But it did not, for Zacharias wondered how any soul could not rejoice in the company of such learned mathematici. Yet when he asked Marcus the same question as he settled down for his next lesson, he got a very different answer.

'Ten words? Why should the daughter of a duke and the granddaughter of a queen speak even one word to you, Zacharias? You are of no account to an illustrious noblewoman born into such a distinguished lineage."

'Of course you are right, Brother Marcus. But as she is heir to a duke, and granddaughter to a queen on her mother's side, I am amazed that she could be torn from such a high seat and thrown like a common wanderer onto such a path as this one."

'There is no path of greater consequence than the one we follow. Leave off these questions and attend." Marcus stepped out from under the awning, shading his eyes as he gazed toward the cliffs, then shook his head impatiently and sat down again in the shade.

Elene appeared at the stern and placed her hands on the railing as she stared toward the distant land. After a moment Wolfhere joined her, and bent his head to listen. Jealous, Zacharias wondered what they spoke about.

'Pay attention, Zacharias!"

He started and shifted his gaze to the cleric.

Marcus had the most caustic smile imaginable, a curious way of turning up his lips and narrowing his eyes that made Zacharias squirm. "Are you done?" He did not wait for an answer. "To repeat. The ecliptic and the motion of the moon. Because the moon's path wobbles at an incline to the ecliptic, the moon crosses south to north and north to south at regular intervals. The points on the ecliptic where it crosses are called the ascending node and the descending node, or caput draconis and cauda draconis—that is, the head and the tail of the dragon."

'Sail!" cried Wolfhere.

The lookout echoed the cry.

Sailors rushed to the railing. Elene leaned out until she seemed likely to pitch overboard, and her face was alight, as though she thought her father was coming for her at last. "Pirates!" she cried eagerly.

A galley powered by oars cut through the water. There wasn't enough wind to save them, and although they could row, too, their sturdy cog could not hope to outrun a swift warship.

'It's a Jinna ship!" shouted Wolfhere. "See the banner! They'll take as slaves those they don't kill."

Zacharias rose but could barely keep his feet because his legs shook so much. He broke out in a sweat. The captain rushed up to Marcus and commenced gesticulating and shouting. Marcus merely looked annoyed as at an exasperating child who will not cease interrupting although he's been told to sit still and keep quiet.

'Enough!" he said, and the captain hushed. "Bring Sister Meriam," he added, and a servant went to her cabin to rouse her from her afternoon nap. "Sit, Zacharias! You're in my way."

Zacharias' rump hit the deck hard; he trembled all over. Sailors grabbed spears and poles and readied their knives. Wolfhere did not move, not even to touch the hilt of his sword. He stared so fixedly at the approaching ship that Zacharias wondered if he had been ensor-celled. Marcus tapped his feet on the decking, a pit-pit-pat, pit-pit-pat rhythm that made the frater want to scream.

The male servant emerged from the tiny cabin, carrying Meriam in her sling. When the man stopped beside Marcus, she assessed the situation as distant oars rose and fell and a drumbeat rang over the smooth waters.

'I see," she said. "Yes, that's a Jinna crew."

'Let me raise a wind to our sails, then, and if you can cast aught to lessen their fervor, it will be the better for us."

'Yes," she agreed with such alacrity that Zacharias stared to see them work as with one mind, in no wise different than laborers who bend to the harvest in harmony to the songs they sang to make the work pass easily during long harvest days.

Oars flashed as the galley sped toward them. The wind flagged. The sail slackened, although the sailors desperately tacked again and caught the last dying gasp of the breeze.

'It's too late," Zacharias whimpered. "They'll catch us. We'll be slaves."

Again.

'They've a conjurer on board," commented Meriam. "Elene! Fetch my pouch."

Elene disappeared into the cabin.

'See if you can learn something," snapped Marcus as Zacharias struggled to repress his tears. The frater hated himself for his servile cowardice, but the sight of those implacable oar beats filled him with such fear that he could not speak. The drum of the oar master shuddered through his body, each rap sounding his doom.

Marcus beckoned to the captain. "Seek any tangled rope on board, especially that which was coiled neatly beforetime."

The captain had not taken two steps away before an observant sailor shouted from the prow, and Marcus hurried forward to find the anchor rope so snarled and knotted that no man, surely, could have done the damage, and no sailor would treat rope so carelessly.

Zacharias staggered after him, hard pressed to keep on his feet although the deck wasn't rolling any more than it had been before Wolfhere sighted the pirate ship.

The last breath of wind died, and the sail sagged and went slack. Becalmed, the ship creaked as waves lapped the hull. It was such a soothing sound but for the hammer of the drum that powered the Jinna galley, swooping in for the kill.

Marcus knelt beside the rope and placed his hands over the coils. Zacharias collapsed beside him as, in a low voice, Marcus spoke words the f rater neither understood nor recognized. Was his vision blurring, or did it seem that the rope began to slither in the manner of snakes?

A song rose from the stern, and he glanced back, surprised to hear a strong alto of such beauty where death came rushing to meet them. Sister Meriam stood at the railing cupping something in her hands that she blew softly against while her granddaughter, beside her, sang with such piercing clarity that it hurt to hear her.

'It won't be enough," he whispered, not meaning to be heard.

'Do not underestimate our power," said Marcus. "You are not a man of faith, Zacharias. You doubt too much."

The still waters, all that separated them from the oncoming galley, roiled and churned.

The drum faltered once, but the steady beat resumed faster than before as the oars dipped and lifted in unison. The waters boiled up in clouds of steam. An angel rose from the sea as glorious as the dawn and towering as tall as their mast. Her hair streamed like sunlight around her uncovered head; her expression was grim and implacable. With each slow beat, her wings of flame shed sparks which spat and snapped as they plummeted into the salt water. She held a bow composed of shimmering blue fire, an arrow nocked and ready to fly.

The drum stuttered and stopped. From across the water, in counterpoint to Elene's song, shrieks and shouts of fear cut through the air as oars skipped across the waves. The galley slowed.

A snake slid roughly across Zacharias' hand. He shrieked in his turn, fell backward from knees to rump, but it was only rope uncoiling like a basket of snakes unleashed. A touch of wind brushed his cheek, a coy kiss, and the murmur of its passing whispered in his ear.

Wind filled the sail.

They left the Jinna pirates behind as the wings of the vast angel disintegrated into a shower of hot sparks that fell onto the deck of the coasting galley. Zacharias pulled himself up and crossed to the rail, watching as the Jinna oarsmen shifted their stroke and struggled to row backward out of that burning rain. A white scrap, like a butterfly, fluttered out of Meriam's hands and zigzagged across the water, growing so small that he should not have been able to see it as the gap between them opened—yet a hard shine kept it visible as it wove its erratic course.

The galley fell farther behind. The steamy mist risen with the angel spread to conceal it, but Zacharias saw a last wink as Meriam's butterfly vanished into a fog. Elene laughed out loud to end her song, and for an instant Zacharias thought she meant to leap into the sea to swim after that bright vision, now lost.

Marcus still knelt by the rope, a look of intense concentration on his face as wind boomed in the canvas. Wolfhere paced restlessly forward as the sailors adjusted ropes and sail, and laughed and joked,

relieved at their escape but not relaxed. The sea lay calm behind them while an unnatural wind sped them forward.

'Well done, Brother Marcus," said Meriam. "The arts of the tem-pestari are difficult to master."

'We must control the weather if we hope to succeed in the weaving."

'Wolfhere, I pray you," whispered Zacharias.

The old Eagle came to stand beside him. Spray off the water misted their faces and caught in his gray beard. "It looked like Liath," the old man muttered, his tone and expression distraught as his fingers opened and closed on the wood railing.

'Was it a real angel, or an illusion?" Zacharias asked, but Wolf-here would not answer.

The wind brought them across the wide waters of the Middle Sea and for five days they sailed along the southern coast with desert to larboard and the pale green waters to their right. Marcus slept most of that time, made weary by his labors, and Sister Meriam also kept to her bed, tended by her servants and her granddaughter. The only time Zacharias saw either of them awake they consulted with each other under the shade offered by the awning rigged up in the stern. What caused them such anxiety Zacharias could not know, but he watched from a distance as Marcus scrawled marks and signs on well-worn parchment, often scraping his notations off with a knife and marking again until the skin became translucent. If Zacharias tried to approach, Meriam's burly manservant chased him away.

'I have no time for lessons." That was Marcus' only comment, delivered with a curtness that stung.

Nor would Wolfhere keep him company. His life was as barren as the land they sailed alongside. The desert shore rose and fell in curves, sand and pale hills with no sign of life, not even grass or scrub. Not even a man. During the day the sun's light made the sand and rock glint so brightly it was painful to look. Only the sea breeze made the heat tolerable. There was nothing to do but wait. Zacharias had grown accustomed to biding his time.

The wind at their back held until they came to the port of Qahirah. They sailed past a promontory where ruined columns rose along the backs of low hills and came into a bay ringed with flowering trees and gardens. The city of domed temples and whitewashed buildings shone under the autumn sun.

'It's a paradise," he said.

Marcus, standing beside him, frowned. "A lure, that's all. A temptation of the Enemy.

It stinks with infidels."

'You don't think it's beautiful? After the desert?"

'The desert is pure. It pretends to be nothing but what it is: a desolation. This fine garb conceals the rot beneath all."

Yet the rot smelled so sweet, a potpourri of lavender, hyssop, jessamine, mint, and rosemary. Any Wendish city of such remarkable size would have stunk like an open sewer, but as the sailors slipped their oars and threw ropes to the waiting dockside laborers, who hauled them in against the pilings, Zacharias saw nothing but clean-swept streets beneath walls covered with the white flowers of the jessamine vine or gleaming as if they had been scrubbed and rinsed that morning.

Qahirah was a lovely city, well kept and hospitable.

A trio of customs officers boarded, and several hours went by as each barrel, bag, and box must be opened for their inspection. Zacharias followed them as a scribe made a comprehensive list in the curling script used by the Jinna. At length they tallied up the impost, the tax levied by the ruler of Qahirah on all goods brought into the port. Coin and a few of those good iron knives traded hands, and the passengers were allowed to disembark under the escort of a youth who promised to guide them to the only hospice in town where foreigners were allowed.

It took the length of the walk from the ship to the hospice, placed at the outskirts of the city, for the ground to stop rolling under his feet. It also took that long for him to stop gawking. Because he had grown up in the countryside and spent years as a slave among the Quman, he had seen few cities and certainly no settlement that resembled Qahirah.

Smaller than the city of Arethousa but grander in scale than Sordaia, Qahirah had an unearthly feel. No refuse stained the streets; old men patrolled with brooms and shovels.

Women with scarves draped over their heads and falling down over their shoulders and men in modest robes that concealed the shape of their bodies went about their business in a tidy, efficient manner. The market they passed seemed crowded and lively, but there weren't any stray dogs scouting for garbage and, indeed, there was no garbage, not even peelings beneath the fruit stalls.

These unexpected sights hit like the slap of cold water, steadying his legs, and he could walk with a sure step by the time the guide indicated a closed double-doorway—

trimmed with bronze—set into a wall that bordered the outer city wall. Both were constructed of whitewashed bricks. The Jinna youth waited for Marcus to gift him with a coin before making an elaborate bow and hurrying off.

Wolfhere rapped on the door. After a wait, it creaked open, they were examined by an old man of indeterminate years, and at length allowed to enter.

'But it's lovely," said Zacharias as they came into a courtyard washed white with a profusion of flowering jessamine and tangles of pale purple-white dog roses. A fountain—all playful spouts and finger's-length waterfalls—rested in the center of the courtyard, ringed by benches. A few robed travelers sat on those benches, all staring as the party entered the hospice grounds.

The guest rooms surrounded this courtyard on three sides; along the fourth side stood an open-walled kitchen beside a built-up floor with carpets, pillows, and low tables. By the noise of squawking chickens and irritated geese, the complaints of goats and the whicker of a horse, Zacharias guessed that the stable lay next door, past an elegant archway. Even a prince would deign to bide in such a luxurious abode.

Marcus examined the courtyard with disdain as he waited for Me-riam's servants to carry their baggage in from the street. "I don't like the smell."

It smelled of jessamine blossoms—and a fainter scent that Zacharias did not recognize.

'Is this a hospice for the wealthy?" asked Zacharias of Wolfhere.

The Eagle shook his head. "This is a simple traveler's rest like many others I slept in when I traveled in these lands years ago."

'You traveled through Jinna lands? Why was that?"

Wolfhere glanced at him, then away. "I was looking for something."

'Did you find it?"

'In the end I did." His success, remembered now, held no apparent triumph. He strayed to the fountain and let water trickle over his fingers before wiping sweat from his forehead and the back of his neck. Zacharias followed him, made nervous by the stares of the other travelers, whose faces were concealed behind hoods and veils that left them free to scrutinize others without being examined in turn. He felt exposed. They might guess everything about him, staring so, and yet he could never recognize them even were they to meet him unveiled in a public market.

Better, really, not to allow men to conceal themselves so.

He splashed water on his face, glad of the cool touch on his hot face.

Wolfhere sniffed, casting back his head. "It's said that you can smell thyme in any place where a murder has been committed. Can you smell it?"

'I don't know what it smells like. That strong scent—that's the jessamine, isn't it?"

'And the other—can you smell it? That is thyme."

Zacharias glanced around. Meriam haggled with the hospice master while Marcus looked on contemptuously and her servants waited patiently with the baggage. Elene had pulled a scarf on over her dark hair, clutching the ends of the scarf in each hand just under her sharp chin. She stood in shadow with a fierce frown on her handsome face and anger in the stiffness of her shoulders.

The frater dropped his voice to a whisper. "Do you think a murder was committed here?"

'I know one was. Long ago. I saw the body."

'You've been in this place before?"

'I have."

The hospice master was a middle-aged man with a lean face and skin twice as dark as Meriam's. He glanced their way, did a double take, and bowed hastily to Meriam before hurrying over to confront Wolfhere. He genuflected before grasping the Eagle's hand and patting it with evident joy.

'Friend! Friend!" he said in accented Wendish. "Friend!"

Perhaps it was the only word in that language he knew. He returned to Meriam.

'What is he saying?" Zacharias asked as he watched the innkeeper gesticulate enthusiastically.

'I don't know. I know only a few words in the local speech." But his narrowed eyes and intent expression, as he scrutinized the exchange between the innkeeper and Sister Meriam, suggested otherwise.

'Allowed to stay one night for nothing, no payment at all, and he will lend us a guide to escort us to Kartiako. All as recompense for a service you did him ten years ago. What might that have been?"

'Nothing that matters to you, Marcus, or to our purpose in coming here."

The servingmen had settled their baggage in the spacious room to which the men of the party were escorted—the women resided in a separate wing—and now, as the sun set and lamps were lit, Marcus, Wolfhere, and Zacharias seated themselves on pillows while youths from the hospice brought around a basin of water in which they washed their hands before eating.

'Are there no chairs or benches?" Zacharias whispered. "Do we not eat at a table like civilized people?"

'This is the custom of the country," said Wolfhere.

'Where are Sister Meriam and Lady Elene?"

'They will dine separately."

'Is it also the custom of the country to separate men and women as though men, like beasts, must be kept apart?" Marcus' lips curled in a sneer.

'No doubt the Jinna find Wendish customs as strange as we find theirs."

Marcus snorted, but since trays laden with food arrived, he let the conversation lapse.

He proved to be a fussy eater, scorning most of the dishes because of their spicy flavor, but Zacharias had suffered hunger too many times to let food go to waste. That one dish contained chicken he recognized, although the heat of the sauce burned his tongue, but he had a name for none of the other foods arranged before him. Still, he ate as much as he could stuff into his stomach and suffered for it later when he bedded down with the servants on hard pallets on the floor.

He tossed and turned, throat burning, and stifled his burps.. His belly churned. In time he had to get up to relieve himself. He felt his way to the curtained door and slipped outside. The moon's light gilded the courtyard in silver, and he padded as silently as he could along the pathway that led under the archway into the stable yard, where the hospice's necessarium stood. Some kindly soul had left an oil lamp burning inside.

After he finished his business, he found he was not particularly tired. He crept back to the shadowed archway and paused there to look up at the stars. The air had a clarity here that caused the stars to look brighter than in the north, and the spherical curve of the rising quarter moon showed in stark contrast to the night sky.

Someone—nay, two people—stood by the fountain, speaking in low voices. He slipped from shadow to shadow until he crept close enough to hear.

'How can this be? You no longer trust him?"

'Sister Anne no longer trusts him. I found him in the company of Prince Sanglant. I tell you, he did not seem overeager to leave the prince and his retinue, yet he claims to have no knowledge of the prince's plans. He says he was kept an outsider to the prince's council."

'It might be so. Prince Sanglant would have no reason to trust him. King Henry certainly did not."

'Yet he did not aid me as he might have in securing the prince's daughter as a hostage.

I wonder, too, about these old journeys he took many years ago, and his service to the Wendish king Arnulf. There is too much of Brother Lupus that remains hidden. He conceals himself just as these Jinna do. Concealment is the sign of a guilty conscience."

'Perhaps. He was always the most loyal to Anne. Is he no longer?"

'Difficult to know. I believe he is still loyal to Anne. They were raised together, he to be her faithful servingman. How can he cast aside what he was raised for?"

'Then what troubles you?"

'I wonder now if he remains loyal to the Seven Sleepers. Does he still follow our cause? I do not know what is in his mind and heart any longer. We cannot trust him. That is why I cannot let him travel with you and Elene into the south. What if he betrays you?"

'I don't think he will. We need another experienced traveler, a strong hand, a keen eye.

The desert is a hard place. We might come to grief in a hundred ways. I am an old woman, Marcus. My granddaughter is strong, but she is young and inexperienced. My servants are loyal and have great stamina, and we can hire a goodly retinue here in Qahirah. Still, I wish Brother Lupus to accompany us as well."

'No. My plan is best. You will travel by means of the crown, if we can use it, and thus you will not have to endure a long journey across this desolate land. If a gateway opens to the southeast, then you will pass through. If not, it means the southeastern crown is lost.

Let us pray that is not so."

'Let me take Brother Lupus. We need him. My granddaughter likes him. It will make my task easier."

'No."

'You give me no good reason, only your own doubts."

'Very well, then. Sister Anne commanded me explicitly to send him back to her. If it is her will, and after she has interrogated him, then she will send him after you. If not—so be it."

'She no longer trusts him?"

'Her will is my will. I do not contest her in this, or in anything. Nor should you."

'Well." Sister Meriam's pause was as eloquent as her words. "We must rely on such servants as we can hire here in Qahirah. I hope they are trustworthy. I hope the desert is not rife with bandits and monsters and storms."

Marcus chuckled. "You are not helpless, Meriam. Neither is Elene. You have taught her well."

Meriam's tone was as dry as Zacharias had ever heard it. "So we must hope."

Beyond the fountain, along the opposite wall, Zacharias saw a slight movement, as much as a hunting beast might make when it eases behind bushes while stalking a bird.

Marcus and Meriam, themselves scarcely more than shadows, took their leave and slipped away to their own rooms, but Zacharias remained, knowing it wise to linger until he was sure it was safe to move. Among the Quman, he had learned to remain still and silent for hours at a time, hoping to escape Bulkezu's wrath.

Yet in all that time he waited there, he saw no sign of that slip of a shadow. Who else had been listening? A breeze stirred the vines and he caught a hint of their perfume underlaid with that other, dustier scent. It was ungodly silent. He did not even hear dogs barking.

At length his legs grew tired because he was no longer accustomed to standing so still.

Keeping to the shadows, he slunk back to the room. The curtain brushed his face as he slipped past, but his bare feet made no sound and no voice rose to challenge him as he lay down to sleep.

In the morning Wolfhere was missing, his pallet empty and his pack removed from the pile of baggage.

'Gone!" Marcus slammed a fist against the wall, then cursed at the pain. But his temper calmed as quickly as it had flared.

'So be it," he said to Meriam as they made ready to leave for the ruins of Kartiako.

"He has revealed himself through his actions."

She said nothing.

Elene wept.

HJ& smelled the choking scent of smoldering fires long before his feet told him that they had left the loamy forest path for a grimier track through ash and dust. Charred and splintered debris crackled underfoot. Its acrid chaff coated his lips. In the distance he heard the sound of men cutting wood, echoes upon echoes of the throbbing in his head.

The throbbing swallowed everything. He couldn't remember how long he had been walking or where he had come from or what he had been doing before being coffled together with the other prisoners.

He wasn't cold—that was good—but his left foot still hurt. A few days ago the pack mule had trodden on it, and it pained him as he stumbled along grasping the rope that bound him to the prisoner in front of him. Besides the merchant and his two hired guards, there were six prisoners roped together and bound for the quarries—or at least, he had learned to recognize nine voices over the days of their journey, and more than once had felt the prod of the guards' staves. He would have fallen a hundred times if not for the mercy of the two men roped before and behind him, a Salian criminal named Willehm and a captured brigand who called himself "Walker."

'Careful, Silent," sang out Will, addressing him by the name the rest called him. A good enough name, since he had no memory of a name, only a hazy recollection of hot tears and shouted fury. "There's a drop right ahead of you. Take a big step and brace yourself."

From behind the rope pulled taut as Walker leaned back to brace him.

He swung his foot out and felt it fall, and fall, trusting to Will's directions. The foot struck loose earth, crushed leaves, and the slick remains of charcoal, and he slipped sideways, flailing. The rope snapped tight on either side of him, and he righted himself and dug his toes into the dirt for purchase. There was a reek about this place that tickled his nostrils and made his head spin and his blind eyes ache. His lungs burned each time he took in a breath.

'Get on!" The master's whip cracked so close that air snapped against his cheek, but he'd taken too many hurts and bruises to flinch.

Walker muttered a curse under his breath as Will tugged on the rope to guide him onward.

'We're walking through leavings scattered from two old charcoal pits," said Will, who often described the scenery for him. "They've burned down to the ground and been cleared off. There's a pit—no, two—burning off to the west. I see smoke through the trees."

'It's a powerful bad stink," said Walker. "The air is nigh black with the smoke. Some kind of demons live here, I've heard tell. They burn iron out of the earth and smelt it with the blood of humankind."

'Nay, that's not so. It's men I see, cutting wood. What are we for, then, if not to labor in the ironworks?"

'They'll kill us and pour our blood into molten spears and swords."

'Work us to death, more like," objected Will. "Hauling ore. Digging pits."

'Cutting wood, like them? That's work that makes a man strong enough to break his bonds and escape."

'You think they'll give us axes, to cut our ropes?" Will laughed curtly. "No, we're for the quarries and the shafts. I do so hate the dark."

