CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Duke Naroshi's Palace

From the ship, Ilyana and the rest of the company boarded a shuttle that took them down not to the surface but to a platform, like a thin sheet of glass, that floated high above Duke Naroshi's palace.

Stepping out from the interior of the shuttle, she felt exposed and dizzy. It was a long long way to the ground.

"This is amazing," David ben Unbutu was saying to Maggie O'Neill. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Any idea how it levitates?" she asked nervously. About the size of a soccer field, the "plate" on which they stood seemed no thicker than a hand, and there were no railings along the sides.

"None. Goddess, if I only had access to their technology-"

Ilyana clutched Anton's wrist with a strong grip and told Valentin in a voice made brusque by fear to pick Evdokia up. It was just the kind of awful accident that might happen, one of the children plunging off the side. To her right, Diana Brooke-Holt had already grabbed hold of both Evdi and Portia.

The air smelled funny, but it was breathable.

The palace spread out below and before them, but they were still nightside and all she saw were pinprick lights and vast contours of shadow. The platform glowed with a silver tinge that echoed distant clusters of subdued and delicate lights.

One of the actors whistled, low, marveling. "Can you tell how high up we are?"

"Pretty damned far."

The musician Phillippe swore: "Tupping hells, I hate heights! Let me sit down!"

"Here, hold on to my legs," said Hyacinth to Anatoly Sakhalin. Hyacinth lay down on his stomach and inched forward until he got to the edge.

"Oh, Goddess," wailed Phillippe, sitting in the very center of the crowd, hair clutched in his hands.

"Don't do that, Hyacinth. You're making me sick."

Hyacinth grinned. Sticking his hand out, he groped forward with it, kept going until his shoulders and head were out over ... nothing. "Yeah, yeah, you can pull me back now," he said, laughing with nervous excitement. When Anatoly had dragged him a body's length back, he sat up, smiling madly.

"There seems to be a beacon, like a lighthouse, underneath us. But there's nothing around or below the platform, no forcefield, nothing."

Anatoly walked up to the edge of the platform, right up so that the tips of his boots edged the rim, and stared down into the gulf of air. Nipper shrieked and fainted. "He's right," said Anatoly calmly. "Is there some tool that can measure the space between air and land?"

No one spoke.

"Oh," said Anatoly suddenly. "The transit." He unclipped his hand-sized computer slate from his belt, keyed a command into it, and held it out. Ilyana caught in her breath. With his arm extended he seemed even less stable, as if the merest touch of breeze could push him over. Nipper revived, but catching sight of Anatoly poised as if to plummet, she began hyperventilating until, mercifully, the company medic rummaged through his bag and slapped a patch on her skin. Her head lolled back, and her breathing slowed.

Anatoly drew the slate in and puzzled out the letters on the screen. The pale light turned his hair to spun gold, and Ilyana saw his lips move, sounding out the terms. "One thousand three hundred and six meters." He clipped the slate on his belt and stepped back.

The others had already clustered at the center, except for Hyacinth, on his knees an arm's length behind Anatoly. Ilyana heard the group give a collective sigh, whether at Anatoly retreating from the brink or at the appalling height at which they now stood. Without warning, the shuttle retracted its landing ramp and banked away from the platform, stranding them there. Its leaving did not rock the flat surface at all. They watched it go until the darkness swallowed it up and the last red and blue lights were lost to distance.

"Damned lucky we can breathe the atmosphere," said one of the women sardonically. Wind gusted and died and rose again more gently. A thin strip of cloud drifted beneath the platform. It was cool, but not cold. And it was weirdly quiet.

"Now what?" asked a lonely voice in the anxious silence. Ilyana counted thirty-eight people huddled in the middle of the platform. The silver light emanating from the platform lit them from below, gilding their forms. Most of them now looked toward David ben Unbutu and Maggie O'Neill, except for Phillippe and a handful of others who had their eyes shut.

M. Unbutu lifted his hands, palms up. "I don't know. Charles was supposed to be here to meet us, and to, ah, formally present us to Duke Naroshi. We can't enter the ducal house without the formal

'crossing of borders,' that's the literal translation. It's some kind of ceremony, although I don't think retainers, like us, are truly introduced to a duke."

There was a bit of tense laughter at this comment, which Maggie O'Neill followed up. "I'm not sure we actually exist as individuals to them," she said.

