with you."

"Then don't come too close, or you might grow a backbone."

Lluka colored as if he'd been struck, and would have continued the argument but for Habiba's rumbled, "It's true, Llesho. Admit defeat with grace."

He didn't concede any such thing, of course, but Balar chose that moment to turn the attack on the magician, freeing Llesho from the unwanted attention of his brothers and the lady's witch.

"You have breached the Dinha's security." Balar said it as a fact, rather than an accusation, just as his will to protect the dream readers was a fact and not a show of bravado.

Habiba slipped from his horse and bowed a respectful greeting in spite of the surly introduction. Llesho was glad Balar wasn't carrying a lute. Experience had shown him that his brother wielded the instrument as well in battle as in song, but the magician had a tricky temper at the best of times. He might indulge a verbal challenge. In a physical attack, however, he was as likely to turn Balar into a camel first and apologize later. Not the best plan in a place that reeked of sleeping magic. Fortunately, his brother had come out unarmed even with music, and Habiba's courtbred manners guaranteed his good intentions.

"You have nothing to fear from me—Prince? I honor the Dinha and her dreams." With that very proper greeting, Habiba gave the signal for his army to dismount. "I beg hospitality for my troops—water for their horses, and a place to rest out the heat of the day. I would pay my respects to the Dinha, and we will be on our way with the rising of Great Moon Lun."

The brothers could not help but recognize, among the soldiers massed at Habiba's back, their own countrymen and the clan dress of the honorable mercenaries who had guarded them as children. Lluka surrendered with a lowering of his eyelids and gestured for a Tashek groom. Kagar had put off her disguise here, among her kinsmen, and Harlol had taken up his role as a warrior, so the task fell to a stranger. Experience told Llesho not to trust the man out of his sight, but Harlol cast him a challenge in a glance. He had to accept the aid Habiba had requested or pay for the insult to the Tashek people. This time, he conceded the point.

Kaydu arranged for a soldier to take her horse. With Stipes and Bixei at her back, she gave the princes a cool examination. Llesho shook his coats into order, pretending to a disinterest he didn't feel when the princes returned her disapproval with watchful glares.

"These must be brothers," she declared with a satisfied smirk. "They look more like you than Shokar or Adar, though I can't say much for their dispositions."

Llesho would have returned Kaydu's grin, but he dreaded his coming report on the Harn attack. He didn't want to compound his offenses with poorly timed humor.

"Indeed," he therefore answered as neutrally as he could manage, "May I introduce the youngest of my older brothers, Prince Balar, who would hold off our army with the daggers of his eyes—or his five-stringed lute, which felled no few of our enemies on the outskirts of Durnhag. And Prince Lluka, who would still have me taking naps in the afternoon with my favorite hound sneaked into my bed."

His brothers' hostile glances turned to surprise and awe when he reversed the introduction: "Princes, may I introduce the loyal servant of her ladyship, the mortal goddess SienMa: Habiba the magician-witch, and his daughter, Kaydu, who is the captain of my own cadre. You know—the Imperial Guards you left in the hands of the Harn."

"My Lord Habiba," Balar began, but an angry roar interrupted his greeting.

"You what!" Bixei, who had remained silent but watchful at Stipes' side, strode forward to place himself between Llesho and the threat of his brothers. "I'm amazed Shou didn't strip the skin off your hide after a fool stunt like that!" he shouted into Balar's face.

In spite of his rage, Bixei retained enough sense not to blurt out the emperor's title. Llesho did the same.

"Shou had no say." This was the moment he had dreaded since Durnhag. "The last time I saw him, Shou was holding off three Harn raiders, trying to reach Adar's side. Neither Adar nor the Lady Carina bore any weapons. Both are skilled in the Way of the Goddess, but they could not hold out against so many. While I fought the raiders between us, one of our Tashek grooms struck me from behind, and I fell."

Harlol, who had taken a position of defense at Llesho's side, jumped at the mention of his cousin's part in the kidnapping, but carefully avoided eye contact. After only a brief, scathing glance, however, Llesho continued his story.

"When I recovered consciousness, I found myself halfway to Ahkenbad in the custody of my brother and our Tashek drovers. They left the others, including Adar and Shou, Master Den, and Carina, to the hospitality of Har-nish murderers."

He exchanged glares with his brother over Bixei's shoulder. Balar still owed him for the lump on his head, and perhaps for much more if the worst had happened to Emperor Shou. Or their brother: the ghost of his adviser, Lleck, had said nothing about getting his brothers killed while gathering them to his side.

Habiba's eyes opened wide. Briefly, Llesho thought the princes of Thebin were about to die. Maybe Habiba would kill him, too, for arrant stupidity, though he doubted it. Llesho was starting to figure out the part he played in the grand scheme of this conflict. Habiba needed live bait to catch Master Markko, and he was it.

He had begun the move to his knife, instinctively ready to protect his brothers, when Habiba brought his expression and his temper under control with a long cleansing sigh. "We should take this discussion under cover," he advised with a quick scan of the road, "And I have yet to pay my respects to the Dinha."

Balar fumbled indecisively in their path, but Habiba set him aside with a casual sweep of his arm and entered the sacred cave of the dream readers. Harlol followed close on his heels, hands perched dangerously on his hilts. Llesho figured he had more right to his place there than the rest of them, so made no objection. The magician wasn't through with him yet, though.

"Could you have angered more of our gods with one foolish act if that had been your intention?" Kaydu spat at the bemused princes before following her father into the gaping mouth of the dream readers' cave.

"Master Den will protect them," Llesho offered as comfort. It didn't help.

"Master Den might, but what about ChiChu?"

"They go back a long time," he reminded her, "before either of us were born."

Behind him, Balar's voice whispered anxiously in his ear, "ChiChu. A nickname for a fickle master?"

Llesho's baleful glare told him otherwise.

"Gods, Llesho! What have we done?"

Kaydu's face closed up around her thoughts with a muttered curse. Llesho knew the answer she would have given: brought down the empire and angered the trickster god. Made an enemy of the mortal goddess of war, left your own brother and a sacred healer to die at the hands of our enemies. Insane to talk about it in the middle of the road, though, where a stray word might escape even the protections of Ahkenbad. He followed Kaydu with just a brief comment for his brothers, "I think you're about to find out."

Only a hand of the dream readers remained in the dragon's mouth. Attendants had cleared away breakfast hours ago, and now they laid a light supper for their guests. Llesho recognized Kagar among the women setting out plates of fruits and flatbreads, and noticed again how she studied Kaydu with quick, darting glances. He had no opportunity to question her even with a look, however. Dognut stirred from his corner, a wide grin on his face.

"Lord Habiba! I knew Llesho would find you! Is that your lovely daughter?"

"Bright Morning, greetings. Yes, Kaydu has grown since you saw her last. I haven't come this far to reminisce, however, but to consult with the blessed Dinha of the Tashek people on a matter of great urgency."

It made sense, now that he thought about it, that these two would know each other. Bright Morning's family lived in the Lady SienMa's province and, like Habiba, the dwarf was in the confidence of the emperor. But Dognut had abandoned Shou and aided the kidnappers, even if they were Llesho's brothers; the association tainted Habiba as an adviser Llesho needed to rely on.

"Child of the desert." The Dinha released her attendant with a touch on his shoulder, and rose to greeted the magician with the rueful smile of familiar associates. "You find us well, thanks to your young prince."

Habiba bent to one knee in front of the Dinha and bowed his head. "Mother Desert, greetings. Meet your grandchild." Without looking up, he took Kaydu's hand and extended it to the Dinha's embrace.

"Granddaughter." The Dinha took both of Kaydu's hands and drew her into a kiss on each cheek. "Your father is a fine man, but he has kept us too long from his child!"

Only Llesho stood near enough to Harlol to see the avid excitement on his downturned face. "Truth?" he asked. "Or a courtesy?"

Harlol gave an affronted snort. "All Tashek are the children of the Dinha. As for the magician, anyone can tell that he has Tashek blood."

A little of both, then. Habiba and his daughter shared an exotic look of foreign lands. Part of that—the shape of the eyes, the sweep of the brow—might indeed be Tashek, though the sum of their features remained a mystery. So the circle is completed, Llesho thought, with himself bound into the plots of those who had no care for Thebin.

He had little time to brood, however. At the Dinha's welcoming hug, the pack on Kaydu's back let out a screech that drew terrified gasps from the acolytes hovering anxiously in the shadows. Harlol's swords hissed out of their scabbards. The Wastrel checked his motion with an annoyed roll of his eyes when Little Brother crept onto Kaydu's shoulder and peered anxiously about him out of wide monkey eyes.

"Pardon my enthusiasm, sir monkey." The Dinha offered Little Brother a star fruit, lightly poached, as a peace offering. "I mean no harm to my granddaughter's familiar." When Little Brother had accepted the gift, the Dinha gestured for the rest of the party to eat, herself taking a light selection of vegetables that her attendant brought her.

"The dream readers have been troubled these many days, Habiba, and you figure in our prayers. But let me first bless you for the loan of young Prince Llesho."

Llesho filled a flatbread with fruit and ducked his head. If he pretended to be invisible, perhaps they wouldn't notice him. He might just as well have disappeared, however; Habiba spoke about him as he would an absent and unruly cadet.

"I can't accept your gratitude, Dinha. I don't command the young man." Habiba dipped a ball of grain-meal into a spicy sauce and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully before explaining, "Had I done so, little of what has happened would have come to pass."

"And yet," the Dinha informed him, "before he found his way to Ahkenbad, the Holy Well of Ahkenbad had failed. In his dream, the Great Goddess' Jinn led Prince Llesho to its source where he released the waters from their prison. Without his help, only ghosts would have remained to greet you."

"The Jinn has come to him?" Habiba darted a glance at Llesho, returning his gaze quickly to the Dinha.

"In a dream," she nodded confirmation, "and not for the first time, I judge."

With his free hand, Llesho drew out the newest pearl with its banding of silver. "Pig led me to the spring, where I found this."

"We are on first-name relations with the servants of the Great Goddess now," Habiba commented in a deceptively offhanded tone. His avid gaze on the pearl gave away his real interest, however. Even Little Brother abandoned his star fruit to sniff the air for danger. The pearl caught his monkey curiosity, and he snatched at it in Llesho's hand.

"No, you don't, little thief!" Llesho closed his fingers around the pearl and looked up to see Habiba's hand reaching toward him as if he, too, would have seized the pearl. The moment stretched, frozen in the gleam of the magician's hungry eyes.

Finally, as though waking from a trance, Habiba let his hand fall. "My apologies, young prince—to you, and to the Great Goddess you serve." He dropped his head, horrified by his own action, while his daughter watched for the tic of an eyelid or the twitch of a muscle that would offer a clue how she should jump.

The Dinha gave Habiba's hand a comforting pat. "Perhaps you should start from the beginning?"

"Which beginning?" Habiba shrugged. "The birth of a seventh son to the king of Thebin? Or the fall to the Harn raiders of the mortal kingdom most beloved by the Great Goddess, and the scattering of her people? Or the perils of one boy through hardship and slavery and battle to free his home from tyranny?"

"There are some," the Dinha remarked acidly, "who would have argued that the king, this boy's father, lavished too much attention on his goddess and too little on his people, which may be tyranny itself. When one loses sight of the smaller things, disaster often follows in the large. But I did not mean to speak of the politics of the dead."

Llesho wondered for a bitter moment if she expected him to object. Well, he didn't. He'd come to the same conclusion himself, and somewhere between Durnhag and Ahkenbad he'd started to wonder if Shou didn't need a reminder of that as well. Maybe, if the emperor survived, they would sit down and talk about fathers and wild-hawk adventures and the people left without their king. The Dinha hadn't removed the arrow of her attention from Habiba's breast, however. "Perhaps you can begin with what our young prince was doing in Durnhag?"

Llesho sneaked a glance at Harlol. The Wastrel was the Dinha's man—how much that Harlol knew could be hidden from one who claimed his loyalty and could enter his dreams? For that matter, the Dinha herself had read Llesho's dreams. But he hadn't dreamed of the companions left behind at Durnhag; he'd dreamed of a magical pig. And Harlol, it seemed, believed Shou to be a simple merchant, with extraordinary skill with a sword but no greater connection to Llesho's team than the contract they had signed as part of their ruse.

"I knew it was a foolish plan from the beginning," Habiba muttered.

Her ladyship's magician was going to tell the truth. Llesho had a bad feeling about this.

"I expected Captain Bor-ka-mar's troops to contain any emergency."

"Shou was concerned about developments in Durn-hag," Llesho offered. He didn't want the soldier taking the blame for his emperor's decisions. "He stopped outside the towers to meet with the spies of the Lady SienMa and sent Bor-ka-mar into the city, where an ambush seemed most likely. Somehow, the Harn found out." And it struck him, not for the first time, that the goddess of war had wanted them there.

Little Brother had curled up for a nap in Kaydu's arms. She clasped her familiar close, braced for the terrible news she expected to hear. Balar had found them at the inn as well—their security had leaked worse than a pair of old sandals, but he'd been hauled off over a camel's back before he could discover anything about the conspiracy that had attacked them. Llesho shrugged, helpless to ease her fears.

"Dinha," Habiba said, and Llesho had never seen her ladyship's witch at such a loss. "It seems we've lost the emperor of Shan, beloved ally of Lady SienMa."

Llesho saw the dismay in the witch's eyes, the dread he felt to return to his lady with the report of Shou's death. But they had lost others as well. "And with the emperor, the trickster god Chichu," he added to the tally, "and Carina, the daughter of Mara, who aspires to ascend into heaven as the eighth mortal god, and Adar, the healer prince of Thebin."

"The emperor?" Lluka asked. "How have I so mistaken the future in my visions?"

"Shou, the merchant," Llesho explained. "He travels in disguise sometimes."

"I didn't know." By the door, Harlol's eyes widened in shock. "You left this out of your tale, dreamer-prince," he muttered under his breath, but Llesho heard.

"It wasn't my story to tell."

"What tale is this?" Habiba asked. Harlol took the question as an invitation to throw himself at the feet of the magician. "I raised a blade against the emperor," he confessed, "and for my crime, my life is forfeit. May justice come swiftly, and sweet death end the torture of the guilty."

"Don't be foolish," Llesho poked him in the side with his toe for emphasis. "If Shou had wanted you dead, he'd have killed you."

Habiba looked down at the groveling Wastrel with wry exasperation. "You didn't know you fought the emperor, did you?"

"No, my lord."

"And would you have fought him in a public square if you had known?"

"No, my lord." This second answer came muffled from the carpeted floor where Harlol lay prostrate, punctuating each answer with a kiss on the magician's foot.

"And did you inflict any wounds on the emperor, intended or otherwise?"

"No, my lord. He beat me soundly, and sent me off in the hands of the healer-prince, who also traveled incognito."

"Then I don't see that we have a case here. Why don't you go back to the door and keep guard as you were doing?"

Harlol lay stretched between the magician and the Dinha for another moment. Then, softly, he answered, "Yes, my lord," and raised himself to his feet. "With the blessing of the Dinha, I pledge my skills and services to the coming battle, and will give my life to win back the life of the great emperor."

Llesho thought the "great emperor" was a bit much, even allowing for the natural respect Harlol had for the emperor's skills. But they could use all the help they could muster, and he'd grown used to having the Wastrel around. Best, therefore, not to mention the attack on Adar that had started the whole thing. The Dinha, however, had other plans for her Wastrel.

"Do you give up your charge so easily?" she asked him, and Harlol blushed.

"No, Dinha—" he pleaded with his eyes to be let off this rusty hook, but the Dinha did not free him.

"Hold to the task you start with," she said, "and it will bring you to what you must do. Even this."

Llesho didn't understand it, but it seemed to satisfy Harlol, who went back to his post with renewed fervor.