'I hear there's goblins who live in the ground around here. They eat the flesh of humankind when they can get it. When a prisoner's too weak to work, the masters lower him down into the deepest shafts and leave him for the goblins, and they pile silver and lead in buckets in exchange. They do love human flesh! They'll eat a man, bones and all!

While he's still alive!"

'Where do you hear these tales?" demanded Will. "I don't believe you."

'You're a fool not to believe me. Haven't you seen those demons shadowing us? They look like great black dogs, a pair of them, but they have red eyes and fangs, and they feast on dead flesh! I saw the guards shoot arrows at them one evening. Haven't you heard them barking at night?"

'Many a starving dog roams the woods. Those who don't know the woodlands may see any kind of creature in its shadows, but that doesn't mean they're really there."

'Believe what you will. I've lived five winters in the forests. I've seen dark shades prowling. I've seen elfshot shivering in the wind.

I've fought off wolves. I've kissed forest nymphs, but their breath stank of rotting waterweed. If you'd seen what I'd seen, you'd not doubt."

'The wolves I believe," said Will. "My aunt's cousin's son got et by wolves. Torn to pieces, and him walking home from mass, he was, at Dearc."

'Wintertide," agreed Walker. "That's when wolves're hungriest. They'll eat anything.

They like fat babies best, though."

'Hush, you chattering crows!" snarled the man roped in back of Walker. He had a hard, nasty voice, one that stung when its sound hit you, and a particularly bad smell to him, all rotting sweet,

'Hush," murmured Will, for the others were scared of that voice; their own voices betrayed them when, they whispered among themselves at night or responded to the man's retorts or gibes.

To understand the world around him, he had to listen. He had heard their whispered confessions; they often spoke around him as if he weren't there. Will had stolen bread from a biscop's table for his crippled parents; Walker had been caught with a band of starving brigands stealing a lady's milk cow; the rest were no better, and no worse—many were hungry and the last two harvests had failed. But the one they called Robert never confessed his crime to the other prisoners, and it seemed likely to them that he was a foul murderer.

Nearby, axes cut into wood, a man shouted a warning, and a tree splintered, groaned, and fell with a resounding crash that shuddered along the ground, vibrating up through the soles of his feet. The breeze turned, taking the worst of the scorched smell with it. No birds sang.

Fear crept along his shoulders. In some other place the birds had fled, too. All gone. A horrible pain filled his belly as he wept, remembering only that his hands had been slick with blood. Where had he been? What was he doing?

Who am I?

Flashes of memory sparked.

Ships slide noiselessly onto the strand, a shining sand beach touched by the light of the morning sun rising over low hills. Because they come from the west, the ships lie somewhat in shadow— or perhaps that is only a miasma of death and destruction that hovers over them. What pours forth from them cannot be called human, yet neither are these creatures beasts. They are fashioned much like humankind, with their strange, sharp faces and the shape of their limbs and torsos, but under the sun's light their skin gleams as if scaled with metal— bronze, or copper, or iron— and the body of each one bears a pattern of white scars or of garish yellow, white, or red paint formed into bright sigils. Fearsome dogs yammer beside them, leaping into the fray, biting and tearing. The defenders of this quiet estate fight fiercely and with great courage, led by a handsome young lord carrying shield and sword, but the invaders outnumber them.

It is only a matter of time.

The lord's hall catches on fire, flame racing along the thatched roof.

'Hey, there! Hey! You can stop now, Silent. We're here."

'It's strange, isn't it, how sometimes he seems to be hearing us, and other times it's as if he's gone right out of his head. Maybe he's one of them whose soul got eaten by wights, just sucked clean out of him."

'I pity him, poor man."

'Well, friend, I pity us, for look and see what manner of a pit we've come to. A great gaping hole in the earth. Look at those pools of filthy water! Gah, it stinks! I don't mean to spend the rest of my life here, I tell you that."

'Hush, Walker. We'll speak of that later when none can overhear. Here, now, Silent, sit you down. The master is talking with the foreman. God help us, this is a sour and ugly place."

A hand pressured him downward, and he sat, numb, bewildered. Only when he dreamed could he see, and then he suffered visions of such a fearful host that it was almost a relief when darkness ate those dreams, as it always did.

Wind played across his face. Around him, the other prisoners murmured nervously.

The dust of stones clotted the air, and everywhere around rang the sound of picks and shovels and the scrape of wheels along rock.

'There goes the master," said Walker. "Bound for home, a soft bed, good ale, and the next lot of sorry men like us. He must be glad to be free of this hellhole."

'I hate you," said Robert.

All the prisoners shifted as the words chafed them. He could feel the placement of their bodies, three to his left and five clustered to his right, with as much space as any of them could manage between them and Robert.

'I don't think he's talking to you," whispered Will.

'The wights sucked out his soul, too," murmured Walker.

'I hate you. No. No, you'll look! Look at the blood! Is that her bonny face?"

The anger and despair in that voice poisoned the air as surely as did the dust and the drifting ash and the stink of distant forges.

He reached, groping, and found a hairy arm, well muscled, that belonged to Robert, but a hand slapped his away, and that voice cursed him while weeping, tears and fury together. He withdrew his hand, now wet with the other man's tears.

'Up! Up! You don't get food for sitting on your backsides! Listen here, you men. My name is Foucher, and I'm foreman of these workings. You'll be hauling stone from the quarry. Work hard, and you'll get fed and in two years' time your freedom."

'Two years."

Will's breath chased along his skin, carrying the murmured words.

'I'll not wait that long," whispered Walker.

Willehm and Walker sat so close on either side that he felt protected, enclosed.

'Which is the blind mute? And the madman? Those two? Take them to the wheels."

His comrades muttered oaths as footfalls approached. "How can a blind man turn a wheel?" asked Will boldly. "He'll be helpless if the mad one attacks him," protested Walker. "Move off, you two! What's it to you, anyway? Who better than a blind man to walk the treadmill, eh? It's all the same to him!" Foucher snickered. "And we can't trust the madman with any tools, so he'll walk, too. Else he'll earn his keep by being thrown down into the deep shafts! As will the rest of you, any what cause me trouble!" They muttered but moved aside. A hand pinched his elbow, dragging him up, while the ropes binding him twisted and pinched his skin as they were untied, then fell loose. The others remained silent as he was led roughly away. Each step jarred up his spine to rattle his head. Pain cut so hard up behind his eyes, beside his swollen ear, that he stumbled and tripped, hitting his knees against shards of sharp rock. Agony swallowed him. All the noises faded in a blur of sound like waves crashing over rocks.

Water surges through a narrow channel cut into the rock, then hisses along the hidden strand, a crescent shoreline composed of little more than rock and pebbles that will soon be covered by the rising storm. Here, among the isles that make up the Cackling Skerries, he and his retinue wait in a place between sea and land where neither he nor his allies hold the advantage. A pale back cuts the foaming waters, followed by a second. Rain spatters over the beach and drums against the rock columns that make up the chief portion of this islet, bones that cannot be worn down even by the endless tidal wash of the sea. Now and again through the misting rain he sees Cracknose Rock, the fist from which he launched his invasion of Alba.

Clouds and rain hide the coast, but he does not need to see what now belongs to him.

"There! Do you see that?"

"What is it, Lord Erling?"

"There!" cries young Erling, who takes a step back and at once realizes that he has thereby betrayed fear in front of the others, each one of whom is ready to notice any weakness displayed by his compatriots.

But the others, even his own kind, recoil as well. He alone does not fear what emerges from the sea.

Four of them drag themselves out of the water until only their tails remain in the surf.

Waves sigh up to engulf them, then retreat with a murmur down through the rocks. Those flat red eyes betray no obvious gleam of intelligence, but this very strangeness is deceiving. They grin to display sharp teeth. Their hair twitches and churns, alive in its own way, because each thick strand boasts a snapping mouth that seeks air, or prey, or water, or some trace of his thoughts— who can tell?

The largest heaves itself up all the way onto the shore. Its huge tail makes it clumsy but nevertheless none of the landbound venture close. The claws and teeth of the merfolk can shred a man's flesh to rags in moments; not even the skin of the RockChildren is proof against their claws.

Its slit nose opens and closes as if sniffing. It speaks in a voice almost too low to hear, and the words sound oddly formed, too round and too flat, because its mouth and throat are not meant to voice human sounds. Yet they are able to speak the language of the RockChildren.

"We have come in answer to your summons."

"So you have, and I thank you."

"What do you want, Stronghand? We give to you aid. Food, you give to us. What do you want from us now?"

"I have heard a rumor that your people can swim upriver into fresh water. That you are not confined to the sea."

It made no reply.

"If I had known that, I could have asked your people to be scouts. If I had a more efficient way to summon you, we could work together in this."

"What more can you give us?" it asks.

"What do you want?"

Their reply comes in a hum so low that at first no words can be distinguished, but the pebbles all along the shoreline vibrate and actually begin to roll, grinding one against the other, slipping and shifting. Rocks tumble down from the high rock columns all around them and crash into the waters. Wind screams through the rocky inlet as the storm shoulders in. Rainfalls in sheets, so cold and sharp that it opens a tiny cut on Erling's cheek as he hunkers down, drawing his cloak over his face for shelter.

"Revenge."

'He's blind and mute, Captain."

'Is he deaf, too?" Laughter followed. Men might laugh at drowning animals in such a way, not caring for their suffering but amused by their struggles.

He became aware of smells and noises and a cold draft rising up from below, the breath of the pit.

Where was he? How had he come here?

Distantly a hound barked, but the laughing man's voice drowned it out.

'All the better, Foucher. We'll put him on the deepest wheel where it will make no difference if he can see or no. No need for chains. Rope will do for him. How's he to escape if he's blind?"

'Are you sure he can work? He looks soft in the head."

'He looks strong enough to me."

'If he's too stupid to know what to do?"

The laughter sounded again, this time mixed with the smell of onions that flavored the man's breath. "Prod him like a beast. He'll figure it out. Walk and he's let be. Stop and he's whipped."

'I hate you."

The comment caused a stir. He heard men whisper all around him. They were too many to keep voices straight, but their fear had a prickling scent that needled his skin.

'God Above, we'll need chains for that one," said the one called Captain. "They call him Robert. He's got an ugly look in his eye. We'll put him down with the blind mute.

What the one can't see and hear, the other can't make trouble with."

'You think the blind lad will last a week with that madman, Captain? He'll get shoved off the treadmill. He'll get et alive."

'They're all dead men anyway, Foucher. What are you worrying for?"

'The duke is displeased we didn't meet our quota last year."

'Due to the flooding. These wheels should fix that."

'With all the troubles in the border country and the civil war in Salia, the duke wants more this year. More iron. More weapons."

'Then get them down there and to work! What else did you bring me?"

'Criminals. The usual ruffians and wandering good-for-nothings. Thieves, mostly. I've sent them to the quarry master."

'We may need more in the shafts to clear out those two rockfalls."

'Better them than us. I fear that whispering, I don't mind telling you, Captain."

'I won't send you down into the deep shafts, Foucher. You've served me well. Your bones won't be gnawed by the goblins!" He laughed again, so hearty a sound that were it not for the comment that had preceded it one might be tempted to join in.

Such cues gave him, the one called Silent, little enough to go on. The haft of a spear or staff prodded him in the buttocks, and he stumbled forward as the men around him roared to see his confusion. He was pushed to the brink of an open hole out of which air poured with a sharp, dry scent that he had smelled before.

What memory teased him?

Creatures scuffling in the dark.

He brushed his fingers over the bronze armband, his only possession, and images flared like lamplight illuminating a black cavern:

He drags Kel and Beor back from the brink of a gaping fissure while a searing wind rushing up from the abyss stings his eyes. His beloved Adica lives, and they have rescued her from the Ashioi, who stand cursing them on the other side of the fissure. In the shadows beyond the shifting light, skrolin chatter in whispering voices as they vanish into the rock. The bronze armband throbs against the skin of his upper arm; when darkness falls, it lights with the uncanny gleam of magic.

"Get on!"

A hand cuffed him on the ear—out of nowhere—right where it was swollen. The pain shattered inside his skull and broke his memory into a thousand shards.

'Go on! Set your foot on the rung. There. There! What a fool!"

'Go easy on the man, Foucher. He can't help he's blind."

'Maybe so. Maybe not."

'What's that armband he's wearing? It looks valuable."

'Master Richard warned me of that. He said it burns any man who touches it."

'Does it?"

'If you'd seen the look on his greedy face, you'd have believed him, too. I say we can wait and take it off him when he dies."

'I wonder…" mused the Captain, but their voices faded as he descended into a clamor of rumbling and cracking and echoes.

A wooden rung slipped under his questing foot. He found purchase and climbed down, because he had no other place to go. Others led him, passing him from one hand to another down a shaft and down a second until it seemed the rock itself pressed around him, whispering of its age and of this violation of its secret parts. Now again he smelled burning oil and a gasp of smoke. Once he slipped into a ditch full of streaming water.

At length they chained him to stand on a curved wood walkway that was a huge wheel. They prodded him until he realized that they wanted him to walk and, by walking, turn the wheel beneath him. Water gurgled and sloshed, riding up from the depths and spilling away in a rush above him. The steady groan and rumble of other wheels turned above him under the tread of other feet.

He walked, chains rattling, and after a time got the hang of it, more sure of his footing, not fearing that he would stumble and fall and plunge endlessly into the darkness that lay everywhere around him. The wood slats of the wheel slid smoothly beneath his feet, worn down by the countless measured steps of the hapless slaves who had gone before him.

Had they died here, too?

Yet he found it so hard to think because his head hurt. It never stopped hurting.

It was easier just to walk.

After a very long time, they unchained him and led him to a hollow in whose confines he smelled the sweet gangrene scent of mad Robert. Curses echoed through the darkness as the madman was chained into the place he had just left. Here on this hard rock he was allowed to sleep, although Robert's ravings chased him through troubled dreams.

They woke him, fed him gruel, prodded him up, and chained him once more to the wheel where he walked again, forever, silent and in darkness.

JHlJbJKJh, said Marcus. "That is what we seek."

The ruins of Kartiako boggled Zacharias. Never had he seen such magnificence so spoiled. They walked half the morning away from the garden city of Qahirah into lands that ceased bearing life across a line so stark that on one side irrigated fields grew green and on the other, beyond the last ditch, lay bare ground. On three hills rising on the promontory that overlooked the sea rose the remains of a great city, now vandalized and tumbled into a shambles that nevertheless left those who approached it gaping in wonder at the columns and archways, the broken aqueducts and fallen walls, the intricate layout of a grand city that had once ruled the Middle Sea.

'You're looking the wrong way," said Marcus to Zacharias as their party turned aside from the dusty path that led across the barren flats toward the hills and the city. Grit kicked up by the mules clouded the air. The locals hired by Sister Meriam pulled the ends of their turbans across their faces to protect themselves from the stinging dust. "That way.

Do you see?"

That way lay a low hill outside the crumbled wall that had once ringed Kartiako and, beyond it, the crumpled ridgelines of rugged country, rock and sand and not a trace of living things. On that hill bones stuck up from the hillside, but as they came closer, he recognized that these were rude columns set in an elongated circle. The flatland disguised the distance; they walked with salty grit in their teeth for the rest of the morning and did not come to the base of the hill until after midday. A narrow trail snaked up to the crest, and Zacharias blinked twice before he realized that the dark creature scuttling down the track was no insect but a man dressed in black desert robes and grasping a staff.

'Not one stone has fallen," said Meriam.

The innkeeper had hired out his eldest son to guide them to the ruins, and this young man gestured for silence. He knelt, and the other locals knelt, heads bowed, as the old man of the hill halted before them. The robes he wore covered all but his eyes and hands.

He spoke in a surprisingly deep bass voice for one so small of stature. Meriam translated.

'Who are these honored ones? What do they wish, to come to this holy spot? I am guardian here. I can answer their questions."

'I admit I am curious why the stone circle lies in good repair," said Marcus. "All of the others we have found needed at least one stone raised to complete the circle."

By no means could Zacharias interpret any emotion in the old man's stance or face, because both were hidden. His eyes gave away nothing, narrowing now and again as Meriam put Marcus' questions to him and added, no doubt, a few explanations of her own.

When she finished, they waited in silence as the caretaker considered. Far away, beyond the dusty flats, green fields shimmered like a mirage.

'Come."

'What did you tell him?" Marcus asked as they climbed the hill with their retinue walking behind them. Meriam rode one of the mules, led by a manservant.

'That we have come to see the crowns. He is an educated man. In this region, most of the people speak the local language and few have been educated in the priests' tongue.

That he can speak it as well as he does means he knows more than we might otherwise imagine. He is no ordinary caretaker, sweeping and fussing. Be cautious. Be respectful."

Marcus snorted.

'If you are not minded to respect him because he is an infidel, Brother, then I pray you be polite for my sake."

'Very well, Sister. For your sake. I have no trust in the education of infidels."

'You must bide among them many months more, Marcus. Beware that your arrogance does not provoke them to turn on you."

He chuckled. "I will be discreet, and silent where I see fault."

As they reached the crest of the hill, the wind off the barrens began blowing in earnest, and Zacharias was pleased to imitate the Jinna hirelings by covering his mouth and nose with cloth to keep out the dust. He had never tasted anything so salty, mixed with grit that ground between his teeth. Up on the hilltop they could see through the haze as far west as Qahirah and northwest to the bones of Kartiako.

The old man strode into the center of the circle, opening his arms and turning slowly to encompass the entire scene. As he spoke, Me-riam translated.

'

'You wonder why this holy place lies not in ruins. That is because the Jinna magi have kept it in repair. It is a holy spot. An ancient battle was fought here, a great battle against the invaders, the Cursed Ones.'"

'Can it be that the story has lived so long among the infidels?" Marcus asked.

'Hush," said Meriam. "I wish to hear what he has to say."

The old man walked to the eastern slope of the hill where it tumbled away sharply into a hollow that then folded up into the barren rock ridges that ran all the way to the eastern horizon. The nearest ridge side was pockmarked with holes.

'Down beneath the hills lie caves. The old ones lived there in the ancient days for a time, but now it is all ruins. Cursed. They worshiped idols and sacrificed children."

The old man looked each one of them in the eye, as if delving for evil. Zacharias started back when that gaze met his; all his sins seemed to swarm up out of him, naked in the light. But without flinching the old man looked away to examine Marcus, and then Elene, and finally Meriam.

He nodded. "All of these abominations Astareos enjoins us from committing according to the laws of heaven. Do you respect the laws of heaven?"

'Ai, God, Meriam, does he expect us to swear some heathen oath?' We worship God in the proper manner. I will not suffer his maundering further, if you please. If the stone crown needs no repair, then there is no reason we cannot make our final calculations tonight and send you and Elene on your way tomorrow evening. The heavens will not slow their workings to accommodate our human frailties. There is much to do—and less time than we need, less than eighteen months until the day we have so long prepared for."

'Do not be hasty, Marcus. What he knows may be of value to us when we least expect it."

But although she spoke to the old man for another hour at least, in the end she admitted to Marcus that she had learned nothing beyond local legends of monsters, sandstorms, and lost caverns filled with eyeless snakes. The servants set up tents to shelter them from the winds, and as dusk came, the air quieted, the haze settled, and the stars shone with such brilliance that they looked close enough to reach up and steal.

Marcus took his stylus and wax tablet and sat cross-legged upon the ground, on a blanket, with a lamp burning at his right hand. He scrawled hasty calculations across the surface of the tablet before wiping it clean, muttering all the while.

Zacharias crouched beside him. "Can I learn to do this?"

Marcus replied without glancing up. "Can you write? Have you knowledge of numbers and sums and geometry? No? Then you must wait. I can only teach one step at a time. You must play Brother Lupus' part now."

'What is Brother Lupus' part?"

'Cauda draconis. The tail of the dragon. Least among us. Be still."

It was hard to be still. He wanted what Marcus possessed so badly that his desire was like the grit: everywhere, rubbing in the folds of his skin and at the creases of the corners of his mouth, caught in his eyebrows and worked deep into his hair. Each time he shifted his clothing shed grit, and it filtered through his leggings and his boots to grind between his toes. He had a blister, too, although he had thought his feet too tough to develop anything but calluses.

No man was permitted to build a fire atop the sacred hill, and a cold night wind off the desert wicked away the day's heat. Zacharias shivered under his cloak as he paced under the moon's light. To the east distant pricks of light marked the walls of dahirah, and he saw, surprisingly, the unsteady waver of a campfire in the ruins of Karti-ako, briefly glimpsed, then lost. Had he only hallucinated those flames, or had they been extinguished? The barren flat lay so dark and featureless that it seemed more ocean than land. Their position out here, so far from human haunts, seemed precarious although Meriam had hired fully twenty retainers to accompany her. If bandits skulked in the lands hereabouts, surely they did not roam so far into the wasteland.

What was there to kill?

His boot scuffed the ground, and a small object rattled and rolled away from him, coming to rest where the ground sloped slightly up again.

Were those finger bones?

He shuddered and turned back toward the lamp in whose wavering light Marcus sat, with Meriam beside him, making his marks and wiping them clean while the old woman whispered comments. Elene paced among the stones, lifting a staff not longer than her arm and measuring it against the stones and the stars. All of them glanced frequently at the sky.

An unholy cry rose from the east, a moaning that trembled through the clear night air.

Meriam's servants leaped to their feet, but the locals shouted hysterically one to the next and grabbed staves and axes. One man wept.

That moan chilled Zacharias until he shivered, and yet he broke out in a sweat, staring into the darkness. There was nothing to see. A scent drifted over them, borne by the wind: stinking carrion steeped with the sweetness of honey, so reeking and foul that he gagged.

The caretaker appeared from the shadows that half drowned the stones and hurried over to the blanket where Marcus and Meriam worked their equations. He called out to the others, and the locals rushed in a group to huddle within the stones, deathly quiet and obviously frightened.

'No light! No light!" The words came in recognizable Dariyan, and the rigid mask of terror that tightened the caretaker's eyes could be understood in any language. "Go! Go!"

Too late Marcus pinched out the wick. Meriam's servants ran to fetch her and carried her within the stone circle as Marcus and Zacharias hurried after. An awful grinding, slithering noise rose from the east.

'Where is Elene?" cried Meriam.

The old man shouted words Zacharias did not know as he lifted his staff above his head. Light sparked from the stone columns. Threads danced between stars and earth to form a shimmering fence woven around the columns, and by that light Zacharias saw, sliding in and out of the light's verge just beyond the stones, a massive shadow writhing and twisting, first a woman and then a monstrous snake.

The men clustered behind him moaned in terror, crying out "Ak-reva! Akreva!" and cast themselves on the ground as though prostrating themselves before the Enemy.