A light flared on the ground. It rose and steadily approached them. One light resolved into four, four into the curve of a ship set off against stars and the pale glamour of clouds. Noiselessly, it slowed down, stopped, and drew up along one side of the platform. A hatch opened. Two figures stepped out, followed by a third. Ilyana sidestepped and yanked Anton along beside her. She had never seen Chapalii this close before.

"Anton, look, the one on the right. That's Charles Soerensen."

"Who?" Anton seemed more interested in Nipper, who was now snoring softly, than in the fantastic events taking place.

"Shhh! You idiot. The only human who has a place in the Chapalii court. Duke Charles."

Ilyana had seen him before, of course, a sandy-haired man of medium height, except there was something oddly unsettling behind his unprepossessing appearance. Ilyana always had a feeling that, like the mythic creature called the basilisk, if he looked at you in the wrong way he would turn you to stone. He was the one person in the whole universe who she suspected her father was scared of.

The two Chapalii looked alike to her, tall, awkward, and angular, but she supposed that the one who stood next to Duke Charles must be the Chapalii duke. His skin was so pallid that he seemed to reflect back the muted light given off by the platform.

"Maggie," said Duke Charles in a low voice. Maggie O'Neill stepped forward and handed Soerensen a rod. He ran a hand down it, as if his fingers were reading something carved into its surface.

"Tai-en," he said, speaking in Anglais. "This is the manifest of my retainers, whom I pass into your hands for safekeeping while they sojourn in your lands." He held out the rod. Duke Naroshi accepted it from him and replied in Chapalii, which Ilyana could not understand.

And that was that. Duke Charles walked over to Owen and Ginny, the leaders of the Company, and conferred with them briefly while the Chapalii duke waited, oblivious to his new companions. To her left, Ilyana saw her father inching by degrees closer to Duke Naroshi. She opened her mouth to say something, but Duke Charles broke away from Owen and Ginny and headed for the little ship, David ben Unbutu and Maggie O'Neill with him.

Without thinking, Ilyana tugged Anton along behind her as she followed them. Had she misunderstood? Was M. Unbutu leaving now? It was too awful to contemplate!

But Duke Charles paused in front of the hatch. "Good luck, David," he said in a low voice. "You'll transmit to Maggie once a day if you can manage it, otherwise through the regular communiques.

What do you think?"

M. Unbutu grinned. "I think I'm going to die happy." He kissed Maggie.

Duke Charles glanced back over the platform, caught sight of Ilyana, and gave her a brief nod before his gaze swept out, locked, and retreated back in again. "Hell." Ilyana was shocked to hear his voice shaking. "I'm glad to get off of here. I hate heights." He crossed over into the ship. Maggie followed him inside.

The hatch closed. Retreating, M. Unbutu waved at Ilyana to move back with him. The ship sighed away from the platform, banked, and headed up into the sky, which was lightening.

M. Unbutu smiled kindly at Ilyana and Anton. "Planetrise. I guess it should be some sight."

"What's planetrise?" asked Anton, but Ilyana hushed him and said, "but why did we have to come here, M. Unbutu?"

She motioned toward the platform, where they hung in the air.

"We're crossing the border, passing from one fiefdom to the other. This place is not quite in one domain or the other."

"Oh. This platform is like a crossing place. But where is Duke Charles going now? I didn't expect to see him here."

"Look!" said Anton. Ilyana turned to see her father standing not five paces from Duke Naroshi, who seemed unaware of Vasil's presence. But Anton was pointing toward the horizon. The smooth line of a luminescent ball nosed up over jagged hills. "Is that the sun?" he asked.

"No, silly," said Ilyana. "That's a planet. Isn't it?"

"Yes," said M. Unbutu. "We're on one of its moons. One of the few things we know about this system is that this satellite has an erratic orbit around the planet, so I'd guess it's practically impossible to calculate simple things like sunrise."

"Moons don't have atmosphere," said Anton stubbornly.

"Yana!" Valentin sidled over, now carrying Evdi, who stared open-mouthed at the planet rising into the sky. "Look at that, will you!"

