CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Surface World

Karolla sat the children under the awning after they had eaten dinner and set each of them a task: Valentin to polishing the worn leather of a bridle, Anton to embroidery on a square of cloth, and Evdokia and Portia to try their hand at spinning. Nipper tied off the ends of a fringe rug, and Karolla took the baby from Ilyana and settled down to nurse her.

"Go on," she said in that tone that Ilyana knew meant she wanted no arguments. "Go out. You have little enough time to be on your own."

Ilyana hesitated, but she wanted to get away from them. She walked away down the road that led to the ruined caravansary. The wind curled in her hair, and she hummed to herself, happy to be alone.

Three moons chased each other across the sky, and the barest curve of ring rimmed the western horizon, the great planet hunkering down to its nightly rest. It was warm. She smelled the exuberant scent of night-blooming flowers, their perfume coating the air.

The ruins threw intriguing shadows over the ground. She wandered through them, tracing a ridge here, a ledge there, finding a single white blossom framed by a ring of stone worn down until it lay even with the earth. She bent to explore it with her fingers, the rugged stone, the loamy dirt, the supple petals of the flower, gray-white as if they had been formed from the palest of ash.

And she heard her name, soft, on the breeze. "Yana. Ilyana."

She did not recognize the voice at first. She stood up and saw him, walking toward her through the quiet ruins. In his right hand he held a bouquet of flowers.

Flowers.

"I'm returning these to you," Anatoly said, and held them out to her.

She froze.

"It is a great honor for a man to be a young woman's first chosen," he went on, his voice as soft and caressing as the breeze, "and a great responsibility." He sounded as if he had said these words before. But what girl wouldn't want a man like Anatoly Sakhalin as her first lover?

She lifted her eyes finally from the flowers, white with a center of red, and he dropped his gaze away from her at once. A moment later he looked at her.

She had an instant of blistering revelation, that washed over her like heat. He desired her. He desired her. She simply could not move.

He smiled, slightly, the merest uplifting of his lips, as if he understood something she did not. He took a step toward her, a second, and lifted a hand, brushed it along her shoulders and settled it around her, comforting, except that now his whole side touched her and he was warm and solid and she was utterly terrified. It had been safe to become infatuated with him when he was on the other side of a room. This wasn't safe.

"Look there," he murmured. "A fourth moon is rising."

When she looked up, he kissed her. It was the briefest touch, gentle, not insistent. Her heart pounded in her chest. She wanted to kiss him again. She wanted him.

And why not?

Even though she knew who must have put the flowers by his saddle, why not? Everyone else was gone. What better night than this night? The actors had said the summons translated as "flower night"

also. She summoned up every bit of courage she had and tilted her chin up and kissed him. And he responded.

Ilyana had such a vivid flash of her father, intertwined with that awful khaja man dressed up in jaran clothing, kissing him, caressing him, that she started back, shaking.

"Yana?" Anatoly did not reach for her. He just stood there, quiet, steady. The moons illuminated his face, a handsome face for a man as old as he was. She suddenly wondered if her father had ever tried to seduce him. Flinched to even think of it, knowing that her father surely wouldn't be that stupid.

Anatoly Sakhalin came out of the old traditions, schooled by the strictest taskmaster of all: Mother Sakhalin. He scarcely spoke to Hyacinth and Yevgeni, except to be scathingly polite. Like Karolla, he held to the old ways even in the new land. The old ways, like flower night.

Except that now all she could think of was her father. She could not get him out of her mind, him and that man, him, the way his body moved. She gulped down air. Her cheeks burned. She had to say something, anything.

"I'm sorry." Her breathing came in ragged bursts. "I didn't—I mean, if I did, it would be you, but—" She broke off.

He glanced down at the bouquet and up again at her. His expression changed to the stiff arrogance of a Sakhalin prince; he looked mightily annoyed. "You didn't put these flowers there." Then he swore.

Mortified, she fled.

But no matter where she fled, it didn't matter. In the end she had to go back to her mother's tent.

She stopped under the awning. The younger children were asleep, and Valentin lay on a pillow with the baby snuffling on his chest. Nipper was gone. Karolla looked up at her blandly.

"I want to talk to you alone," said Ilyana in a low voice.

Valentin shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep, making little snoring sounds.

"You put those flowers by his saddle!" Tears came, hot, to her eyes. "How could you?"

"It is past time—"

"I don't care if you think it's past time. It's my time. It's my choice."

"You don't want to lie with Anatoly Sakhalin?"

"Not tonight! I wanted to go with the actors. I wanted to go with David!"

"David ben Unbutu?" Karolla considered this, frowning. "He's not jaran, but if you won't have Anatoly Sakhalin, I suppose he'll do well enough. He is one of Soerensen's trusted captains, and I suppose if he was good enough to be Nadine Orzhekov's lover, then he is good enough for you, Yana."