'By God's Name, Meriam, what is that creature?" demanded Marcus.

'Where is Elene?"

A figure darted forward from the hillside where it had strayed, but the hideous woman-snake slithered faster than any earth-bound creature could move and cut off Elene's retreat. The girl was stuck beyond the safety of the encircling spell, easy prey for the monster as it closed. She raised her staff, but it was a frail stick with which to fend off death.

The choking sound of grief and horror that came from Meriam's throat catapulted Zacharias into action. He would not stand by as he had when the Quman had attacked the party guarding Blessing outside the walls of Walburg. He would not run away.

Better to die than find himself a coward again.

He grabbed a staff out of the hands of a cowering servant and dashed past the glimmering net of the spell. The threads burned where they touched him; cloth blackened; his skin stung and turned white.

The monster reared up before the stunned girl, its tail lashing. Its scales were coated with a noxious substance that gave off a phosphorescent glow. Its tail bore a barbed stinger, and it whipped its tail forward, and struck. Elene darted sideways. The tail thunked into the ground. Dust spattered. The monster opened its mouth to trumpet its rage, a high, horrible scream echoed off the distant hills and vibrated the stones. The threads of light sparked and wavered. Behind their net of safety, men shrieked in terror.

Zacharias jumped forward and whacked the monster across the coils as hard as he could. It reared back, twisting to confront him. Its body was massive, as thick as a tree trunk and rippling with muscles, and it was shiny pale and so grotesque that he wanted to cry, or vomit. The stench brought tears to his eyes. The long snake body bloomed into a monstrosity, the grotesque semblance of a woman with round breasts and narrow face but so crudely formed that it seemed an ill-trained craftsman had botched the job.

Elene's voice rang out. "Hear me, Misael, Charuel, Zamroch. Come to my call. I invoke you, Sabaoth, Misiael, Mioael. Prepare for me a sharp sword drawn in your right hands. Prepare for me seven radiant lights. Drive this evil creature from our midst!"

It struck.

He was slow, unlike the girl. The tip pierced his shoulder. He did not remember screaming. Suddenly he lay on the ground and a cold swift burning blew outward from the sting, turning his flesh to stone. He couldn't move.

It stared down at him, its youthful face like that of a girl but lacking all intelligence and emotion. It clacked sharp teeth together and drew its tail back for a second strike.

How strange, staring upward, that time should move so slowly. The creature had hair, of a kind, but in that last instant he realized that it was not hair at all but a coiling mass of hissing snakes writhing around its face.

A falling star flashed in the heavens. A burst of fire exploded before his eyes, and its brightness shrouded his vision. The monster screamed in such agony that the sound of it might as well have turned every soul there to stone. He could not move but shivered convulsively as that tail was dragged across him, drawn by what force he did not know, nor could he see, nothing except those heavy gray coils pressing their weight into his chest, the tail dwindling until the white stinger floated before his eyes, a bead of venom dangling from the barbed tip, ready to fall into his mouth.

It would burn off his tongue. He would never speak again.

The ground shifted under him. Hands gripped him and hauled him away over the rocky ground, then let him drop onto the hard ground as voices exclaimed in fear and excitement.

'It was a demon!"

'Nay, it was an angel, you fool!"

'It was a phoenix! Are you blind?"

'Not so blind that I don't know lightning when I see it! That was no creature at all."

'Gah, gah, gah," he said, but no words came.

'Is he safe?"

'He is stung, Sister."

They conferred, but he could only stare up at the heavens where light burned just as it burned across his skin. He shivered, so cold. So cold.

'The old one says there is no cure for the sting of the monster?"

'So he says, but I am not so willing to give up on a brave man." "

When had it become so foggy? A haze drifted before his eyes. Yet those words blazed: a brave man.

Those words gave him heart.

'What do you suggest?"

'I am the only one skilled in healing among us. We will remain here while I do what I can."

'We have no time for such luxuries, Meriam. In any case, the creature is wounded, but not dead. It may return."

'Even if we go, you will still be in danger."

'Perhaps. It is easier to protect one man than an entire retinue. You know I must change my plans because Brother Lupus deserted us. I can bide in Qahirah until Sister Anne sends a brace of soldiers to guard me, if that is necessary."

'Soldiers cannot defeat such a monster."

'Enough! You and Elene and your party must leave at dusk tomorrow."

'Will you abandon him to death after he saved the life of my granddaughter?"

'Nay. He can be our messenger to Anne. He can still serve us, and in serving us may serve himself…"

The wind's moan tore away the rest of Marcus' words.

Sister Meriam had called him a brave man.

It was better to die bravely than to live with shame.

It was better to die, but he lay there not precisely in pain but unable to move or see, with his skin on fire and yet not really hurting. He lay there and felt the sun rise, although the touch of light hurt him. They shaded him with a lean-to of cloth, and he lay in that shade while Meriam coaxed a bit of honeyed water down his throat, but the smell of honey nauseated him. That stench of honey-carrion that pervaded the monster welled up in his memory, in his throat, and he threw it all back up.

Elene sat beside him, staring at him with solemn eyes. "I didn't look at him," she said to her grandmother. "I thought him beneath my notice. How strange that God should act through such a common, ugly, dirty man."

'Even a cringing dog can bite, Elene. Look more closely at humankind. The outer seeming may not mirror the inner heart."

'I know! I know!" said the girl impatiently, as though she had heard this lecture a hundred times before. "That isn't what I meant! He just didn't seem to matter."

'Neither did the mouse spared by the prisoner, who later gnawed through her ropes and thereby freed her."

The shade drew a line across the girl's tunic as she smoothed it down over her knees; she had her head in the sun and her legs in the shadow. "I'm afraid, Grandmother. I don't want to go into the wilderness. You don't know what we'll find on the other side of the gateway. What if there are monsters there, too?"

'We must be strong, Elene. We have been given a task. I alone can speak the language of those who bide in the desert country, so I must go. So be it."

'So be it," she breathed, bowing her head.

'Gah," he whispered, but the sound vanished in the trickling tumble of grains of sand down the sloped cloth lean-to as a wind blew up from the flats.

His body was ice, his thoughts sluggish. Somehow, the lean-to came down and he was rolled onto a length of cloth and dragged over the bumpy ground to be dropped again, left lying with a rock digging into the small of his back.

There he lay. A haze descended, and for a while he heard faint sounds, none of them distinct enough to identify. A drop of moisture wet his palm. Through the haze the sun shone as it sank low into the west, but its glare had the force of ice, creeping into his limbs.

He drifted. It was getting harder and harder to see people; they seemed so tenuous and insubstantial set against the pale hills and the darkening sky, which were older creatures by far, populated by ancient spirits that stalked the shadows. Light winked in the heavens; a star bloomed. Figures moved outside the circle, raising and lowering staffs and murmuring words too softly for him to hear or understand.

A spider's thread spun down from the heavens to latch to one of the stones, followed by a second. His heart sped as he realized they were engaged in the art of the mathematici, who could read the movements of the heavens and discern their secrets.

Years ago Kansi-a-lari had woven a spell into the stones while he cowered and prayed, but she had woven it with the intent to keep them in one place while time moved forward around them. Marcus wove a gateway into the stones through which Meriam and Elene and their retinue might travel to a distant land.

The stone circles were gateways, each one a gate that could lead to any one of the others, but he did not know how to weave the spell. He wanted to know how to weave the spell. He tried to lift his head; to look, to learn, but none of his limbs moved and that waxing torpor dragged him down, and down, and down into the pit. A shadow bent over him; hands pinned parchment to his robes; the cloth on which he lay strained and tugged around his body and he moved into the web of light. Blind, he floated while all around blue fire burned with a cold breath that soaked him to the bone.

It is so cold that it burns. He sees branching corridors and down each one a vision, whether false or true he cannot say.

A man, grimy, thin, half naked, walks and walks as a rumbling wheel rolls around and around him, never ending.

Wizened creatures whisper and skulk in the depths of the earth, listening.

A merman glides through smoky waters, pulled by the wake of a slender ship.

A small party of robed figures strides hastily through the blue-white fog. Is there a familiar face among them? Isn't that the Eagle called Hanna, who was freed from slavery to Bulkezu? She turns as if hearing his thoughts and calls aloud.

"Who are you?"

Light flared, and died, and he hit hard ground, his back and head and hips jarred by the force of the impact. That flare of the light washed away until no light remained. Was it night? Or was he blind?

He could no longer move his lips. But he could still hear.

'Who is this?"

'See, there is a message pinned to his robes with a fine brooch. Ai, God! He stinks!"

'Feh! So he does!"

'This is signed with the name of Brother Marcus. Here is the man who dragged the filthy one. He has the look of a servant."

'What's wrong with him?"

"I don't know. He looks as if he's been knocked cold, but otherwise healthy. We must take these two to the Holy Mother."

'That's a long road."

A warm hand touched his lips, then his throat, and last his eyes. "God Above! He's like ice! I think he's dying. Hurry! Send for Presbyter Hugh!"

Their voices faded into a hiss, but that, too, fell away as he sank into the silence of the pit.

XXIV HIS VOICE . was raining again, a downpour that threatened to drown the newly planted seeds and sow the dreaded murrain among their precious sheep, for they'd heard rumors that the disease had blighted lands south of here. Ivar stood on the porch of the infirmary and listened to the gallop of rain on the sloping roof, accompanied by the coughs of the afflicted resting under the care of Sister Nanthild. Ermanrich, Hathumod, and Sigfrid were all sick with a pleurisy that had felled three quarters of their little congregation. One elderly nun had died, but the rest seemed doomed only to be miserable and weak for many weeks.

'There you are, Brother Ivar." Sister Nanthild could barely walk with the assistance of two canes, and she never went farther than the porch of her infirmary, but she was nevertheless a fierce and wise ruler of her tiny domain. "Still healthy, I see. Are you chewing licorice root?"

'More than I ever wished to, Sister." The taste had ruined his appetite, since every food now stank of aniseed.

She chuckled. "An obedient boy, even if you are a heretic. Is there aught Her Grace wishes from me? I can't let you in to speak with your comrades. We rely on your health, Brother Ivar. We must take no chance that you catch the contagion."

'I know."

'You don't like it."

'Am I so easy to understand, Sister?"

Her smile was a well-worn crease in a wrinkled face. He had never seen her lose her temper, even with her most crotchety patients—and many tested her with their whining and complaints. "I have seen every condition of humankind in the course of my years, Brother. You are no mystery to me!"

The comment frightened him, although he knew it ought not to. He had worked hard to quiet the demons that pricked him, but she saw into his innermost heart.

'There, now, child. I do not know all your secrets, nor do I wish to know them. I have secrets of my own."

'Surely you have led a blameless life!"

'When I was a young girl I was allowed to kiss the hand of the sainted Queen Radegundis. It may be that a trifling measure of her holiness blessed me with a long life and few troubles. But I have sown my share of ills in the world, as do we all. Now, then.

How goes it with Her Grace?"

'She says to tell you, 'It is time.'"

'Ah." She went to the door and called to her assistant. "Sister Frotharia, fetch me the satchel hanging from the hook behind my chair."

Coughs and groans greeted her words as patients sought her attention, and she gestured to Ivar to stay put and hobbled back into the long hall where the sick lay on pallets. After a while, Sister Froth-aria came out onto the porch and, without a word, handed Ivar a satchel, then went back inside.

Ivar glanced up and down the porch, but of course he was alone. No one ventured out in such rain. The ground was slicked to mud, and even on the gravel pathways rivulets and puddles made walking perilous. Their guards rarely ventured within the limits of the palisade that ringed their holy community.

The satchel weighed heavily on his arm as he hurried out into the rain. The infirmary abutted the main compound. The guards posted at the door to the biscop's suite stepped aside without speaking; they had served almost three months and glowered at him with the suspicion of men who have heard nothing but poisonous gossip. The guard was rotated through every three months; to this schedule Lady Sabella adhered with iron discipline. The usurper feared, Ivar supposed, that lengthy contact with Biscop Constance might corrupt the guards.

As it would.

Biscop Constance had certainly corrupted him. She possessed every quality that set apart those noble in spirit as well as blood: tall and handsome, prudent and humble, diligent and pious, farsighted and discreet, eloquent, patient, amiable, and stern.

'Ah," the good biscop said, looking up as he entered. She sat as usual at her writing desk with two assistants beside her in case she needed anything.

Never in his wildest imaginings had he expected to become the familiar attendant and counselor to a noblewoman of such high station, one who wore the gold torque signifying her royal kinship at her neck.

'Are you sure this is wise, Your Grace?" he asked.

'I am sure it is not. If I cannot go myself, then I do not wish to put one of my faithful retainers into such danger."

'It must be done," said the young woman seated at the biscop's feet. She had riotous black curls that the nun's scarf over her head could not constrain. Sister Bona had been a foundling, discovered at the gates of the biscop's palace in Autun some sixteen years before. Now she was one of the prettiest girls Ivar had ever seen, and her houndlike loyalty to the biscop gave her a warrior's bold resolve. "It must be done now! The rain will cover my tracks. The guards hide in their shelters. I can find refuge with certain farming families and loyal monasteries that are known to me through my travels with you, Your Grace. If I can reach Kassel, Duchess Liutgard's steward will give me aid and send me with an escort to Princess Theophanu. Even if I can get as far as Herford Monastery, I will be safe with Father Ortulfus. You know it must be done!"

'I could go," said Ivar, but Bona fixed him with such a glower that he laughed nervously and took a step back.

'You are one of only seven men who abide in this prison," said Constance. "You would be easily missed." Pain never left her. She shut her eyes, frowning, but with a deep sigh opened them again. "Go, then, Bona. Make haste. Avoid the roads at all costs. Go with God."

They embraced, then parted. Constance did not rise as Ivar gave the satchel to Bona, who slung it over her shoulder and hurried out into the courtyard, Ivar at her heels.

'I know the countryside better than you do!" she said, not looking back at him.

'It will be dangerous!"

'So it will." She glanced over her shoulder, and her grin challenged and vexed him. No girl brought up in the convent ought to be so provocative, but no placid creature would have dared what Bona meant now to attempt. Sigfrid and Ermanrich had no difficulty adjusting to a celibate life as the only young men confined to this convent—there were also four elderly lay brothers who labored about the grounds—but Ivar felt the sting of itchings and cravings every day. He could never scratch.

At least it wasn't Liath he dreamed of every single night, but the procession of women who progressed through his dreams only made it worse, all of them succubi wearing familiar faces: Liath, sometimes, but Hanna, too, and Bona (too often), and that girl from Gent, and a dozen others glimpsed and forgotten until they returned to haunt him. He never dreamed of Baldwin, but that betrayal only plagued him in his waking hours when he wondered how much his friend suffered and whether he smiled or wept in Sabella's tender care.

On two sides of the courtyard the windows and doors opening onto the courtyard had been boarded up to keep Constance confined within the biscop's suite, but Bona had loosened a board and after a final, considering glance at Ivar, she wriggled through the opening, dragging the satchel behind her. He pushed the board back into place to conceal the opening and went out to stand in the cold rain beside the dry fountain, letting himself get drenched.

Six months ago he and his three companions had been marched as prisoners into this place. How long would they bide here? Would they ever be freed? Or would they die here?

After a while he walked, dripping, back into the audience chamber.

Constance did not look up, but her quill paused. "She is gone?"

'She is gone, Your Grace."

She nodded. Her pen resumed its scratching across the parchment, driven with the same stern determination that had kept this tiny community going, although they might all so easily have lost heart.

He left and went outside, finding shelter in the mouth of the byre where the sheep sheltered during the winter. From here he had a good view of the palisade. This high fence had originally been erected across the mouth of the valley to keep out the enemies of Queen Gertruda, the founder of this tiny community dedicated to St. Asella but commonly referred to as Queen's Grave. Yet a refuge that kept enemies out might as easily be turned inward. Since Constance's arrival, the palisade had grown to enclose the community on all sides, zigzagging through woodland and running below the high ridge that closed in the valley at the far end. Guards patrolling the walls day and night kept them locked in. The high ridge walls and the palisade bounded their world, yet it was not precisely an evil existence, only a curtailed one.

What made it evil dwelled in the world, not in their hearts. Yet he could not believe that they were better off waiting in here than fighting out there.

a long time Zacharias could hear but not see, could feel a jostling all along his torso and limbs that at long last and for no obvious reason ceased.

'Is this the one? He reeks."

'Yes, Holy Mother."

'He and the servant were found in the crown at Novomo?"

'Yes, Holy Mother. It took six days for them to convey him here in a cart. As you see, he is crippled, mute, and blind."

'But not dead?"

'Not dead. The message speaks of a poison that both paralyzes and preserves."

'This is the parchment that was pinned to his robes?"

'Yes, Holy Mother."

'Brother Marcus has appended his name at the end. I recognize the imperfect curve of his 'r's."

'Yes, Holy Mother."

The woman's voice lowered as she read the words in a murmur, phrases rising and falling out of earshot. "… akreva… Sister Me-riam left this receipt for a nostrum that will counteract the poison… she has departed without further incident, but where she has landed I know not. She will send a servant back to me, but I do not know when to expect… I remain here to safeguard this crown and prepare for the conjunction… Brother Lupus' treachery… our calculations with the locations and angles necessary to locate each crown and link them together according to the ancient spell… but it will be necessary to double-check against these calculations from the tables of Biscop Tallia…"

The voice lulled him back into that stupor, prey to the touch of hands and the play of water and then cloth over his body as servants washed and dressed him and exclaimed over his mutilation. He knew when the haze lightened and became something more than a gray fog, when vague forms took on shape and he recognized forms as people bending over him to examine his skin and eyes. He knew when his sense of smell returned because of the unexpected scent of hot bread fresh from the ovens that caused him to salivate, and then to swallow.

The sensation of movement shocked him. Was he so utterly paralyzed? How had they been feeding him all this time?

Yet he was not dead.

When he tried his tongue, only that stubborn 'gah' sound clawed in his throat. Day after day he struggled against this muteness until he dared not attempt speech at all because it was worse to imagine that he had lost the ability to talk altogether. Day after day folk came to marvel, for what reason he did not know and could not ask. Mute.

Speechless. Nothing could be worse. Even death was preferable.

But one day as the sober-looking servant called Eigio who always tended him rolled him to one side in order to change the bedding beneath him, he tried again because he could not stop trying to talk.

'Where have I come to?"

The man shrieked, dropped the half-cleared bedding, and ran from the room, leaving him propped up on his side like a board.

Was that truly his own voice, so rough and low? He tried again.

'Where have I come to? What day is it?"

Elation spilled tears from his eyes, streaming down his cheeks to spot the rumpled bedding. Emboldened, he tensed and rocked, overbalanced, and tipped forward to land facedown on the lumpy mattress at a tilt, caught between the mattress and the ridges made by the half-stripped blankets. A hollow cradled his face so he could breathe, inhaling the musty smell of straw ticking and coarse canvas cover moist with his sweat and effusions.

'Yes! He spoke as clear as can be, Your Excellency. God in Heaven! Look there! He's rolled himself forward."

Hands gripped him by shoulder and hip and heaved him back against the wall. He looked up at the worried servant and, beyond him, a golden-haired man clothed in a fine pale linen tunic who gazed at him so pensively that Zacharias thought the man was about to weep.

'Can you hear me, Brother Zacharias?" asked this magnificent figure in a fine, mellifluous voice. "Can you speak?"

'Who are you?" he croaked.

'Ah." The man called to an unseen fourth party. "Vindicadus, bring me my robes."

'Yes, Your Excellency."

The patter of footsteps faded as the lord examined Zacharias. "What shall we do with you?" he mused. "What shall we do? Two days yet until the king's ascension. Can you move?"

Zacharias tried to wiggle his feet, to move his hands, but nothing happened. He might as well have been stone, and it sickened him to think of lying here in helpless terror as each day spun into the next. "Am I a cripple, Your Excellency?"

'His finger moved, Your Excellency," said Eigio.

'So it did. Sister Meriam's nostrums have had their effect, as she promised us in her letter, but faster than expected. Strange." As he bit his lower lip in a gesture more common to children puzzling over an unanswered question, he looked startlingly young and oddly frightening, but the shiver of fear passed quickly.

'Very well, Eigio." He walked to the door and paused there. "Let no person enter. Say his condition has taken a turn for the worse and that he is near death, and on no account let any soul hear him speak. Your meals will be brought as usual and a guard will be posted outside the door. You are not to leave this room again. Do you understand?"

'Yes, Your Excellency. It will be done as you say, Your Excellency."

'I am sure it will be."

Eigio shut the door behind him, closing them in.

'Where am I?" Zacharias asked, and the man looked at him in surprise, as if he had forgotten Zacharias was there.

'Nay, Brother," he said, wrinkling his brow in distress. "Only Presbyter Hugh is to speak to you, he made that clear. You may ask all you want, but I can say nothing."

Zacharias had nothing left to do but wiggle his fingers and toes as he surveyed his domain: the bed, a bench and cot for the servant, a side table with a basin and pitcher of water, and a garland hanging over the door. On the bench rested a tray of oddments including a ball of bright red yarn and two large hooked wooden needles, a wine cup, a chess set carved of ivory, a bowl and spoon, a bundle of rosemary with a sprinkling of pale blue flowers among the spiky leaves, and a writing knife, stoppered inkhorn, and several uncut goose quills.

Two shutters leaned against the whitewashed walls beside a single embrasure. Outside it was day.

'Where am I?" Zacharias repeated, but Eigio turned mute and would answer none of his queries, only gave him a ghastly sweet mead to drink.

He slept, and when he woke it was dark, the chamber illuminated by a single candle whose light gilded the pale head of the lord Eigio had called Presbyter Hugh. He had pulled the bench up to the side table, on which a sloping writing desk had been set. He worked industriously, pen scratching as he wrote on vellum, his attention fixed on his labors as he copied onto the parchment from an exemplar out of Zacharias' sight beyond Hugh's left arm. He was a remarkably handsome man, with a face that light cherished and women no doubt swooned over, that wealth of golden hair, and his limbs and figure so well proportioned that he seemed more angel than man.

All at once Zacharias knew who the man was and, therefore, where he must be.

'Am I in Darre? How did I get here?"

Hugh set down the pen and used the penknife to scrape off a blot before turning to regard him with that same pensive expression Zacharias had seen before.

'I have been sitting beside you for half the night, Brother Zacharias. Did you know you talk quite volubly in your sleep? Yet in such a disjointed fashion that I am left puzzled. What can you tell me of Prince Sanglant?"

Almost he blurted out Hathui's accusations, but he stopped himself. He was helpless and alone. This was not the time to make enemies.