Bronze and ivory-colored bands girdled the planet, swirling together in thick stripes, and by its light Ilyana could see the suggestion of curves and planes on the ground below, the palace taking form as if light itself brought it into being. But the glory of the great planet was its magnificent rings. The rings stretched out as far again on either side as the planet's diameter, so that the planet and rings together appeared monstrous.

"Oh, gee," said Valentin, who was never awed by anything.

Even their father simply stood and stared, forgetting how close he stood to the Chapalii nobleman.

Karolla, sitting, nursed the baby, but she glanced up at intervals to look, she who never truly looked at the khaja world, who had learned to avoid seeing it. The company whispered and exclaimed to each other in a reverent hush. The planet took so long to rise that Evdi fell asleep in Valentin's arms.

A sharper light caught and splintered over the horizon, and the sun rose. It was bright, bluish-white, and small, disappointing compared to the huge planet. But the sun and the reflected light of the planet combined to bring dawn.

Ilyana's first thought was that the horizon was curved.

Then she saw the palace.

First, the sheer size of it, stretching out in a web over the land, curving away from the horizon. A huge river cut through the palace, infested with towers; a nest of towers even grew up from the middle of its confluence with one of its tributaries. Almost directly beneath them a canyon cut deep into the earth, spanned by three gossamer bridges whose arches splintered the new light into rainbows. Domes huddled in the depths.

Phillippe started to hyperventilate. A spate of wondering talk flooded the group on the platform".

"Goddess bless us," said M. Unbutu under his breath.

Ilyana had not had time to take in everything when an opaque dome coalesced over the platform and the floor sank. Her heart and stomach collided. She thought she was going to fall, but the descent was even and slow and anyway her feet seemed to be stuck to the platform.

After a long time, they stopped. An arch of silver light appeared in the opaque dome. Duke Naroshi walked out through it. Light flared around him and vanished back into gray. He was gone.

The dome moved again, slowed and stopped, and the opaque wall steamed away into nothing.

They stood in the middle of ruins. The platform sank, melting into the ground until they stood on dirt. Pale crumbled brick walls surrounded them. A squat tower, half fallen in, marked a gateway.

Through it, Ilyana saw green. The sky above had a hazy density, and the planet loomed along the horizon. It seemed to have sunk a bit, so that its bottom rim lay hidden behind the jagged mountains.

The sun's light cast weak shadows out from the ruined walls, and a few stars shone faintly. The air still smelled funny, and here in the middle of the dead brick city it carried grit unleavened by filters or plants.

One Chapalii remained with them. He—Ilyana reminded herself that it had to be a "he" because the females were sequestered—stepped forward and addressed himself to David ben Unbutu in Anglais made odd by his inability to sound a hissed "s." "I am called Roki. It is my obligation to serve you and these assembled people. This caravansary has entered into decay but another has grown beyond the arch." He inclined his head, an awkward gesture that looked copied, not natural, and walked away from the group toward the arch.

"Entered into decay?" muttered Hyacinth. "How old is this palace, anyway?"

"I'm no antiquary," said M. Unbutu, "but this was either cleverly constructed to look this way, or else it's been abandoned for centuries. This kind of erosion doesn't take place overnight."

Anatoly was the first to move. He ran a hand carefully along a waist-high wall, testing it. "I have seen such places in Habakar, old cities and towns lost out in the desert, forgotten by everyone except Father Wind and Mother Sun."

Diana glanced at him but said nothing.

One of the new actors said, "Father Wind and Mother Sun?" and Gwyn Jones told him to be quiet.

Finally, Yomi picked up her trunk, activated the lifts on the company trunks and boxes, and started the whole mass moving after the Chapalii steward. "Well, what are we waiting for?" she demanded of the others. The trunks and boxes floated about an arm's length off the ground, locked together in stacks and lines, and she maneuvered them out the still-intact arch and into the green.

First one, then a second, then a third person gathered together their personal luggage and either hoisted it up onto their hips or back or activated its levitation grids, and followed Yomi. Their breaking away precipitated a flood, so everyone converged on the arch at one time. Ilyana waited patiently for the congestion to sort itself out. She let Anton run ahead with their mother while she hung back, loitering near M. Unbutu, who had evidently decided to bring up the rear. That way she managed to walk beside him as they came out through the arch and caught their first glimpse of the palace from the ground.

