31

Every time Garric's heart beat, pain pulsed blindingly white, then deep bloody red. The buildings around the square blurred and sprang back into focus in the same throbbing rhythm. He lay on cobblestones. That would have hurt if his brain could make room for such lesser matters.

Tenoctris knelt beside him, droning a spell. The moon was at zenith and the clouds of earlier in the evening had blown away.

Garric's back felt as though it had been minced for sausage. There were spectators, mostly workmen. One nobleman gaped from his sedan chair as his entourage of servants and toadies whispered and pointed. Liane, wobbly but upright, fumbled in the folds of her silken sash. She called to the grandee for help.

Garric's sight steadied and he realized that he was sprawling before the semicircular steps that ornamented the approach to the count's palace. The masonry had been quarried from Old Kingdom buildings, but the construction was regular and ornate in the modern manner.

The windows of the lowest story were small and protected by heavy iron gratings; those of the second story alternated arched and triangular pediments over the openings, while the third-story windows were framed with pilasters supporting flat brows beetling out from the wall. Towering above the real facade was a false front aping a temple of former times, crowned in turn by a gilded statue that gleamed in the moonlight.

Some of the lower windows were lighted; the count's bureaucrats lived and worked in the palace, and in these troubled times they worked late.

"How did we get here?" Garric mumbled. He wasn't sure he even spoke aloud. Tenoctris continued her chant, touching the tip of her boxwood twig to points in the air around Garric. A leaden numbness began to replace the pain of his wounds, and he wondered if he was going into shock.

He and Tenoctris had entered the demon's plane in the graveyard half a mile from here, the Government Square of modern Carcosa. The distance they'd traveled to where Strasedon waited was about right; the moon's greater height now in the sky also matched the time they'd spent searching the other dimension.

Garric couldn't guess at the direction they'd gone in that place of black sun. Perhaps that was right as well.

He was exhausted but he couldn't rest. His back was a mass of live coals, burning him to wakefulness. The demon's claws carried a fiery poison like the touch of certain caterpillars; he would never sleep again, he'd blaze forever until he died. . . .

A pair of porters holding a handbarrow between them stared in horror. Garric and his companions must have dropped into sight directly in front of the men as Strasedon's plane dissolved. Giving up on the noble, Liane called to the porters, "You there! Get this man on your pallet!"

The man at the front of the barrow shied from the girl's attention, but his partner remained motionless in amazement. The barrow twitched but the men didn't go off down the street as the leader intended. They carried a roll of wet hide reeking with the stench of the tannery.

"Look!" Liane said, bringing her hands up from her sash. She let coins cascade from one palm to the other. Even if the porters didn't recognize the chime as that of gold—where would they have seen gold?—the implication of even that much copper was enough to hold them now.

"Carry this man to the Captain's Rest," Liane ordered. "You know where it is, don't you? Get him there alive and there's a gold Sandrakkan rider for each of you!"

"But mistress," the man at the front of the barrow said. The pair had been too shocked even to lower their burden to the cobblestones as they gaped. "We have to deliver this to Chilsen the Cobbler in Boot Lane."

"You idiots!" the grandee shouted in amazement from his chair. "A gold rider would buy Chilsen's whole shop and his daughter besides!"

The porter at the back raised his right handle and lowered the left one, dumping the roll of hide on the ground before his partner fully realized what was happening. The men exchanged glances, then set the barrow down beside Garric. They lifted him with surprising gentleness. They were workingmen, well used to injuries.

Tenoctris continued to chant as the porters raised their barrow with Garric aboard it. Pain faded slowly as waxen darkness diffused through Garric's mind.