'I left the service of Prince Sanglant to become a servant to Brother Marcus. He promised to instruct me in the secrets of the mathe-matici."

'Did he do so?"

'He did! He had begun to teach me about the motion of the heavens and the glorious architecture of the world. When I had mastered those, then he promised to teach me how to weave the crowns."

'Did he!" Hugh glanced toward the unshuttered window but looked back as quickly.

"Instead you were stung by a dread creature called an akreva and paralyzed by its venom.

Brother Marcus saw fit to send you back to us, as the bearer of a message to the Holy Mother."

'How came I here? Am I in Darre?"

'Brother Lupus, it seems, had deserted Marcus. He was to bear the message, but in his absence Marcus chose to send you—as you are now—instead. How did it happen that Brother Lupus abandoned his duty?"

'I do not know, Your Excellency."

'You do not know Brother Lupus?"

'I do not know why he deserted the company, Your Excellency. He fled one night, while we slept in a hostel in Qahirah. That is all I know."

'Is that all you know? Truly?"

His gentle smile made Zacharias shudder, and that movement spawned another as his hands spasmed and his feet twitched. It was a warning. If he could survive this paralysis, if it were wearing off, then he might hope to escape. He had no loyalty to Wolfhere, after all.

'We stayed at a hostel where Wolfh—where Brother Lupus had stayed many years before."

'He traveled in Qahirah before?"

'So he said. I don't know why. The innkeeper recognized him. He had done the innkeeper a favor many years ago, so we were well treated and given a splendid feast that night and a palatable wine, as much as we could drink. That night I had to rise to use the necessary. When returning to my bed, I happened to overhear a conversation between Brother Marcus and Sister Meriam. Marcus no longer trusted Brother Lupus. He thought Brother Lupus had spent too long in Prince Sanglant's company and seemed unwilling to return to the fold. Sister Anne had commanded that Brother Lupus be sent back to her once we located the crown which lies beyond the old ruins of Kartiako. It was the next morning that we discovered he was gone. Perhaps he overheard their conversation as well. Perhaps he knew they were suspicious of him, and so he fled."

'If so, it seems their suspicions were correct. Wolfhere." He savored the name as he might a sweet wine. "It seems that the king's distrust of him was deserved."

So spoke the man who had, according to Hathui, corrupted the king by insinuating a daimone into his body! Zacharias held his tongue. It was all he could do not to blurt out the accusation just to see Hugh's reaction, but instinct saved him. Hugh was not Bulkezu but something different, better or worse he could not tell.

'Are you a mathematicus?" he asked instead. "Can you teach me now that I no longer travel with Brother Marcus? He promised that I would receive teaching if I joined his cause."

'Is that your wish, Brother Zacharias? To receive teaching?"

'It is! More than anything!"

'Yet you have not told me what you know of Prince Sanglant. And of an Eagle whose name is Hathui. You spoke her name while you slept. What do you know of her? Is it possible you have seen her? She was once King Henry's trusted counselor, but rumor has it she murdered Helmut Villam after a lover's quarrel and fled in disgrace."

How difficult it was to remain silent! But Zacharias held his tongue. He struggled and writhed in his heart, but he held his tongue.

'A man who brought me information about this Eagle, Hathui, would be accepted as a trustworthy member of my household. Such a man could expect to receive training in any craft his heart desired. Even as a mathematicus. For I am one such. I could take him on as a discipla. I could teach him how to weave the crowns, and much more besides."

At the price of betraying his sister.

Hadn't he once said: ",' will do anything for the person who will teach me" ?

He shut his eyes, and held his tongue, although he knew his silence betrayed him.

Where desire and loyalty warred, loyalty won, and he possessed no glib words to worm his way out of this confrontation. He had probably lost the one thing he desired above all else—that he might learn the secrets of the heavens—and yet it mattered not. He had left Hathui behind, but he would never betray her.

Never.

'Ah," said Hugh. "I will leave you to think it over."

He stoppered the inkhorn, cleaned the quill, and tidied up his writing things before he left. In his place, Eigio returned, blowing out the candle before he lay down to sleep.

In that darkness Zacharias smiled to discover what blossomed unexpectedly in his heart. Peace.

Hathui had accused him of never being content, but he was content now. He had saved Elene's life despite his fear. He had stood his ground in honor of the bond between him and Hathui. Weren't these the actions of a good man? A decent man? A courageous man?

In the morning, Eigio propped him up against the wall and he was delighted to discover that he could use his arms well enough to spoon gruel into his own mouth. He was ravenous. He had lost so much weight that his body seemed skin stretched over bone, and when he tried to stand, his legs hadn't the strength to hold him. Only a handful of days ago he could not swallow or speak. If he ate and rested, he would recover his strength.

The afternoon's meal of gruel and wine made him unaccountably sleepy. He drifted in and out of a doze as his skin burned and chilled at intervals and his tongue seemed swollen, choking him. Night came and departed while he napped and woke, head cloudy, hands tingling. Light returned, and he lay on his bed and struggled to move, but his limbs felt as heavy as stone, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

Presbyter Hugh appeared suddenly, splendid in court robes and a scarlet cape that rippled like water every time he turned.

'Give him the antidote, and then bring him," he said, and left.

Eigio poured sour wine down his throat. Half of it spilled down his cheeks and trickled along his jaw, but the serving man wiped him up and clad him in a plain shift, the kind of shroud a poor man would be buried in.

He couldn't move.

Servants arrived and rolled him onto a stretcher. In this manner he jounced down the hall, down stairs, up and down and in such a twisting, turning, crazy route that he became dizzy. Bile burned at the back of his throat, but he could not swallow it down or force it up. He could not even blink, but must stare up at plain and fancy woodwork both, and once a stretch of bright blue sky, until the jostling brought him along an arcade open to the air and surrounded by an ocean of murmuring water. Yet these were the mutterings of humankind, because the servants bore him past multitudes whose faces flashed past as quickly as those of the painted cherubs laughing and weeping above him among the vaults.

A huge crowd had gathered, but where, and why, he did not know.

They crossed under a lintel and came into a space absolutely packed with women and men and rank with their perfumes and sweat and the headache-inducing bite of incense rolling in clouds past his streaming eyes. The ceiling flew away from him, arching up to an impossible height from which stared solemn angels and gloomy saints with huge eyes and glowing hands and heads.

Had he died at last and arrived at the Chamber of Light?

Whispers teased his ears as the servants bore him through the crowd.

'Look! That's the cripple who was found a month ago."

'He can't talk or move, poor creature, yet he lives."

'They say he's possessed by the Enemy."

Male voices rose in unison.

The angel spoke to the chosen one:

Rejoice!

Receive the light for the glory of God illuminates you.

Rejoice!

A dome opened above him, the gulf of air so vast that he could scarcely see the painted figures gazing benignly down upon him, who was smallest and least. Folks gaped at him but his bearers did not falter and he was borne forward under the dome and crossed under a lower arch to the apse, where the crowd thinned and he was set down in the midst of a company of brightly dressed nobles. One man stood with his back to Zacharias, his figure limned by the light streaming through a tall window. He turned. The sun dazzled Zacharias' eyes as the man knelt beside him. He was clad in gold, and the gold cloth was sewn with gems; a heavy gold crown sat on his head and a gold torque encircled his throat. He had brown hair chased with silver and the calm, handsome, bearded face of a man in his middle years. Truly, he was as glorious as the sun.

Floating above, faces swam in and out of Zacharias' sight: a pretty young woman crowned and robed in splendor equal to that of the kneeling man; Presbyter Hugh; a woman robed in white with a delicate gold torque at her throat and an embroidered golden cap concealing her hair.

The choir finished. Silence trembled beneath the gulf of air.

The crowned man drew a red gillyflower across Zacharias' lips and after that a tickling branch of yew.

'If God favor this day," he said in a powerful voice that surely carried all the way to the back, "if the Lord and Lady look kindly upon the birth today of this new Holy Empire, I pray They will heal this poor unfortunate. Let my kiss be for him the breath of life."

He bent down and kissed Zacharias on the lips. He reeked of a heady perfume so strong that it tickled in Zacharias' nostrils and made him, all at once, unbidden, unexpected, and just as the crowned man sat back, sneeze.

An audible gasp burst from the assembly.

'Catch it! Catch it!" cried a woman excitedly. "The demon has been expelled!"

Zacharias burned all over as he stared up at the crowned man. Ai, God, surely it could only be one man, so glorious and so proud. The man whom Hathui respected above all others. Her king.

He struggled and found that his limbs worked after all. The crowned man rose to his feet, and Zacharias got his elbows under him and with immense effort, straining, levered himself up.

'Your Majesty!" he said hoarsely.

'He speaks! He speaks!"

'A miracle! The Emperor has healed him!"

All through the cathedral voices drowned him in a thunder of exclamations and joyful weeping. King Henry stared down at Zacharias without expression, his gaze that same calm facade, but suddenly he noticed that the king's eyes seemed first green and then blue and then green again as though he were both himself and some other creature entirely.

Hathui's anguished testimony crowded back into his mind, for with his excellent memory he had certainly forgotten nothing she had said to Prince Sanglant, although it was difficult to think with such a roar around him and so many bodies pressing forward to look at him, at the miracle. He was the cripple the new emperor had healed.

'Take him," said Hugh's voice, almost lost in the uproar.

The stretcher rocked and he rose into the air, reaching, grasping, gasping.

'Your Majesty! Your Majesty!"

They shoved past the yammering hordes and hurried out through a side door and then by halls and courtyards heedless of his pleading to be let down, to return to the king who was not king any longer but now emperor. All that way he heard, fading, the noise of the multitude and, in counterpoint, a hymn.

Sing a new song of praise!

Lay the old man aside and take on the new.

Glory! Glory! Glory!

They came at last to a silent chamber where sunlight streamed through open windows to illuminate murals painted on the wall.

They set him down on a pallet in a corner behind two handsome chairs placed on a low dais, drew a curtain, and left him alone except for two guards at the door.

There he wept, but for what reason he was not sure.

A miracle!

Maybe he wept for the lie.

STRONGHAND'S ship sailed into Rikin Fjord on a calm day in late spring. Deacon Ursuline was among those who came to the strand to greet him, and she looked hale and healthy, as did all those who labored in the fields and pastures.

'My lord," she said, inclining her head respectfully. He had learned to interpret human facial expressions and it appeared that she was actually glad to see him. "We have received word of your triumphs in Alba. I pray that some few of the young people I am training in the way of God may be sent to that land to bring the Light to those who worship the Enemy."

'The queen of Alba is dead," he agreed, "and her heirs with her. If there are any tree sorcerers left, they have fled into the wilderness and the high country. I do not wish to lose you, Deacon, because you keep the peace here in my birthplace, but if there are any disciplas you wish to send to Alba, I will see that they sail with the next ships that journey there."

'You are generous, my lord."

'Perhaps. If belief in your God makes the Alban people obedient and prosperous, then it is worthwhile to have them believe."

'It is true that good deeds are most fruitful when they rise from a righteous heart, but you do the work of God despite your disbelief, my lord." She looked past him at the group of clerics disembarking down a ramp. "It seems you have brought clerics of your own, my lord. What are these?"

'They have come to seek the wisdom of the WiseMothers, although I do not believe they understand what they will find. Make them welcome, Deacon, and feed them. I must give my report to OldMother."

'Ah." She nodded. "She will be glad to hear it, my lord."

He had taken a step away but turned back, caught by her tone and the odd choice of words.

She anticipated him. "We have been good stewards of this land, my lord, as you will see, and have served you faithfully. You have been gone for a long time, so I have gotten into the habit of consulting with OldMother when I have questions."

'Have you?"

'We have much to learn from each other."

'As do I, it seems."

She glanced at him sharply and pushed her scarf back from her head self-consciously.

Although her face and hands were clean, her nails had dirt under them and the hem of her robe was stained, as though she had recently come from the gardens. "Does this displease you, my lord?" Her tone was not at all submissive. Quite the contrary.

He bared his teeth, the merest flash, and had the pleasure of seeing her eyes widen in alarm and, an instant later, an ironic smile lift her lips.

'Had OldMother not wished to speak with you, she would never have allowed you to set foot in her hall," he answered. "So be it."

Yet as he strode up to OldMother's hall, he puzzled over her words. It should not have surprised him that OldMother would speak with the one who stood as OldMother for the Soft Ones, weak as they were, but nevertheless the comment disquieted him. No son of the tribe entered OldMother's hall without her invitation, and her invitation came only to those sons who would lead, breed, or die. He had never heard of any time in all the long years since the RockChildren walked the Earth that one among the OldMothers had spoken to humans. Why now?

The SwiftDaughters had seen him coming by means of watch fires that burned along the fjord to alert the inhabitants of approaching ships, and they gathered outside the hall to welcome him. He had forgotten the unexpected beauty of their forms, or perhaps he had simply never appreciated it. Their hair shone with the gleam of ore, and this glamour wove veins of light into their skin as well, so that the midday sun made them shimmer.

They moved with a grace no clumsy human limbs could imitate, and their cold lips and bright eyes held a wealth of expression as they danced in greeting. Yet like his cousins they were, as far as he knew, nameless; unlike most human females, they would never breed and produce hatchlings of their own.

Wasn't that the weakness of the RockChildren, who were stronger in so many other ways? Humankind would always outnumber them.

He crossed the threshold into the vast dimness of OldMother's hall, with its impossible sweep of stars glittering above despite the hall having a roof. As he walked forward, the ground transformed from beaten dirt to hard rock beneath his feet. An abyss opened before him, and he dared walk no closer to OldMother's high seat. A winter wind chilled his face and torso, blowing up from unimaginable depths. Ice formed on his braid and coated his lips.

Her voice scraped. "You are bold, Stronghand. You set your ships onto the seas and fight to possess other lands than the one you were born to. You force the many chieftains to bow down before one leader, who is yourself. You seek both the living and the dead.

You invite sorcerers into our homeland who care nothing for us although it is their kind who gave us life. What will come of these plans?"

'That remains to be seen. I use the tools I find."

'In aiding the strangers, do you not put your own plans in jeopardy?"

'Perhaps. I will take the risk. They speak of a great cataclysm set into motion by their ancient enemies, whom they call the Aoi—the Lost Ones."

Her silence encouraged him to go on, yet it seemed to him that she was not alone, that many more presences listened as he spoke. "They seek a stone crown in these northern lands through which they desire to weave a spell that will reach across the lands from north to south, from east to west."

'They will find what they seek," she replied, "yet it is not what they think it is."

'They claim to seek only knowledge and wisdom, but I can see that they seek power as well."

'In this you follow the path of humankind, Stronghand. Use caution."

'I do."

'You have a question."

The statement caught him off guard, but he knew how to recover quickly, and he knew better than to attempt to deceive OldMother. "Why did you not give your sons names?"

'Because they never asked for them."

'Now they do."

The blistering wind abruptly calmed, and ceased. He saw nothing, only darkness, but OldMother's presence enveloped him.

'An inescapable storm is coming, Stronghand. This my sisters and I know. Prepare yourself and those who shelter under your hand. In this storm long ago the RockChildren were born. The Mothers of our tribes do not wish our children to perish, but to survive, when it returns."

'What must I do?"

'Step forward."

He knew better than to disobey. One step plunged him into the chasm, falling and falling through blackness.

turning and turning and turning and a pause for unquiet sleep with the muttering of the madman infesting his dreams, and then up again, and again, and again, a hopeless round of labor that has neither beginning nor end, and still the wheel turns under his feet as he walks endlessly and never gets anywhere, the wheel rumbling around and around until he no longer recalls anything except this pit of darkness and the turning of the wheel.

Every time as he drifts off to sleep, the madman plodding in the traces whispers such a tale of blood and fear and anger that images pollute his dreams until all he sees is fire and weeping, although at times he has a momentary flash of surprise that he can see at all, even if only in his dreams.

"No, no, I pray you my lord leave her be she is just young yet an innocent my daughter if it please you she's never done any ai God the blood no you must look you will look I'll kill you look at the baby at her face I'm glad he is dead is that what you've done to her?"

The water drawn up from the depths to keep dry the shaft below spills endlessly into the ditch where it will flow onward to a pool where the next wheel draws it up to the next level and up and up, and the flood never ends, it just keeps turning and spilling.

"Nay do not you go there I will kill him dead and cut off his balls and why shouldn't I just look at the blood I hate you my poor child for it won't bring anyone back kill you kill you kill you."

He falls because there is no bottom to this pit, it just goes on and on, and one day the pain of the madman reaches his tongue at long last, and a thing stirs there he no longer has a name for.

He speaks, although his voice is rough from disuse.

"Why do you despair?"

A horrible silence follows his words except for the rumble of the wheel and the splash and gurgle of running water and the echoes of the wheels above, whose turning never ceases.

Silence.

"Who are you?" asks the madman, although he does not stop walking the wheel which mutters under the tread of his feet, hard as fate. "What happened to the mute?"

"I don't know."

"Have they put a new one down here? Did the mute die? Are you a spy for them, come to wiggle out with my secrets? I know where the treasure is buried, it's buried with my treasure, my sweet, my innocent. And if I could have killed him who despoiled her I would have but he took what he wished and went his way for he was a lord among men and we are only the dirt he walked on. Did you see the blood?"

"I can't see. Was harm done to someone you cared for?"

"Don't mock me!" the madman roars, pounding his fists against wood. The wheel ratchets to a stop. "Don't mock me! I protected her! All of them! But what could I do, for they had swords and spears and I only my hoe and shovel and them made of wood, nothing to do when they came round God was helpless I was afraid I let them take the girl for fear of what they would do to the rest of us though she wept and clung to me and now I am punished for it, for wasn't I a coward, didn't I kill her with my own hands by not fighting them?"

The madman weeps, while above voices shout and there comes the noise of men descending to discover what has happened to the wheel. The one who was once silent rises from the cold pallet of stone where he rests and gropes along the passage. In an odd way he can see the walls, because his body senses the presence of stone so close that he feels its respiration, each breath seeping like the damp through its pores, as slow as ages upon ages. It's as if the stone wishes to speak to him but its voice can't quite reach him.

"Hurry," he says as he feels against his cheek the upwelling of cold from the lowest shaft. He grasps the rim of the still wheel. "You must walk. Or they'll whip you."

"What care you for a man with blood on his hands? I am a murderer! I am! I am! I killed him, the one who done it! Not him, but his servant, for I couldn't touch him! I killed the one who took the leavings when the lord was done. It was all I could do. She was a good girl. She was a good girl. It was all I could do. My firstborn. My treasure."

But the madman begins walking, weeping and blubbering until words and sobs meld together, for it is a different whip that goads him on.

"Ai, God," he says as he listens to the roll of the wheel and the disjointed rambling of the madman. "No wonder you grieve. I wish you may find peace."

No chasm after all.

Stronghand stumbled into a ditch, and his feet slipped on gravel as water purled against his shins. The shock of spring water wrenched him into awareness, and he noticed how still it had become, as if the world held its breath.

Into this troubling silence OldMother spoke.

'We see into the heart of the Earth and we sense the threads that bind the heavens. Our memories stretch long, and long, into the past, but a shadow lies over our sight. We do not see everything. We are blinded where our memory most needs sight. The threads that weave heaven and Earth are not haphazard. Find this one who lives in your dreams. He has sight where we have none."

'He is blind! He has lost his memory, even his name. How can he help you?"

'It is difficult to know who is lost and who is blind. Do you know?"

The question gave him pause. "I do not. What of the foreigners I brought, the circle priests? They, too, have a quest."

'My daughters will guide them to the fjall. There we shall see if they are wise or foolish, whether their plans threaten us or aid us. As for you, son of Rikin: Find him. He has seen what we have not. He can tell us what we need to know."

OO weak to move, Zacharias lay on the pallet and stared through a gap in the curtain at the murals decorating the walls, scenes from ancient days of the first empire and before, the Lay of Helen and the triumphs of the Son of Thunder, and scenes he did not recognize of doe-eyed women riding on the backs of winged sphinxes. Because the servant hadn't completely closed the curtain separating him from the chairs, he could also gaze across the floor toward the doors that opened onto the corridor. The alternating pattern of white-and-black tiling on the floor made him dizzy, and he faded into a doze but started awake when a babble of voices surged. The doors were thrown open by guards. Folk streamed into the chamber. Their bright clothing and ringing voices made his head hurt so badly that he covered his eyes with a hand. Since he hadn't the strength to flee, he could only hope to remain overlooked here in the shadows.

The emperor and his consort ascended to the dais and seated themselves to the acclaim of the crowd, although many fewer people had the privilege of so close an audience with Henry in this more intimate setting. Clerics and stewards crowded around behind the chairs, and through their legs Zacharias watched as one by one nobles came forward, knelt before the emperor and empress, and pledged their loyalty.

A buzz of conversation undercut these proclamations. A pair of clerics whispered, standing so close that they almost stood on him, yet they seemed unaware that he lay just a footstep behind the curtain.

'So, after all, the skopos chose the first day of Sormas, as I told you she would."

'So you did." Spoken grudgingly.

'That Bright Somorhas, the Fortunate One, should come into conjunction with the Child's Torque, signifies the rightful ascension of the true heir."

'That's true enough, but I thought the signs were most auspicious for the twenty-second of Novarian, last year."

'The Arethousan usurpers still had a foothold in the peninsula then. It would have seemed premature to claim an empire he did not control. It would have been tempting fate."

'So the skopos said. Yet how could you or I or anyone have foreseen it would take three years to drive the bandits and usurpers and rebels out of southern Aosta?"

'That's all in the past. The last Arethousan heretic has fled, the Jinna bandits are dead, and Tiorno has capitulated at last—Look! But speak the name, and the Enemy winks into view! There is Lady Tas-sila and her nephew. Now that her brother is dead she is regent for the boy, but she intends to claim the duchy for herself and install her own children after her."

'Can she do that?"

'Why not? Her brother fought against King Henry until last winter. The boy might bear a grudge because of the death of the father. He can't be trusted. There's this new campaign they speak of, to take back the Dalmiakan shore from the Arethousans. They'll need Lady Tassila's troops and her loyalty in the army. I heard that Empress Adelheid—"

'Hsst."

In a different tone, they spoke in unison. "Your Excellency."

Feet shifted. The cloth of their robes creased as the two clerics dipped knees and heads, blocking his view of the chamber.

'I pray you," said Hugh kindly. "If you would attend me?"

'Of course, Your Excellency! What do you wish?"

'Pray go to my chambers. Ask for my steward. He has in his keeping a small chest that I need brought to me."

'Of course, Your Excellency!"