When the matter of the attack on Shou by his own party had been settled, Lluka extended his hand, palm up as if to soothe troubled nerves. "Surely these bandits won't hurt their prisoners," he suggested. His own voice quaked with doubts, however. "They will keep them well whatever course they take, in case they need to negotiate a surrender."

"They've already hurt him."

No one asked Llesho how he knew. The Dinha didn't even look surprised. A groan from another quarter, however, greeted the dire announcement. Balar, stricken with remorse, curled in against his knees. "I didn't know," he whispered, unwilling to draw attention to himself, but unable to stanch the flow of his grief. "We made a terrible mistake."

"Would the presence of this one boy have saved this precious party of emperors and princes, when the gods themselves did not, child?" The Dinha spoke to Habiba, but she meant it for them all. She held the witch's gaze, relentless but kind, until he surrendered to her logic.

"No, Dinha." He sounded much as Harlol had, on being chastised for taking on more than his burden of guilt.

"And did not the boy's own goddess send her familiar, the heavenly gardener Pig, who led the boy to the holy spring of Ahkenbad? And did not this Pig entrust to him a great pearl from the goddess' lost and broken necklace as a token of the quest he undertakes to free his kingdom and the very gates of heaven from the enemies of the Great Goddess?"

"Yes, Dinha."

Llesho sneaked a glance at Kaydu, who watched her father with the stillness of a cobra.

One tear fell from Habiba's eye. "But my ladyship has lost so much."

"Your ladyship is the patroness of wars, and gathers to herself only what she has sown in the fields of others. This boy you blame for all your tragedies has suffered at the hands of your lady war, and yet you blame him for her losses?"

"No, Dinha," he said, with a sigh that released the anger he had suppressed but not let go of until now.

Llesho had thought it might please him to see the powerful magician brought down a notch, but now he realized how much comfort he had taken in that strength. If Habiba could be humbled like any man, what protection could he give against Master Markko and the armies of the Harn? Llesho remembered Master Jaks lying dead in a battlefield tent, all his strength and cunning spent so early in the struggle, and did not want to think that he could lose another defender.

"Apologies, my prince."

"Accepted. The important thing is getting them back before Master Markko, or his minions, do any more damage."

Habiba had treated him like a student and like a soldier in his command, and on occasion, even like an inconvenience, but the witch had never addressed him with the full weight of belief in his title before. Llesho found that it worried him now. If Habiba looked to him for direction, they were in deeper trouble than even he had thought.

"You're not making any sense, brother. You can't risk your life and your quest to save the emperor of Shan. He has soldiers and the gods to take care of him. Your responsibilities lie elsewhere. We will need you when the time comes to bring freedom to our people. The Great Goddess herself depends on you."

Lluka's objection came as no surprise. That didn't mean Llesho appreciated fighting with his brother over every decision, and his voice had an edge of frustration to it when he tried to explain again to his stubborn brother why he couldn't sit out the coming storm.

"That time is already here. If Shan falls to Master Markko, what chance do any of us have?" He gestured to the assembled company, to show that he meant not only Thebin but Ahkenbad and the mystics of the Gan-sau Wastes as well. "We need a strong Shan to back us if we are to have any hope of defeating the Harn." He didn't mention the demons that his dreams told him were laying siege to the gates of heaven. He didn't think Lluka was ready to hear it.

Habiba agreed. "Markko will have to eliminate anyone with the power to oppose him. Llesho is at the top of his list of targets. I'm certainly on that list and Ahkenbad will be soon, if it isn't already. When you intervened in Durnhag, you put yourselves forward in his eyes as well."

"I got them into this, I owe them my best effort to get them out." Llesho gave a little shrug. It went without saying, except that Lluka needed to hear it. "We are none of us safe, however, if we don't stand up to him now." Nobody needed to know that the torments of the captives echoed regularly in his dreams.

He suspected the Dinha already did know, though. She touched her forefinger to the back of Lluka's hand, as if reminding him of something he had known for so long that the awareness of it had fallen out of use. "You can't go back and prevent that small boy in your past from suffering the loss of his home and the murder of his parents. You can't roll back the Long March or erase the years of slavery.

"The young prince of Thebin has become a tool of the gods, and you can only love him and find your own place on the juggernaut."

Llesho recognized his own life in the Dinha's rebuke, but he didn't understand what she was telling his brother, except to let him go. Lluka didn't like it, but he bowed his head, in submission to what will Llesho was uncertain, except that Balar wasn't happy about it. And Dognut— Bright Morning—had a satisfied gleam in his eyes that didn't make sense on the face of a simple musician. He'd always known the dwarf was more, of course, but he was reminded of why that made him nervous. At the moment, however, he had more immediate worries, like the need for a plan.

"When do we leave?"

"The horses are exhausted," Kaydu reported, "and so are the troops that came with us."

The Dinha agreed. "So is Llesho."

"We rest then until sunset and ride with Great Moon Lun," Habiba decided.

With a gesture, the Dinha summoned an attendant and dismissed them with courtesy. "Quarters await you in the cavern of the acolytes. Balar can lead you."

But when Llesho rose to leave with the rest, she set a hand on his sleeve, her eyes fixed on the stone staircase set into the back of the chamber.

"I believe your Master Den suggested that you might better understand the course you take if the dream readers of Ahkenbad visited your dreams and gave you counsel."

He hadn't ever told her that, exactly, but it didn't take a special ceremony to have the Dinha enter his dreams. She must have seen his answer in the set of his mouth, because she accepted the rebuke with a bow of her head. "It is, however, an honor to sleep between the horns of the dragon. And sometimes, the dragon himself whispers in the sleeping ear of his guest."

She smiled when she said it, so that he could dismiss it as a jest or a fireside tale if he chose, but the glint in her eyes promised more if he believed. He wasn't sure how he felt about the Stone River Dragon, but he'd met enough of the creatures in his short life to know that, true or not, he didn't doubt the tale was at least possible. He gave the shadows at the top of the stone staircase a long look, then, with a bow of thanks, he went up. No surprises—he had visited this chamber in dreams, and found the pallet set there for his rest as he remembered. He didn't think he would sleep, but a heavy curtain he hadn't noticed before shut out the heat and glare of the afternoon sun, and soon his eyelids shuttered the glow of the dragon's crystals.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

IN a dream he left his bed and went not to the staircase he had ascended to this place but to the beaten path that passed in front of the dragon's horns, above the head of the stone dragon. When he pushed aside the curtain, he found that Great Sun had set, leaving only the dim, dim glow of the lesser moons, Han and Chen, to light the trail to the cave shrines above the city. Centuries of Tas-hek pilgrims had made this path, carving shrines like a string of prayer beads out of the soft rock of the hillside. Close up, Llesho could see how varied were the hands that had created these offerings to the Gansau Spirits. Some caves were no more than shallow holes in the cliff, roughly finished in mud, their entrances covered by coarse curtains stitched with trembling fingers. Others cut deeply into the hillside, hollowed around elegantly carved pillars of rock, their walls smoothly plastered and decorated with jeweled images of the Gansau Spirits. The rugs at their entrances showed a fine hand in the weaving, shot through with precious threads.

The greatest of the cave shrines hid secret chambers filled with prayers written on paper and silk cloth, knotted in rags or wrapped in tooled wooden boxes. Nuns and priests made this pilgrimage from all over the Wastes to deliver the prayers they wrote down for a penny on the backs of older prayers or supply lists or letters of safe-passage, if their clients could not afford fresh paper. But all who found their way here—rich or poor, scholar or unschooled—made the trip up to the shrines on foot.

The trail was steep in places, in others passable only by ladders set along the cliff face and hard to find or follow in the dark. Llesho stumbled and caught his balance—the wrenching pain in his knee made it all more real than a dream had any right to be. Just as he began to wonder if he really did travel the pilgrim way through the waking dawn, however, the patchwork of rugs and curtains shrouding the mysteries of the mountainside came to writhing life. Against a faded backdrop of hills streaked with rust the color of blood, gods and goddesses and impetuous spirits moved through landscapes of thread.

Trying not to return the looks of the woven figures who stopped and watched out of the tapestries as he passed, Llesho moved more carefully through his dream. He had little understanding of the beliefs that had created monuments out of mountains, and he did not wish to intrude where he did not belong. His dream created caves out of his own mind, however: not Tashek designs, but something more familiar drew his hand. The embroidered scene on a background of pale blue reminded him of her ladyship's gardens in the governor's compound at Farshore Province. Those gardens had themselves been an artful rendering of her ladyship's home, Thousand Lakes Province.

Did such a thing as home exist when one lived through the ages as a mortal god? The Lady SienMa had carried a bit of Thousand Lakes with her to Farshore, as if that reminder had mattered to her. His memories of that time contradicted one another, however. Sometimes he saw her as the woman who loved a husband and honored a father, and who taught him how to use a bow. At others, he remembered the icy goddess who had judged him at weapons and who had given him gifts that whispered to him of his own past deaths, and perhaps his death to come.

If he thought about it too much, it made his head hurt. With careful fingertips, therefore, he traced the flow of a stream across the tapestry, caressed banks thick with rushes on either side of the ripple of green thread. Little wooden bridges, their planks marked in shades of sepia and tan, crossed to a knotted island very like the one where Llesho and his cadre had learned to fight as a team. Llesho remembered weapons training with Lling and Hmishi, led by Kaydu and chivied on by Bixei and the others, with a warmth almost of home.

He pushed aside the curtain and entered. Inside the sacred cave a flame burned like a ghost. Gases escaping the thinnest crack in the floor of the cave fed the eternal flame in honor of spirits Llesho did not know. By its light he made out a pillar of stone at the center of the shrine, carved in relief from top to bottom with a scene of whirling warriors. The figures stirred in the dim light, and sounds and smells of the battlefield came faintly to him, as if from a distance. He'd lost Master Jaks to the armies of Markko the Magician in a battle like that. They'd buried him in an unmarked grave so that his enemies couldn't find him to mock his body. Llesho hoped he'd made his way to the warriors' last home and the comfort of his brothers.

"All debts are paid," he muttered to the dream figures on the pillar. He knew enough to dread what the cave would reveal to him next, but still he reeled with shock when he saw the scene painted on the plastered walls. Her ladyship's orchard.

If he hadn't remembered the trees, laden here with amber peaches and amethyst plums, the figures in the painting left no doubt. A small, dark boy with worshipful eyes lay at the foot of a heavy-laden tree, his head in the lap of a lady with a face white as a ghost and with ruby tears of blood falling from her eyes. A bow lay abandoned next to a bowl of jeweled fruit on the soft green grass. The boy, he saw, lay dying. A short spear pierced his heart and yellow light spilled from the wound.

Llesho knew he was the boy painted on the wall, and recognized the spear. Somewhere in the city below, the weapon waited for him, a fearful thing to keep so close, but too dangerous to trust in the hands of anyone else. He hoped this wasn't a prophetic dream.

As if reaching for a lifeline, Llesho slipped a hand inside his shirt and grasped the small bag that held the pearls of the goddess resting over his heart. The one with the silver scrollwork was missing. Slowly he backed out of the shrine, would have backed right off the hillside if he hadn't bumped into a tall dark figure on the path behind him.

"Not to your liking?" Pig wore no clothing, but was wound about with thin chains like the silver wires that wrapped the pearl.

"Are you responsible for this?" Llesho gestured at the cave he'd just exited. Only a plain and dusty rug of Tas-hek leaves and flowers covered the entrance when he looked at it again.

"It's not my dream," Pig reminded him. "I'm only here because you called me." He nudged Llesho up the mountainside a pace or two before nodding at a rug covered in Thebin embroideries in rich mountain wool. Brushing aside a fold of the tapestry, he disappeared into the darkness. Llesho followed and found himself in a small cave.

The tinted plaster copied the yellow mud that gave Kungol its golden glow in sunlight, but no other sign of the pilgrim who had made the shrine remained. Llesho wondered if the Thebin cave existed in the waking world or if Pig had created it out of dreamstuff, but the Jinn said nothing. Whoever had hollowed out this space hadn't meant it for strangers. It felt unbearably private. Stroking one hand down the nearest wall with all his in hisyearning—for his lost mother, his sister, his home fingertips, Llesho turned away.

"Don't you want to see what's here?" Pig asked him.

"There's nothing to see." Nothing but smooth, cool walls of Thebin gold. The back wall did have a painting on it, though, in subtle colors so like the yellow of the plaster that he hadn't made them out in the dim light. As the light grew stronger, however, the mountains that rose above Kungol appeared like a whisper on the back wall: pale and shrouded in mist at their peaks, fading at their lower reaches into the yellow mud of the city.

The light, he realized, was coming from the painting, and he couldn't turn away, had to reach out. A cold, thin wind off the mountains touched his face, and he shivered. The mist on the mountaintop seemed to clear for a moment, and a gate made of golden pillars appeared. Llesho walked toward it, passed through into a place he'd never seen before, but knew instantly.

"The gardens of heaven," he whispered, and Pig, beside him, nodded.

"They need tending," the Jinn answered more than the question. His little piggy eyes held such a complexity of emotions that Llesho could not bear to look at them. Longing, he knew, and the delight of coming home, but also dismay, and a great sorrow, as if in the moment of greeting Pig braced himself to bid the beloved gardens good-bye. From somewhere Pig had materialized a rake, and he wandered off with a nod of farewell, his mind already on the work that needed his attention.

Abandoned to the vast gardens that existed nowhere in his own plane of being, Llesho shivered and searched behind him for the gates by which he had entered. Common sense told him he didn't belong here. He needed to wake up, to get back down the hillside and into his bed. But the gates had disappeared. He saw only gardens run to weeds and tangles of thorny scrub in every direction he looked.

Nowhere could he find a sign of friendly life. Llesho reached for his sword and remembered he had come out in a dream, unarmed. He wished for a spear or even a rake, but had only his bare hands to protect him from the teeth and tusks of the creatures grumbling threats in the rustling undergrowth.

Resisting the sudden need to curl up in a tight ball in the fork of a tree until Pig came to find him, Llesho looked around for a landmark to guide him through his terror. He found himself looking into the eyes of a plain woman of middle years in the simple clothes of a beekeeper.

"You've come."

She lifted the thick veils that draped her beekeeper's hat and her smile seemed to light her up from the inside, like a party lantern. Llesho found himself uncertain, suddenly, of all the assumptions he had made in his first look at her, as if two images shared the same space and vied for his fractured attention. One, the beekeeper, he understood. The other made him tremble, and he didn't dare name it to himself.

"Pig brought me." He addressed the beekeeper, and gradually his awareness of the other, stranger presence subsided.

"Pig." She nodded, and he shivered with aftershocks of something he refused to see. "But you've come. At last."

"It's just a dream," he reminded himself, or answered the unspoken question in her words. "I can't stay." Not really here. Gone with the moonrise, into a waking reality a thousand li away from Kungol and the gates it had guarded for so long.

"Don't dismiss your dreams. All of heaven is counting on them." She held his gaze another moment, gave him a little nod to emphasize her words, and then she was gone, slipping away into the foliage. He followed, thrashing around in the underbrush like a wild boar, but he could find no sign of her except for the hive that buzzed with wild bees in the branches overhead. He remembered his first impulse, to hide himself in that tree. At least her appearance had saved him from the painful discovery that there was no hiding in heaven. By the time he stopped looking for her, he had lost his bearings completely, and couldn't tell which direction he had come from or where he had seen Pig go.

Nothing at eye level gave him a clue, but the roof of a garden pavilion rose above the treetops in the distance. An overgrown path led in that direction, and he followed, it seemed, for hours, though the bright light of midday never varied. That was part of his quest, after all: to find the String of Midnights— the goddess' scattered necklace of black pearls—and bring the night back to heaven. If anything, that knowledge made the constant daylight more ominous instead of less, however.