Yana shrieked in wordless fury. "That isn't what I meant! How could you? How could you? I hate you!" She burst into tears and despised herself for doing so. She wanted to run anywhere, as long as it was away, only there wasn't anywhere to go.

"Unnatural child," said Karolla calmly. "It is selfish of you not to be done with what other girls celebrated long before. The baby needs a name, and I have not yet offered blood to Grandmother Night."

"All you think about is yourself! Papa would never have done something like this to me!"

Valentin snorted.

Ilyana would have slapped him, except he had the baby, who had woken up and was beginning to complain.

"That is enough, Valentin," admonished Karolla. "Ilyana you will apologize to me."

"I will not! You're the one who should apologize to me."

They stared each other down. Finally, Ilyana spun and ran away around the tent. Except there really was nowhere to go. She sat down, arms wrapped around her knees, out in the midst of the gardens, praying that no one—gods, especially not Anatoly Sakhalin—would come looking for her.

Two moons set and a fifth rose up over the horizon by the time the Company returned. She saw a glow in the distance and then heard them, laughing and singing, their celebration like a scent on the wind. She swallowed sobs and pressed her fingers into her eyes to stop more tears from coming. She had never felt more alone in her life.

"I want to go home," she said in a small voice, except she could see her mother's tent as a hulking shadow not one hundred paces from where she huddled. That was all that she had of home. Before that, they had been outsiders living with the Veselov tribe, on the sufferance of Arina Veselov, and before that, a dimmer memory, outlaws, riding with a tribe that was not truly a tribe, only a collection of people united in their goal to kill Ilyakoria Bakhtiian. Before that— but there was nothing before that. Karolla Arkhanov had turned her back on her mother and aunt's tribe before Ilyana had been born. She had turned her back on them to follow her father and her husband, and so sundered her children forever from their true home.

"I'll never forgive you for that," muttered Ilyana fiercely and buried her head against her knees, shuddering, clutching herself against herself, holding on.

Rain misted the ground and swept away, leaving its cool touch like a distant memory.

"Oh, dear," a woman said. Ilyana jerked her head up. David and Diana stood not ten paces from her.

"What are you doing out here?" David asked kindly.

She burst into tears.

He took a step toward her, hesitated, and looked at Diana. "I'd better get her father."

Ilyana was crying too hard to protest.

Diana knelt beside her, embracing her. "Dear child. Do you want to talk about it?"

Ilyana could only bawl. "I can't," she gasped out. "I'm so unhappy."

"Oh, Yana." Diana sighed deeply. "So many of us are. I'm so sorry. I wish there was something I could do."

They stayed that way until Vasil came. Diana retreated quickly, leaving them alone. Vasil pulled Ilyana to her feet unceremoniously and studied her while she gulped down sobs and wiped her nose with the back of one hand.

"I'm sorry," she stammered. "I don't want to get your costume wet."

He hugged her. "Yana! Someone can clean it. Why are you crying, little one?"

She shrugged in his arms.

"Next time I'll see that you come with us. You can stay backstage with the techs. It was marvelous, Yana. The house had perfect acoustics. I walked all through it before the audience arrived, except for the boxes that were sealed off, and I even saw the box set aside for Duke Naroshi. I took off one of my rings and left it in his chair."

"Papa!" Appalled, she pulled back and stared up at him.

"Yana," he said gravely, "you must learn the basic lesson that those who have power will use it, and those who don't must learn to control those who do. You and I have nothing—"

"We're pretty," she said bitterly, choking down sobs. "Everyone says so." Anatoly Sakhalin had thought so, staring at her in the moonlight.

"No, we're beautiful. Never forget that. That's what sets us apart from others and makes them desire us. Duke Naroshi is a powerful man—"

"He isn't a man, Papa. He's an alien."

"It doesn't matter. People are the same everywhere. They want the same things."

"Charles Soerensen didn't want you, did he?" she asked suddenly. "Or you wouldn't care about Duke Naroshi. Papa, that's disgusting."

"That Soerensen wasn't interested? I admit it puzzles me, but it isn't worth dwelling on. Naroshi must have better connections with the Empire. Perhaps I can even be introduced to the emperor himself."

"And then what?" Ilyana asked, curious despite her heavy heart. "What would you do?"

But he got that look on his face and he let go of her and stared at the stars. One of those stars probably was the star around which Rhui orbited. "I would have him give me Rhui," he whispered,

"and everything on it, to do with as I wish."

He fell silent. She did not interrupt him.

After a long time, he looked down at her. "Why were you crying, Yana! You shouldn't be unhappy."

"Do you think I'm too old to be—? I didn't know and then—" She broke off, bit her lip, and could not go on.

"You're not making any sense."