They hurried off. Zacharias saw a fine, clean, strong hand take hold of the curtain and, with a firm tug, twitch it entirely shut, closing him into a tunnel of darkness. Beyond the muffling curtain the oaths continued.

For a long time he lay there, fretting and anxious. He knew how to run, but he didn't know how to fight. He could babble, but he could not talk himself out of the maze he had stumbled into. Hathui had fled because she had no real power in the king's court except the king's favor, now turned against her. Yet he had pledged his loyalty to Marcus in exchange for teaching. His loyalties ought to lie here, but the bond with Hathui clutched too tight. If he betrayed her, then he was nothing but a soulless slave in bondage to those who meant to ruin or even kill her.

After some time, he groped around the pallet and, as softly as he could, rolled himself off into the gap between the mattress and a wall. He rested. When he could breathe normally again, he pushed up to hands and knees and crawled forward along the wall, trembling and sweating. He had not gone farther than the length of the pallet when he collapsed and lay there for what seemed a year before he could try again. The curtain that concealed the wall rippled as folk moved along its length. Once or twice it sagged in so far that it brushed him; the gap between curtain and wall wasn't more than the span of his arms.

No one noticed.

He kept crawling.

Maybe there were miracles, or perhaps the curtain only served to allow servants to come and go in concealment. A door revealed itself to his questing fingers, and with great effort he rose to his knees and pushed up the latch. It opened inward. He fell into the adjoining chamber and lay there stunned and aching and gasping with his head and half his torso on a carpet and his hips and legs on the other side of the threshold.

At last he dragged himself through and pushed the door shut with a foot. The latch clicked into place.

He sprawled with eyes shut, unable to move. Just lay there as his muscles twitched and he thought he might melt into the rug whose fibers pressed into his cheek. A friendly whippet nosed him, licked his face, and, when he did not respond, curled up congenially against the curve of his bent knees.

Perhaps he slept.

The next thing he knew, hands took hold of his arms and dragged him over the rug as the whippet whined resignedly. He cracked his eyes open to see that day had fled. Lamps lit a chamber hazy with shadows that congealed into things he could recognize: a table carved of ebony wood, a magnificent broad bed hung around with curtains, two massive chests, a woman dressed in cloth of gold trimmed with purple who turned to regard him with a faint expression of surprise on her pretty face.

'Is this the same one?" she asked as the hands released him, turning him over and dropping him supine on the floor a body's length from her.

'Yes, Your Majesty. This is the one." Hugh stepped out of the shadows or perhaps through an unseen door. A servant scuttled past him to place a brazier full of red-hot coals next to a wall, then vanished back the way he had come. "I cannot stay long. It must be done quickly."

The empress nodded, still staring curiously at Zacharias, but as she approached the bed, her attention shifted to the man lying asleep there, whom Zacharias had not seen before.

It was the emperor.

'Ai, God," she whispered as she sank down beside her husband, her hands clasped in prayer. "Can we save him, Father Hugh?"

'We can, but we must not falter, although the road seems dark. You have given him the sleeping draught?"

'Yes. He fell asleep just after the midnight bell. My servingwomen will not disturb us.

They believe that he and I intend to make a new u^±

child tonight, one born of empire, not just to a mere king and queen. The four guards outside are those I would trust with my life. They will not betray us."

'So we must hope. If they do, all is lost, for then the skopos will know what we intend."

The shimmer of lamplight twisted across her face, making her look young and vulnerable, but there remained an iron tightness to the set of her mouth that suggested she was bent on a cruel course. "Aosta belongs to Henry and me at last, Father. Henry would go north if he could. You know this."

'I know this."

'Yet now we are told that it is the emperor's destiny to ride east, into Dalmiaka to make war on Arethousa. And for what? For what? For a heap of stones, so my spies tell me! I had hoped we could be quit of this awful daimone by now, that we could restore him."

'We dare not."

A tear rolled down her cheek as she regarded the sleeping emperor. "Look at him as he sleeps! Look at his beloved face!" She touched his cheek tenderly, brushed her fingers through his hair. "Now and again I swear to you, Father Hugh, just as he wakes I see him, a glimpse of him, behind his eyes. He is angry. I swear this to you. He is angry that this cruel thing has been done to him! And done by the ones who love him most!"

'It was the only way to protect him. The Holy Mother will kill him if he does not do exactly as she wishes."

'I know the skopos claims that this crown of tumbled stones is all that will save the world from a terrible cataclysm. That our empire must hold the lands where the crown lies. So must we war against the Arethousans who control that territory now!"

'She is a woman obsessed with but one thing," he agreed. "Henry is not to be ordered about like a common captain, not even by the skopos! He would have insisted on marching north to Wendar now that our task here is through, now that the Empire is restored. He's heard the reports of all these Eagles, bearing dire tidings. But if we'd abandoned Aosta before, we would have lost it forever. Now that our work in Aosta is done, we can march north to Wendar safely. The skopos can lead an army herself into Dalmiaka to fight the Arethousans. The chronicles tell us of Holy Mothers who have sent armies to do their bidding. Who have accompanied their soldiers. Why must she force Henry to her will?"

'That's right." As Hugh spoke, he moved closer yet to the bed where Henry slept and beautiful Adelheid bent in sorrow. "We must protect him in the only way we can. Now, Your Majesty. I pray you. Just for this hour we must withdraw the one thing that protects him from any harm the skopos might do to him. He'll never know that his protection lifts.

He'll never know when it is returned into his body, as it will be as soon as I have what I need."

'So be it," she murmured.

She drew the sign of the Circle at her breast and with a sigh moved to the foot of the bed. Hugh sat beside Henry's sleeping form while she watched over them. The way the shadow and lamplight played over the scene made it difficult for Zacharias to see exactly what was going on, only that Hugh had a ribbon wrapped through his fingers. He passed that hand over Henry's face as he murmured, and the ribbon came alive, writhing in his grip as if it were trying to escape him.

How could a ribbon move of its own will?

Henry's body relaxed so abruptly, although he still slept, that the emperor appeared oddly different than he had a moment before although his eyes did not flutter, nor did he give any sign of awakening. The young empress gave a gasp, then bit her lip, but she did not move. She was as finely wrought a statue as any Zacharias had ever seen, a lovely woman in the prime of her youth and glorious in her empress' raiment, golden and splendid. A true queen.

Hugh rose, crossed the room, and knelt beside Zacharias. The red ribbon tangled through his fingers lashed and slithered, but it could not escape. His golden hair shone where the light gilded it. His smile was gentle.

'What do you know of Prince Sanglant, Brother Zacharias?" he asked. "What of the Eagle, Hathui?"

He was too weak to run, but he was strong enough to keep silent. Never would he betray her.

Never.

Hugh touched the ribbon to Zacharias' lips and in his melodious voice chanted the names of angels, holy creatures, bidding them to come to his aid.

A cool sensation slipped down Zacharias' throat, insinuated itself in through his nostrils, and clawed its way into his eyes.

There was something inside him.

He struggled, but he could do nothing. An aery presence flooded him, twisting into his skin, into his vitals, into the very hall where he stabled each of his memories, precisely placed and uncannily accurate.

'Can you hear me?" asked Hugh.

'I can," his voice answered. His tongue formed the words, but he was not the one who spoke.

He fought, but in vain. He was both prisoner and slave.

'Tell me everything you know of Prince Sanglant. Where was he when last you saw him? What are his plans? Where is his daughter? What of the Eagle who escaped me?

What does the prince know? What did Hathui see?"

The daimone that infested him brushed through his memories and, one by one, with his voice and his tongue, told his secrets.

Every one.

XXV A MUTE BEAST Zacharias."

He came to himself with a shock: he was free, untainted, unharmed, and alone in his body. The horror of that infestation thrilled along his skin, a million ants crawling, a thousand wasps stinging, too awful to contemplate.

'He cannot lie under the influence of the daimone," Hugh was saying. "So. The Eagle escaped me, and told Prince Sanglant everything."

'True," said Adelheid thoughtfully. "But now we are forewarned and thus armed."

Tears of shame streamed down Zacharias' cheeks. The others did not notice. They had turned their backs on him.

'If he seeks griffins and sorcerers," Adelheid continued, "and means to return with them and invade Aosta, then he must cross the Alfar Mountains over one of the three passes—St. Barnaria, Julier, or the Brinne."

'Where is the Brinne Pass?" Hugh asked. "I've not heard of it."

'It's far to the east. Few folk use it, for it leads into eastern Avaria and the marchlands, and there's little trade in that direction. The road lies up the northeast coast and inland into Zuola, where Mar-quesa Richildis rules. She is loyal to us." Zacharias heard the turn of her foot on the carpet. Her voice remained cool and collected, but her pacing betrayed agitation. "That is what we must do. We must post men in each of the passes to keep watch for the prince and his army." "It could be months or years before an army appears, if it ever does."

'So be it. That is the only way we can hope to gain warning of his approach."

'If he returns from the east," said Hugh.

'If he does not, then he is no threat to us."

'Perhaps. If he chooses to foment civil war in Wendar, then the north might rise against Henry."

'Henry will ride east with the skopos. When he returns from Dal-miaka, our position will be strong. That's when we can march north to restore his authority in Wendar and Varre. For now, all we can do is watch the passes and prepare ourselves."

Hugh chuckled. "You are a strategist, Your Majesty. It is well that you are, because you must fight this battle alone. I will ride north soon in preparation for the great weaving."

'Why must you go?"

'Because the Holy Mother demands it."

'What of Henry?"

'Anne will take the ribbon. She will watch over the emperor."

'I don't like it. Dare we trust the Holy Mother with him? She might do anything without you or me there. That we hold Henry is the only sword we have to protect ourselves from her."

'There is much in this world that we do not like that we must suffer because it is the only way to achieve the ends we seek. If we do not make a show of trusting her by giving her the ribbon, then she will know we do not trust her. She may come to believe that we act against her. She is more powerful than we are right now. We must be patient. We will bide our time. The day will come when all that we seek will come to pass."

Too late, Zacharias searched for the door. He still lay on his back, and the door lay a very long way away, an impossible distance but his only hope. If he could escape this chamber, he could warn someone—anyone—even fall at the feet of the skopos herself and use his tongue to condemn these two, who had forced him to betray his beloved sister.

'Very well." Adelheid's footsteps sounded on the carpet as Zacharias hunched his shoulders to see if he could squirm backward.

'Will you kill him?" the empress asked in a cool voice.

'He is innocent," said Hugh. "Brother Marcus promised him that he would be taught the secrets of the mathematici. Yet, as he is, he is a danger to himself and to the emperor because he knows too much."

Too late Zacharias realized that they no longer spoke of Prince Sanglant. It was Hugh who had come to stand next to him, not Adel-heid; she remained by the emperor's bed.

'Is he so educated that he can learn the secret paths known only to the mathematici?"

she asked.

Hugh's beautiful face wore an expression of compassion, but his eyes were cold.

"There is much he can learn. But, no, he is not educated. Yet it is precisely because he cannot write or read that we can show him mercy."

Zacharias got his elbows under him and heaved himself up. On the bed Henry slept, yet a stiffness in his limbs suggested that the emperor did not rest entirely at peace. The red ribbon lay across his throat, unmoving.

'Will you teach me?" he demanded through his tears, then hated himself for succumbing even for a moment to that consuming desire. "Nay! I will not be taught by you, who made me betray my sister!"

'I will teach you to weave the crowns," said Hugh patiently. "If you learn well, you can take my place as cauda draconis when the time comes."

A grim exhilaration goaded him on. "I'll not consort with those who mean harm to my sister!"

'I will need all four guards," said Hugh to the empress. "You are certain of their loyalty?"

'They wear the amulets you wove for them."

'Ah. Then we need not fear that they will betray us."

She went to the door, spoke, and four guardsmen entered the room, men with broad shoulders and powerful hands.

'Hold him down." Hugh turned to the brazier sitting forgotten beside one wall, slipped a glove on his right hand, bent, and withdrew a knife from the coals. Its blade gleamed white-hot.

The guardsmen pushed Zacharias to the floor.

He thrashed against their grip. "Ai, God! Ai, God! I pray you, mercy! I'll do anything you want! Anything you want!"

'So you will," said Hugh. "Hold him tight. One of you, take the head."

Weak though he was, he struggled like a lion caught in a net, biting, kicking, scratching as the guardsmen cursed him, or laughed, each according to his nature.

They were stronger than he was. They were a vise. When they had him pinned and his head clamped between arms like iron claws, he still thrashed even if he could not move.

He fought, and he twisted; he wept, and he begged, but they pried his mouth open and used tongs to fix hold of his tongue and hold it extended as Hugh brought the knife down.

No glee animated that beautiful face, only the frowning intentness of a man sorry to be doing what was necessary.

When the blade touched, pain and fire exploded in his head, but the worst of it was that he did not pass out, not as he had that day long ago among the Quman when Bulkezu had mutilated him. He felt the knife slice, and he screamed.

It was the only speech he had left.

SJHLJh stepped last of all through the archway of light that she had woven between star and standing stone. As the blue light enveloped her, it blinded her to the world below at the same time that it opened her sight into its interstices, paths leading off at every angle of past, present, and future. Yet her gaze remained fixed on a lodestone falling behind: Her daughter, a stranger to her, lay asleep on cold earth while each step took her farther away from the child because she had to follow the sparks made by the passing of Sorgatani's wagon. She dared not lose them.

As she was losing Sanglant for a second time.

She saw in him flashes. With each step he and his army receded; with each step her vision blurred, or his army got larger, a mass of soldiers attended first by two Quman banners, then four, then eight, a succession of images, glimpses into the future as days or weeks passed outside the weaving.

How long would it be until she saw him again?

Emotions shone in as many colors as the blazing stars, woven together to create the thread of her being: a sense of triumph at the ease with which she had woven the crown, a gnawing doubt that she had done it wrong and they would end up cast onto unknown shores, grief at leaving her daughter and husband behind yet again, anger at Anne, the weight of responsibility she had taken on, desire in thinking of him but that would distract her so it must not be thought of except that he had a very particular way of laughing when—

'Liath!"

She stumbled on uneven ground and went down on one knee. A strong arm steadied her as her head reeled and her legs gave out. She would have fallen flat if someone hadn't been holding her up.

'Just so tired," she murmured, amazed.

A breeze chased her hair, whipping her braid along her shoulder. Dust eddied along bare earth.

'Where are we?" she whispered.

She looked up. Down the slope of a small mountain valley stood the familiar tower where she had studied for many months. She had left this place only days ago, or so it seemed.

Verna.

She went all hazy, breath punched out of her.

She woke to find herself lying on her cloak under the shade of an apple tree while Lady Bertha, seated beside her, cut worms out of apples. Bertha's padded tunic was blotched with sweat. A cord tied her hair back from her face, although the ragged ends didn't reach her shoulders.

'It's summer, no doubt of it," Bertha was saying to someone out of her line of sight.

Liath stared into the canopy of an apple tree whose contours she recalled clearly from her time spent in Verna. She had eaten many apples off this tree. Once she and Sanglant had snuck out here at night and made love under these branches while the night breezes—or Anne's captured daimones—played around them. But he was far away now, lost to her. Months had passed for him while she had stepped through a single night. She could scarcely fathom it, yet the ache never left her and the apple tree reminded her bitterly of what she had left behind.

'If we're in the mountains, we must hope to find a pass that will lead us north to Wendar or south to Aosta," Bertha continued.

Liath groaned and sat up.

'Liath!" Breschius loomed over her, a slice of apple crushed between his fingers.

'Don't look at me so! I'm well enough. Weaving the crown taxed my strength, that's all."

'Do you know where are we?" asked Bertha.

'Ai, God. I fear I do. We've come to the ruins of Verna. In one night we've come from the uttermost eastern wilderness all the way to the centralmost massif of the Alfar Mountains."

Bertha whistled appreciatively. "It's true that with such power a man could strike all unexpected at his enemies. Eagles could cross vast distances with only a few strides."

'Except for this matter of days and months passing in that night," said Breschius, apparently continuing a conversation Liath's waking had interrupted.

"When is it?" Liath demanded. "On this all our success depends."

She set a hand on Breschius' shoulder and stood. The earth stayed steady as she swept her gaze over the scene: Heribert's fine hall was charred and fallen, the old tower was blasted with stones crumbled at its base, and the sheds had burned down. Soldiers picked grapes in the riot of greenery that marked the vineyard, untended for several years. Fir and spruce covered the upper slopes of the valley except where fire had ripped through, leaving the skeletons of trees. Three mountains, Youngwife, Monk's Ridge, and Terror, towered above, their immense heights more rock than snow.

'Summer," she said. From farther away, she heard the splash of water over rocks; many streams drained down into the valley to feed the overgrown garden and the pond, hidden behind a grove of leafy beech. The sun stood high overhead.

'It is summer, my lady," agreed Brother Breschius, "or so it seems."

Their party had not set up camp, but the men had taken advantage of the slope and breadth of the valley to graze, water, and rest the horses. Sorgatani's wagon rested in the middle of a sward of new grass; her cohort of Kerayit warriors ranged around like a fence, although obviously the marchlanders had been warned to stay clear.

Liath's Jinna servants, Gnat and Mosquito, knelt a stone's toss from her, trembling like dogs straining against a leash; it was only after she nodded at them that they settled back on their heels to wait with more patience. Sorgatani's young servingwoman crouched in the shade of the next apple tree, watching Liath. Heat rippled through the mountain air, or was that an aery daimone? She had never been able to see them before, but now she detected flickers of movement.

'We arrived at dawn," said Bertha, "and you slept all morning."

'We'll have to wait for nightfall," Liath said. "I'll try to speak to Hathui with Eagle's Sight, and after that I'll measure the stars. We must decide whether we march, or attempt the crowns again."

'If I recall the lay of the land correctly," mused Bertha, "we can scarcely come much closer to Aosta than this and still tread quietly."

'Nay." She shook her head, disappointed with herself. "Had I more experience weaving the crowns, we would not have landed here. I have seen the Crown of Stars laid out across the land. South and east of here, near the shore of the Middle Sea, lies the central jewel of that crown. That is where we must go, because Anne will go there as well. If we are not too late—if this is only a few months after we set out from the east—

then there is time, a full year or more."

Breschius licked the sticky remains of the apple off his fingers. "We could march through Aosta and along the eastern shore of the sea to seek this crown."

'So we could. And fight every step of the way, first through Aosta and then into Dalmiaka, which is ruled by the Arethousans. Should we survive, we'll have lost the element of surprise. That is all that gives us an advantage. I'll observe the stars tonight while the army rests and prepares. Tomorrow night we cross again."

'I pray you, my lady," said Breschius softly, "teach me how to calculate the date by means of the stars. I know that when the Dragon rises at dusk it is spring-tide and that the Child rises to the zenith at midnight during autumn. Mok rides around the Houses of the Night every twelve years, and the Evening Star and the Morning Star are the same and rise and set according to a regular pattern. Can you teach me?"

She smiled at the frater. His answering smile gave his face a liveliness that revealed his strong heart, his courage, and an affectionate warmth that brought a touch of red to her own cheeks, seeing that he was a comely man, if rather old—certainly past forty.

'Yes, Brother. I will need my own schola of mathematici if I am to combat Anne."

'A schola!" muttered Bertha in tones of disgust. Then she laughed. "We have only one cleric. Is that enough for a schola?"

'It makes no matter to me whether a discipla is a cleric or a woodcutter's child, Lady Bertha. I will teach any woman or man who brings patience, a good memory, and a willingness to learn."

By the lift of her head Liath could see she had startled the noblewoman. "Any woman or man?"

'Any, no matter their station in life or what they are now, as long as they will work, for it is a difficult and dreary labor and few will have the taste for it. At dusk, assemble those who wish to watch and listen."

'What will you do?" Breschius asked.

'I know what day we left the steppes because you and Heribert kept a close record of the days during your journey. It is possible we have skipped months or years by traveling through the crowns."

'How can that happen?"

'I walked in the land of the Aoi for only a few days while years went by here on Earth.

When we cross through the crowns, we touch the aether, where time passes differently than it does in the world below. I suppose there must be a way to calculate how much time any crossing would take. We know how long ago the Aoi land was cast into the aether. If we knew Eldest Uncle's exact age, we could discover how long a day in the aether expands into a day or month here on Earth. Then, if we knew how far we wished to travel between two crowns, we might predict how long we would spend within the crowns as we cross that distance. Unless there is some other factor that alters the measure of days. What if the time doesn't remain as a constant, if a day measured within the aether doesn't always equal a month on Earth but fluctuates—"

'Ai, God!" said Bertha, laughing. "You've lost me! What if we've walked right past the cataclysm? What if it's already happened?"

'We would know if the cataclysm had rocked us while we crossed between circles. We would have felt its impact because of the thread that connects the exiled land and Earth.

We still have time. I must see which of the wandering planets appear in the heavens, and where they walk. Then I can calculate backward to the places they stood when we first entered the crown in the east. That will give me a rough date."

'The lore of the mathematici be no secret if any woman or man is allowed to learn it,"

said Bertha abruptly.

'What is hoarded among a few loses its power when more share it. Only think of what might happen if more than Eagles learn the trick of gazing through fire. If merchants can hire sorcerers to weave the crowns and allow them to cross over these mountains safe from avalanches and bandits. Only think of Anne's power, which she has guarded well. If there were more to combat her, she would not be skopos now, with the king dangling from a chain of her devising. Amulets protect us from her gaze, but they also cripple us because we cannot use my Eagle's Sight, lest it expose us. We can risk the sight once a day at most, as I arranged with Sanglant. If we did not fear, we would not be so weak. As I know myself, for I was fearful and weak once, too."

'You would even teach the common-born folk?" Bertha demanded.

'Those who can learn. Why not? Da and I lived among highborn and lowborn alike. I saw no great difference between those born to a high station and those from the most humble. Some chose wickedness and some good. Some chose an honest path, and some chose a road paved with lies. Some were clever, and some had no more wits than a sheep.

Any Eagle could tell you as much, for they are all of them born of low station yet they walk along paths frequented by princes."

Bertha was looking at her strangely. "You are born out of a noble line."

'Am I? I am not Anne's daughter. I am not Taillefer's great grandchild. Da was born to a noble line, it is true, but I suppose they might have been free farmers digging a foothold into untamed land in the time of my great grandmothers. Why should I be prouder than Ha-thui? Why should I hold myself above her? With the gold she claimed from the Quman she'll dower her nieces and nephews and who is to say that, if they prosper, their children's children might not marry a noble lady's sons and daughters? Or that a lord fallen on hard times might not send his youngest son into service as a soldier in another lord's army, and if that boy ever marries and if his fortunes fall further, his children's children might be no better off than that of a servingman who obeys the will of a count."