He struggled forward, against his own fears and the dense growth. Once or twice he thought he caught a glimpse of someone through the bushes ahead, but up close, he found no sign that anyone had been there. Toward what must be afternoon in the world where sun and moon brought night and day, storm clouds boiling on the horizon gave the illusion of nightfall to the gardens. Lightning stabbed from thick black clouds and rain came on fast, pelting him with hail that left bruises on his arms and beat down the grass. Llesho ran for cover through rain-black tangles of thorns that caught at him as he passed. He hoped the beekeeper had found shelter, and prayed that no bolt of lightning strike him down, no flood drown him. When rescue from the storm did not come, he offered up his misery to the goddess and struggled on.

Eventually, the storm passed. The sun came out, sucking the steam out of the muck to curl around his slipping feet. He was afraid he'd fall into quicksand, but the ground remained solid enough under a soupy film of mud. When he no longer needed the protection, of course, he stumbled upon the pavilion he had seen from afar on the other side of the storm.

Once it must have graced the garden with its soaring beauty. Now, rain-swept leaves rotted against the risers and the excrement of predators raised a greater stink than the mud-rot. He hesitated at the bottom of a short flight of steps, embarrassed to mark the pale treads with his muddy footprints, even though there wasn't much more damage he could do the decaying structure. Picking his way carefully through the debris, therefore, Llesho made his way inside.

Trees, driven by the terrible storms, had crashed through the roof, strewing broken limbs and shattered tiles on the floor. A divan, chewed and defiled by nesting vermin, sat in a far corner. Llesho made his way toward it past the debris. He had thought he might find the beekeeper sheltering from the storm, but the pavilion stood abandoned. Without her there to ask directions, he didn't know how he would find his way back to the gates or to Pig. Nudging the shreds of draperies aside, he sat heavily on the smelly divan.

"What has happened here?" he asked, softly because he was only talking to himself.

"Too much despair, not enough attention to duty."

At the sound of a voice behind him, Llesho leaped to his feet in fighting stance, his leg raised for a side kick. Pig. The Jinn had found clothes, the rough pants and shirt of a common worker bound by a cloth belt and streaked with mud. Mud clotted between the teeth of his rake and the toes of the cloven hooves he walked on. Llesho relaxed his striking leg, so that he had both feet on the floor, but otherwise gave no quarter. "What happened here?" he demanded. "Where have you brought me?" He said nothing about the beekeeper, afraid that he'd created her out of his own imagination.

"We are in the gardens of heaven, as you well know." Pig leaned on his rake, exhaustion carved into his smooth round face. Llesho saw blood on the rake handle and blisters on the thick fingered black hands where a proper pig would have a second set of hooves. "As for what has happened here, it is despair. I've shaken things up a bit among the under-gardeners, though, and we've had some rain."

"I'd noticed." Llesho wrung out his shirt, distaste twisting his mouth. "It soaked me through. I thought the sun always shone in heaven."

"You have seen what happens when the sun shines all the time, Llesho: the Gansau Wastes. Even heaven needs rain. Its gardeners sometimes need a kick in a tender spot to get them moving as well, but these gardens, at least, should be set to rights soon. For a little while."

"Why just for a while?" It seemed pointless to maintain a threatening posture when Pig looked like he could barely stand on his two hooves. Llesho threw himself down on the corner of the divan and cleared the spot next to him for the Jinn, who did not sit, but paced his anger out the length of the pavilion.

"Because, when you awaken from your dream, we will both be in Ahkenbad again. I have given my assistants the flat of my rake, but heaven remains hostage to the demon at the gate, and no help can come until Thebin is free of the Harn who called him. When we are gone, lethargy will reclaim the lesser gardeners, and they will soon return to the state in which I found them, gaming among themselves, drinking, and weeping.

"Fools!" Pig threw himself down on the divan, nearly toppling them both into a snarl of bat droppings and chewed satin. "Not a one of them has left heaven by choice since called to serve the Great Goddess in her gardens. Now that they cannot leave, however, they mourn a freedom they never valued when they had it."

"And the goddess?" Llesho asked. He'd expected to see her, thought she might come out to greet him. That she hadn't only confirmed his own belief, despite his advisers' insistence to the contrary, that she had found him lacking as a husband.

"I thought—" Surprised, Pig cleared his throat, squirming uncomfortably so that the divan they sat on groaned under his shifting weight. "No one approached you?"

"I haven't seen anyone but you. While I was looking for you, after you had gone off without me, I stumbled on a beekeeper trying to coax a wild hive out of a tree, but no one else."

"A beekeeper." Pig looked at him thoughtfully, and it was Llesho's turn to squirm. "Did she say anything to you?"

"She seemed to think that I had come to free heaven in my dreams. That isn't possible, is it?"

Pig shrugged his shoulders. "I've never heard that it could be done. Until I tried it, however, I didn't know that I could turn myself into a pearl, or that I could escape by rolling into a spring that flows between the worlds of heaven and earth."

"You're a Jinn," Llesho pointed out practically. "Magic comes with the territory. Until a handful of seasons ago, I was a pearl diver and a slave. I can fight now, but my real talent seems to be as live bait that Habiba can dangle in front of Master Markko." His journey to Ahkenbad slung wrong way over the back of a camel still rankled. "I excel as baggage as well."

"The . . . beekeeper . . . thought you were more, though?"

"She said my dreams were important. Here." He gestured with a nod of his head to encompass the gardens that surrounded them.

"Believe it." Pig nodded, as if the words only confirmed something he already knew. "Though I'm surprised she hasn't changed her mind about you, now that she knows your wits are dull as a fence post."

Llesho pondered this for a long moment. "You don't mean—" Pig couldn't mean what he thought. The Great Goddess must be beautiful, or at least as terrible as the Lady SienMa. Not plain, in homely dress and at homely work. Before he could pursue the question with Pig however, a familiar voice broke into his reverie.

"Llesho!" Habiba's voice called from some distance he couldn't measure, "Wake up! Hurry!"

"We have to get back," Pig agreed, as he heard the voice, too.

"There you are." The sorcerer appeared at the edge of the foliage that encroached on the pavilion where he sat with Pig. "There's been an attack. We've got to get you out of here and let the dream readers close the portal."

What portal? And how did Habiba get into his dream? The magician's urgency brought him to his feet even as the questions bounced around in his head. "Lead the way, my lord."

Habiba gave him a very strange look. "It's your dream, Llesho. All you have to do is wake up."

"I can't, my lord." Llesho gave an apologetic twitch of his shoulders. "I'm lost."

"We're going to have to work on that. Later, though. No time now." The magician seemed to be speaking to someone Llesho couldn't see. He felt a sudden pinch that brought him up off the divan with a yelp. Then Habiba was gone, and he was standing alone, high on the sacred mountain of Ahkenbad.

Kaydu met him halfway down the trail that wound through the cliff of caves.

"Llesho!" she called to him. "Are you awake yet!"

She grabbed his arm and shook it anyway, and he realized that the shock of finding himself in the hills instead of in his bed must have shown on his face.

"I'm awake. How did I get here?"

"Walked in your sleep, according to my father. You nearly gave him a heart attack when he didn't find you between the horns of the dragon. The Dinha told him you'd be wandering in the caves."

She gave him a strange look, wide-eyed with the urgency of the moment, but still filled with secrets. "Father walks in his sleep, too."

"Oh." He walks in other people's sleep as well, he could have told her, but he thought she knew that already.

"This way. There's no time." At a run that should have sent them headlong off the mountainside she led him down, down, the cliffside path, into the dragon's chamber he had left in his sleep.

"What's happened?" he gasped as he followed her through the crystal cave.

"Master Markko attacked the dream readers. They held him off as long as they could, but he knows where we are."

"How'd he find Ahkenbad? I thought the city was hidden."

"The dream readers were holding the portal open to your visions. Master Markko stumbled onto the portal and slipped past their defenses."

He'd been looking for Llesho. At what cost to their own people had the dream readers defended him? Llesho stopped to pick up his spear and his sword, then he tumbled down the stone stairway behind her.

He expected to find soldiers fighting, the clash of weapons in the moonlight, but all was in silence. Too silent, he realized. The dream readers lying on their mats were dead. Acolytes moved among them in a daze, offering fumbling help their masters were beyond accepting. Bloody tear tracks streaking their faces gave the only sign of the violence that had left the student dream readers shattered within.

"This is my fault." Llesho reached out a hand, as if the evidence of touch might disprove what he saw. "I should never have come here."

"You didn't choose to come here." Lluka stepped away from a tight cluster of figures in the shadows, his face a mask of horror. "It was our idea to bring you here." His gesture included Balar, and Harlol, who wiped at the blood dripping from the corner of his eye as he followed the princes into the dim light. Llesho wasn't accepting the excuses his brothers made for him.

"I could have gone—"

Absently, Harlol brushed a streak of blood from his chin. "It wouldn't have made a difference. The magician was trying to find you when he attacked. If you were a million li from here, he would have attacked just the same. He only knows where you are now because of what he found in our minds. The dream readers resisted, but they had to choose between—" He stopped, his complexion turning green under the bronze, as if he had only that moment realized the import of what he had to say.

"They had to choose between protecting my dreams from him, or protecting themselves. And they chose to die." Llesho jerked his head in a sketchy nod, all he could manage of courtesy while he struggled to contain his grief and rage.

Not again. He couldn't take it again, not the deaths of more innocents on his hands. There was nothing, nothing he could do that could repay the lives sacrificed for him, and he resented it, resented the burden they put on him, the expectations they never quite spelled out. All those souls waiting between the worlds for him to do something or be something that would set them free, and he had to make it worth their sacrifice. But he didn't know how he was going to survive the weight of their deaths long enough to redeem them.

"Kagar?" Llesho asked, afraid to add another soul to his tally.

Harlol had that one bit of comfort to offer. "The Dinha had forbidden the acolytes to join in the dream reading tonight. Some are hurt, all are in shock, but Kagar and the others are alive. They'll need help."

Llesho felt the Wastrel pulling away and gave him permission to go with a quick nod. "Help where you can," he said, and added, "I'm as safe as I'm going to be," to Harlol's retreating back. When he had disappeared into the dim night, Llesho turned to his brothers.

"The Dinha—"

Habiba's low voice rumbled out of the dark. "She's alive."

There was little hope in his voice when he said it. Peering intently into the corner, Llesho saw the Dinha lying as still as the dead, huddled in a heap of drapes and robes. The dwarf, Bright Morning to the Tashek dream readers, sat with her head in his lap while he gently stroked the hair from her forehead. Habiba sat at her side, her hand wrapped in his long, skilled fingers.

As he watched in an anguish of remorse, the Dinha's eyes drifted open. "Take the boy," she said. "Run. Worlds hang by his life's thread."

"You should have let him have me," he accused. "It should not have come to this."

"We could not allow him to follow you through the gates," she whispered.

It was true. The mere thought of Master Markko tainting the gardens of heaven made him shudder. The beekeeper—at the thought, her image filled his mind, and the spear hummed with life at his back. He'd do anything to keep her safe. Oh. His eyes, shocked at the recognition, met the Dinha's warm understanding. Then, with a little sigh, her eyes drifted shut.

"Will she be all right?"

"Yes." Dognut kissed her brow and lay her down gently into the nest of pillows. "She's fine."

Liar! She was dead! But Llesho was beginning to understand, a little, what she had meant his dreams to teach him. The body died, the spirit went on. She would travel far and return again with wisdom to the wheel of life. He ought to believe that, and maybe in a hundred seasons he would.

Slowly, a tremor underfoot drew him out of his desperate reverie. The keening wail from everywhere at once, it seemed, started so low that he scarcely noticed it at first, but rose in pitch and volume until he thought it would deafen him. The acolytes couldn't raise that much noise. He threw his hands over his ears, but it didn't help. When he thought he could take no more, the ground rumbled and snapped beneath his feet like a flag in the wind.

"Ah!" the rugs on the cavern floor cushioned his fall, but his left wrist hurt when he tried to put his weight on it to get up again. Then a rough hand had him by the shoulder, and Balar was dragging him to his feet.

"Llesho. We have to leave." Kagar appeared between the stone teeth guarding the entrance to the chamber. She had washed and put on the robes of a dream reader, but he saw the faint tracks where the blood had leaked from her eyes and nose. Her eyes glittered with fear and wonder in the dark. "The spirits have awakened the dragon. He stirs."

Llesho thought she was talking in mystical riddles until a great gust of wind passed out through the gullet of the cave, rattling the roof and emitting a roar that singed the hair on the back of his head.

"Quickly! Quickly!"

The ground heaved. With Kaydu's hand pushing in the middle of his back and Balar gripping his shoulder, he stumbled out of the Dragon Cave, onto the Stone River road.

"Dognut!" he cried, "Did Dognut get out of the cave?"

"I've got him!" Habiba swept by, the dwarf looking alarmed but safe enough tucked into the crook of the magician's arm.

Servants and acolytes spilled out all around them. Still weak from the shock of Master Markko's spirit attack, they stumbled and ran, linking arms for physical support and to ease their terror as the horrific roar mingled with the shrieking cries of unearthly voices. Horses and camels added their screams to the chaos, fighting the soldiers who struggled to control them.

Rocks were falling and they hunched their heads low between their shoulders as they ran. Llesho bounced off an armored figure who grabbed hi i and spun him around, thrusting the reins of a horsie into his hands. "Get up. We have to get out of here—the mountain is coming down!" It was Stipes, and Bixei was near, holding two more horses against the panic. He mounted, and saw that others were taking to horse as well.

"Go! Go!" The acolytes, running on foot, were a little ahead of them, but they caught up, were well past the most elaborate of the caves when the roar rose in pitch, and the whole mountain shook, throwing off dirt and rock and the offerings of centuries. The great Dun Dragon rose into the sky, belching fire and screaming in anger.

The mountain was gone, the voices fallen to a low moan. Llesho thought the dragon was going to kill them all, but it circled slowly and came to rest at Kagar's feet.

"Dinha," Dun Dragon said.

Kagar bowed. "Lord Dragon."

"Who is this creature who rouses the Gansau Spirits and disturbs my sleep?"

"His name is Markko, and he searches for this boy." She gestured at Llesho, and put a hand on his arm to lead him forward. "Prince Llesho, of Thebin."

"What does he want of this child?"

Llesho's experience with dragons had taught him caution, and he answered politely when Kagar looked to him for an explanation.

"I am on a quest, Lord Dragon, to gather my brothers and free my people from the bandits and raiders who oppress them." He bowed deeply to the creature, to show his respect even as he spoke. "As part of my quest, I must find the pearls of the Great Goddess, the String of Midnights, free the gates of heaven from the demon who lays siege to them, and bring the turning of night and day to the heavenly gardens."

"If memory serves me well—and it always does— princes usually go hunting for princesses, or treasures, or alchemical formulae for everlasting life," the dragon commented. "Don't you think you've taken on rather more than you can chew for a first time quest?"

Llesho found it difficult to take his eyes from the trail of smoke drifting from the dragon's left nostril, but he managed a diffident shrug in answer to the dragon's curiosity. "I didn't choose my quest—it's been handed to me in pieces along the way."

"It may be time to add the word 'no' to your vocabulary."

The dragon studied him, and Llesho considered asking it to return the Dinha. He was getting tired of dragons eating his teachers. But this time, he knew it would be no use. The Dinha had been dead when the dragon awoke. She wasn't coming back.

"What of this Markko—why does he want you so badly he will kill my children to reach you?"

"I don't know," he answered as truthfully as he could. "He has only ever found me useful for testing poisons on."

"I suppose he has learned something about you we do not yet know. Like why the gods would burden a young prince with so onerous a quest. At any rate, it seems clear enough he wants to stop you from accomplishing your many sacred tasks."

Llesho had no answer to that, but he had a question, growing more pressing as the mournful lament rose to painful levels once more. "Who . . . ?" he began, meaning the voices wailing in the night.