From this angle, everything looked different. Down along an unpaved road stood another square brick caravansary, this one intact. To the left lay fields and a green park in which clumps of animals roamed, and behind the caravansary and to the right loomed a great rose-colored wall, a mass of jade towers with bulbous stems and flowering roofs, and a glass-paned dome that shimmered in sunlight. A tiny gate marked the rose wall, like a stain. Above, in the sky, the ringed planet loomed.

"That's odd," said M. Unbutu, crossing back under the arch. Ilyana followed him. "Look. From inside, you can't see the towers or the dome, and they're tall enough that you should be able to."

Ilyana gaped. From inside the ruined caravansary, she saw only dunes and a line of craggy mountains etched against a hot blue sky. Even the planet did not show. She walked back out, half expecting to find a different scene outside, as if she were caught in one of Valentin's guising worlds, but she saw the same landmarks as before. Yomi's tiny figure, attended by the levitated freight boxes and trunks, crossed under the arch of the other caravansary and disappeared from Ilyana's view.

One actor broke away from the road and trotted out to one of the fields, kneeling down to examine a low growth of green plants. "Strawberries!"

"That's interesting." Ignoring the excitement, M. Unbutu keyed a note into his slate. "Yana, you might want to note that there's a field inside these ruins that affects what we see."

"Unless it's the outside view that's wrong."

"Or some kind of massive refraction ... at this point it's undoubtedly useless to make many conjectures. We take notes. Then, if we see different parts of the palace, we can compare notes on how often this sort of thing occurs. As well as other anomalies."

Ilyana simply nodded. She was thrilled to be included, but she wasn't going to make a fool of herself by saying so out loud. They reached the caravansary in time to hear a bloodcurdling shriek from inside. M. Unbutu broke into a run, and Ilyana raced after him.

"Look!" one of the young actors was shouting, sounding hysterical. "You expect me to use that?"

M. Unbutu seemed good at navigating by sound. He found the frenzied actor quickly, in a small chamber by the back gate. She stood in front of a meter-long trough. A shallow stream of water ran down it, spilling into a drain. The Chapalii steward waited by the door. He and the actor looked toward M. Unbutu, who arrived at the same time as Yomi.

"He says this is the bathroom!" said the actor. "And there's only one! One bathroom for thirty-eight people!"

"This is insufficient for your needs?" asked Roki. Ilyana saw an odd shade of color mottling his pale skin. M. Unbutu began to chuckle.

"How can you laugh?" shrieked the actor. "There isn't anywhere to bathe, and there're no mirrors, nothing!"

"Roki," said M. Unbutu calmly, "if you will step outside with me, perhaps we can discuss some alterations."

"We followed the specifications given to us," said Roki. His tone had such an odd pitch that Ilyana could detect no emotion in his voice, but colors swirled and faded on his face, and she knew that the Chapalii were sometimes called chameleons by humans because they shifted color according to their mood.

But outside another controversy swirled, rather like a physical expression of the steward's consternation.

"There isn't any food!"

"Of course there's food, you idiot. There are gardens and herds."

"Oh, yes. I want to watch Thea butcher one of those sheep."

"Fuck off."

"Now, let's all calm down—"

"I thought the Chapalii were supposed to be so damned advanced."

"What? You thought the food would just come out of thin air? I don't think even they've managed that level of molecular transformation."

"Shut up, Thea. But it's true, Ginny. We came here expecting that these things would be taken care of. There isn't any one of us here who knows how to exist in such primitive conditions."

Ilyana had never figured out exactly how much Anglais her mother understood.

"First we must set up my tent," said Karolla with calm authority. Yomi emerged from the caravansary, M. Unbutu looked around from his conversation with Roki, and slowly a hush fell over the assembly, which had worked itself to quite a pitch.

"Then we will gather under the awning and I and the elders will decide which men will go to the herds, which women to the gardens, and how the women will divide up the stone chambers which must serve as your tents."

To Ilyana's utter astonishment, they all obeyed her as unquestioningly as if she really was etsana.

Anatoly dumped his saddle, bridle, and saddlebags on the floor of the chamber which now belonged to his wife. He laid his saber down on top, the crown of his possessions.

"I don't understand why you insisted on taking those with you," said Diana.

"There are horses out in the park," Anatoly retorted. "Didn't you see them?"