When she stopped, having run out of breath, she saw they were staring at her as though she had been raving, a lunatic run wild right before their eyes.

'I pray you," said Bertha, "fetch her some wine."

Gnat and Mosquito leaped eagerly to the task, bringing a flask of wine and a tray of bread and cheese as well as a freshly plucked bunch of exceptionally sweet grapes.

Bertha left her under Breschius' care and went to walk among the troops.

'I have troubled her," she said at last to Breschius. "I didn't intend to. I wasn't thinking."

'You have traveled a strange road, my lady. The touch of the aether must alter a person's vision."

'It did." She looked after Lady Bertha, who was laughing with a pair of soldiers. Yet she was master and they were servants, evident by the way they stood each next to the others, the amount of space between them, their postures as the noblewoman made a final comment and moved on. "There is no going back to what I was before. Nor would I want to."

Breschius nodded agreeably. He did not seem to think she was insane. "It's true the blessed Daisan teaches us that all souls are equal before God."

'Then why are they unequal on Earth?"

'Their position, not their souls, are unequal on Earth. God ordered the world so, my lady. That is why."

'That's not really an answer, is it? Did God so order the world? Or did humankind order it so and give the claim to God to justify their actions?"

'You tread close to heresy, my lady."

'Do I?"

He smiled, and she could see that he was not one whit offended. This was a man who liked to wrestle with difficult questions. "You do. So I ask you this: What other order might obtain? How else can humankind prosper, if there are not some who command and others who serve? If we have no order in the world, then we will live in • chaos, no better than the wild beasts. Even among the beasts, the strongest take what they wish and the weak die."

'Beasts don't think, not in any way like to us," she said stubbornly, but she could not answer his question. God had so ordered the world, with regnants above and slaves below and the rest each in their own place. How could she change it?

'Yet I will teach any person who comes to me, no matter their station," she said, peeling the sour skin from a grape and tasting the sweet center. "They must only show themselves willing and able to learn."

He chuckled. "Anyone, lady? Even these two Jinna idolaters?"

Gnat and Mosquito were watching her in the manner of dogs hoping to catch their master's intent and mood. She was still learning to tell them apart. Mosquito was the one with the round scar on his left cheek and a missing tooth. Gnat had broader shoulders, a broader face, and was missing the thumb on his right hand.

'Would you learn the sorcerer's skill, if you could?" she asked them in Jinna. "Master the knowledge of the stars?"

They considered, looking into each other's faces as if what one thought, the other could read by means of a lip quirked upward or the wrinkle in a brow.

Finally, Mosquito spoke. "Who would teach us, Bright One?"

'I would."

Again they spoke to each other by means of expression alone, and this time when they were finished, Gnat replied. "We will do as you command, lady."

'But do you wish it?"

'Yes, lady," they said.

Breschius smiled, watching them. "What do they say?"

'I don't know whether they wish to please me, or to learn!"

'It is for this reason that princes must defend themselves against flatterers. Slaves are in some measure like courtiers, because they fear—rightly enough—that they have no existence without the good favor of the master. Therefore, it can never be known whether they speak truth, or lie to protect themselves."

She smiled, liking him very well. "Have some more grapes, Brother. I pray you, do not flatter me only because you think I desire it, for I do not. I think we should see if there are any likely disciplas among our party in addition to these two. If you agree to this task, I will expect you to teach what you learn to others, and to be my captain. If you will."

He considered her with an unnerving intentness, as though he saw a different face hiding behind her own. "Will you raise an army of sorcerers and become an empress?"

'I have no taste for empire. I do not wish to rule over others and make them do my bidding. I don't need a court of flatterers surrounding me! If I can defeat Anne, then I want to delve into the mysteries of the heavens and of Earth. There is so much to know and understand. That will be enough for me."

A smile touched his lips, then vanished. "You remind me of someone I once knew,"

he murmured, "who was dear to me." He inclined his head, touched fingers to forehead in a gesture of respect, and met her gaze. "I will be your captain, my lady." His expression held a spark of laughter; he rubbed the stump of his missing hand and pressed it against his chest, over his heart. "I will gladly serve as you command."

Sanglant always had a hard time sitting still, but sit he did for the entire afternoon under the shade of a canopy that was all that sheltered him from a hot summer sun. The supplicants waiting for a turn to speak to him had no such shelter, but he had directed Captain Fulk to make sure that each soul there was given a cup of something to drink, although it depleted the army's stores. The stories had begun to sound the same, and yet every woman and man who knelt before him grieved his heart.

'I pray you, Your Highness. No rain fell all summer and the wheat died on the stalk.

We've nothing to eat but berries and grass, and nothing to lay in for stores for the winter."

'God help us, Your Highness. Bandits have raided our village twice. My daughter and son were stolen."

'It was the plague killed my family, all but me and my cousin, Your Highness. We didn't dare bury them, it was so bad. We had to abandon our village."

'I pray you, Your Highness. Help us."

Although he had nothing to give them, each one went away lightened, as if the touch of his hand alone could ease their troubles. As if the griffins he had tamed made him a saint. His mood was sour and his shoulders itched from the sweaty tunic, but he dared not show discomfort. His trivial cares were nothing compared to the suffering these people had endured.

The field in which his army camped lay in the marchlands, in border country where no person quite knew what land lay under the suzerainty of which lady or lord. Most of the folk here believed they lived in Eastfall, but few were certain; their concerns were more immediate and so pressing that they braved a camp inhabited by two gleaming griffins, one staked and hooded but the other roaming free.

'There's two noble families at feud, Your Highness. They've begun stealing our sheep although we're just farming folk. Their quarrels mean nothing to us. Can you stop them?"

'My lord prince, our monastery was burned by the Quman and half the monks killed, those who hadn't time to hide. All our precious vessels and vestments were stolen by the barbarians. We lost our entire crop, for there wasn't anyone to harvest it."

The petitioner, Brother Anselm, clearly chewed his nails, and looked as if he wished he could do so now as he glanced toward that section of camp where war bands of eight Quman tribes had set up their tents. Their wings fluttered in a rising wind blowing up from the southeast; their banners snapped. Gyasi stood directly behind Sanglant with arms crossed, his blank expression more terrifying than any glower.

'Be at ease, Brother," said Sanglant. "These Quman serve me, not their former master.

Go on."

The monk bobbed his head too quickly and stammered as he continued. "W-we live as well as we can in the ruins, but this summer two score foundling boys were left at the gatehouse. One was just an infant. No doubt their families can't feed them. The older ones are good and eager workers, but we need seed to plant winter wheat, and for next spring's planting as well, and stores to tide us over this coming winter."

It was getting near dusk, with dark clouds piling up on that wind, and he had spoken to no more than half the folk who waited here, some of whom had walked for days upon hearing that his army was marching through this region. Twenty score or more of them camped nearby, perhaps most of the population of the surrounding region. A few seemed eager to join his troop or to follow along behind the rear guard. Many seemed simply to desire assurance that someone, anyone, meant to protect them from whatever disaster would strike next. He could promise them so little, yet that he listened at all, that he had set foot in this land, seemed enough for most of them.

It burned at his heart. Henry should never have abandoned Wendar to chase after dreams of empire. Henry was needed here. The time to chase an empire was when your own house was strong, not when it was tottering.

'My lord prince!" Hathui strode up, her cloak flapping as the wind gusted. She was damp but in good spirits, with a grin that seemed likely to split her face. "I bring news from Walburg. And from the fire."

Walburg meant Villam, but the fire meant that Hathui had at long last spoken to Liath through flame. He beckoned impatiently to one of his stewards. "Bring the Eagle something to drink!"

A soldier brought wine. Although it was turning, so sharp he could smell the flavor of vinegar, she gulped it down as wind shook the awning and made the tents and banners dance all down the long slope where the army had pitched camp. There was a commotion at the far edge of the tents, where Hathui's escort was moving in and, no doubt, startling the new recruits who had joined up in the days since he had sent Hathui and her escort on their detour to Walburg while continuing his own southwestward march.

It was hard to wait, but he did; he reined himself in, tapping one foot on the ground in a staccato until she was at long last finished although it hadn't taken her more than ten breaths.

'What news?" he asked in a low voice. "What news of Liath?"

'Each night at dusk I've lit a fire and taken off my amulet and looked into the flame, just as we planned, but I've seen nothing. Until last night. She's at Verna."

'Verna!" The name rocked him; he pushed so hard with his legs that his chair teetered, and Gyasi leaned forward to stop it tipping over.

Hathui shifted to put more of her weight on her other knee, the one not plagued by an old injury. "Verna. That's what she said. She thinks it likely they'll cross back into the crowns tonight."

It chafed him, for he had no skill to speak or see through fire, but perhaps it was for the best not to have to see her and hear her voice. That would be torment. Even the centaurs were beginning to look attractive to him, and he did his best to keep women well away from him. It was the only way to keep his promise to her.

'We've been five months marching at a hard pace," he said at last, "yet she leaps farther in one step."

'So be it, my lord prince. We have each chosen our own path. Had you willed it, you might have crossed through the crowns, but you needed to shepherd the griffins and raise your army."

'So I did. What of Villam? Has Lord Druthmar returned with you?"

'He has. The milites who marched east have gone back to their farms, all but the soldiers. He comes at the head of an army of five hundred, which is all the margrave can spare. These are her words: "My lord prince, march south if you must, but be swift in this task. Wendar suffers and will break apart if you linger too long in the southern lands as does your father. Beware. There are those in the southern lands who know the gift of Eagle's Sight. They will spy you oüt if they can, and prepare where they must. Go in haste. Bring home the crown and the mantle that will rule Wendar in peace once more.'"

He grunted, and brushed his fingers over the gold torque at his neck that Waltharia had given him, symbol of his descent from the royal line. "Is it my father she wishes to rule Wendar, or me?" he asked softly.

Hathui's smile cut. "The margrave wishes for prosperity and peace, as do we all. That her people have not suffered as badly as some is due to her wise and prudent stewardship."

'What do you think, Eagle? Ought I to remain in Wendar and restore what I can?"

She would not be drawn. "I am the king's Eagle, my lord prince. I serve Henry. It is to Henry that I desire to return. Free him, and he will return to Wendar of his own volition and set all things right."

'Very well. What of supplies?"

'Ten wagons."

He gestured to a steward. "Let two bags of seed grain be given to Brother Anselm.

Brother." The monk crept forward, tears in his eyes. "Husband this grain well. Your monastery must become a refuge to all folk who suffer in difficult times. Hold fast."

The monk kissed his hand, weeping openly. "Bless you, Your Highness." The steward led him away.

'Let the next one approach."

A brawny man with arms the size of tree trunks shuffled forward; he was lame in one leg. His face looked odd until Sanglant realized that he lacked eyebrows. His face was red, but his gaze was steady.

'I am a smith out of Machteburg, my lord prince. By name of Johann."

'How goes it in Machteburg? That's a long walk from that town to this place, if I judge it rightly."

'A long walk, it's true, but I came east hearing a report that my sister's village was besieged by barbarians, these Quman. By the time we came, we saw no sign of them for they'd ridden on west into Avaria."

'Your sister?"

'Still living, thank God. I stayed to help her people rebuild their village and forge weapons. I married again, for my wife died two years back of the lung fever. But I found these things out in the woodland where we went to get trees for the palisade."

He gestured to the trio of men who followed at his heels and they opened leather bags and poured out a treasure trove of armor, pieces large and small as well as two complete suits of mail. The prince picked up a shoulder piece stamped with a dragon rampant and turned it in his hands. A gold tabard had been washed and mended, but many small tears and cuts obscured the black embroidery that adorned the front. Last of all they set down a shield; its rim had splintered and half of the middle had been stove in, but it was still possible to make out the remains of a dragon rampant matching that on the tabard and the shoulder piece.

'There'd been a battle, my lord prince," said the blacksmith. "This is what we found."

'Dragons!" His skin burned where he touched the armor, and he dropped the shoulder piece as though it had scorched him. Bile rose in his throat. He had lived as a beast among the bones of his faithful Dragons for a year; he had discovered their remains and the leavings of their armor in the crypt at Gent. His sight dimmed as he struggled to prevent memory from overwhelming him.

'Ai, God! Look at that sky!"

Thunder cracked.

'Hold on to the tents!" cried Captain Fulk in the distance as soldiers raced among the tents. "This should blow through—

A wall of dark cloud, almost green, bore down on them. Wind whipped the tops of trees, and the folk waiting on the open ground ran for lower ground. Many threw themselves down on the earth as the wind roared over them, and even Hathui crouched and bent her head, tugging her cloak up to protect her face, but Sanglant stood.

The world might cast a thousand arrows at him; his enemies might raise winds and storms to slow him down, but as the gale streamed around him, as the awning strained at ropes held by soldiers, he braced himself against the onslaught and let the blast of rain scour him. Wind screamed. Hail drummed across open ground as people cried in terror, horses neighed, dogs barked, the griffins screamed in challenge, and the wind howled on and on. The storm boiled over them like a huge wave.

He had faced worse, and would face worse still. Hail peppered his head and chest. It had been too hot to wear his cloak, and he had nothing but his tunic to protect him, but he minded it not. The storm broke free the regrets and cautions that infested his heart.

He missed Liath bitterly, but he had done the right thing, the only thing. He must strike south and strike quickly. Free Henry, and then turn his sights north to restore peace to the land. If Henry remained a prisoner in Aosta, Wendar could never be at peace, no matter who pretended to rule there. If Wendar was not at peace, then he and Liath could never live at peace.

The storm blew past as quickly as it had come in, leaving the land strewn with branches, leaves, torn canvas, lost clothing, and every manner of weeping and wailing and shouts as folk picked themselves up and ventured to measure the damage, then cast themselves back on the ground as the female griffin launched herself into the air with a thunder of wings and flapped off on the trail of the storm.

Hathui had thrown herself flat to the ground when the griffin sprang, and now she unbent and rose with a sheepish grin, helping up the blacksmith whose stalwart nerves had been undone by the sight of that beast leaping into the sky. The man had fallen into the pile of armor, whose polished iron surfaces were now scumbled by damp leaves and streaks of grass and twigs and even feathers. Pellets of hail had fallen in between the pieces, collecting in hollows on the ground.

'Whew!" said Johann. "That was a strong one! We had a blow last month that near tore down the houses. And look there! Beasts ride the wind. Some folk say the end of the world is coming. Can't say I blame them."

'Make ready." Sanglant bent to pick up the shoulder piece. The rain had cooled the iron; it didn't burn him now. "Take this armor. Build your houses as sturdily as you can.

A storm is coming, Blacksmith. You and your people must be strong to survive it."

It alone of all the daimones bound into service in the vale had not fled on the day when its elder cousins had come calling with a conflagration that had set even the heights of the mountains on fire. Though the thread binding it to Earth had been severed by the edge of a griffin's feather, although it was free to escape back to the sphere that had given it birth, it had remained to haunt the buildings and the orchard.

As a lower form of daimone, it had little memory and less will, easily bound and easily trained, more like a hound than a man and yet unlike because it was a creature whose aetherical body could not be touched by earthly ills and earthly mortality.

Yet its captivity had altered it, given it a semblance of human memory and will beyond that granted to its cousins. It persisted here, it waited, although it had forgotten what it waited for: A familiar touch. A familiar voice. A familiar presence. It lingered among the burned-out ruins.

One dawn as the sun rose the dead stones sparked and spit out a stumbling collection of mortal beasts, some on two legs and others on four, a confusing starburst of colors and heat and voices. It raced down on the wind to investigate, curling around the newcomers.

None saw it; they were blind. Only there was one they kept enclosed in a little house on wheels, and this one had power to see both what lay above and what lay below and when it insinuated itself through a crack the creature spoke to it, so it fled.

It fled, but there remained a greater threat. The Bright One, child of flame, had returned, the one who had brought the conflagration down upon them. It concealed itself in the boughs of an apple tree, too frightened to approach the creature with a heart of flame yet so curious it wished to see what was going on. In the end apprehension mastered it, and it fled to the hut where it had in times before slept alongside the familiar presence of the one it longed for.

There it hid until nightfall, venturing out when darkness might hide it from mortal eyes, but the Bright One and her retinue still inhabited the valley, and it feared they meant to stay and perhaps even to call the elder cousins down upon them all again in a terrible, incandescent bloom.

'That is the River of Heaven," the Bright One was saying to an audience of eight shivering souls seated by the stones beside the remains of a dying fire. "See how the Serpent is swimming across it."

'It's so bright!"

'Those are the souls of the dead, streaming upward to the Chamber of Light. Or so the church says."

'What else could it be?"

'The ancient writers had many explanations. Look there! Mok still resides in the Unicorn. There is Jedu—that red star—rising with the Penitent. I do not see the Red Mage or Somorhas. The moon hasn't risen yet, if it means to rise at all. The mountains block part of our view, as well. As the hours pass, we'll look for the other wandering planets, but already I can guess that about four to six months have passed since we left the east."

'How can you guess that?"

'It isn't really a guess. The planets wander along the ecliptic in a regular pattern. Mok spends about one year in each house, Jedu from one to two months or as many as six months if it is in retrograde—"

Two voices spoke, overlapping.

'You've lost me!"

'What is'retrograde'?"

A ripple of laughter raced around the cluster of seated figures. The Bright One stood and went to lean against the wagon. Its door stood open, a stick propped against it to hold it wide, and a figure stirred, hidden behind a curtain of beads, peering outward.

'Nay," said the Bright One as she brushed fingers over the beaded curtain. "I'm going too fast. Let me start at the beginning. We stand on the Earth, which is a sphere. Earth lies at the center of the universe, so the scholars claim, which is also a sphere. But I wonder-nay, never mind that now. The Earth is encircled by the seven planetary spheres and by the outermost sphere, that of the fixed stars. Beyond that lies the Chamber of Light."

As her voice flowed on, the stars crept along their fixed paths across the heavens.

Later, after the moon rose, the watchers slept, all except the Bright One and the hidden woman, who ventured outside, heavily veiled. These two spoke in quiet voices far into the night, and now and again held their faces close to the flames of a campfire, as if staring within.

Toward dawn, the veiled woman climbed back inside her cage as the camp roused. By torchlight and moonlight men and horses made ready to depart. The Bright One wove threads of starlight into the stones, and one by one the visitors crossed through the brilliant gateway and vanished.

Last of all, the Bright One turned, there at the verge.

'Who are you waiting for?" she asked. Then she was gone.

The blazing threads frayed and collapsed in a shower of sparks. Dust eddied around the base of the stones before settling. Shadows faded. The peaks daz,'led as the sun crested the eastern heights and its light caught the blinding white snow fields. On one of those heights a cliff of snow calved loose and roared downslope in a tumble that shook the valley as a white haze rose off the mountain. The avalanche of snow and ice roared and boomed and at length slowed, gentled, and came to rest, still so high above the tree line that it was impossible to see any change in the shape of the mountain itself. The cloud of snow and ice sparkled and sank.

A leaf drifted in on the breath of the avalanche, spinning and dancing, at play among the stones, but although the daimone chased it, the leaf was a dead thing, its spirit fled, and it could give no companionship to one who was lonely.

Who are you waiting for? the Bright One had asked it, but only the wind moaning through the stones answered.

'Who? Who?"

Y O U JR. Excellency, we've had word that the honored presbyter and his party arrive today."

Antonia set aside her book. The library in Novomo had so few volumes, even supplemented with those she had removed from the convent of St. Ekatarina, that she had been forced to reread St. Peter of Aron's The Eternal Geometry three times in the last nine months, although she still didn't comprehend more than a third of it. Lady Lavinia's steward waited beside the door, hands folded, as Lavinia paced to the unshuttered window. Light pooled on the table, illuminating the precious chronicle and the huge map inked onto a sheep's hide cured and treated but left intact instead of cut in sheets for vellum.

'He will bring news of my daughter. There was talk of marriage to one of the king's Wendish lords, although I would hate to see her forced to live in the cold north. Yet if Father Hugh thinks it for the best…"

Lavinia was a loyal and righteous woman and certainly devout enough that she insisted Antonia deliver the sermon in her household chapel every Ladysday, but she had long since developed an unfortunate infatuation for the handsome presbyter and treated him more as if he were God's bright messenger than one of God's humble servants.

'He would not countenance any alliance that might bring her to harm, not after saving her from Ironhead and introducing her into the queen's household. She is quite the queen's favorite, I hear. A marriage to a Wendish lord would improve the family fortunes.

We could seek further alliances in the north for my kinfolk. But there is a boy of good family in southern Aosta, too, whose family has shown interest in a match with our house."

As she rattled on, still staring out the window, Antonia cut quills. The lady's concerns were the heart of the round of life on Earth; a lady must steward her estates and prepare for the next season, breed her herds and tend her gardens. How her children married affected the prosperity of her household and the longevity of her line, and every noble lady and lord had a duty to perpetuate the lineage out of which they themselves flowered.

These toiled worthily in the service of God, who had created all, but they had not been fitted with the task of supervision. That task fell to the elite.

'With all this talk of the emperor and empress riding east to Dal-miaka to make war against the Arethousan Emperor—I don't know what to expect. None of us know what to expect."

'Only God can see into the future, Lady Lavinia."

'So true, Your Excellency! So very true!"

'Do not forget the tale of Queen Salome, who feared that a usurper would supplant her and so went to the witches and begged them to spy into the future on her behalf by raising the ghost of the prophet."

'Yes, indeed. So it came to pass that for her impiety, a worthy successor took her place."

'Yet was Queen Salome not a worthy regnant? She was humble. God Themselves raised her up to her high state. It was disobedience, not impiety, that caused her downfall.

The witches did as they were told, and were not punished for their act. But the queen had disobeyed God's voice when God commanded her to kill the tribe of Melia."

'She was a mother herself! She did not like to put children to death."

'God may often call upon us to do things that may seem distasteful to our imperfect understanding, but we must never hesitate. Obedience is righteousness."

With such lessons Antonia strove to educate Lady Lavinia and her household. Hugh had hidden her in plain sight, installed her as a member of Lavinia's schola, although in truth few visitors came and went from the lady's palace and fewer still from the court in Darre and least of all any clerics from the palace of the skopos, who might have cause to recognize and betray Antonia.

'Very true, very true," said the lady distractedly as she leaned on the casement and squinted out into the molten Setentre sun. "There! I see them." She crossed to the door, paused, and turned. "Will you come to meet them, Your Excellency?"

'I am not walking well today, Lady Lavinia. Best if I bide here and have a tray brought up for my supper."

'As you wish, Your Excellency." She hurried out.

