13

The aqueduct's central arches had fallen away long years since; their bricks had been reused for the foundations of the houses and barns Garric had seen along the road ever since they'd halted at midday to allow the sheep to chew their cud. The concrete-cored pillars still remained, marching across the barley fields like giants of a former age.

"Our ancestors piped the water all the way from the headwaters of the Stroma," Garric said. "Seventy miles, the route ran. Can you imagine that, Liane? Can you imagine a town needing so much water that you'd go that far to bring it?"

"Erdin has an aqueduct," Liane said, "but that's because the local water is brackish, not that there's any lack of it. All heavy goods in the south of the island travel by canal barge. Our island—Sandrakkan."

They stood at the end of the dock onto Talpin Lake. The sheep were in the paddock; the fishing boats whose catch would provide dinner for travelers here at the inn, the Lakeside Arms, were still out though the sun was casting long shadows onto the water.

Liane surveyed their surroundings. The flat countryside and the lake's smooth surface gave a broader vantage than Garric was used to. Even the sea was a series of hills and valleys no less real for constantly changing. "This reminds me of Erdin," she said. "Of when I was growing up."

Ilna was in the kitchen; Tenoctris wandered by the lake while Cashel sat with the flock—by choice; the sheep didn't need his presence at the moment. Benlo had gone off alone; his guards drank morosely in the common room. Garric didn't particularly want to know what the drover was about.

At another time Garric would probably have been with Tenoctris, learning about these ancient structures that she could have seen new; or with Cashel, chatting as friends do about shared experiences and nothing in particular. But Liane had looked at him, and though she hadn't exactly asked Garric to walk with her out onto the dock the signals had been clear enough.

They were in plain sight of over a hundred people; the Lakeside Arms did a major trade, and this close to Carcosa there were numerous travelers deciding to push on to the city before dark or at least not long after. No one would look askance at a young man and a lovely woman standing together, even though they were well out of earshot of everyone else.

"The Grove of Tappa was on this side of the water," Liane said. There was tension in her voice. Her hands were clasped on top of one of the support timbers; the dock didn't have a railing. "There aren't any trees now; I'd think it was too wet for trees to grow, except cypress."

"Really!" Garric said in excitement. "I'd always thought Tappa was a myth! The dread goddess whose virgin priestesses sacrificed a male traveler every year on the first full moon until the hero Talamis, ah, ended the practice."

"I don't swear Tappa was real," Liane said with a faint smile. "Or that Talamis was either; even for a demigod his exploits seem . . . impressive. But there was a grove here and a cult, that much is true."

Talamis was said to have impregnated the fifty priestesses all in the same night, changing the cult of Tappa from blood sacrifice to one of motherhood which had survived until the fall of the Old Kingdom. Historians in the reign of Carus had written of the site; there was no reason to doubt that it was real. Garric had never connected Tappa and her lakeside grove with Talpin Lake east of Carcosa, though.

"The countryside must have gotten a lot boggier in the past thousand years," he said. "Well, that's a long time. I wonder if Tenoctris knows about the grove?"

"My father does," Liane said, staring across the lake like a statue. "He's looking for it now."

She turned and faced Garric with a grim expression as though daring him to respond. He cleared his throat. "Oh," he said. "I suppose an old temple would be a place where there'd be a lot of what Tenoctris calls 'forces.' "

"You mean a site of human sacrifices, don't you?" Liane said in a challenging tone.

"No," said Garric calmly. "I still think the part about human sacrifice is just legend."

Two winters before, he'd found Gizir weeping and shouting in the inn's stables. That was the night Laya had announced her betrothal to a wealthy widower named Hakkardi, whose farm was a mile north of the hamlet. Gizir was drunk, and he drew his knife when Garric walked in on him in all innocence.

Liane was as likely to go off explosively as Gizir had been. Garric wasn't worried about his personal safety, now or then; but he didn't want to hurt a person he liked and sympathized with.

Liane covered the top of the post with her palms. She laid her cheek on them and began sobbing her heart out.

Garric had worried that Liane would shout at him or maybe even try to claw his face in displaced anger—the sorts of things that living with his mother had falsely taught him to expect from women in general. Liane's tears took him completely by surprise. He blinked and turned so that he wasn't staring directly at the girl.

Liane reached a hand sideways, caught his wrist, and squeezed it. "May the Shepherd forgive me, Garric," she wheezed through her snuffling. "I thought that was what he was doing. I still think it is. Looking for the ground of old deaths to work his magic!"

She straightened and turned her back. She used a handkerchief from her sleeve to mop her eyes, then blow her nose. Garric continued to look at the boats out on the water; the fishermen were beginning to row toward the dock with the slow stroke of strong, weary men.

"I don't really know my father anymore," Liane said in a voice with only the vaguest hint of trembling. "He used to be so wonderful. The happiest time of my childhood was listening to him sing love songs he'd learned all over the Inner Sea on his travels and brought back to Mother and me."

She looked at Garric and forced a smile, actually lifting the corners of her mouth with her thumbs and forefingers. The mimed humor made them both giggle in truth.

In a less strained tone Liane continued, "Our family name is bor-Benliman. I'm sorry to have lied to you."

Garric shrugged. "You didn't lie," he said. "If you didn't want to tell people you're noble, that's your business. Anyway, my mother said that's what you were. She, well, cares about that a lot. She was in service in the palace in Carcosa."