She ignored him. "Help me with the cots." She had chosen a room without a bed built in. As Anatoly unfolded the cots, he reflected sourly that she had probably chosen it in order to have an excuse to sleep alone: Each cot was meant for a single person.

Portia came in, poked around the room, then grabbed her box of molding blocks.

"Where are you going?" Diana asked sharply.

"Out to the tent. Yana said I could."

"Go with her," said Diana to Anatoly without looking at him.

He frowned, but he grabbed a halter, took Portia's hand, and went out. She chattered happily as they crossed the caravansary courtyard and under the arch to the outside. Anatoly said "yes" and "no"

at intervals, but he wasn't really listening to her. He was furious with Diana. Yet, stepping out into the open, he felt relieved of pressure. The open sky was refreshing. The sight of a tent set out in the open, where it belonged, acted as balm to his soul. Children played under the awning. Ilyana looked up, seeing them, and waved, then abruptly looked embarrassed and turned her attention back to the little ones. It bothered Anatoly. Girls her age were supposed to act like women, not like boys. Portia pulled out of his grasp and ran over to the tent to plop down beside Evdokia.

Karolla emerged from the tent, discussing something with Yomi and Ginny and the eldest of the women actors, Seshat. The women nodded, came to some conclusion, and the khaja women left, greeting Anatoly as they passed.

Karolla caught his eye and, obediently, he walked over to her. They had achieved an understanding early on, nothing codified but rather understood through a shared belief that someone must hold to the ways of the jaran and must teach these ways to the children. Even while Anatoly could not approve of Karolla's leaving her mother's tribe, still he valued her adherence to tradition.

"Walk with me," she said quietly. They walked out into the park. Anatoly studied the horses, a small herd of seven: four mares, two foals, and a stallion. The lead mare was a handsome creature, big-boned and sturdy and from what little Anatoly had seen of her so far, not one to take any nonsense from the others.

"My servant will supervise and tutor the younger children now," began Karolla, "but it is my hope that you will take some interest in Valentin."

"I will keep an eye out for him," agreed Anatoly cautiously.

She cleared her throat. "There is one other thing. It is past time for my daughter to celebrate her tsadokhis night. Because she is a daughter of the Arkhanov line, it would be appropriate for a prince of the Sakhalin tribe to be her first lover."

Anatoly kept his gaze fixed on the horses. "Any man would be honored to be your daughter's tsadokhis choice."

"I beg your pardon for speaking of these things so baldly. But you have seen as well as I that Yana has lived too much in the khaja world and has had no older girls to emulate. It is wrong that a girl should reach her age and not arrange with her aunt for her flower night. So I must act."

They had come close enough to the horses now that by mutual unspoken consent they both halted.

The stallion circled warily, but the lead mare lifted her ears and ambled toward them.

"Of course," said Anatoly softly, watching the mare, "no man would wish a girl to feel that he was forced on her."

"She admires you," said Karolla flatly, "but she acts as a boy would act admiring an older woman, shying away, waiting for her to approach him."

The mare had a black mane and a chestnut coat, and she halted six paces from them and eyed the humans curiously but without fear. Anatoly knew an invitation when he saw one. Karolla calmly handed him an apple she had evidently taken from the gardens, and with it he approached the mare.

She deigned to take the offering and to let him introduce himself. He let her sniff the halter and then he pulled it on over her head. Clearly she had been ridden before. A half grown filly came up and shied away, skittish, and the other mares cropped at the grass. Anatoly heaved himself up onto her back and swung a leg over. Waited. She shifted but seemed content.

Karolla had another apple and a bridle. Now she walked over to the nearest of the other mares.

Soon enough, she, too, was mounted. Anatoly grinned. Together they rode back toward the tent. The rest of the herd followed at a distance, except for the stallion, who trumpeted his displeasure at this desertion. Anatoly's mare merely quirked her ears.

"It's no wonder you prefer me to him," said Anatoly to her. "I'm much better-looking."

She flattened her ears briefly, and he chuckled.

Karolla came up beside him. "If I arrange her tsadokhis night, will you agree to act as if she had already lain flowers beside your saddle?"

The children saw them. Portia leaped up, shouting, "Papa! Papa!" and Valentin hoisted her up and shushed her. Ilyana stood up as well, her face alight with pleasure.