Better if Hugh comes to me, as a steward attends his mistress. Per haps the ploy was beneath her, but her position seemed weak and Hugh's all the stronger, and she felt it necessary to do what she could to remind him of her lineage and stature and the respect he owed her. She heard only such news as had trickled northward in the months since Decial, when she had arrived here still reeling from her imprisonment. Little enough to feed on, but she had learned to survive on scraps, and she now possessed the entire library hauled out of St. Ekatarina's Convent, most especially their chronicle, the work of many hands and many generations, a treasure-house of knowledge and observation.

She had read through the chronicle so many times that she had memorized entire passages, and as she shifted in her chair, she studied the map with immense satisfaction, knowing her work in deciphering the tangle of hints scattered throughout the manuscript like gems in a field of wheat had proved fruitful.

Sooner than she expected, Hugh came to wait on her. He, no less than she, knew they possessed information of incalculable value.

'This is it?" he asked, after a perfunctory greeting and after banishing his servants from the chamber. There remained only one beardless, thin man who cowered at the door looking ready to flee and never spoke one word as Hugh set hands on the table and studied the map.

From this angle, examining him, she understood why Lady Lavinia had cause to be grateful to this man beyond his service to the lady by saving her young daughter from rape. God favored few souls with such exceptional beauty. Yet he did not overplay his hand; he dressed plainly, without unseemly flourishes. He wore clothing of such fine weave it seemed invisible, his over-tunic dyed to a muted wheat gold and beneath it a reddish-golden under-tunic shining with the intensity of hot coals, barely seen but startling, the kind of detail that made you look twice. He wore three simple rings—

emerald, citrine, and lapis lazuli—and his gold presbyter's chain and Circle of Unity.

Only the gold chain, and his clean-shaven face, marked him as a churchman, although one might guess at his vocation because his hands were so remarkably clean, nails trimmed, and the skin smooth and unlined. No calluses or blisters marred his hands, but in truth they looked strong enough to throttle any soul who did not do his bidding. The mute manservant shifted nervously, took a step forward to get a look at the map, but when Hugh glanced at him, he slunk back to the door and quivered.

'This is the tale you gleaned from the convent's chronicle," said Hugh at last. "It is."

The sheepskin had arrived six months ago with the known lands inked in by a master cartographer, the hinterlands marked in cruder dimensions—a sheep's head to represent the western island kingdom of Alba, the horns of a goat to suggest the northern reaches where the Eika barbarians nested, the blank emptiness of untracked deserts beyond the shore of the Middle Sea, and the geometric oblong marking the unknown reaches of the Heretic's Sea that lay north and east of the Arethousan capital. Dragons lay to the east and beyond them grass and sand and the distant glories of Katai. By careful measurement and guesswork, she had marked on this map each stone circle mentioned in the nuns'

chronology.

'Every one you have marked here?" he asked.

'Every one, to the best of my knowledge of the land and as well as it is described within the text. The nuns of St. Ekatarina's recorded all things precisely. No fables and superstitions marred their pages.

They set down what they heard as accurately as possible. I did the same."

'Here." He placed a finger on the map east of the Wendish march-lands and a little north of the kingdom of Ungria, although the borderlands of such places could not be marked with any precision, since they fluctuated with the season and the year.

She waited.

'Here," he repeated. His finger covered a circle representing a known crown, with the number of stones inked inside. Seven. "The Holy Mother has commanded me to journey east. I will oversee the crown discovered by Brother Marcus during his travels through the wilderness lands that lie north of Ungria and south and east of Po-lenie. Seven stones.

One of the original crowns, so Mother Anne has decided."

'How will you get there? That is a journey of many months' undertaking, through perilous country."

He removed his finger. The servingman moved a foot, and a plank creaked, and the poor man winced, as startled as if a lion had burst out of the woodwork. "I will travel by means of the crowns. Now that we have a better idea of the placement of each of the crowns, it is apparent—" He brushed a hand over The Eternal Geometry. " —that by using geometry the threads can be woven to open a passage from one specific crown to another. Depending on the rising and setting of the stars and their altitude at the time of passage, and allowing for angle and distance, I must reach east and north from Novomo using the threads from stars in those quadrants."

'Other crowns stand between Novomo and this distant place. Might these not confuse your passage?"

'It is possible. If I can move swiftly enough, then I can correct for my mistakes and try again. I am confident that my calculations are correct. They have been double-checked by the Holy Mother herself. Her skills as a mathematicus are unequaled."

'Except perhaps by her daughter."

The felicity of his expression stilled and became rigid. He drew his finger south from the Ungrian border to the Heretic's Sea and farther south yet into desert wilderness surrounding the holy city of Sai's, west to the ruins of Kartiako, then west and northwest to the disputed lands lying between southern Salia and the Jinna kingdom of Aquila, yet north and west again to the sheep's head that marked Alba, and farther north yet to Eika country, inscribing a vast circle—a crown of sorts—across the continent of Novaria. By the time this was done he had recovered the mobility of his smile.

He beckoned. The servingman shuffled forward and handed him a brass disk engraved with marks and adorned with a bar on one side and a curling nest of circles, a smaller one superimposed on a larger, on the other.

'Except perhaps by her daughter," he echoed. "Do you know what this is?"

'I do not," she admitted.

He did not offer to let her hold it. "It is an astrolabe, which the Jinna use both as an observational instrument and a calculating device. It offers precision, and foreknowledge.

I need only determine the altitude of a single star and with that information can tell which stars are about to rise and which have just set. You see there are several disks nestled here, each one a climate for a different latitude. If I am pulled off course, it will be quick work to forge a new path. I will get there."

'Geometry holds many mysteries for me still, Father Hugh. Now that you must journey east, what thought have you given to my role here in Darre?"

After a measure of silence, during which the servingman shifted twice onto the creaking board before moving to avoid it, Hugh sat on the bench opposite Antonia and set his fine hands flat on the map,

covering Wendar and Varre. "The Holy Mother Anne has departed Darre for the east with the emperor and the army."

'To the old imperial lands of Dalmiaka, so I have heard." "What you have heard is true. For many years Anne supposed the central crown of the great crown lay at Verna, but now she realizes she is mistaken. This crown—" He pointed to a mark lying on the shore of the Middle Sea about halfway between Aosta and Arethousa. "—must come into our control. Therefore, a conquest. Empress Ad-elheid is pregnant again— "Again!"

'—so she remains in Darre. I have encouraged her to bring you into her schola. Go there now. Prepare the ground." "Prepare the ground?"

'We have spoken of this before. The cauda draconis has a particular role to play when a great spell is cast."

The cauda draconis died, but since he did not say so out loud, neither did she. She waited. Let him show his strengths and weaknesses first; then she would know how much to conceal and reveal. "Yet we need not stand passively." "God's will must be accomplished," she agreed. "So it will be, Sister Antonia. But in order to accomplish God's will the righteous ones must wield power." She nodded. "You are ambitious."

He bowed his head. "I serve God, and the regnant. That is all." He was lying, of course. Yet what difference did it make? In all the years of the church, no man had been skopos. Hugh had risen as high as he could. He needed her. For the time being, she needed him. "I will journey to Darre and join Empress Adelheid's schola." "She will welcome you, Sister. You will be satisfied with the arrangements. You will be shown the respect due to you." He picked up the astrolabe and rose. "We must be patient, and cautious. Now we walk on the knife's edge. Now is the most dangerous time. It would have been best if I had remained with the emperor, but the Holy Mother has given me a different part to play. Be wary. Be strong."

'You will not find me lacking, Father Hugh. I am aware that the hour of need draws close."

'

'All that is lost will be reborn on this Earth because of a Great Unveiling like to that Great Sundering in which vanished the Lost Ones.' As it was said: There will come a furious storm.'" "To overset the wicked."

He shrugged. "The innocent may drown in the same tide that sweeps away the wicked."

'Then they were not innocent, if God did not choose to protect them!"

Because she was seated, he had the height to loom over her, and because he was beautiful, she felt, briefly, diminished, as though visited by the messenger of God, who stood in judgment upon her in all its glory and found her wanting.

Antonia did not like to feel diminished.

But his lips twisted up in an ironic smile, which betrayed his mortality and imperfection. "I have never been sure of God's intentions," he said softly. "Much has been hidden from our eyes, and more than that is twisted and confused. Where we have seen a horse, perhaps we have mistakenly called it a cow."

'Without conviction, there cannot be righteous behavior, Father Hugh. Be warned.

Doubt is the tool of the Enemy." She indicated the map. "I know the shape of the world, and its place in God's plan. Do you?"

'I know what I want," he said, and with that he made his farewells and departed.

JHlJc madman died soon after, leaving his corpse on the stone where he had slept. It was peace of a kind.

There came a string of screaming prisoners dragged down into the depths to walk the wheel, but none of them lasted more than a score of turnings. He discovered by searching with his hands several who died in their sleep, worn to nothing, so emaciated it was a miracle they had been able to walk. Another lay in agony with the flux for hours or days until at last he voided his soul as well as his guts. The sleeping hollow stank so badly afterward that the next four prisoners refused to sleep there, preferring the noisy ledge beside the wheel. Even the miners complained that the smell made them sick, so eventually a pair of workers dumped chalk in the hollow and after a few turnings swept it up again, but for many turnings afterward he shed chalk dust like skin and traced it into the creases of his body and rubbed it out of his hair, although in truth any substance in his hair was a relief against the crawling lice and the endless scratching.

One man slipped and broke his arm, and he died, too, for there was nothing to set it with and none of the guards cared to take the poor man back up, so the sweet sick smell of poison set in and the prisoner died suffering and babbling of nightmare visions. The next one leaped gibbering into the depths because he could not endure the darkness, and as the wheel rumbled on, strange noises echoed up from the pit where no miner walked—

scraping and cracking, like dogs gnawing on bones.

Maybe it was better to be dead than living in this purgatory, which wasn't life or death but a state of abandonment in which neither the angels nor the demons could get their claws sunk into the flesh. He dreamed of sun and wind and the wide seas; he dreamed of the prows of dragon ships slicing through the swells as salt spray streamed against his face and wind snapped in his hair. But down here neither sun nor wind reached; he was buried, already entombed and awaiting only the final sentence.

The miners dug a transverse gallery and found, unexpectedly, a vein of silver-lead ore so rich that the levels sounded at all hours with the uneven staccato of picks and hammers at work and the rattle of four-wheeled barrows and the squinch of the windlasses hauling up filled buckets and the murmur of miners coming and going. They spoke of new shafts to be sunk and fortunes to be made, and yet always they whispered of the creatures that lurked in the pit where the richest deposits lay ripe for the pickings except for the danger of unstable tunnels and the fear of what waited below. Every day a bucket of purest silver was hauled up from the pit, and every day some dead creature or another pitched down into the darkness. Most of the dead men from the workings met their final resting place in this way although the overseer pretended that any prisoner who died while condemned to labor in the workings received a respectable burial and the blessing of a deacon.

All criminals were doomed to the Pit, surely, so what difference does it make if we trade their corpses for silver?

So they said, but their uneasiness wafted like the stink of the dead man's voided bowels through the levels until the mines reeked with guilt.

The wheels turned. He walked, because it was the only thing he remembered how to do. The dreams wicked away, swiftly come and swiftly gone, and if there had ever been any existence beyond the wheel, he had long since forgotten what it was. Whispers tickled him as smoke and steam did when a miner set fire to heat the rock and then poured water on it so it would crack. In these closed spaces he could smell and hear and taste every least tremor of life.

'They say he's protected by a twisted spell that looks like a bronze armband."

'I think he's a demon."

'An angel."

'How else could he have survived so long? No man turns the wheels for as long as he has. Have you ever seen one last beyond two months?"

'Has he been down there two months?"

'Nay, three seasons or more."

'I don't believe you!"

'I was here when they brought him in the spring. Mute and blind, if you please."

'Hsst! It's almost winter! The levels make no difference to him! If he's touched in the head, he's like to an ox pulling in its traces. That would explain it. A mute beast."

He walked, and he slept, and he ate, and walked and slept and ate, and again. And again.

Until the guards clattered down one turning and surrounded him, thrust a hapless, moaning prisoner into his place on the wheel, and hauled him up the ladders, up and farther up although it was no trouble to climb because he trudged so far every day, until a strange touch hissed against his skin and he swayed, dizzily, as air opened around him and they emerged from the workings.

So many smells! The perfume of earth made him reel. The scent of fallen leaves and the stink of forges dug into his lungs until he coughed. Sounds expanded, fading away into the heavens, which were unbound by stone walls.

There were too many noises to sort through: the hammer of picks breaking up rock; a man's shout; a goat's bleat; the susurrus of wind; feet grinding on loose rock and squeaking on damped down earth as a man halted before him.

Sour breath chased across his nostrils. The breeze carried the rich tang of horse manure.

'Here's the one, Foucher."

'Ai, Lord! What a stink! Best clean him up."

'Do you think so? If we clean him up, no one will believe he's survived below for so long. The duke won't be impressed."

'Umm. True enough. But the highborn won't like the stench."

'Nor will any man, low or high. I can scarce endure it."

'True words. This creature is something rarely seen. We've got us a real prize here. He looks strong enough still." The point of a stick prodded him in the chest, but no hands touched his body. "He might last months more on the wheel."

'Years more!"

'Do you think so, Captain? Think you so? That would be a miracle!" Foucher snickered, enjoying this thought as another man might enjoy the sport of laughing, innocent children.

'You feed on our misery," he said to Foucher.

Silence from his captors, fed by drawn-in breaths.

'I thought he couldn't talk!" exclaimed the Captain.

A switch whistled, snapped against his ear.

Pain exploded in his head, that had for so long now been a half-forgotten dull ache.

'So he shan't!" said Foucher. "We'll take him over quickly. Parade him before the duke and whip him if he speaks, then haul him back down below." Foucher hissed hard between his teeth and the stick prodded him again, this time in the stomach, but its thrust barely penetrated the pain raging in his skull. "You'll keep quiet, Silent, if you know what's good for you!"

'Maybe this isn't wise—" protested the Captain.

'Nay, I already told the duke we'd a fine strange sight for him, so he's waiting. I hate to disappoint him."

'Ai, indeed. He might do anything if we displease him. He's that angry already that there isn't more ore, nor did he like the sleeping conditions for the prisoners."

'As if they deserve better!" The switch slapped against his buttocks. "Get on! Get on!"

He stumbled forward. As the pain throbbed with each jarring step, vision flashed on and out as a man might catch glimpses in a dark room when a candle was covered and uncovered.

He saw feet so grimy and mottled with a scaly growth that they didn't seem human feet at all; then nothing, blinding darkness; then a swaying distant ocean of yellow and orange; then darkness; then the ocean again, but these were trees seen a long way away only it had been so long since he had seen trees painted with the colors of autumn that it had taken him this long to recognize them; then night as the clamor of the workings muted as they walked out beyond it; then mushrooms growing in sparse grass, only these weren't mushrooms but pale tents and graceful awnings sagging and rising in the wind with brightly colored creatures laughing and chattering and walking out under the sun. A magnificent, broad-shouldered lord stood among them whose skin was dirty yet after all not dirty but burned a deep brown complexion like that of Liath. Beside him clung a frail, pallid woman with hair the color of wheat. Her belly was swollen with pregnancy. She and her noble husband turned to see the curiosity that the foreman of the mines had brought for their amusement.

He saw her face. She was repulsed by the grime but otherwise disinterested. Yet he recognized her.

'Tallia," he said, the word like the throttling gasp of a man as a noose tightens around his neck. A nail burned in his empty hand.

His voice woke memory in her. Her expression shifted and altered.

'She's pregnant," he said. "Tallia is pregnant."

But it was a lie.

Her shriek cut through the pain. Darkness swallowed the brief stab of vision. He drowned.

'Conrad! Take him away! Make them take him away!"

'I pray you, Your Highness, we meant no offense," gabbled Foucher. "An amusement only, meant for your—"

'Lord have mercy!" swore the duke as the woman shrieked on and on and on, a grating wail that dissolved into hiccoughs and a whining sob. "Take the creature away, Foucher. I know you meant no harm. It's a miracle, indeed, and he looks more like a goblin than a man with so much filth caked on him, although I wonder if you wouldn't get higher yields if your criminals lived under better conditions."

'But my lord duke—"

'If I starved my soldiers and let them sleep out in the rain, they'd be too weak to fight.

Why do you mistreat these poor souls?"

'The miners are hardworking free men, my lord duke. As for these others, they are only criminals. Half of them had a death sentence imposed on them for their sins but were shown mercy by being sent here instead."

'A strange sort of mercy. It wasn't so bad last year, as I recall it. I never saw so many sickly creatures in my life. Look at the sores on that man!"

'He's no more than a mute beast, my lord duke. It's a miracle that he turns the wheel as well as he does. Think of it as his penance for the crime he committed."

'Maybe so. No matter. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I have need of different miracles today such as more iron for my army and silver for minting coin. To add grief to all else we have word that the Eika have come back and are harrying the Salian coast! Take him away. Away! As for you, Foucher, my clerics will look over your records of the summer's yields."

'Throw him into the pit! He should be dead! He's dead!"

'For God's sake, Tallia! Control yourself!"

A choked silence followed the crack of his words, and after it a sniveling whine that blended with the whisper of the breeze through distant leaves and the faraway noise of the workings and the sting of smoke from the charcoal fires set through the forest for leagues around.

'Should we throw him in the pit, my lord duke?" asked Foucher, voice trembling.

"He's a valuable worker. We've none so strong for the wheels as this one."

'God Above! I hate wasting good labor. Nay, put him back to his task, as he was before. He's serving his sentence, just as we all are. Nay! Enough, Tallia! We'll speak no more on it!"

The switch stung his thigh. "Get on! Get on!" said the Captain. "This is all your fault!"

He stumbled, blind again, and tripped, and fell, but a hand grasped his arm, pinching his skin, and dragged him upright and hauled him away as he wept because she had betrayed him and he had betrayed Lavastine only he could not remember how. The past was closed to him. The blindness swallowed him up.

They came back to the workings, yet at the lip of the shaft a man's silky voice drew the Captain aside, saying, "Here's two gold nomias for you, friend, if you'll cast that creature into the pit I hear tell you have beneath the levels, out of which no man ever emerges. You'll gain as well the favor of Her Highness Lady Tallia who, I should tell you just between you and me, will be Queen of Varre soon enough. Duke Conrad's war along the border against the Salians is going well. There's no word from Henry in Aosta. Varre will break free of the Wendish yoke soon. There's no one to stop Duke Conrad for he's born out of the same royal lineage as Henry, just as his lady wife is, and she with the right of primogeniture on her mother's side as well. Do what Lady Tallia wishes and you'll be glad of her favor in the days to come. Trust me."

'Two gold nomias," murmured the Captain, greed melting his voice until it wasn't a man's voice at all but that of the Enemy. "I'll throw him in myself. Here, let me have them."

'One now, one later when the deed is done. I'll go down with you and see you're given a second when you and I have come safely to the surface."

'Fair enough! Fair enough!"

When they had pushed him and prodded him down the ladders past the turning wheels and their rumbling tumbling roar, they drove him to the edge of the Abyss where a cold wind blasted up from the depths and a smell of decay and sulfur swirled around his body.

He did not fight them. He was too stunned because it had been a lie that she was pregnant; she had renounced the married state for all time and chosen to wed herself to God's service, hadn't she? God did not make bellies swell with pregnancy. Only men did that. What she withheld from him she had given to another man, and she had betrayed him to his death twice over, though he had loved her honestly and well.

With a thrust from the butt of a pick hard into his back, they shoved him over the edge, and he fell.

XVI THE DEAD SlJLJbJN C^Jc did not come easily to Zacharias. Words screamed in his head every waking moment, but he had only vowels left him, a babble of ooo ah ee eh, all those strong glorious sounds shaped twixt tongue and lip cut clean off. He was a mute beast who could only moan and groan. It would have been better to be dead.

It would have been better to be dead than to have betrayed his sister.

Yet he did not die. Like a whipped dog he staggered at his master's heels cringing and slavering, communicating with gestures and a grotesque vocal mush that Lord Hugh sometimes deigned to interpret, for after all whatever Lord Hugh wished him to be saying surely was what he meant to say, wasn't it? He was a shadow, kept close by the iron chain that was Hugh's will and by fear. What if Hugh choked him again with the daimone?

At the end of a miserable summer they left Darre and journeyed north to the town of Novomo, where Novomo's mistress, Lady La-vinia, entertained Presbyter Hugh and his entourage lavishly and showered Hugh with attention and praise for his role in saving her daughter from an unnamed but obviously gruesome fate. Here they lingered only one day, however, because the heavens remained clear, and in the afternoon of the second day his retinue loaded pack mules and a pair of wagons with a king's ransom in provisions and traveling gear. With their escort of forty of Adelheid's crack Aostan cavalry they rode to a hillside outside Novomo where an old stone crown stood above slopes turned to white-gold after summer's searing heat.

The dozen servants, forty soldiers, and half a dozen clerics who made up Hugh's retinue waited in marching order as the sun sank toward the rugged western hills. Hugh led Zacharias forward to a patch of sandy ground—the only part of the hill not covered with brittle grass—and placed Zacharias directly in front of him, back to chest, placing into Zacharias' hand the arm's-length wooden staff used to weave threads of starlight into stone.

This mathematical weaving Hugh had been teaching him for months now, and tonight his learning, and his memory, would be put to the test. His knees trembled, his palms were damp, and his lips were cracked. Was it worth the price of his tongue to have the secrets he had so long wished to uncover revealed at last?

His tongue, perhaps. But not Hathui.

'There," said Hugh. "Do you see it? The first star. We must seek east and north to weave our path. We will hook the Guivre's Eye, rising to the northeast, and weave a net around the Eagle rising to the east."

They would snare the Eagle, who had already been betrayed by her own brother. The staff quivered in his hand as rage shivered through him, but Hugh guided his arm. The staff rose as Hugh chanted words Zacharias would never be able to speak, although he now knew them by heart.

'Matthias guide me, Mark protect me, Johanna free me, Lucia aid me, Marian purify me, Peter heal me, Thecla be my witness always, that the Lady shall be my shield and the Lord shall be my sword."

With Hugh's hand directing him as the first stars shuddered into visibility in the purpling sky, he caught the threads of the stars with the staff and wove a pathway into the stones. The stars strained against this tether as the heavens churned inexorably onward, turning and turning with the wheel of night, and the entourage hurried nervously through the gleaming archway to vanish as if into thin air.