"The dead weep for the dead." The dragon sighed a thin stream of ash. "The Gansau Spirits demand vengeance for the innocents who have died here." Something about the way the dragon said that made him shiver. Dragons didn't always live in the same present as humans did, and this one seemed to be answering a call out of the past as well as the present. He didn't think he wanted to know how those voices had become the captive spirits of the Gansau Wastes.

A trill on a reed flute announced the arrival of Dognut the dwarf and his intrusion upon the conversation.

"Lord Dragon!" He performed a sweeping bow. "The songs of this terrible night shall be sung from Thousand Lakes Province to the very gates of heaven!"

"We've had enough of songs, Bright Morning." The dragon's head rose on its limber neck, waving back and forth hypnotically. "I have my children to attend, those your Master Markko has left me. Grieving must be done, and rituals performed. Take your quest and go. But don't come back."

"Not my quest," Dognut objected, but the dragon wasn't listening. Llesho was, though: it sounded almost as though Dognut and the dragon knew each other, which was impossible. The Dun Dragon had slept under the cliffs of Ahkenbad for untold ages—had been the cliffs, more or less.

"I think we've worn out our welcome," Dognut said to the air, then looked around him. "Has anybody seen my camel?"

When he had wandered off again, the Dun Dragon rested his head on his claws and smoked quietly as Kagar said her farewells.

"I had hoped to have time to travel with you, to see the world as a Wastrel sees it," the new Dinha told him, "but I am called to a harsher duty much sooner than any would have thought."

Llesho bowed his head in agreement. "We are both called to duty too soon, Dinha."

She touched his hand to acknowledge the truth of that, and tears filled her eyes as she said, "We will send a party of our Wastrels to guide you. The sword of the Tashek people will join the storm gathering at your back. Spend our children well."

"The Tashek people have lost too much for a quest they didn't ask for. I'd rather not spend them at all, Lady Dinha."

Harlol chose that moment to join them. He held out Llesho's pack in his hand. "I know you didn't want to lose this."

Llesho took it with a sour frown. "I only wish I could," he said. The gifts of the Lady SienMa had only brought him bad luck.

Harlol didn't understand, but the dragon seemed to. Smoke rose from between its back teeth, but the creature did not object to the Dinha's offer, and finally Llesho surrendered with a promise, "I'll try to send them back in the condition I got them."

"I know that's what you want." The look she gave him pierced Llesho to the heart, and he would have cut it from his breast and offered it to her in his outstretched palm rather than see what she had seen come to pass.

"Harlol, at least, stays here. You will need him."

"There is no 'here' anymore, no safety anywhere," she answered him, ignoring the spark of anger in the Wastrel's eyes that almost rivaled the dragon's in its fire. "Ahkenbad no longer dreams my cousin. Harlol has passed to your dream now."

If the look in her eyes was anything to go by, Harlol was dead at the end of Llesho's dream. He couldn't let that happen.

"It's time you went, before you lose the light of Great Moon Lun." Kagar closed her eyes against his silent entreaty and walked away, into the moaning night. Yet again Kagar had become someone he didn't know, and the audience was over.

PART THREE
THE ROAD TO HARfi

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THEY rode into the silver night of Great Moon Lun with Habiba at Llesho's right hand and Harlol at his left. His brothers would have taken the places of favor at his side, but in his mourning he refused their company with a baleful glare.

"I don't need your protection, and I don't have time for your regrets," he informed them stiffly. "I have a magician to kill."

Habiba flinched at the dire threat. Llesho didn't mean him, of course, but he was angry enough to give even his friends second thoughts about approaching him. With more determination than good sense, his brother Balar ignored the warning to plead with Harlol, "Make him understand."

Harlol's face had become a mask, wiped clean of any emotion. Only his bitter words revealed the depth of his revulsion. "I'm done with drivingwhere he doesn't want to go. I'd have thought you'd had your fill of it as well."

The accusation struck Balar like a bolt from a crossbow, but Lluka responded with smooth reason: "The Dinha wanted to see him—"

"Not the way we did it."

If they hadn't dragged him by the chin to Ahkenbad, the Dinha and her dream readers would still be alive. Ahkenbad itself wouldn't lie in a ruin of shattered stone. No matter what Harlol said to make him feel less guilty, they all knew it. After a moment of tense silence, Llesho's brothers fell behind.

Harlol would not back down. "The Dinha will have my head in a bucket if anything happens to you," he insisted.

He meant Kagar, who had wanted to be a warrior before Master Markko had wiped out all the tiers of priesthood between the Dinha and her most rebellious acolyte. What do you think of war now? he wondered. Llesho could well imagine what she would say to her cousin if he failed her.

With a handful of the mercenaries lately come from Shan, Bixei scouted the dangers ahead. Behind rode a force in excess of fifty soldiers, including ten Gansau Wastrels the Tashek of Ahkenbad could ill afford to lose. Llesho didn't know what Harlol thought he could do that their gathered forces could not. He'd lost more than any of them in Master Markko's spirit attack, however, and seemed determined to fulfill whatever charge his Dinha laid on him as penance.

It was hard not to trust this man who had lost his home and everything he loved in Llesho's defense. Some debts transcended all possibility of payment, but he thought they might share the common goal of destroying Master Markko. That much he could give the Wastrel. But he expected Kaydu in Harlol's place, and craned around in his saddle to find her. Stipes led her horse, riderless except for Little Brother, who peeked out of a sack tied securely to the saddle pack.

"Where's Kaydu?" he asked Habiba.

"Scouting." Habiba cut his eyes skyward, by which Llesho understood that his captain was hunting information in the shape of a bird.

"Where are we going?"

"Toward Ham." Habiba gave a shrug. He was working on little sleep and less information, and seemed to beg forgiveness for not seeing into the hidden heart of their adversary as Master Markko had looked into theirs. "We'll have a better idea of our course when Kaydu returns. For now, we are simply putting as much distance as possible between us and Ahkenbad."

No need to ask why. Llesho wanted to find the magician, but on his own terms, not wake up with Master Markko's teeth sunk in his throat. He couldn't do much to move their party faster across the Gansau Wastes, or to hold Great Moon Lun in the sky past her transit to light their way. But he could get his own enormous rage under control and do something about Habiba's unreasonable guilt. With a long, cleansing breath, he let go of his anger—for the moment—and looked to her ladyship's magician.

"How difficult would it be for an adviser who can enter the mind of his enemy to do the same to his allies?" he asked.

"Not difficult at all, my prince."

Llesho returned a measured nod, accepting the conclusion. "Would you advise a prince to trust a counselor who might steal through his mind at will?"

"No, my prince."

"Then you present me with a problem in logic, Lord Habiba. How do I condemn you for the very lack that makes it possible for me to trust you in the first place?"

The magician slanted Llesho an exasperated frown. "I had thought of that, my prince. The simplicity of the question belies the complexity of the answer. Which answer, I might add, I do not have."

Was that sarcasm pressing a thumb to the scale next to the respect that had weighted Habiba's use of his title of late? About time, Llesho figured. "Let me know when you've figured it out," he responded with equal tartness. They rode on in silence then. The tension still lay between them, but they'd come to an agreement of sorts, to set it aside as long as they needed each other.

When Great Moon Lun chased her lesser brothers below the horizon, Habiba called a halt and had the tents set up for a few hours of rest before dawn. Llesho settled in the command tent with Bixei and Stipes nearby, a barricade of restless, lightly dozing bodyguards between him and his brothers. Harlol didn't rest at all, but huddled over a camp table at the center of the tent, where they had spread a map in the light of a shuttered lantern. The Wastrel's breathy voice rasped low in the night, answered by Habiba's deeper whisper. But there was little of planning to do until Kaydu reported on the progress of Markko's Harnish accomplices. Gradually even these murmuring voices died away. Llesho had feared more dreams, but the memory of soft fingers at his temples settled his frayed nerves. The Dinha had died, but still he recognized her touch, like a benediction and absolution. He rolled snugly in his blanket against the cooling air and let his heavy lids fall over his weary eyes. Harmless, meaningless dreams wandered through his sleep. He made no effort to banish or to follow them, and woke to Kaydu's voice setting a forceful alto counterpoint to the deeper tones of her father and Llesho's brothers.

"I found Bor-ka-mar on the road and took his report. The Ham who attacked the emperor's party left Durnhag with the prisoners in train, as we suspected. Master Mar-kko wasn't with them, so Shou's identity may be intact."

"Kaydu." Llesho pulled himself out of his bed and nodded a salute which his captain returned. After a visit to the trenches to relieve himself, he took his place at the map table and Kaydu continued her report. She looked weary, he noticed, but her delivery remained crisp and efficient.

"Bor-ka-mar followed with twenty imperial militiamen. He guessed wrong on the direction and lost the trail and a day's march."

Llesho didn't notice his own hiss of dismay until Kaydu had answered it, defending the man Llesho had thought a sound and competent soldier. "I would have guessed the same, that the raiders would head straight for the Guynm-Harn border. The captain's men had to turn back, but they are on the right track now, and have gained back some of the distance they lost." She pointed to the map with a fingertip to mark their own position, then sketched the path from Durnhag toward them rather than away. "We've had some luck there. The raiders are heading north by northwest, as the crow flies—"

Llesho gave her a wary look which she returned with a bland smile. She'd been the crow flying, then. He made a mental note to ask her how she did that some day and bent to the map. They would need luck and more to intercept the raiding party even heading straight at each other. On the desert, a man who wandered off to take a leak could lose his party and his life in the endless sameness over the next dune.

"And Shokar?"

"Shokar, too, has adjusted his course. At utmost speed, however, I don't expect either party to catch up until sometime tomorrow afternoon."

"How long before they pass into the Harnlands?" They all knew time was their enemy. The map compressed all distances. It had taken them weeks to cross the Wastes to Ahkenbad, a matter of finger-lengths drawn on soft leather.

Harlol had listened intently, not speaking until now he stabbed at the border some fifty li west of the position Kaydu had marked out on the map. "I expect they are following the Gansau track and will cross into Harn territory here."

Lluka and Balar had fallen quiet while Kaydu and the Wastrel talked, but now Lluka added a caution, "If the raiding party crosses the border at a place of their choosing, rescue forces will face whatever support they have waiting for them."

"Then we will have to find them before they can join forces. We don't have troops enough to wage a war against Harn." Llesho didn't tell them that he heard their companions crying out in his sleep, that even now it might be too late.

"Best not to bring war to someone else's doorstep," Harlol agreed, "but the Harnlands aren't like Thebin or the Shan Empire. Small bands follow their herds all across this map. They have no centralized government and only the most limited communication between the most powerful of the clan lords. Sometimes a few clans will make short-term alliances for specific goals, but there's hardly a concept of 'official' at all. The raiders turned away from the most obvious route, perhaps to make it more difficult to follow, or to draw attention away from movements gathering against Shan. Or they may be making a detour around their own enemies among the clans.

"The farther into the heart of the grasslands you go, however, the less likely anyone you meet will have any notion that their neighbors are waging wars in the name of the Harnlands. The clans won't know or care what the raiders are doing, as long as they themselves are left in peace. Their shaman may be troubled by a powerful magician in their midst, but the Shan Empire figures in the thoughts of very few. The raiders will doubtless have some number of their allies waiting to aid them at their intended crossing, but I'd warrant their numbers will be small, and their Harnish neighbors unhappy."

Habiba had listened silently, but he stirred at this intelligence. "Master Markko or one of his puppets will be close by, probably at the border where the raiders plan to cross. He won't want to wait to question the prisoners."

Harlol studied the magician with a troubled frown. "No, you don't want to meet this one in battle," Llesho tried to convey with the downturn of his mouth; and: "Kill me yourself if the choice is to fall into his hands again," he pleaded with his eyes.

Kaydu shivered, a combination of empathy and memory in the way she met his bleak gaze. He saw a promise there. Good.

"We have to intercept them before they reach the border," Kaydu agreed. Little Brother wrapped himself around her neck, his uniform hat in his hand, as if he would urge them on their way. "We have a good chance of success if we can limit the fighting to just the raiding party. If we cross in force, neutral clans would have to enter the conflict on the side of the raiders, to repel what they see as an attack on their territory." Like him, she did not mention the futility of taking on the magician in his power.

"So we ride," Habiba instructed. Kaydu gave a low bow of salute, and Harlol and Bixei did the same. Together, they escaped to set their troops in motion. Llesho tried to follow, but his brothers blocked the way. Lluka was giving him that big brother look, a sign of trouble sure as a beacon. Lluka saw the future, except now, when none of his visions made sense to him. Must be driving him mad, not to know the right thing to do. "What?"

"Let us go with the troops, in your place." Lluka gestured at Balar and then at himself. "Stay to the rear with your own picked guard. Once we've returned the emperor to his militiamen, we can bring Adar and Shokar back here with us and decide what to do next."

"And if I say 'no,' will you hit me on the head and leave me tied to a tent pole?"

"You're the seventh son, Llesho." Lluka held out a hand, as if he held the Thebin Empire in his palm and could offer it as a gift. "The goddess needs you alive to fight for Kungol, which you can't do if you die for Shan." "You can't protect me from my own quest, Lluka." Llesho rejected his brother's plea with a slow shake of his head. "And you don't know what the goddess expects of me." Too much, he would have said, but he didn't want to undermine his own argument with his brothers. "If the disaster at Ahkenbad taught us anything, it is that there is no safety except to see this miserable quest through to the end."

"What happens to the empire, or the kingdom, when the true ruler expends his life like a foot soldier?"

"I don't have a kingdom to lose." Where were you when the Harn came? He gave his brother a long stare, trying to keep the accusation out of the memories of blood in the Palace of the Sun. "But I do have one to win. I can't do that cowering in a tent in the middle of the Gansau Wastes."

"Llesho's right," Balar interrupted with support from an unexpected direction.

His brothers had seemed a united front, not against him so much as opposed to what he had to do. Until now. "Bringing Llesho to Ahkenbad was necessary to maintain the balance between heaven and earth. We had to study his gift, and the dream readers died for what we learned. But the Dinha knows where his duty lies, and so do we."

Balar didn't look happy about what he said. Llesho wasn't sure he even knew why he'd spoken out, but he didn't back down when Lluka glared at him. Instead he held out his hand, reflection of his brother's gesture, but his fingers flexed as if they held within them something as fragile as it was precious. "Much rides in the balance—"

Habiba watched the brothers, sharp eyes flicking everywhere. His shoulders heaved with a quick breath of relief when Lluka bowed his head, conceding the argument. With a nod to accept his brothers' surrender, Llesho followed his captains out of the tent.

He found Bixei and Kaydu and Harlol each among the forces they commanded, and drew them away for a quick conference of his own.

"Before we go on," he said, "I have to know where your allegiances lie." In particular he looked at Bixei and Kaydu. "We aren't the cadre that the Lady SienMa set on the road to Shan together anymore. So tell me now, who holds your oaths."

They knew he meant, "How far can I depend on you? Will I look up during battle to discover that the winds have changed at the first uncomfortable command, and allies have become enemies?" It troubled them, what he must think, and more the reasons why he thought it.

"I never should have stayed behind." Bixei stripped off his brass armguards and extended them on his outstretched hand with all the guilt in his heart written in the lines that creased his stricken face. "I thought only of myself. Our cadre was broken, and Shou has fallen to the enemy. We could have lost you both—"

Losing Emperor Shou to the Harn must have rubbed that old wound raw in the hours his broken cadre had to brood while he slept. But Llesho had no more use for his companions' guilt than he had for the armguards held out to him. It wouldn't save Shou or his fellow prisoners, and it could only destroy the hard-won rapport that had made their cadre work at all. Llesho wanted his friends back, wanted the backslapping and the bragging with which they had met him out in the desert, back the other side of telling them that he'd lost Shou to the Harn. He didn't think that would ever happen now. And Habiba had come out to watch what he would do next. Another damned test.