"Oh, Mama! Let me ride!" she called. "No, I'll go first, Evdi, and then I'll take you."

She disappeared inside the tent and came out a moment later with a saddle. Karolla dismounted.

Anatoly watched as Ilyana swiftly made the acquaintance of the mare, a compact roan, and saddled her and mounted.

She shot a glance toward Anatoly. "Race you!" Urging the mare forward, she put it through its paces, getting acquainted. After a bit, she encouraged it to run. Like any jaran girl, she knew how to ride. Her braid bounced on her back and she laughed with joy.

Anatoly sighed and dismounted. He tossed the reins to Karolla. "Let me get my saddle. We'll let the children ride."

"Do you agree?" asked Karolla quietly.

Gods, it was tempting. Any man would be tempted. But what Karolla suggested went too far. He could just imagine what his grandmother would say about it. "If she places flowers beside my saddle, I would be honored by her choice. But if she does not wish it, then even by your request I cannot act. I beg your pardon."

Karolla simply nodded.

They let the children ride for a while, then turned the horses loose.

It rained in the afternoon, so they were all stuck inside the warren of rooms that made up the caravansary. There were many arguments, mostly about rehearsal space and if anyone knew when they were expected to perform. Portia splashed in puddles in the courtyard until Diana yelled at her to come in under shelter, and David ben Unbutu found some kind of interface to a map of the palace under the gazebo in the center of the courtyard.

But only three people could stand out of the rain under the tiny gazebo roof, and so many of the actors began quarreling about right of place that David told them all to go away. He did not precisely lose his temper, Anatoly noted; instead he spoke so softly that they had to stop talking in order to hear him. Anatoly sat on a bench and watched the spectacle. Most Earth khaja were quite patient—it was something he admired in them—but many of the actors were not just young but nervous, and that made them irritable and quick to take offense.

Diana took Portia to bed. The rain slackened and gave out, and Anatoly walked into the courtyard and leaned over the gazebo railing. The map looked like a mosaic made of thin lines of light, but each time David touched an intersection of lines an image rose out of the floor, mist rising and solidifying into a tiny model of a building.

"It's clever," muttered David to what was left of his audience: Anatoly, Gwyn Jones, Yomi, Hyacinth, and the woman Wingtuck. "But not very illuminating. We'll have to copy each individual item into our modeler and then assemble it as a whole."

Nevertheless, they watched with interest as, one by one, insubstantial edifices formed on the mosaic and melted again. Much later, Anatoly went back to Diana's room, half expecting to find flowers beside his saddle. There were none, of course. He was surprised at how disappointed he was.

He took off his boots and his clothes and lay down on a cot. He heard Diana shift, so attuned to her that he could practically feel the blanket slipping over her skin.

"I couldn't believe it when you walked right up to the rim of that platform," she whispered suddenly.

"I thought I was going to have heart failure. Aren't you scared of anything?"

"Only of losing you," he murmured.

"What? I couldn't hear you."

"Why should I be afraid of anything here? If I died, no one would miss me."

"Oh, Goddess, now you're feeling sorry for yourself again." She shifted to turn her back toward him.

"Diana!"

"Shhh. You'll wake Portia."

He got up and she stiffened, but he went instead to the window. The clouds had blown off. Three small moons chased after them across the sky. Earth had never seemed quite as different as this. He felt lighter, almost buoyant, something to do with gravity and the size and density of this moon. He stood there until she fell asleep.

He woke when the first slivers of light pierced through the window. Going outside, he caught and saddled the chestnut mare and rode toward the distant rose wall, toward the dark slash that marked, perhaps, a gate. It loomed greater and ever greater, much farther away than he had first judged. When he reached the base at last, it blocked out half the sky; it practically seemed to curve inward at the top. The mare grew skittish, so he dismounted, hobbled her, and walked the rest of the way. The air hummed, a tingling on his skin.

The dark slash was not a gate but an opaque window, a huge block of ebony stone. The wall itself was translucent, and through it he saw another world colored rose by the substance of the wall.

Beyond, in that other world, it rained. Tentatively, he reached out and touched the wall. Hard. Still, the material had some quality that made him feel as if with the right kind of pressure he could push his way through.

"Anatoly!"

He turned.

Two riders approached. One was khaja; he could tell by the seat. As they neared, he recognized David by his profusion of black braids. The other rider was Ilyana. Anatoly cursed under his breath.