But she just couldn't tell him. The words choked in her throat and she knew it wasn't right. A girl wasn't supposed to speak of these things to a man. She should have an aunt to confide in, a grandmother, a cousin. Gods, she couldn't confide in Diana about this.

A memory struggled up from the depths, of Arina Veselov's good-natured and thoughtful brother Anton, who had died in the battle at Karkand: She could have confided in him. He had been like an uncle to her. She could trust him. As she looked at her beautiful father, who watched her with what was truly sincere concern, insofar as he was capable of feeling concern for people other than himself, she understood that she could never trust him or confide in him.

"I'm just lonely sometimes, Papa, here."

"We're going to be here a while longer. We might even be able to tour farther into the Empire after this. Perhaps we could send to your friend Kori's parents and see if she wanted to come spend some time with you. Would you like that?"

Ilyana wondered suddenly if Kori had had her flower night yet, in the time she'd been away, even though she knew it was done differently with Kori's people. Would Kori, given the chance, choose someone like Anatoly Sakhalin as her first lover?

"I'd like that," she said.

"Perhaps Duke Naroshi would like a dance troupe to perform here," mused Vasil. He took her hand and together they walked back to the caravansary.

Anatoly waited until Ilyana had vanished into the darkness before he moved. Impulsively, he flung the bouquet into the air and flowers scattered down around him, flecking the dry earth. He walked back to Diana's chamber, stripped, and threw himself on his cot, tossing and turning, furious with Karolla Arkhanov. Furious with himself. Poor Ilyana was just a pawn tossed between them. It wasn't right. It was right; any man accounted himself honored to be a girl's first chosen lover. But it wasn't right that he, Anatoly, should put his frustrated love for Diana onto Yana. She was a beautiful girl, unspoiled, hardworking. In the tribes, a hundred young men would be competing for her attention by now, and her mother would have to be careful that some reckless young rider didn't just mark her out of hand. But she was little more than a child. Truly, she was still like a child in some ways. However beautiful she might be, she was not a Singer. She was not Diana.

Thinking of his wife, it almost seemed that he had made her flesh. The Company had returned. He heard their gay laughter and the bright sound of their singing, a tribe unto themselves, rejoicing in a victory. He refused to go out and join them—an outsider—in their celebration.

After a long long time, Diana pushed aside the curtain and slid into the room, giggling, disheveled, sounding drunk. The sleeves of her gown had slipped so far down that he could see the gleam of her shoulders, pale, inviting, in the moonlit chamber.

"Are you awake?" she whispered, and then went on, either knowing he was awake or not caring.

"It went wonderfully. The Duke built a wonderful theater, just for us! Do you know that there were separate boxes for the males and the females I'd guess of highest rank and the female boxes were shielded so we couldn't see them, but they could see us or at least they must have been able to and the house was just filled with Chapalii, although I suppose they must have been all males in the house because they don't mix, do they?" She laughed under her breath and leaned down over him. "Anatoly, you're naked! Ummm. Here, help me off with this—"

He needed no more invitation than that. He drowned himself in her.

"You're serious tonight," she said later, still brilliant with her Singer's glory.

"I love you," he said desperately.

"Oh, Anatoly."

But her expression betrayed everything. She did not truly love him anymore, as a wife loves a husband. She pitied him. He shut his eyes, as if that could obliterate the awful knowledge. And he made love with her anyway, because it was all he had.

"Oh, Goddess," said Diana in the morning, tucked in close beside him. "I have a headache." She smiled at him, bleary-eyed in the bright shafts of sunlight that streaked the chamber. "I'd forgotten how much I like you," she added, and rolled up on top of him and kissed him, brushing his hair back from his temples.

"I am content," he replied softly.

"Are you? You have to be bored here. I'm sorry you ever left the tribes."

He winced.

"No, I don't mean it like that. I wish you would stop feeling sorry for yourself all the time. I know we ... don't always get along now. But with the tribes you had something to do, you knew who you were and what part you played."

"Even if it was a part you despise? That of a soldier?"

"Oh! You idiot! I fell in love with you because you were a rider. I just don't like you dragging it out all the time."

"You don't like me teaching Portia the things I gained respect and glory doing with the tribes."

She placed a hand firmly over his mouth. "I am not going to argue with you. It just went so well yesterday, that I refuse to blacken today by having the same stupid argument again."

"All right," said Anatoly, encouraged by her mood, liking it, and never one not to press an attack when he saw he had an opening, "then perhaps you had better remind me again of the obligations a husband owes to his wife."

"Hmm."

Someone rapped loudly on the wall beside the entrance to the room. "Di-aaaaaa-na."

"Go away," she said.

"Whatever you're up to in there," added Hyacinth cheerfully, "and I'm only sorry that you're not going to invite me in to join you, we're having a Company meeting in one hour. So don't say I didn't warn you." He stamped off, deliberately being loud.