"I thought this army was worth something." He jerked his chin in the direction of the troopers mounting up for the march.

"They're good." Bixei's head came up at the challenge.

"But for whom?" Llesho asked. "Where is their loyalty sworn?"

"I am sworn to the Lady SienMa, who has put me in your service." Kaydu spoke up, appropriately as their first captain and trainer. "The imperial militia ride in the service of their emperor. Fewer than I would have liked could be spared from the imperial city, but they will die to win Shou's freedom and, if they survive, will continue to serve at his pleasure. So you have us all until then, and me after, however Shou chooses."

Bixei answered next, "The Thebins who remember the Harn attack on Kungol have sworn life and limb to Thebin's king. I'm not worried that they'll panic when it conies time to attack, but that they'll throw their lives away rather than hear an order to retreat.

"For myself, I ride with the mercenaries, in memory of Master Jaks, to reclaim the honor of his clan lost at the fall of Kungol. We are yours to the Palace of the Sun, and will ride with you to the very gates of heaven if you demand it of us."

"I hope that last bit's not an idle boast." Llesho released a long sigh, feeling the reins of battle coming into his hands, if some more steadily than others. "The Great Goddess needs our help."

Bixei gave a little shudder, but they'd all grown accustomed to traveling with wonders.

He didn't have to ask Harlol. Kagar, the new Dinha, had given the lives of her Wastrels to Llesho for the spending. He knew what he would choose in commanding them. . . .

"Take your men home," he said to his kidnapper, who had become a trusted friend. "There's been enough death among the Tashek. Your dream readers need burying and your living need their brothers."

Prince and Wastrel studied each other across an abyss of culture. Shutting out his other captains and the army mounting up at a short distance, Llesho's eyes narrowed with the intensity of his purpose. He would cut through the Tashek's objections like a Thebin knife.

Harlol, for his part, answered Llesho's desperation with a serene smile. "We go where the Dinha sends us."

"Kagar—the Dinha—believes that you will die." Llesho's voice had fallen to a whisper. The very notion squeezed his heart. He didn't want to imagine a battleground littered with more Tashek dead, and his revulsion curled his lips back from his teeth.

"And so we will die, and heaven will take us in. Water will fall out of the sky on us and we will fill our stomachs with the fruit of lush gardens."

You don't have to die for that, Llesho thought. The Lady SienMa has gardens and plenty in the imperial city, where rain will fall on your head as often as not. Harlol knew that, of course, had been to Shan and back again, and still believed in a heaven that looked like the orchards of Farshore Province.

"If I order you to go—" he began again.

"We will follow," Harlol answered. There would be no bending.

"Come if you must," Llesho told him to end the argument, "but I own you now. Die only at the risk of my displeasure." He turned to walk away, then threw a last warning over his shoulder— "And remember, I have some say in the heavenly gardens. It will not go well for you in any world if you cross me now."

He didn't know that it was true, but Harlol seemed to believe it. The Wastrel stared, unblinking, for a long moment before he dropped his head to accept the threat. Don't die, Llesho willed him. How can I face the Dinha in my dreams if I have lost the children of her station, and the cousin of her blood?

Habiba, crossed by the shadow of the last tent pole standing, was satisfied. Llesho didn't know how he knew, because the magician's mouth remained as thin and expressionless as ever, but the easing of the tension in those shoulders was, for him, the equivalent to a smile in another. He'd done all right, then. Wished Habiba had dealt with the situation instead of giving Llesho a headache trying to figure it out for himself, but he'd done it.

"It had to be you." Dognut had wandered up on the other side and jabbed him with an elbow to punctuate his muttered comment. "They hadn't done harm to Habiba, so he couldn't forgive them."

Llesho didn't know where that came from. Wasn't anything to forgive. He grunted some vague acknowledgment and went off to find his horse.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THEY had ridden through the morning, and after a stop at the heat of the day, had gone on when Han and Chen rose to chase Great Sun over the horizon. When it grew too dark to continue, Harlol directed them to a sheltered place off the road, with no water or grass for the horses but a bit of scrag for the camels to gnaw on. The rest of them would be living off what they carried until they reached the border.

While a handful of troopers raised the command tent, Llesho wandered out into the darkness. The slide of sad-dies and the thump of packs landing on the ground told of soldiers who would take what rest they could against their tack, but first they tended to their animals, feeding them by hand what forage they carried.

Some few of the soldiers recognized him, and they turned to watch when he passed, nodding an informal salute. Well trained not to demonstrate undue deference for the eyes of spies hidden anywhere, they couldn't hide their battle nerves. No one spoke to him, which was just as well, since he didn't feel much like giving inspirational speeches. The soldiers understood that the world as they knew it rode on their success. His own presence, a deposed prince of a ruined house, was lesson enough of the consequences of failure.

After an uncounted time of such directionless wandering, a dim light flared behind him. Llesho flinched, then settled. A lamp, nothing more, shaded by tent canvas. Llesho turned and retraced his steps. The troopers had departed to their own rest, leaving Bixei and Stipes on guard; Bixei trusted no one else with this duty. They nodded salute as he drew near and stood aside to let him enter.

Habiba had instructed against the laying down of rugs and the hanging of silk from the crosspiece. Their packs lay piled in the dirt of a corner, with Dognut sitting atop the heap like a prince of drovers, his flutes and music quiet for once. On the dwarfs lap, Little Brother slept peacefully, tiny monkey paws curled around the hat of the imperial militia the creature wore. Llesho wished his own rest came so easy.

At the center of the tent Lluka and Balar sat on camp stools. Harlol watched from a corner, his hands on his sword hilts and Habiba, with a dun-colored owl perched on his shoulder, paced impatiently between the dwarf and the Wastrel. The map, as always, lay open on the table like a silent accusation.

"Llesho," Habiba greeted him. A hand stroked the head of the owl, which returned the soothing caress with a head butt to the magician's chin. The owl peered solemnly at Llesho, then, with a ruffle of wings and a fluttering hop, Kaydu stood in front of them, still twitching in the way a bird settles its feathers.

"Spirits of storms!" Harlol made a warding gesture but stood his ground. The regard of Llesho's own brothers sharpened keenly, he noted, though more with scholarly greed than fear or superstition. Lluka gave him a searching look, measuring the ease with which he accepted the owl's transformation.

"You travel with wonders," Lluka reminded him as he had once before.

Yes, brother, he didn't say. I've grown casual around miracles. It showed on his face, though, an irony born of darker knowledge than his brothers could imagine, who had lost the understanding of their gifts when they were needed most. Knowing Kaydu as he did, Llesho wondered if Harlol's fear didn't show more sense than any of them.

Kaydu followed the unspoken challenge with her usual ease. She was his teacher, after all, and had long ago learned to gauge his reactions. When she thought the pissing contest had gone on long enough, she grabbed Llesho's arm and tugged him into the group around the map with a proprietary sniff.

"We were about to hear the young Wastrel's report." Absently, Habiba flicked a stray pinfeather from his fingers, commentary of his own laced with an obvious reminder of the powers gathered around them.

"We are here." Harlol came forward and pointed at a spot on the map that showed no human habitation, but a range of hills that folded into the high plateau of the grasslands.

"The border with Ham lies here." The Tashek's finger trailed up the map. "If we rest until Great Moon rises, we can travel through the bright of the night, into the morning. By high sun, we should be within striking distance of the Harnlands."

Habiba turned to Kaydu, who had scouted high above the fleeing Harnishmen and their pursuers.

"And you, daughter? What can you tell us?"

Kaydu studied the map for a moment, as if trying to convert her owl memory into the symbols burned into the leather.

"The Harn are here." A gesture pointed out the place where she had picked up sight of the raiders below her in flight. "Their party has grown since it left Durnhag; they now number a hand of hundreds, though scattered up and down the road for a li or more, each band trying to look like it has no interest in the others.

"They know they are followed now, and there seems to be a split in the ranks. Markko's supporters ride for-wardmost and wish to reach the Harnlands and their master before attack on their rear can come. Others hope to trade the hostages for wealthy ransoms and lag behind.

"As an owl, I overheard their conferences. Emperor Shou continues to play the part of an indignant Guynmer drawn into events over his head, but they torture him for information to turn against his fellow travelers. Lady Carina and Master Den likewise hold to their disguises and travel under light guard as servants of no consequence. We will have help from that quarter when the attack comes."

"Attack?" Habiba raised a disapproving eyebrow. How much better it would be, Llesho thought, to cut the forces against them in half with the simple application of money. But Kaydu rolled her eyes in disapproval of the message she brought.

"Bor-ka-mar was closest, so I stopped at his camp to pass on the intelligence before I returned. I urged him to pretend surprise when the demand for a merchant's ransom comes, to pay it and quietly return the emperor to the capital city with none the wiser. He chooses battle. Honor is at stake, he claims, and a lesson to be learned."

Llesho wondered who needed the sharper lesson: Bor-ka-mar, who would surely feel the edge of his emperor's temper for taking the path more costly in lives, or the Harn, who would learn not to touch the citizens of Shan. A hostage wanted for his value in cash, however, would remain alive as long as his captors found a value for him. But ... "What of my brother?" Llesho asked.

"Adar is well. For the most part," Kaydu added. "The prisoners ride. They fear he is magical, as the superstitious often see healers. He travels surrounded by heavy guard, but in the company of the leader at the head of the convoy. Lling they move in chains, as befits the armed guard of their prisoner."

Pig, he thought, his hand sweat-tight on the pearls that had fallen from heaven, how does your mistress allow such torment? Of course, the goddess was herself a prisoner in her heavenly gardens.

Kaydu hadn't mention Hmishi, would have let that slide into the misdirection that he suffered the same harsh but honorable fate as Lling. Llesho remembered the cries in his dreams, however, and rejected the non-answer.

"And what of Lling's partner, Hmishi?"

"Not well." Kaydu closed her eyes, whether to call to mind more clearly what she had seen or to blot the image from her inner vision he could not immediately guess. "He lives. We all need our rest now—more can wait."

"I need to know."

Kaydu looked to her father, for permission to speak or, perhaps, for permission to withhold this information. He returned only a narrow shrug. Not his call, or hers. She sighed.

"In Hmishi, they must believe that they have captured the prince they were looking for, and wish to bring him properly chastened to their master."

"And so?" Llesho asked. Absently, he slid his hand inside his shirt and wrapped his fingers around the little sack of pearls, caught between his dreams of dangling in Master Markko's clutches and the waking chaos that awaited them all if the Harn should kill the emperor of Shan.

"And so," Kaydu continued, "the others ride, but Hmishi walks. Chained, as Lling is chained, but with a rope around his neck. When he does not keep up, the rope tightens, pulling him off his feet and choking him. When he loses consciousness, the raiders drop him over the rump of Lling's horse, then set him on his feet again when he comes to." There was more she wouldn't say, but he knew it, had known since he heard the screams of his companions in his dreams, and he didn't press her.

"Evil rules the waking world," he muttered, and felt the thought take root in his own heart. He would risk all to free his companions, but in his most secret soul gave thanks that this time someone else bore the torment in his place. Not for long, of course. If Hmishi survived the journey, Master Markko would know they had brought him the wrong Thebin boy. Then Hmishi would die for the crime of not being , and Markko would send more raiders to search for Llesho again. But for a short time, Hmishi suffered and he did not.

"We have to get him out of there."

"All of them," Habiba agreed. "And before they cross into the Harnlands."

"Here," Harlol traced a route that intersected the raiding party on the road a good twenty li from the border, and east of where they now rested. "There are no roads through these hills, but natural defiles and hidden passes easy enough to find as the bird flies—" He sneaked a nervous look at Kaydu, as if she might peck at his eyes for suggesting such a thing.

"Can be done." She nodded her thoughtful agreement. "Do you hunt with eagles, Wastrel?"

"None so beautiful as my captain," he said, and smiled at his own temerity to give her compliments and put himself under her command.

"A warrior with flattery," she softly teased him.

Llesho wondered if either of them knew what game they played at, here at the edge of the world. "How long till moonrise?" he interrupted this strange courtship.

"Three hours," Harlol answered promptly, and Llesho nodded, suddenly more tired than was reasonable. He hadn't wanted Kaydu for himself, but he felt, as he had when Lling chose Hmishi, the exhaustion of being alone in a world where everyone else came in twos.

"Sleep," Habiba insisted. "Let others keep watch."

As if the magician saw a future in which he could no longer defend his charge. Oh, help me, Llesho thought. I am falling through a crack in the world, and no one can save me.

He let Bixei roll out his blanket, and made no objection when Habiba trimmed back the lamp to the least glimmer. But he did not sleep. In that dim light he checked his pack, drawing out the gifts Lady SienMa had given him. Cross-legged on his sleeping blanket, he set the jade cup before him and meditated upon its green depths. A marriage cup, he knew it to be. In lives past, he had loved and married, perhaps had children, joys and sorrows. A life.

He'd died, but more to the point, his time had come again. What lessons was he supposed to learn from this life? What had he learned in the past of the jade marriage cup? A priceless object, he knew it to be—it would have been even then. Was he always a king or a prince, in all the lives that he had lived in the kingdoms of the waking world? Or did the cup have some other tale to tell? Perhaps a poor soldier had reached too high, touching lips to exalted honey before the bitter gift took it all away. He reached into his pack and took out the short spear that whispered death to him, felt the weight of it settle easily in his hand. Once this spear had killed him, but it was his spear, no doubt of that, worn to familiarity in his grip and steeped in more blood than his own.

The coming battle would be fought on horseback. Luck had brought Llesho up against his enemies on foot until now, but that wasn't how the raiders of the grasslands preferred to carry out their campaigns. The Lady SienMa had taught him, with Kaydu and his Thebin guards, how to shoot a bow from the back of a horse, how to bring the attack in close, with spear or sword. His wrist still hurt from his fall in Ahkenbad, but he reached for his bow and strung it in the near dark, with fingers that had almost lost the knack of it. When he had done that, he polished the short spear, laying them both nearby before he let his head fall back upon his pack for an hour's rest.

In the hard dark, without even the light of the lantern for comfort, Llesho woke screaming. "They are killing him. Oh, Goddess, they are killing him!"

"What?"

"Who are they killing?"

"Llesho, wake up!"

Of all the voices calling to him, Llesho responded to the last, Habiba's.

"Help me!" he cried, and sprang up, both arms wrapped around his middle. But his heart was beating out of time and he couldn't make his legs hold him. The ground rose to meet him and he let it, curling in on himself and rocking, rocking against the pain. Soldiers tortured him and abused him for pleasure and to vent their anger that their raid had come to nothing, so they thought. Broken, and bleeding inside and out from his many wounds, still they made him walk, until Hmishi had fainted in the dust. Then they tied him to a horse and laughed at his groans and his agony. Now his fever rose unchecked. With two sacred healers in their train they would let no one tend the wounds.

Callused fingers brushed the hair from his forehead "You are with friends, you're safe. He can't reach you here." Habiba called him out of the dream, and Llesho hiccuped, and wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand, trying to quiet the erratic thunder of his heart that sent shudders throughout his rocking body. Habiba lied. Ahkenbad proved that Master Markko could reach him anywhere. But it wasn't the magician who was torturing Hmishi to death on the road to Harn.

"He knows it isn't me."

"Not yet," Habiba told him. "Time means little in the land of dreams. But soon perhaps, if we do not reach him first."

Something in the way he looked at Habiba made her ladyship's magician flinch and look away.

"He's angry because they caught the wrong one. He doesn't even care what Hmishi knows or could tell him— he thinks he's got Lling for that when he's done. He's just angry and wants to hurt him for pleasure, but he's gone too far . . ."

"Master Markko?" Kaydu asked, softly, as her father spoke, trying not to panic him again.