The threads pulled taut against the stones, stretching, thinning, and unraveling, before Hugh clapped him hard between the shoulders and shoved him forward after the final pair of riders in the rear guard. Zacharias stumbled through the gateway with the music of the heavens ringing in his ears and his legs as weak as an invalid's and his forehead and neck running with sweat. A steady throbbing buzzed up through his soles and all at once he sees a girl asleep within a circle of attendants, a motley crew, certainly, for one of them is Anna to his utter surprise, and just as the vision flashes into darkness he realizes that it is Blessing, grown so large, trembling at the edge of womanhood Sanglant rides at the head of an impressive army, Wendishmen and marchlanders and the ungodly banners, a dozen or more, of Quman tribes, a host of them to strike fear so deep that he wets himself.

The prince does not ride in chains as their prisoner. He leads them, and yet he wears no griffin feather wings because he leads a pair of living griffins as easily as he might bring along a prized stallion and mare, their iron feathers gleaming so brightly that Zacharias is blinded his head hurts night drowns him as stunted shapes scuttle along rock and through tunnels, voices chattering and clacking as they converge on a pale corpse lying at the base of the shaft beside bronze-bound buckets half filled with nuggets of silver.

They are so hungry that it gnaws his belly and he weeps with the pain of this constant starvation so many of them and all trapped here where they must labor in return for the merest dregs of foul nourishment without which they will all die and not merely the many who have already succumbed. They swarm, ready to descend on the corpse, but a sorcerous light bleeds from the arm of the dead man for he isn't dead at all and that precious totem they recognize as a sign passed down through their generations. They back away, their whispers echoing through the stone halls within which they are trapped others walk in the labyrinth he glimpses, briefly, the Eagle whom Prince Sanglant rescued from Bulkezu's horde, her hair gleaming like pewter as she turns to glance around in surprise, as though she has seen him. She vanishes down a side path, pushing a white-haired woman along before her, but he does not see the older woman's face before a wagon rolls far away, a tiny cottage on wheels with beaded curtains rattling and smoke spinning upward from a hole in the top, and beside it on a sturdy gelding rides a woman who shines gloriously as the blue light pulses around her and all at once refulgent wings blossom from her shoulders Zacharias fell hard up to his wrists in muck and pungent manure, gasping and panting, chest tight.

'Liath!" said Hugh in a voice rough with passion, or anger.

'My lord presbyter! Your Excellency! We have been waiting for hours, Your Excellency! We despaired—!"

'God help us! He looks ready to faint. Grasp hold of my arm, Your Excellency.

Vindicadus, run down to the camp and make sure my lord's chair is ready. Warm broth!

This way, Your Excellency."

No one helped Zacharias up. Their voices faded as they moved away from him, and it took some time before he had the strength to lift his head and rise. Clouds chased across the heavens. Below his feet the ground tumbled away into massive, broken earthworks and farther down these leveled out to become grassland and woodland and, to the north, a dense forest of oak and pine. A river curved away until it was lost among the trees. A piece of metal glinted far below on bare earth, but when he shifted his weight onto his other foot, he lost sight of it. His shadow fell before him, drawn long by sun at his back.

He turned, gasped in fright, and lifted a hand to shade his eyes, but the looming figures that advanced on him were nothing more than giant stones set into the earth—the crown out of which he had staggered. Pinks, blue gentian, and yellow stars bloomed on the grassy sward within the stones although whole stretches of ground consisted of dirt tamped down by a great weight now removed. Here and there cinquefoil speckled with yellow flowers crept through and around bleached bones lying scattered through the grass.

'Brother Zacharias!"

Two soldiers waited, arms crossed as they frowned at him. He stumbled after Hugh who, surrounded by his retainers, descended through the maze of earthworks.

A crude hamlet consisting of a dozen huts and several pit houses lay at the base of the hill, just within an eroded earthen gateway that closed off the labyrinthine earthworks from the open land beyond. There was such a dearth of refuse, with fresh pits dug close by for a necessarium and heaps of earth still crawling with worms and bugs, that Zacharias realized the tiny village was itself newly erected, not more than a year old and inhabited by two dozen or so dark-haired, pale-skinned folk. These natives cowered at the doors to their houses and, when Hugh appeared in his splendid garb, flung themselves prostrate to the ground.

Hugh studied them before speaking in an encouraging tone. His voice was no longer ragged with emotion, although he still looked pale.

'Brother Marcus said there was one among you who could inter pret for the others—

who would that be? Let that one come forward without fear. I am pleased with all I see and all that you have accomplished here. Fear no anger on my part."

After a pause, a man raised up and by means of gestures indicated that someone was coming from outside the earthworks. One of Hugh's soldiers, by name of Gerbert, scrambled to the top of the nearest embankment.

'There's a small church half built out there, my lord," he called down, "and some men coming. They've a deacon with them."

The gateway had once boasted a deep ditch crossing its opening as a form of defense, but the pit was now mostly filled in with debris although on one side recent scars showed where someone had started to dig it out again. Boards thrown over this sinkhole made a bridge. The procession that approached was led by a young deacon in stained and mended robes, who supported herself with a staff since she walked with a pronounced limp. She had a merry face and a cheerful smile that made her look extremely youthful, since her two front teeth were missing, and her bright, open expression sustained the shock of Hugh's presence without much more than a widening of her eyes and a trembling of her hands.

'My lord!" She knelt before Hugh. He offered her a clean, white hand, and she took it in a hand chapped and dirty from hard labor and kissed his fingers, but after this he squeezed his fingers over hers and indicated that she should rise.

'I am Presbyter Hugh, come from the skopos' palace in Darre with these retainers."

'My lord." She gazed at him with tears in her eyes, perhaps blinded by his beauty or overcome by the scent of rose water that clung to him. "I am Deacon Adalwif, who watches over this flock on behalf of God, our Lord and Lady."

'You are Wendish," he said with surprise.

'So I am, my lord. My own people have their lands near Kassel, but after I came into orders, I walked east to preach among the Sa-lavü heathens. Here you find me." She nodded toward their audience, who watched in respectful silence. "They are good folk, if rather simple, but their piety and hard work have proved them godly. You see that we have accomplished all of that task which Presbyter Marcus of Darre set before us two years ago. The stones are raised. Now we are engaged in erecting a church in order to hallow this ground and to keep the old heathen spirits away."

'You have done well."

'We do our best to serve God, my lord." She hesitated as if to ask a question, but did not. "Now you have come."

'Here I will stay for the time being. I pray you, Deacon Adalwif, what day is it?"

She nodded. "Brother Marcus told me that within the holy crowns the days might pass in different wise to that on the profane Earth. I have kept a careful track of days so that my flock may celebrate the feast days, as is fitting, and so that children may be named in honor of the glorious and holy saints. It is the feast day of St. Branwen the Warrior."

He smiled, although a certain tension squeezed the curve of his lips. "A glad day for arrivals! We departed Aosta most propitiously on the feast day of St. Marcus the Apostle."

'St. Marcus!"

'It has taken far longer than I had hoped to come here."

'Fully five months."

'Almost six."

'All these passed through in a single night?"

'In a single night," he agreed, glancing up the hill, but the massive earthworks and the curve of the hill hid the crown from view. "Yet," he mused, "what matter if six months pass in one night? We must wait here until Octumbre in any case, preparing for what is to come. I have a strong company to attend me, Deacon, as you have seen. We shall finish building your church. Then we will erect a palisade since this place was the scene of a fearsome battle not many years past."

'True enough." She nodded gravely. "We remember those days well, my lord. Prince Bayan and Princess Sapientia brought a strong force here, but the Quman overset them and drove them northwest. In the end, so they say, Prince Sanglant saved us. All the Quman are driven out and will never return."

A shift in the wind made Hugh grimace, chaff blowing into his eye, but he smiled quickly and gestured toward the neat camp his servants had already begun to set up. "So we must pray, Deacon. If we are patient, and strong, all our enemies will be laid to rest."

HE drowned under the bones of the world. A whisper teased his ears, and he opened his eyes into a darkness relieved only by a gleam of pale gold light that emanated from his left arm. Amazed, he waited for his vision to come and go in flashes, to fail again, but the gleam remained steady as he looked around.

He lay in a low chamber carved out of the rock by intelligent hands or shaped by more persistent forces. The floor had been swept clean of rubble. To his left the slope of the chamber created a series of benchlike ledges along the wall. Creatures crouched there, curled up with bony knees pressed to chests and spindly arms wrapped tight up against their shoulders. Many wore bits and pieces of ornaments slung around thick necks, odd scraps they might have scavenged out of a jackdaw's nest, most of which glittered with sharp edges and polished corners. The creatures had faces humanlike in arrangement, yet where eyes should stare at him, milky bulges clouded and cleared. He could not tell if they watched him or were blind.

With a grunt, he sat up. The movement made his head throb, and he had to shut his eyes to concentrate on not vomiting. At last his throat eased and his stomach settled, although the pounding ache in his temples pulsed on and on. The air was comfortable, not truly warm or cold; the air hung so still that he could taste each mote of dust on his tongue.

One of the creatures moved, arms elaborating precise patterns as it rubbed fingers one against the others, against its arms, and against the rock itself, clicking and tapping. The voice was not precisely voice but something more like the grinding together of pebbles.

'What are you?" it said.

'I am," he said. "I am…" It was like flailing in deep water as the riptide drags you inexorably out to sea. "I have lost my name. It is all gone."

'You wear a talisman from the ancient days," said the creature patiently.

He saw now a dozen of the creatures seated like boulders around the chamber, sessile except for slight gestures whose subtle configu rations and variations in sound began to make sense to him, flowing together and apart in the same way that seams of metal work their way through rock.

'The ancient days are only a false story! We must set aside comfort and dig for truth!"

'Despair is not truth. The ancient days are no false story, but a record carved in air to tell us the truth of the ancient days and the city whose walls speak."

'You are a fool! A dreamer!"

'You are trapped by falls of rock that exist only in the mind you carry!"

They spoke by means of touch and sound, reaching out each to the others, passing speech down from one to the next and back again, punctuated by the scritch of fingers on dust and the rap of knuckles against rock or skin, by the push and pull of air stirred by their movements and the intake and exhalation of breath. The words they spoke were as much constructs he made through his own understanding of language as uttered syllables.

'The talisman bears witness to the truth! This creature bears the talisman! This catacomb traps us because in the watch-that-came-before we walk here seeking luiadh.

To find luiadh we follow the veins of silapu. One element leads us to the next. This creature leads us to this talisman, or this talisman to the creature. Do not pretend one comes without the other. Listen!"

They quieted.

The one whose skin gleamed like pewter, the one who had spoken first, shifted and addressed him. "What are you? The others of your kind, who descend from the Blinding, are empty when they reach us. You are not."

'I am alive," he agreed, before recalling the fate of the poor criminals cast into the pit.

He shuddered. That shudder passed through the assembly like a venomous wind.

'It fears us!"

'It wishes to poison us!"

'It seeks silapu! Thief! Concealer!"

'Listen!" Pewter-skin stamped a three-clawed foot, and the others shifted restlessly before subsiding. When they crouched, motionless, they really did begin to blend into the rock so that he wondered if he still dreamed. They were only rocks, and he was hallucinating. But they kept speaking, and he kept hearing their words. "Let it speak.

What are you? Why are you not empty? Why are you cast down like the empty ones?

Why do you wear the talisman?"

'I don't know." Shards of memory flashed in his mind like lightning, burned into his eyes. "You are skrolin. My people called you that once. It was one of your kind who gave me this." He brushed his fingers over the gleaming armband, cool to his touch although its surface burned as though it were hot. "I remember the great city. A shining city."

'Ah! Ah!" They stirred, sighing and groaning, and fell silent again. Their milky eyes swirled and stilled. A few brushed fingers over rock before curling back up into their crouch.

Pewter-skin spoke. "Tell us of the city."

'Are you going to eat me?"

"Eat you?"

'The bodies of my people. They are thrown down here for your food, and then you give silver to the miners in exchange."

They huffed, all their breath whuffing out. Dust stirred on the floor. First one, then a second and third, and finally all of them uncurled and with a rolling gait scurried out of the chamber, leaving him alone. He rubbed his filthy hair, shivering with fear and exhaustion as he struggled to get his bearings, to remember, but he could make sense of nothing. He possessed only scraps, like the chipped and broken ornaments the skrolin draped around their gnarled bodies. Nothing fit together.

Hadn't he seen a woman with wheat-colored hair, her belly swollen with pregnancy?

She had betrayed him! But he wasn't sure how. It seemed as if anger and sadness had been his companions, but even they escaped him now.

He staggered to his feet, hit his head on the rough ceiling, and collapsed back to his knees while pain wept through him. It was all he could do to draw breath, let it out, and suck it in again. Once the world, every fiber of his being, had not hurt so much, but his head hurt all the time now. That was why he had been blind and mute. That blow to the head had damaged him.

When had it happened?

He couldn't recall.

A butterfly touch fluttered over his back. He jerked up, saw Pewter-skin folded into that boulder curl just beyond arm's length. There was something wrong with the creature's smooth skin; the lack niggled at him, but he couldn't place it. He couldn't remember.

'Come." Pewter-skin used sounds, touch, and gesture to convey his meaning. "You speak words that poison. The others turn away from you. We look away from the thing that offends us. But I think I first will show you. I think you are ignorant." The skrolin unrolled and waddled away.

Walking made pain lance through his temple with every footfall, but he followed as the chamber narrowed on all sides. He walked in a crouch until the ceiling opened up and the walls fell away to a larger chamber. Pewter-skin led him to a low opening, where he crawled on hands and knees over coarse rock then cautiously down a steep incline to a larger chamber ribbed with veins of a mineral he could not identify. A well-worn path took them along a branching tube, past two shafts that plunged into darkness, three stone pillars with rubble heaped to one side, and four branches forking off the main corridor whose ceilings curved so low he could never have hoped to squeeze through them. The ceiling in the main tunnel remained high enough that he did not hit his head, and finally, where the floor ramped up, Pewter-skin scuttled through an opening and he scrambled up behind him, scraping his knees and palms although the soles of his feet were so callused that not even the rough rock edges could cut them. The ceiling and walls opened up with startling speed to a much larger cavern, and he sucked in a breath in surprise, inhaling a smell as thick as bubbling yeast in a closed, warm room filled with rising bread.

White growths, like huge mushrooms, grew in tidy rows and discrete clumps across the floor of the cavern. That powerful smell pervaded the air. He coughed, blinking back the stinging aftertaste of putrefaction that made his eyes water and his tongue turn dry.

Life cannot grow from dead rock.

Corpses lay in stages of decay. The freshest bloomed heavily with a funguslike mass; elsewhere, a few last sprigs decorated bones as the spongy fungus devoured the last shreds of the living.

Pewter-skin plucked a handful of the white stuff and ate it.

'We live in a trap. Clavas keeps us alive. The empty ones give nourishment to the clavas. So we trade silapu for the empty ones. We cannot eat the silapu, though some say we could in the time of the city. In that time, we were a strong and clever people, handsome and crusted with growths. Now we are sick and dying, even the free ones."

'Where are the free ones? Why are you in a trap?"

'Come." Pewter-skin beckoned.

He followed through the garden of corpses and bones and into a tunnel streaked with discolorations that glittered as he passed. By the glow of his armband he picked out veins and crystals grown into the rock. Sparkling grains slipped under his feet. Tunnels branched out to either side and crossed over and under where shafts pierced down or up until their path bewildered him and he knew himself lost. Pewter-skin led the way unerringly, and after an interminable time that might have lasted the length of a hymn or a hundred years they squeezed between twin pillars and he stared up in wonder. The ceiling and walls of this wide cavern shone where the light reflected off it, although the walls faded to darkness not so many steps away. The floor was unusually level. Here the skrolin had used scoured bones to build a strange architecture: a pyramid of skulls; an archway woven of thighbones cunningly trimmed and threaded together; a wharf constructed of linked rib cages; shoulder blades and pelvic bones arranged in a crude miniature temple or governor's palace.

'This is the tale of the city," said Pewter-skin. "We try to remember."

'Why can't you remember?" he asked.

'The tale is told from one to another through many lives, but we forget if it is true, or if it is false."

'The trap you speak of? Is that a true tale, or a false one?"

'Ah!" The sound cut, edged with rage, resignation, and sorrow. "Come. Come."

A trail bifurcated the bone city, leading them past the eerie structures to the far side where ceiling met floor. There, at the joining, a narrow passage ramped down.

'This is the trap."

He smelled water. He got down on hands and knees and crawled forward into a tunnel far too low for him to stand upright. He hadn't gone more than a body's length when his hands met moisture. He touched liquid to tongue, spat it out, and wormed back out.

'It tastes like sea water."

'Such water is poison to us. Through that tunnel many watches ago we come, thirty of us, seeking luiadh. The earth shivers. The feet of the wise ones far to the north shift and tremble. The waters rush in to trap us here where the tunnels run in a circle. We cannot get out."

He had to sort through this speech. "These tunnels you live in now are a dead end. The tunnel you came in through filled with water because of an earthquake. Now you are all trapped here."

'Yes. Fourteen of us have emptied, but we the rest endure with the clavas."

'So you trade silver to the miners in exchange for the corpses, which are the soil on which your food grows."

'Yes."

'It is this tunnel that leads back to your home?"

'Yes. Through this one we came. This tunnel is the path to the home, where the tribe roams the long caverns."

'Is there no other path?"

'None. Many watches we have looked. Many watches we have dug. We wait in a trap."

'Can you not climb to the surface? Find another entrance into the depths?"

'The Blinding burns us. The water poisons us. We cannot reach them. We are in a trap."

'Can you not dig your way back? You are miners, are you not?"

'We dig in the earth. We dig, but slowly. We who came to be trapped here scout only when first we come here. We left the strong tools behind. Also, we are too few to dig so far within the span of our life. We will die here, waiting. One by one."

He nodded. "I'll go. I'll swim as far as I can and see if I can get to the other side."

'The water does not poison you?"

'No. I can't drink it, but it does not poison me as long as I do not drink it."

'Why?"

'I don't know why. The salt is too strong. That's why we can't drink it."

'No. Why do you help us? Do you not wish to escape back to the Blinding?"

He sank down cross-legged, rubbing his eyes. "Why would I not help you? You are trapped. Maybe I can free you by telling your kinfolk that you still live. If I climb back up the shaft, they will kill me, so I am doomed anyway. Maybe God sent me here to help you, seeing your need."

'Who is God?"

He laughed, and the sound of laughter spooked Pewter-skin, who leaped backward and rolled up into the curled position, like a turtle retreating inside its shell. Yet his laughter acted like a knife, cutting one of the strands of the rope that chafed him. So many things bound him: his empty memory, his aching head, the mystery of his anger and grief. Still, laughter was its own enigma, a tonic to ease the burdens of life.

'Let me gather my strength first. I am so tired. I hurt. I need water to drink. Share your clavas with me, if you will. Tell me your stories while I rest. Then I will see how far I can swim." days fell into a routine. On fair mornings, Hugh presided over the schola, such as it was, with certain likely children seated on the ground before him as he taught them to write and read. Zacharias was never allowed to come close enough to listen, for if he had, he would have learned to write and thereby have a means to speak, and it was obviously Hugh's intention to prevent Zacharias from ever speaking in any form again. He had, therefore, to content himself with scratching letters in the dirt with a stick when he thought no one would observe him, and from these bent and crooked symbols he tried to puzzle out a meaning, for since he knew the liturgy by heart surely he must discover the secret that allowed words to be poured into letters, the Word that brought forth Creation according to the Holy Book in which he no longer believed. Yet there was something, surely, to the Logos, the thought and will that nestled at the heart of the universe, its kernel, its soul—if the universe had a soul. If any man had a soul.

Hugh had long since given up his soul, yet how might a man appear so beautiful and so kind and at the same time hide within himself such a poisoned heart? How could any great lord stand so patiently before a dozen dirty Salavü peasant children and teach them their letters? A pious churchman might, who hoped to see them become deacons and fraters in their turn who could minister to their countryfolk and thus bring their heathen relatives into the Light. Did that mean Hugh was a pious churchman? Or a cunning fraud? Yet he labored in support of King Henry and Queen Adelheid as their loyal servant.

These contradictions Zacharias could make no sense of. He did not understand a man of such elegance who could nevertheless live in this wilderness without complaint, keep his hands clean and yet bloody them with such cruelty as cutting out an innocent man's tongue, teach snot-nosed common children like any humble frater and yet walk among the great nobles in Darre with the arrogance of a man born to the highest rank. Be ruthless and yet seem so compassionate when mothers brought hurt children to his care, or his soldiers confessed their cares and worries and little crimes to him, for which he always prescribed a just penance leavened by the kiss of mercy.

,'/,' did not hate him, I would love him.

The weeks passed as spring flowered around them. The church rose plank by plank, and many nights Hugh took Zacharias, Deacon Adalwif, and the other clerics to the crown where they studied the stars and the mysteries hoarded by the mathematici and prepared for the spell that would soon be their part to weave.

'What of the miracle of the phoenix?" Deacon Adalwif often asked Hugh as they walked back through the earthworks by lamplight.

'Did you see it with your own eyes?"

'Nay, I did not, yet these Salavü folk and I were spared by the intercession of a saint dressed in the garb of a Bang's Lion. The Quman army passed right by us while we were helpless and yet none were touched."

'A miracle, truly. But why do you think this miracle is linked to the heresy you speak of?"

'I know it in my heart, Your Excellency. Do you not also? You do not condemn it, as you would if you did not doubt the old teachings."

Hugh did not reply, but his arm tightened on the book he carried with him day and night. He watched over that book in the same way he watched over Zacharias, who was never left alone during the day and was by night chained to the center post of the tent.

The Feast of St. Barbara marked the first day of Avril of the year seven hundred and thirty-five. Thirteen days later the Feast of St. Sormas dawned with a shower of rain followed hard on by a balmy south wind that chased the clouds away. As the novices gathered for their schooling, two excited Salavü boys informed Hugh that the waters had receded enough with the coming of spring that he could, if he dared, creep into the burial mound.

'What does he mean?" Hugh asked Deacon Adalwif.

She shook her head. "Nothing holy, my lord presbyter. This is an old grave mound such as the ancient ones erected over the bodies of their queens. That is why I insisted we build the church. I would have built it atop the hill to hallow the site and make it holy, but I could not obstruct the crown. Nevertheless, some of the children discovered a pool last summer and a hole that leads deep into the hill. They meant to crawl in, but I put a stop to it. There's no telling what might lie inside an old grave mound like this one."

'Surely you are not superstitious enough to believe in evil spirits, Deacon?"

'Nay, nay, not at all, Your Excellency."

'Best that I investigate for myself, if the way is clear," said Hugh, although Zacharias thought his color unusually high. "In that way I can drive out any lingering evil from this spot."

'Of course, Your Excellency," she said, looking relieved. "It has not been easy to keep the older boys from exploring where they will. One poor lad drowned in the river last autumn."