Liane nodded, but her attention was clearly on what she was going to say rather than what she was hearing. She placed her hands on the post again and lowered her eyes toward them as she said, "It all changed when my mother died, five years ago. They were very much in love and when she died he didn't . . ."

Liane looked at Garric. "My father didn't accept that she was dead," she resumed coolly. "I know that sounds silly; how can you not accept that somebody's dead? But he put everything into bringing her back. He'd always been a wizard, but his art wasn't important to him the way Mother was. Since her death he's concentrated on it, and on kinds of spells that he'd never have considered before."

Garric nodded toward the fishing boat nearing them, its oarlocks creaking. "Ah," he said. "Maybe we should go in?"

"We'll walk a ways along the margin of the lake," Liane said, briefly again the imperious noble speaking to a commoner. "There's light enough for that."

They left the dock together, her slippers hissing on the weathered boards while Garric's bare feet moved soundlessly. "I was at Mistress Gudea's in Valles," Liane said emotionlessly. "I don't know what happened. Armed men came to the headmistress. They moved me from the school dormitory to a locked cloister. Nobody would tell me anything, just that I couldn't leave but I wouldn't come to any harm if I kept quiet."

Liane began to snuffle again. She dabbed at her nose with the handkerchief. Garric looked around, but it was too deep in the evening for anyone at a distance to see that the girl was crying. The path along the lakeshore had been paved with blocks from the nearby aqueduct, but that was a very long time ago. Some were tilted, and muddy water lapped broad stretches.

"They held me there for a week," Liane said, ignoring the doubtful footing. "Then my father came. He never told me what had happened, only that we no longer owned any property except for the family tomb in Erdin. That's where my mother was buried. It would all be right again soon, though; he just had to do some business for someone else and we'd be back as before. Only for now he was Benlo or-Willet and I was to travel with him until he found what he'd been sent for. That was eight months ago."

Garric placed her left hand in the crook of his right elbow and turned them around. It was just too dark to continue this way. He was uneasily aware that he'd have to explain not only to Benlo but to Ilna if he and Liane managed to fall into the lake together.

"At first we stayed in Valles," Liane said, apparently oblivious of everything but the story she was telling for the first time to another person. "We stayed at various inns around the city. I hid in my room mostly. I was afraid I'd meet one of the other girls from my school. I felt like I had leprosy. My father poked around palaces and tombs. He was able to go most of the places he wanted to, but it was always in secret, at night or wearing a hooded cloak."

"He seems, well, rich," Garric said. He swung them wide to avoid the fisherman leaving the dock with a pair of wicker baskets of fish on a yoke across his shoulders. A woman called to the man from the back door of the inn.

Liane nodded in the dimness. "Father never cared much about money," she said. "Of course, we had plenty of it. Since he came and got me out of school he always carries a belt of gold coins and a chest of gold in our luggage. I thought that was why he hired the guards, but now I'm not sure. Not since what happened to . . . in your inn and last night. With the liches."

"That wasn't his doing," Garric said. "Even Tenoctris says that." He didn't add—he didn't have to add—"and Tenoctris doesn't like your father at all."

"Not that he made the attack," Liane said, "but that someone else is trying to block whatever my father is doing. Someone else who won't stop at anything."

It was really dark. Light came through the kitchen windows and glimmered from the inn yard where men with rushlights completed the business of the day. The ground at Garric's feet was pitch black; he knew the path straight back to the inn was clear, but there was nothing else that he was sure of. He stayed where he was with a hand over Liane's hand on his arm to hold her.

"With no warning he chartered a ship and we sailed to Carcosa," Liane said. "For me it was like falling off the edge of the world. Compared to Erdin and Valles, Carcosa is a menagerie of clowns dressed in cast-off clothing and monkeys with no culture. I was so alone. I wanted to die, Garric. I wanted to die."

"And then you came to Barca's Hamlet and it was even worse," Garric murmured. He could sympathize with Liane. His life had been dislocated badly enough that he could appreciate how what she was going through must feel.

Liane laughed. "No," she said, "it wasn't. Because the folk in Barca's Hamlet don't think they're nobles when by civilized standards they're not. And because there's real learning in Barca's Hamlet."

Garric laughed in turn. "There're real scholars in Carcosa, Liane," he said. "I'm sure there are."

The clatter of wooden trenchers on trestle tables indicated that the evening meal was being served in the common room. Well, if he missed the stew, he'd eat bread and cheese; as often enough before.

Liane sniffed. "Do you think so?" she said. Then she added, "Your father is a remarkable man, Garric."

"Do you think so?" Garric said in unintended mimicry. "He certainly wouldn't agree with you."

Garric wasn't sure what he thought. It was hard to visualize Reise as a person rather than a fact of existence like the inn itself or a winter storm.

"I don't know my father anymore, Garric," Liane repeated, her features hidden in shadow but her lips' faint tremble audible in her voice. "It's as though when he changed his name he became another person . . . but I know it's not that. The change came when my mother died. Before then I could hide at school and pretend I didn't know what my father was doing."

"I guess we ought to go inside now," Garric said uneasily.

"He must have done something very terrible to lose everything but his life," Liane said, resisting the faint pressure Garric put on her hand. "I wonder who could have saved his life . . . and what the price of my father's life was."

A whippoorwill began calling, using an ancient concrete pier as a sounding board to amplify its sound. After the tenth call in the series the bird paused.

"Yes, we should get in," Liane said crisply. She walked toward the inn, her grip firm on Garric's arm.