Llesho thought a moment, going over the dream in his head. "He isn't there. I don't know how he knows." He wouldn't say any more. Finally his heart and his breathing settled. His own stink, stale fear-sweat drying on his body, embarrassed him but he couldn't do anything about that now. Gradually, when his silence made it clear that there would be no further revelations, his companions drifted off to their own disturbed rest. Only Habiba stayed, stroking Llesho's hair back with a soothing rhythm that belied the tears falling absently from unseeing eyes. So only Llesho heard the magician's whispered prayer, "Dear lady, why? They are only children."

Habiba served the mortal goddess of war. If she were listening, she would have understood Llesho's thought. We are not children. We never were. But he was too tired, too heartsick and still aching from his dream. Habiba, he decided, would have to figure it out on his own.

Pfloonrise cast ghostly shadows over the army stirring out in the cool of night. Llesho shivered,ftot from the temperature, but from superstitious dread of the images moving like a dream in his head. Armies of the dead. In the moon-washed night, it seemed that he led armies of the dead. Blanched of life and color, his companions readied themselves for battle. Habiba rode at the head of their forces. Lluka and Balar had sorted themselves out amid the protection of their few countrymen. Kungol had hired mercenary guards because Thebin had turned away from war long ago. Now Kungol and heaven itself needed Thebin warriors, and skills long practiced as royal arts showed their military bones. His brother-princes would be as safe among Shokar's Thebin recruits as any soldiers could make them.

Harlol stood waiting with Llesho's horse. "Dognut rides with the baggage," he said. "I've assigned two Wastrels to stand guard when the battle comes." Two at least who might be saved, this much he gave .

"Thank you."

Llesho set his bow and arrows in their saddle quiver and shifted his shoulders to bring the short spear to a more comfortable rest at his back. His place was at Habi-ba's left, flanking the magician-general, except that Harlol, respectful but determined, would have ridden in front, to take the first wound for his Dinha. Llesho glared him down. At his side, then, in the first ranks as befit the envoy of Ahkenbad.

Kaydu rode to battle in the shape of an eagle, seated on a hunting perch set up for the purpose on the pommel of her father's saddle. They would need her special skills soon.

"That's really her?" Harlol muttered as he settled his horse next to Llesho's.

"Probably."

At a flick of Habiba's hand, horses moved, carrying their riders into a landscape of broken shadows. The path they followed between naked hills scoured by wind erosion carried them higher, to the elevated plains of the Harnlands. Llesho's horse set a steady pace and he let Harlol distract him from reliving his dream with questions about Kaydu.

"It might be someone else, or even a real hunting eagle. But if you know what to look for, you can usually tell. The general her father always has that funny line next to his mouth when Kaydu is performing a transformation. I've figured it half for pride and half for terror that she'll forget how to change back."

With a horrified start, Harlol jerked on the reins of his horse. The animal sidled nervously until brought under control again.

"She hasn't forgotten yet," he reminded the Wastrel, and shifted the pack that rode in front of him on his saddle. Little Brother peeked out at the passing scenery but made no comment for a change, which was some relief. The monkey had objected loudly when Llesho tried to hand him off to Dognut. No amount of argument had convinced Little Brother that he'd be safer riding with the dwarf among the baggage. And no amount of dread and foreboding could withstand the foolishness of a fight with a stubborn monkey.

Harlol watched Kaydu's familiar for a moment. Finally, he subsided into his own thoughts, perhaps trying to judge if Little Brother was more than he seemed as well. Llesho had wondered that on occasion, but he'd never seen a sign of anything but monkeyness. If Little Brother were some prince or magician, Llesho figured he'd long ago forgotten his way back to human form.

Habiba would never let that happen to Kaydu, so he, too, held his peace. He didn't mention a fear—question, really—he'd carried since Shan and the fight in the market square. Was his captain human in reality, or was that shape as false as the eagle? Her father had fought as a roc and, Llesho suspected, as one of the dragons who had come to their aid in that battle. The Dinha had called Habiba and his daughter her children, and the Dun Dragon had said the same of the Tashek people.

She wouldn't be the first dragon he'd befriended in human form, but he wasn't sure what he felt about following one of them into battle. Dragons didn't, he had concluded, quite grasp the concept of death. No reason to trouble Harlol with his questions, though. They were too complicated if you hadn't met a few of the creatures for comparison.

He'd thought Habiba preoccupied with the battle ahead, but when he surfaced from his musing, Llesho found the magician watching him sharply.

"Deep thoughts, Llesho?"

"Not really." He lifted a hand open-palmed, not to deflect the question but because words failed him. "I was thinking about Kwan-ti," which, it turned out, was more of the truth than he'd realized when he said it.

Habiba said nothing, and in the invitation of that silence, Llesho added, "She wasn't what I expected of dragons."

"Was Golden River Dragon more to your liking?"

"I liked Kwan-ti fine. At least she didn't eat the people who tried to help me." He'd loved her, in a way. Not like his mother, but more than anyone since the Long March. During the years of his enslavement in the pearl beds, the healer Kwan-ti and his father's minister had been his only comfort. He hadn't known what she was then, of course. Not even when she'd saved his foolish life the afternoon he'd tried to escape Pearl Island the hard way.

"Pearl Bay Dragon is young, as dragons go—much younger even than Golden River Dragon, who is younger by far than Dun Dragon. So she hasn't withdrawn so much from the world as they. And she is a mother. Her instincts would draw her to protect a youngling whose magic was just emerging."

It was Llesho's turn to nod that he understood. Not personal, Habiba warned him: his magic, not himself, like a mother duck takes stray chicks under her wing. But that didn't answer the question that disturbed him as he rode beside the magician. "I had thought the dragons left this world a long time ago. Now I've met three of them—are there any more of them still out there somewhere?"

"Not many, but a few."

"Have you met any of them?" A sneaky question that, and one for which he would have chosen his own answer if he could. No more dragons, and certainly not me, it would have been, and nothing else to worry about but a magician who could sneak into a person's dreams and kill him there.

"Not many, but a few. Their day is past: mostly they sleep now, or tend to their own business." Habiba let him set the pace of the conversation, offering no more than Llesho directly asked.

"I wonder if it's a good thing, to meet a dragon day-to-day?" Llesho asked. He was thinking of Kwan-ti, and wondering about Habiba, both the dragons the magician had met and the dragon he might himself be. "One can admire Golden River Dragon, but one never mistakes him for a friend."

"Friendship may be asking too much of a dragon," Habiba conceded. "Loyalty, however, is a well-known trait of the species."

"And is Habiba the magician, her ladyship's general, also a dragon?"

He'd disconcerted the magician, and ruffled the feathers of the eagle on its perch. Llesho would have felt smug about that if not for the fact that he was shivering like he had the ague, out of fear that Habiba would actually answer him. "The Dun Dragon said . . ." he began, as if he could guide the magician's answer.

"The blood of Dun Dragon flows in the veins of the Tashek people," Habiba repeated what the dragon had said, and then reminded him of the Dinha's greeting, as if he could forget: "And I have Tashek blood."

Which didn't exactly answer the question, but was maybe as much as Llesho really wanted to know. That wasn't the end, however. "All magicians have a touch at least of the dragon in them."

"Master Markko?" Llesho didn't want to know.

"Certainly, though not as much as you may think," Habiba hastened to ease his fears. "He seems more powerful only because he has honed his skill in the arts that will do the most harm, and he turns the focus of his attention on the one task of finding and stopping our advance."

Llesho's advance, though it was kind of Habiba to share the blame around. His own magician seemed to read his face, if not his mind, however.

"You are not the center of the world, Llesho," he admonished. "When the forces of death rise up in power, all who practice life are called to battle."

Llesho studied the general's stern countenance, and saw in it the memory of more battles than his own short life had sunsets. "Then I'm nothing but a pawn."

"I wouldn't say that." Habiba tugged on his reins, readying his horse to move out of the range of Llesho's questions. "That part about not being the center of the world? I lied."

There was no time for further sparring of wits with the magician, however. Bixei had returned from a scouting expedition with a brace of Gansau Wastrels.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WITH a hand raised above his head to signal the troops who followed, Habiba called a halt to their line of march and signaled Bixei to report: "What did you see?"

"Tents," Bixei saluted and continued with a grimace. "Black felt domes, like poison mushrooms. I counted half a hundred of them going up not more than an hour distant."

It made sense. The sun had reached zenith. Half the distance they'd made since Ahkenbad had been straight up. If not for the altitude, they'd have broiled in their saddles by now. The Harn had come out of a cooler climate into the Gansau Wastes; they had little choice but to rest through the heat of the Great Sun. Common warfare would have pulled their own troops off the road to wait for the shadows to return. Habiba said nothing of this, however, but asked: "Did they see you?"

"No, sir." Bixei answered properly for all three scouts, but the Wastrels' indignant snorts at his back would have said enough. No outlander was going to catch a Tashek wanderer if he didn't want to be seen. "The raiders sent scouts back along the way they came. They would report that Bor-ka-mar follows, and will know that the imperial troops will have to rest from the sun as well. But they don't suspect an attack out of the Wastes."

Habiba squinted into a sky bleached white with sun glare and scratched absently at the ruff of the eagle in front of him. He might decide to stop here, Llesho figured, watching the magician take the temperature of more than the air. Or they might press on and catch the enemy while they still had the element of surprise in their favor.

"Did you see any sign that Master Markko has joined with the traveling party?" Habiba asked, his gaze fixed in the elsewhere.

"No, my lord magician. And we looked for him." The first of the Wastrel scouts, who introduced himself as Zepor, spoke with such elaborate courtesies and bows that Llesho wondered if the man was mocking them or actually terrified of the general. Bixei didn't rebuke him for it, so he figured it was terror.

"The camp remains divided in two factions as Kaydu described. Those who hold the Thebins hold the forefront, but there seems to have been fighting among the rear guard, where Shou is held."

"And the emperor?"

"We didn't see him." Bixei gave an apologetic little shrug. "They have put Master Den to work carrying water to the cook tent, with just a single guard accompanying him. The healer Carina met him at the entrance. She looked anxious but unhurt."

Bixei paused, but the Wastrel scouts who flanked him made no move to step into the silence. Rather, they looked to Bixei with worried glances, leaving it to him to report the conclusion they had drawn together.

"Some want to murder the hostages as a hindrance to flight, others would negotiate with their pursuers even this close to battle, a ransom being less costly than a fight no matter the odds."

"Bor-ka-mar won't negotiate," Habiba commented.

"No, sir," Bixei agreed. Kaydu had already tried, and failed, to dissuade him.

"But," Llesho interrupted, recalling Habiba's assurances of the night before, that Hmishi's deadly torment hadn't happened yet. "As long as the Ham believe they've captured me, they don't dare murder their Thebin prisoners. Master Markko would have their heads on pikes. Or worse. So they are slowed down whatever they choose to do and may decide to hand Shou to Master Markko as well—to get the problem of the extra prisoners off their hands."

"If Master Markko doesn't know that he has Hmishi instead of you, he will soon." Bixei clearly hated what he had to say—like the others, he had awakened to Llesho's screams, and had heard the prophetic dream—but he straightened his shoulders and made his report. "I saw Tsu-tan the witch-finder heading away from camp, to the slit trench. You knew him when you worked the pearl beds. He belonged to Master Markko even then, and must have recognized all of your party who came from Pearl Island: Hmishi and Lling, and Master Den as he was among the gladiators—a laundryman and teacher of hand-to-hand combat."

"But Master Markko won't find out until a message reaches him—"

Habiba flicked his eyelids, calculation passing in the flash of that tiny gesture.

"What the witch-finder saw, Master Markko already knows," Habiba informed him.

"Then the things I saw in my dream have begun—" Somewhere in that camp of black tents, Tsu-tan was torturing to death the most loyal friend he had.

"Perhaps." Habiba accepted the rebuke of Llesho's frown. "Probably."

Bixei's hopeful expression faded into a soldier's impassivity, but Llesho could see past the training. He, too, had ridden with Hmishi and Lling, and would fear for his friends.

ARIS Harlol cleared his throat then, a Tashek way of gaining his companions' attention. "Does this Tsu-tan also know Shou?"

"No," Bixei answered.

"The magician will pluck from the witch-finder's eyes what he needs to see," Habiba reminded them; and, "Master Markko does know Shou as a general in command of Shan's provincial forces."

They had fought against each other in the battle that had killed Master Jaks, Llesho's weapons teacher and military adviser. What would Markko do to crack the mystery of a high officer of the empire traveling alone so near the Harnish border with only a handful of Theb-ins and a simple laundryman?

He looked across at Kaydu, wondering what she made of this news and shivered, unnerved by what he saw. Little Brother had gone very still, studying his master as a careful student might. And Kaydu, in eagle form, ignored everything else and studied Little Brother as if he were lunch.

"We have to move now," Habiba decided, as Llesho knew he would. "Can you bring us around the flank without being seen?"

"Yes, my lord magician." The Wastrel Danel gave a short, sharp dip of his chin in affirmation. "The Harnish-men believe these hills protect their backs, but the road from here to there is an easy grade and the passes are wide and free of pitfalls. Our warriors will rain down on them like heaven's retribution."

Not yet, Llesho thought. The goddess remained locked behind her gates in her heavenly garden, from where even her tears could not reach them. But they could do the next best thing. How he was supposed to cross the Harnlands in secret after waging a pitched battle on their very frontiers he couldn't imagine, but with his brothers Adar and Shokar so close, with Lluka and Balar in this very train, and with the pearls of the goddess warm against his breast, he could believe they would succeed.

The only question that remained was the cost, and if Hmishi—and Shou—would be paying it with their lives.

Habiba was saying nothing in haste, however. Thoughtfully he watched the sky and scanned the road ahead. "The road tends to the east," he finally said.

True enough, and their intended direction, to intersect the Harn heading west and south. Ah.

"We press on," Habiba decided, "at an easy pace, not to tire the horses."

Llesho shivered in spite of the heat as they set their horses once more upon the trail. Too many would die among those Harnish tents. For the sake of the empire, he hoped Shou was not among them. For his own sake, he thought of his brothers, and the companions of his cadre, which led his thoughts to the eagle riding near enough to take a piece out of his ear without leaving her perch. Could he follow such a creature into battle and trust its strange mind to bring him back out again alive? Habiba lifted her, a flinging motion with his arm, and she took flight, circled high on an updraft, and wheeled out of sight above them. Or, Llesho mused, would he even have the chance to test the question?

And what was he supposed to do with her damned monkey?

Habiba spread his army in a thin line across the hills that overlooked the Harn encampment. With Bixei on one side and Harlol on the other, Llesho waited for Hab-iba's signal while the sun beat down on their backs. That was part of the plan: the Harn would face a double disadvantage with a surprise attack coming out of the sun on their unguarded side. Screaming shadows would pour down on them out of the blinding light, driving them back before they had rightly figured what was attacking. His brothers, skilled in self-defense but with no training in the military arts, had withdrawn to the rear and waited with the baggage handlers and the grooms. They wanted to take him with them to wait out the battle in safety. He'd refused, with language that shocked Lluka, who was prone to ease his tensions in prayer. To Llesho's surprise, however, Habiba agreed with them, and they had argued the matter while they rode.

"The situation has changed," the general pointed out. "We don't need to flaunt you on the front lines as bait for Markko's taking this time. He knew when he attacked Ahkenbad where you had been, and that his raiders don't have you as they thought. Through Tsu-tan's eyes, however, he has discovered that they bring him valuable hostages. It would be better to force him to negotiate than to offer yourself in battle."

"And would you negotiate such an exchange? A deposed prince for a wandering emperor disguised as a lowly merchant?" Llesho gave Habiba a long, calculating look of his own. Would the Lady SienMa's magician, he wondered, prove any less powerful an enemy than Master Markko if it came to a conflict between them?