He was too old to become infatuated with a girl half his age. He knew very well that part of it was a reaction to Diana's turning away from him, and yet, he was perfectly within his rights to admire a beautiful young woman and even to hope that she might honor him by choosing him as her first lover.

It wasn't unknown for a man to find more gratifying love with a lover than with his wife, but, gods, at least he expected his wife to respect him.

"How do you know the map in the courtyard is a real map of the palace?" Ilyana was asking as they came within earshot.

"We don't, of course. Find anything interesting? Did you do a scan for the composition of the wall?"

"No," said Anatoly. "I wouldn't understand the figures. See how the wall curves. It's raining on the other side."

"I think we're under a dome," said David. "It would make sense, given that they would have a different composition of air to breathe—close to what we're used to, I'd guess, since they can exist in Earth's atmosphere without any evident aids. That doesn't explain the trick with the platform yesterday, though."

"The air is singing." Ilyana put out both hands and touched the wall. She shut her eyes as if to listen better. "It's just like that trellis in the ship: It's as if something is pouring through this. I almost feel like it's talking to me."

She shrieked and jerked back her hands.

"What's wrong?" David demanded, taking hold of her arms. All three of them took quick steps backward. The wall remained. Beyond, it rained, while the air remained clear and warm on this side of the wall.

Ilyana gulped down air. She leaned her head unselfconsciously against David's chest, and it was David who, a moment later, let go of her and stepped away.

"It was so odd," she said finally, turning to look at the wall. "It was hard like stone when I touched it. Then when I began to listen I really did feel like I could just hear what it was saying if I focused right. I felt like I could hear this tone. I thought it was the beat of a drum, and the wall began to melt away under my hands, like I could all of a sudden push through to the other side." She paused and smiled apologetically. "It scared me."

David pulled on his braids—' locks, he called them—and frowned. He turned and walked over to the wall, placed both hands on it, and shut his eyes. After a while he opened them. "I feel a humming.

That's it. Anatoly?"

"Just the humming. But when I touched it, I felt as if I should be able to push through, if only I could understand it."

Ilyana cast him a grateful glance. He forced himself to meet her eyes and smile reassuringly at her.

Gods, she was scarcely more than a child.

"Well, Yana," said David, "do you want to try it again?"

She smiled nervously. "Do I ... do I have to?"

"Of course not!"

"No. Not right now." She hesitated. "You know what else?" Her words were tentative, groping. "It was like I had started opening a door into a room, only just as I looked I realized that the room was way bigger on the inside than it could be from the outside." She faltered. "Does that make sense?"

Anatoly exchanged a glance with David. "We could ride the wall," Anatoly said. "If it is the wall of a dome, it must circle around until we reach this spot again."

"Yana?"

She bit her lower lip, shook her head. "I have to go back. Mama is expecting me."

"Tell the others where we went, then," said David as she went back to her horse. As she rode away, he turned to Anatoly, and for an instant Anatoly thought he was about to say something about the girl, but he did not.

Instead, the two men began their ride. Anatoly enjoyed being out here, exploring. He taught David some songs, and they discussed how to take readings on the slate and why the rose wall might appear to run in a straight line, from a distance, and yet prove, as they rode, to be curved.

It took them the rest of the day, riding at a steady clip and stopping several times to rest and water the horses at streams which were too convenient to be natural, to circumnavigate the dome, for that was what it proved to be. The distant, craggy mountains were simply part of the barrier, steep cliffs that from a distance gave the illusion of naturally sloped hills.

At dusk they reached the slab of ebony stone again. It was night by the time they got back to the caravansary. Two moons lit their way, and as they dismounted and unsaddled the horses, rubbing them down and turning them loose, a third and a fourth moon broached the horizon and rose into the starry sky.

"What do you think?" asked Anatoly.

"I don't know," admitted David. "It could be that Duke Naroshi is protecting us in some way, from other Chapalii, from a poisonous atmosphere, from getting lost. It could be that we are prisoners. It could be he just doesn't want us wandering around in his palace without his knowing where we are.

He knows we'll try to spy on him. Why shouldn't he try to stop us?"

"Then what did Yana hear?"

David just smiled wryly and shook his head. "That one I won't even guess at."