With just a nicker of an eyelash Habiba seemed to read his thoughts and brush aside his questions. Which Llesho took for a yes, but at the same time, a distaste for the skill. Just another reminder that little stood between the renegade magician and their own, except for the thing that Habiba had tried to explain to him on the road. Loyalty. Maybe he was starting to figure the size of that with a man like Habiba. Bigger than he'd ever thought, that was for sure. But ultimately pledged to the mortal goddess of war—not to the Emperor of Shan or a Thebin prince—which also bore thinking about.

The general, however, hadn't stopped talking just because Llesho had hit a crisis of trust. "Markko will expect you to advance with the forces sent to free the prisoners. And they've already caught a bigger fish than they know with Shou. It's a fool's mission to give them a chance at you."

"You trained me to fight." With his faith that the magician would not exchange him for the emperor restored, the giving of his life came into Llesho's own hands again. And while he would rather live and be free, once again he found the limits to what he would surrender to stay that way.

"Worlds stand or fall around Emperor Shou, but as you pointed out, I have brothers with the baggage. Either one can take my place in the Palace of the Sun if something happens to me."

"You are more important than you know," Habiba began, but shut his mouth with a snap around whatever he had nearly said.

"Don't expect me to hide when the lives of my brother and my friends—and that includes Shou—are in jeopardy." Llesho resettled his bow against his saddle with an expression that dared the general to order him off the attack.

Habiba glared back at him. "I expect you to take orders. And not to take foolish risks."

Llesho froze. This was more the magician he knew, but it reminded him how stupid it was to fling a challenge on the edge of battle. He could lose it all for them right here, split their small force along lines of loyalty—Shou's men, Thebin's and the Dinha's Wastrels. They needed to work together, under one leader, to win.

If the general gave the order, he'd be sitting out the fighting with Dognut and the monkey. But he could make his case until the order was given, and he could use the emperor in his defense: "Shou would say that you need to take the risks to understand the dangers, for later."

"And we see where it got him, don't we?" Habiba drew irritably on his reins and his horse startled and skittered in place.

Llesho had waited until he settled the animal, and then pressed his defense. "He's right, though, isn't he?" Which seemed a pretty stupid thing to say with Shou a prisoner, if not dead already. That didn't make him wrong, though.

Habiba gave him a look that peeled and dissected him for hidden motives, but he finally relaxed into a long-suffering sigh and a muttered comment about bad role models that Llesho didn't quite catch.

"Can I trust you to depend on the army at your back, and not to take it on yourself to rescue the Thebin prisoners singlehandedly?"

"I'm a soldier, trained under your own eye, sir." It cut right to his heart that the magician would doubt him, but something at the back of his mind squirmed under the demand for his promise. How much of a martyr was he willing to make of himself? Llesho decided not to look under that particular rock; better to admit the obvious.

"Do you think they'd let me?" Truth. The Wastrels and the Thebins in their party had arranged themselves as his personal army. At their head, Bixei and Harlol rode to his right and left. They might have been comrades in arms except for the tension that kept their eyes coming back to Llesho. Neither had seen the other in combat. Each doubted the wisdom of trusting Llesho's life to the other. But neither of them would let him get in over his head.

The general wasted no more time on him, but speared his self-appointed guards with a baleful glare. "The Ham don't need any more hostages," he warned them, "nor do the Thebin people need more martyrs."

Ouch. Habiba was using the deadly forms of argument after all.

"No, sir," Bixei saluted with more enthusiasm than Llesho thought was absolutely necessary, and Harlol gripped the hilts of his swords in the Wastrel posture of ready defense. He would have laid the blades at Habiba's feet in pledge of his good faith if they hadn't been traveling at the head of an army on horseback.

The general had acknowledged their pledges with a nod, and Llesho had marched with the army. Now that the waiting had come, Llesho admitted to himself that he was scared. He'd always carried a bit of fear into battle, of course, sensible considering he'd been wounded twice: once, in an ambush. He didn't remember much of that one—had slept through most of it thanks to the healer Mara, Carina's mother. Afterward, he'd gone back into battle no more scared than he'd ever been, but with the experience to know that sometimes in a fight you hurt your opponent and sometimes he hurt you.

But the wounds Master Markko had put on him scant months ago in the battle for the Imperial City of Shan had torn his body apart. Llesho still felt the scars pull when he overreached himself and likely would for the rest of his Me.

When the Harn had attacked the inn at Durnhag, he'd been too surprised to be more than the usual amount of logically scared. Then his brother had hit him over the head and he'd missed the rest. Poised in the hills above the enemy for the signal to advance, however, his fear went deeper than logic. He could feel a nest of dragon kits frolicking in his guts, where his brother Adar had stitched him up.

After arguing himself into this position, he realized that only one thing held him to his place in the line: an irrational determination that his brother Adar, held prisoner below, could not die as long as Llesho was trying to save him. He was, as Habiba had suggested, a fool. He hadn't realized until this moment that he was a coward as well.

"We'll get them out." Bixei sounded more than determined—as if he were reciting a known fact. They'd never quite been friends, but that didn't mean they weren't loyal to each other and to their cadre beyond all reason. Bixei had been at Shan, and he looked like he knew some of the things going through Llesho's mind.

"I know." Confidence in his companions he meant, not a boast about their success. He was feeling damned small in himself right then, and the world seemed upside down.

"I'd always thought battles that decide the fate of worlds would be bigger," he commented, revealing a little of what he was thinking. "There are so few of us, so few of them."

Harlol, on his other side, snorted his disapproval. "That's what happens when kings play soldier. Empires stand or fall, and no one is the wiser until they count the dead and kings are found among them."

He was risking Harlol's life. Spending it, if the Dinha saw truly. Llesho hadn't thought to ask, until now, why Harlol himself had come with them. Now wasn't the right time, but he could answer the Wastrel's charge at least.

"Kings are murdered sitting in their palaces, too. Better even for kings—or princes—to die fighting than to be slaughtered on their knees." He didn't think his father would have begged, but he knew enough now that he wouldn't think less of him if he had. And thought maybe that was Harlol's answer, too, or the Dinha's.

"Better not to die at all," Bixei reminded them both sharply. Unlike the Wastrel, he'd been through battles and unlike Llesho, he'd survived them relatively unscathed. Hurt worse in his single bout in the arena, he often reminded his less fortunate comrades. With none of Llesho's morbid dread, his common sense seemed to reach out and steady nerves. Llesho twitched an eyebrow to mark the hit his companion had made, center target.

But Shou was Habiba's problem. Against the rear guard of the Harnish camp the general led imperial troops who would die to the man to reach their emperor. To Llesho and his division fell the task of finding and releasing the Thebin prisoners. Hmishi had suffered torture in Llesho's name. They owed him rescue and they had to be quick about it. The Harn now knew he wasn't the prince Markko was looking for, which made him expendable in their eyes. They also had a prince their master didn't recognize. The trick was to reach Adar before the raiders could threaten to kill the hostages. Because Habiba had made it clear they would not surrender, not even to save Shou.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THEY waited, soldiers and warriors together, in the shelter of the hilltops until Habiba's signal came down the line. Then the battle cries of Thebin and Tashek and mercenary and imperial trooper rose with a terrifying roar as warhorses flew down the hillsides. Infected with the heat of the charge, Llesho's mount took off with the others. Llesho gritted his teeth and held on with his knees while his horse carried him at breakneck speed into the bowl of the Harn encampment.

The raiders had thought themselves protected by the hills at their backs. They'd posted guards who looked back along the road they had come by, but still sent no scouts ahead to warn them of trouble from that direction. Habiba's army took them by surprise, as planned.

That surprise lasted only seconds. Some few of the raiders rested in their tents, and these scattered to their horses like bees smoked from their hives. But many Har-nishmen remained mounted even in rest, and these wheeled and banded into groups, ready on the instant to fight. Habiba had timed his attack perfectly, however. The raiders, from their position below the attack, were forced to stare up at the advancing army which, coming out of the west, fell upon them as shadows against the blinding white light of the falling sun.

When Habiba's forces reached the encampment itself, the sun remained an ally of the magician: sparks flashed off armor and weapons, driving the Harn raiders back in confusion. Raiders on foot ran for their horses and weapons but were cut off on every side. Llesho felt the battle fever surge in his veins, drowning his fear. He knotted his reins over his pommel and fitted an arrow to his bow. Lifting up on his knees for a better angle as her ladyship had taught him, he let his arrow fly. Fitted another before he had fully registered his man down and shot, again, and again. His battle-nerved horse plunged into the fray, using teeth and hooves to drive away any who approached too near.

A squad of raiders regrouped and took the offensive, galloping into the attack with bloodcurdling screams and raised battle axes. Llesho directed Harlol to take his Wastrels to the rear of the fighting, to cut off a Harnish retreat and panic the horses. Bixei stayed close, forming his mercenaries into a circle of swords defending an inner core of Thebin bowmen grouped around Llesho himself. Firing over the heads of their own defenders, they drove the Harn back with bow and arrow.

Llesho fought with the logic of mathematical simplicity foremost in his thoughts: a Harn raider down couldn't kill his brother. A Harn raider dead couldn't stab him in the back as he drove past. He shot and he shot, until he reached into his quiver and found no arrows there. The spear at his back fairly vibrated with its own urgency to bring the fight closer. But his teams, with Bixei and Harlol at their heads, had driven the advance guard of the Harn back, where they fell into the clutches of Habiba's imperial troopers.

And then, with a shock like a door opening when one had given up all hope but the pounding on it, he realized that the battle had ended. Marching toward him, he saw more Thebins on the field than he had come with, and Bor-ka-mar, striding among the tents.

"We have to find Hmishi!" Llesho shouted. "Where is Adar?" Maddened by the dream and goaded by the weapon at his back, he slid from his mount, the short spear coming to his hand as if he been born with his fingers wrapped around its shaft. It wasn't his brother he longed to see, however, or any of his friends once he took up the short spear. He wanted Tsu-tan, wanted to pluck the witch-finder's heart out and return it to his master on a platter. With that bloody thought he broke through Bixei's defensive formation and dove toward the first tent. Nothing. When he came out again, Bixei was leaving the next tent, and his Thebin troops had scattered in the search.

From a tent larger than the others at the center of the camp, Harlol joined them, a bloody rag in his hand. Llesho recognized it as a strip torn from one of the militia uniforms they had worn in their masquerade as caravan guards to a Guynmer merchant.

"The witch-finder is gone." the Wastrel handed him the bloody cloth. "This was all we found."

Hmishi's, Llesho figured, and felt his stomach twist with memories of the prophetic dream. Was he still alive at all, or had they killed him in their rage that he was the wrong Thebin orphan? Harlol was waiting for an answer, so he nodded to show that he'd heard, but didn't trust himself to speak. Didn't know what to say to Bixei, who had come up beside them and was looking at the evidence in the Wastrel's hand with grim foreboding. Wherever Hmishi and his companions were, they could do nothing more for them here.

"Burn them," he said, with a jerk of his chin to indicate the round black tents. "Leave nothing."

Harlol stared at him for long moments, wondering what to do. Bixei, however, shared some of his loss. He had trained and fought with Lling and Hmishi, depended on them as mates in a fighting cadre, and he looked at the bloody cloth with a bleak anger of his own. He said nothing, but grabbed a tent peg and held it to a small cook fire until it burst into flame. Then, he jammed the burning spike end into the felt of the witch-finder's tent and walked away. The tent itself would be fuel to fire others.

The snapping flames fed something dark in Llesho's heart that grew without slaking. With blood in his eyes, he turned to his commanders. "Bring me prisoners," he said. "I will know where the witch-finder has taken my brother."

At that, Bixei eyed him uneasily, and Harlol would not look at him at all.

"Is this one of the times that Habiba expects us to protect you from yourself?" Bixei asked him, uncertainty in his voice.

"It's not me I plan to hurt."

Harlol hadn't sheathed his swords yet, but he rested them with their points to the ground. "You're hurting yourself with every word. If you do what you plan, I don't know if you will ever recover. And if you can massacre your enemy and walk away unmoved by the act, how will Thebin be better off with you in the palace than it is now?"

"You dare—" Llesho turned the cold heat of an inexplicable rage on the Wastrel. He's meant to die for you, whispered in his head. What matter if you do it, or the Horn?

"It's that spear," Bixei reached out and plucked it from his grasp. "I don't know what it is about the thing, but the Lady SienMa did you no favor when she gave it to you."

"Returned it," Llesho corrected, but he stumbled against Harlol with a frown, fighting a sudden dizziness that passed slowly, like clouds parting in front of his eyes.

The sounds of battle were giving way to the moans of the wounded. A horse squealing in pain was suddenly cut off as a rider put him out of his agony, but there were others crying out all around them. There were too many dead, too much blood spilled into the dry ground, though most of it looked to be the enemy's. He might have brought himself to care, if he'd found Adar and his cadre. Llesho shuddered when he remembered what he'd asked Bixei and Harlol to do, however. He was a soldier, but not yet a torturer.

He reached for the spear. When Bixei reluctantly handed it over, he returned it to its sheath at his back. "I'm all right now."

"Llesho." Kaydu, in human form, walked toward them out of the reek and stain of blood and carrion released on the battlefield. She still twitched with lingering bird-ness, but she'd stopped at the baggage train for Little Brother and carried him clinging to her neck. His face solemn and anxious, the monkey watched his mistress as if he expected her to transform into a bird of prey and sweep him off for dinner. Llesho sympathized. He also wondered what task she had completed as a bird, and when she had returned.

"Habiba said to bring you. He's taken the cook tent as his command post. Your brothers are with him."

"Adar?"

"No." She looked away for a moment, afraid to let him see in her eyes what he was already thinking. "But Shokar has come."

He'd known that, and was relieved to hear her say his name that way, to know that his brother had survived the battle. He followed her, picking his way past the living who moved over the ground gathering spent arrows like gleaners after a harvest. Harlol followed at a slight distance, to give them the privacy of their conversation.

"Has Habiba found Shou?" He dreaded to hear that it had all been for nothing. "Is the emperor safe?"

"Shokar found him, yes. Master Den and Carina are with him."

She'd only answered half his question and offered nothing to reassure him. "Alive?"

"Yes." She wouldn't say any more, and he wondered what he would find when he entered the tent. Shou was more than a political ally or even a friend, he realized while he waited to see how much of the man Markko's creeping spy had left them. The emperor was the only model Llesho had for how a king behaved, what he owed his people, and how he kept an empire safe as peaceful Thebin hadn't been. If Tsu-tan had conquered Shou, how did Llesho expect to defeat the witch-finder's master?

He had other greetings first, however. Shokar met him at the tent flap with a bear hug and a roar. "Little brother!"

"Don't call me that, please." He settled his clothes and his dignity, but softened his rebuke with a wry twist of a smile. "It confuses the monkey."

Only slightly chastened, the eldest prince cuffed him gently on the arm. "We thought you might be dead in the fighting."

"I had excellent teachers," he assured his brother. "I'm good at staying alive."

Balar joined them with Lluka, ready to continue his protest begun before the battle. "You have brothers to protect you," he insisted with a sweep of his arm that included Shokar and Lluka, their expressions of relief and disapproval so familiar that it hurt.

Brothers. In case they had not yet heard, Llesho told them. "We didn't find Adar."

Shokar tried to put an arm around his shoulder. "We know, Llesho. It's one of the reasons we're all so worried about you."

Too late for that. Llesho slipped out of reach, unwilling to accept any comfort. "Habiba needs to see me."

"I should think you'd have had enough of magicians leading you into danger," Lluka scolded. "We've talked about it, and we want you to come back to Shan with us, where it's safe." Lluka seemed to think he'd taken the round, but Llesho just looked at him as if he had truly missed the point.

"There is no safe place. I would think that the dead we left behind in Ahkenbad proved that if nothing else did."

Kaydu winced as Little Brother shrieked indignantly in her ear, but added her own support to Llesho's example. "Harnish raiders in the market square at Shan proved it to me."

Llesho gave a superstitious shudder as new scars twitched in his gut. Shokar, too, seemed to be remembering. In defense of his protectiveness, Shokar added, "I would rather not see you hurt again the way you were in that battle."

Llesho agreed heartily, but he wasn't going to say it out loud when any admission would sound like weakness. Instead, he asked, "Why do you, of all people, think that there is any safety to be had in Shan?"

When his brother hung his head, Llesho repeated his earlier question. "Where is Habiba?"

"With Shou," Shokar held aside the flap and pointed to the center of the tent.

Habiba presided from a folding wooden chair over a handful of raiders on their knees in front of him. Shou sat on a simple camp stool in the magician's shadow. Llesho saw a bruise or two, but no obvious wounds. Shou, however, sat with the look of a man pressed beyond his endurance, who has escaped into the land of mazes in the mind. Many, he knew, never returned from that place.

Bor-ka-mar stood at attention at his emperor's back. Only someone who knew him, as Llesho had come to do, would know that his rigidly correct posture hid a personal anguish that he had failed his emperor. He wondered if someone had reassured the soldier that it wasn't his fault, but figured Bor-ka-mar wouldn't believe it no matter who told him so.

Master Den and Carina sipped tea in the corner of the cook tent. Nothing in the way they had distributed themselves gave the raiders any clue to the relative importance of their former prisoners or their rescuers.

"Tell me what happened to them," he asked, meaning the Thebin prisoners. His voice cracked, refusing him the power to say the names. The sound drew Shou's attention.

"I'm sorry," Shou said over the prostrate' forms of the prisoners.

Llesho's heart froze. They're dead, he thought, an image of Hmishi lifeless in Lling's arms so sharp in his head that he gasped from the shock of it. Master Den must have seen something of that in his face, because the trickster god rose quickly from his place at tea.

"They're alive, boy. Alive. That miserable witch-finder escaped as your armies entered the camp. He's taken them ahead, into the Harnlands."

"I'm sorry," Shou repeated, and passed a hand across his forehead. "I didn't mean you should think—" he gave a little half laugh, caught on a deep indrawn breath, before his mind seemed to wander again.

"What happened to Hmishi?" Llesho asked the question of Carina, who hadn't moved, but watched them all with quick, anxious eyes. He feared for his brother, but he needed to know if they'd reached them in time to stop the dream.

"This Tsu-tan didn't see your attack coming through the Wastes," she answered him. "His spies reported that Shokar had joined forces with Bor-ka-mar and they were not far behind. The witch-finder ran for the Harnlands, with Hmishi and Lling, and your brother, in his custody.

"He realized they had the wrong boy right away," Carina added. "He knew Hmishi and Lling from Pearl Bay. Master Den he recognized, of course, and threatened his master's tortures for withholding the truth from his raiders. When he learned that I was a healer, he promised that Markko would burn me at the stake. But his prejudices led him to dismiss me as having no consequence, just as he dismissed Den for a laundryman. Lling he preserved for his master's questions, but he handed Hmishi over to his soldiers. They did terrible things to him. I don't know how he lived."

She stopped with a choked cry, and Master Den picked up her sorry tale. "The damage was extensive, but ill-thought. Master Markko raged within the witch-finder's own mind for putting the boy beyond questioning. He left with Hmishi on a stretcher and the healer Adar to tend him."

"And Shou?" They spoke in whispers as the emperor listened to Habiba's questioning of the prisoners, neither letting on who commanded whom, or what force had taken the camp.

Carina opened her hand, as if to let go of some truth. "Tsu-tan could not identify him, but his master made a puppet of his lieutenant's body, and even at a distance saw through the merchant's disguise."

"If Markko saw him through the witch-finder's eyes, he would have known him." Llesho told her what the rescuers had already discussed. "They met after the battle on the outskirts of Shan Province." Shou had worn a different disguise then.

"Tsu-tan called him 'General,'" Carina confirmed Llesho's observation. "Shou insisted that he had lost his post for smuggling. Markko, through his witch-finder, tried for a day and a night to force the truth from him, but Shou resisted both physical and mental attack. At the end, he admitted to spying for the empire, but never gave away his secret."

"Timing worked to our advantage," Master Den added. "The Harnish raiders who tried to force a confession from Hmishi had no reason to suspect that Shou was more than he professed. Tsu-tan believed Hmishi and Lling were simple slaves as they had been on Pearl Island. He knew nothing of Adar or Carina. Markko knew Shou as the emperor's general, but none of the other prisoners. So he accepted Tsu-tan's conclusion, that the provincial general and imperial spy had taken advantage of a chance encounter to use as decoys a pair of traveling healers with a couple of Thebin slaves. It never occurred to either of them, at that point, to question the Thebins about Shou's identity."

"They never would have given him away." Their companions must know that, of course, but Llesho thought it needed saying anyway.

"They didn't," Master Den assured him softly, "But Tsu-tan made him watch what his soldiers did to Hmishi, and through his witch-finder, the magician attacked Shou's mind."

Habiba had finished with his prisoners, and he called for guards to lead the captives away. When they had gone, Llesho went to the emperor and knelt on one knee. Looking into Shou's eyes for a sign of the man he knew, he whispered, "Have they broken him?"

"No," Shou answered for himself, in a whisper, "but I'm afraid for Tsu-tan's prisoners. Markko will take a long time killing them to get what he wants, and they don't have it to give." Llesho, that was. The Thebin king and whatever else he was to Markko.

"Then we have to get them back first." Llesho kept his voice low, in keeping with the almost secretive mood the emperor had drawn about them with his voice. The power of his will, however, gave force to each word. "And we will. Get them back."

"There is another," Shou nodded, as if listening to inner voices. "His name is Menar."

"Menar?" Llesho asked, unprepared to hear that name.

"A prince of Thebin," Shou said from his waking dream, "A blind poet, who mourns his brothers after many years."

"Menar is alive? Did you see him?" Llesho pushed the hope and the fear down, down. Blind. And Shou was looking at him as if he were some curious artifact he couldn't quite puzzle out. The emperor wasn't the best witness at present.

"I can't see him," Shou answered in the tone one takes with the dull witted. "He's blind. But I hear the wind in the grass, and the heavy cadence of his poems in my head. They weep, weep, for his brothers. Shokar and Lluka, Ghrisz and Adar, and the youngest, Balar and Llesho."

Wind in the grass. Menar was somewhere ahead of them, if Shou truly had some knowledge of the Thebin prince. But Shou knew about his brothers, and his weary brain might have stirred the tale out of its own longing 'for rescue. Llesho had not talked about Ping, however. "Does Menar also mourn his sister?" he asked as a test.

Shou shook his head. "For Ping, anger." His eyes, focused on some unseeable distance, flicked into the now again with a wince at their corners. "My head hurts," he said, with the same expressionless voice that had channeled some vision out of the grasslands.

Carina pressed a finger to her lips, silent warning that the conversation was over.

"I know," Llesho soothed. He rested his head on the emperor's knee for a moment, a gesture that in other circumstances would mark him as the emperor's man and Thebin as a vassal nation. In this hour of torment, however, he wanted only to give and receive the comfort of a son or a brother. "But it will get better. Let the healers help you."

He rose and left the tent, leaving the emperor to the ministrations of Carina, whose drawn face reflected her own worry about the prisoners still in the hands of Markko's minions. She cared about Adar, he knew, and couldn't find it in himself to begrudge his brother that loving concern. It was all getting far too confusing, how he felt and who he felt it for, and he wondered when feelings had become such a responsibility. He didn't have answers, but he took the questions out into the camp with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY

HABIBA, acting as general of the combined armies, had ordered the remaining Harnish tents torn down and their own camp set up in its place. The dead they had taken a little apart and burned in a pile with the round black tents for fuel. The stench of burning felt and crackling flesh rose to heaven on a pillar of black smoke. Llesho watched until the flames had smoldered down to coals. "This my gift to you, Lady Wife," Llesho whispered bitterly to the rising smoke. So many had died— how many more would he add to his count before Thebin was free and the gates of heaven opened again? During the day, he could believe they did the right thing.

But night had come upon them while Habiba sorted out the prisoners, questioning some, and allotting guards to accompany others back to Shan. Carina had gone off to work with the wounded, both Harnishmen of the Uulgar clans who had followed the witch-finder and the few of their own who had need of her services. For a change, none of his friends had been injured during the fighting. If you didn't count Shou, who'd suffered in the waiting, not the battle.

Llesho had tried to rest as they urged him, but frightful dreams drove him out again into the darkness to hide.

Wandering the encampment, he found a three- legged folding stool plundered from a Harnish tent and settled himself to watch the dying of the coals that used to be his enemies. The dead couldn't tell him where Tsu-tan had taken his Thebin hostages, but he found himself asking them anyway.

"What are you doing alone out here?"

Balar's voice, that was, edged as it hadn't been when they were young and Kungol ruled over a peaceful Thebin. War changes everything, Llesho thought. It made fighters, if not warriors, of musicians.

"Thinking," Llesho answered. He wondered what war made of poets, of their brother Menar left in the hands of the Harn all these years. The very idea of it made him shudder.

"It isn't safe out here."

Safe. Llesho snorted rudely at that. Habiba's scouts spied out the Durnhag Road and looked ahead to Harn. Guards posted throughout the camp and along its perimeter watched for any sneak attack, but Llesho didn't expect one. The raiders had lost too many of their number in the fighting already. They couldn't count on their Harnish countrymen along the Gansau border to help them either. While they might be inclined to look the other way at the strange coming and goings of the raiders, the border clans would resist efforts to draw them into a stranger's conflict. Like not fouling one's own tent, the locals wouldn't pick a fight they'd have to live with long after Master Markko's henchmen were gone.

So Llesho was as safe here by the cooling pyre as anywhere in the camp. That didn't mean a picked team of assassins couldn't reach him any time they wanted, of course. Master Jaks had worn the marks of six such kills on his arm. The magician himself could be watching in the shape of some animal or bird of prey. He'd felt those sharp talons before. It seemed like Master Markko wanted him alive this time, though.

"What's safe?" he asked, shaky enough in his sanity not to care about the answer.

Balar seemed to take his meaning, or part of it at least. He scrounged a low stool from the ruins and dropped down beside his brother. "I'll grant you that. Nowhere is really safe. But you would be safer inside the command tent."

"No. Later, maybe." He ought to be in there with Habiba, making decisions and rewarding his own followers with his praise and encouragement, not out here sulking with his clothes reeking of the dead. While Shou tossed in restless sleep in that tent, though, he just couldn't do it.

As if he heard his name in his sleep, the emperor cried out, a heart-stopping wail that sent a chill through the camp and raised the hairs on the back of Llesho's neck. He wondered if Master Markko, through his witch-finder, had broken something vital and soul-deep in the man. Carina said not. Shou agreed with her, or said he did. But Llesho had never seen eyes as empty as the emperor's had been tonight.

According to Carina, he hadn't cried out like that during all his mental tortures. She didn't know why he did it now. Dreams, he could have told her, while he shivered in a cold sweat remembering Ahkenbad. The magician could kill even in dreams. Was that the plague of Shou's sleep even now?

"You should talk about it," Balar said. "We can help you."

"From the baggage?" Llesho snapped, and then wanted to call it back.

"With someone, then."

Balar didn't come back at him, which made Llesho even madder. He really, really wanted to fight with somebody, the kind of fight where he could spill what was bothering him, at the top of his lungs and spewed out along with a lot of meaningless stuff. Nobody would die and nobody would guess what of the fight was the important part and what was just noise. Balar refused to argue, so he was left alone with the dream that had sent him escaping into the night.

Wastrels lay dead in tall Harnish grass he hadn't seen since his seventh summer, their eyes wide open to the sun. Except that, instead of eyes, each orbit held a single black pearl. In his dream, Llesho went about the grassy field plucking pearls from dead men's sockets. When he came to Harlol, the Wastrel was still alive, though dying, and he reached up to his own eyes and plucked them out, handing them to Llesho as a gift. There'd been no more rest after that.

"Where's Pig when you need him?" he muttered under his breath, a formless complaint he hadn't meant his brother to hear.

But Balar was paying close attention. "Why don't you ask him? He's hanging around your neck, if we're to believe your stories."

Which might have been Balar taking the question seriously or being snide. Either way, it reminded Llesho that some things only seemed difficult until you realized they weren't. Maybe Pig was like that. Or maybe the person he really needed to talk to was Master Den.

"I'm going back." Balar seemed to realize that he wasn't going to get an answer. He stood up, his worried frown shadowed in the dim light. "Is there anything you need?"

Adar. Hmishi and Lling. Kungol. Menar. And his brother Ghrisz, whose name he hadn't heard in all his travels. Pointless to say those things to a brother who would hand them all to him on a plate if he had the power. Like Llesho's dreams, however, his heavenly gifts seemed of no earthly use. Balar was as helpless as he was to give him back what they had lost. And he confided in Lluka, whom Llesho didn't trust.

"The washerman, Master Den. If he will come." Not knowing who might be listening outside the dim glow of the funeral pyre, he didn't say aloud, ChiChu, the trickster god, my particular adviser.

Balar nodded, hesitating as if he might think of something at the last minute to persuade Llesho back under cover. Llesho fixed his attention on the pyre until he heard his brother walk away.

He expected the solid tread of his teacher to follow, so the short shuffling steps of the dwarf took him by surprise. Dognut dragged his own low stool behind him, and Llesho smiled in spite of himself, reminded of the first time they had met. "No ladder today, Dognut?" he asked, half expecting the little man to look at him as if he were mad.

Dognut took the question for an invitation and settled himself next to Llesho. "No camel this time." He almost smiled, but a different memory slipped across his face. He sighed instead. If Llesho had it figured right, the dwarf was Shou's personal spy as well as his musician, and maybe more. The emperor looked to varied advisers, he was slowly discovering, and the people around him were never quite what they seemed.

"How is your master?" he asked.

Dognut hesitated only a moment in his answer. "He's well enough when the sun shines." He pulled a flute from the quiver at his back. The lesser moons had risen, shedding a faint light on the instrument as the dwarf ran his thick fingers along the stops. A mournful tune rose on liquid silver notes and fell away again. "But, Goddess knows, he can't stay awake forever."

Llesho said nothing. He had firsthand experience of the torment Master Markko could inflict, but he hadn't been with the fleeing Harn. He didn't know what Tsu-tan had actually done to the emperor or what dreams the magician visited on his sleep. Dognut wasn't settling for stubborn silence, however.

"You could help him."

"I have my own dreams to worry about."

"Ah, yes." Dognut sighed. "The stone men of the grasslands. They find the hearts of men a particular delicacy, or so the stories say, and leave a bit of a fingertip behind when they've plucked the living organ from their victims."

"I saw no stone men," Llesho objected. The dead he had seen plucked out their eyes, the pearls of the goddess in the orbits, and not their hearts.

"They are only stories," Dognut let it be known with the tone of his voice that he didn't believe his own words. "And from very far away. No one has ever seen one of these stone monsters, of course."

Had the dwarf seen such monsters himself? Llesho wondered, but Dognut wasn't through with him: "Shou is here, now, however, and he needs your help."

"I'm not a healer."

"You know Markko."

That was too close to Llesho's own thoughts. He refused to answer. Rescue arrived in the shape of a dark body that planted itself between Llesho and the pyre, eclipsing the faint moonlight. Master Den sat heavily, blocking the morbid view. He sometimes forgot how big the trickster god was; they were face-to-face, with Chi-Chu settled like a great stone pyramid on the ground and Llesho perched on his borrowed stool. He gave the musician at Llesho's side an almost imperceptible nod and Dognut returned the greeting with a bow from the waist. Then the teacher turned his attention on his pupil.

"They're not your dead," he said.

Llesho wondered if everyone had been reading his mind tonight. "Who else's?" he countered. "How many people have to die so that one exiled prince doesn't have to dive for pearls?"