Diana giggled. "Anatoly, your expression!"

"I don't find his jokes amusing."

"Hyacinth is a good, decent person, and much the wiser for what he's been through. I really am tired of your endless prejudice against him just because what he is isn't accepted by the jaran. It's so medieval. But go ahead, say it anyway." She rolled off him and swung her legs over, perching on the edge of the cot. She was very distracting, sitting there naked, gold hair unbound and falling down over her shoulders. When he said nothing, she turned to look at him inquiringly.

"I don't want to argue with you today," he said.

They examined one another for a long while, while the light shifted and altered, heralding planetrise.

Finally, getting impatient, he caught her by the waist and pulled her down against him. It was, for a little while, almost like it had been at the beginning of their marriage.

Thus fortified, Anatoly could watch her go to her meeting with equanimity. He went to confront Karolla Arkhanov.

Taking her aside, he said, "Never do that to me again."

"If my daughter refuses to do what is right—"

"Never do it to me, or to any man. A young woman must choose in her own way and in her own time, and it is not fitting that I, a man, should have to tell this to you, her mother. But since there is evidently no one else to do so, I must."

She looked chastened enough that briefly, he felt sorry for her, until she went on. "You don't understand how difficult it is to raise children properly, here. You have a khaja wife. Your child is already half khaja. Mine are not."

Anatoly sighed. He caught sight of Valentin, loitering under the awning, looking their way with the bored curiosity of a boy who had nothing better to do. Of Ilyana he saw no sign. "You are right," he said suddenly, seeing his chance. "I will take Valentin off your hands right now."

She looked relieved. "It would be well. He and his father ... do not always get along."

He nodded to her and walked over to the tent. Valentin eyed him dubiously. "Come with me,"

Anatoly said.

"I don't want to."

"In the tribes, a boy would never dare to speak that way to his elders."

Valentin stubbornly did not reply, but he looked nervous. Anatoly knew well enough that the boy needed to push, wanted to, but was scared to.

"It is not only disrespectful," added Anatoly, "but it is impolite."

"What do I care?"

Anatoly studied him. He was a thin child, with a lean face that always seemed to be hungering after something. Not a boy to be reasoned or argued with, not a boy to be cowed into obedience. "You care because if you learn your manners then I will take you along with me to scout."

Valentin glanced toward his mother, who was carefully ignoring their conversation. "What do you mean, to scout?"

"I am scouting the Duke's palace."

"You can't get out of the dome." Anatoly let that one lie. After two blinks of the eye, Valentin got an odd expression on his face. "You don't mean in the surface world, do you? You mean through the nesh link."

"You have used these words before. What is 'the surface world'?"

"You wouldn't know, would you?"

"I'll have to come back another day."

"No, wait. I'm sorry. I just meant, most people don't know that it's all just like a top layer, here, that is, not there." He hesitated. "You don't nesh much, do you?"

"No. I like things that have weight, that are solid. How can you trust a saber that isn't really there?"

"It doesn't work like that. There's way way more there than there is here. That's why we call this the surface world."

"We?"

Valentin shrugged, looking coy. "Other people."

"Other people who also go into the world where nothing is real?"

"It is real. It's more real—" Valentin trailed off and glanced again toward his mother and then, oddly enough, at the great tent rising behind him. "It's more real than this." He looked up at Anatoly measuringly. "I'll show you. If you want."

"If I am to scout, I must have a guide who can show me how to find the landmarks in that other place. In a year or two more, if we were with the jaran, you would be sent to another tribe's jahar, to learn how to care for the horses and the weapons, to learn what it is to be a rider."

"I don't want to be a—" He stopped himself. He was learning. "I'd like to go with you."

"Then you will. But first you must learn to saddle a horse."

Valentin went pink. But he didn't protest.

The days went by. Valentin got thoroughly sick of the horses—-Anatoly could tell—but the boy did not complain. The Company rehearsed A Midsummer Night's Dream and Prometheus Bound, and the fragile truce he and Diana had patched together held. Portia was happy. Ilyana avoided him.

Eight days after the first summons, a second came. That evening after the actors left in the barge, Anatoly met Valentin by the gazebo.

"What you gonna do with that saber?" Valentin asked, stopping in his tracks, eyes wide.

"A scout always goes armed."

The boy was so excited that he was shaking. "Say goodbye to the surface world," he said cheerfully. He twined one hand around the latticework.

"Wait. We must have a plan of action. What we will do if we are separated. How long we will reconnoiter. How we will return."

Valentin's mouth was thin and pale, lips pressed tight, and his eyes had a feverish light in them. "Just hold on like this," he said hoarsely, and he was gone.

Gone. Like a Singer, his spirit had left his body. Anatoly had seen a Singer in the midst of her trance, and all at once he wondered if it would be impious for him to try to follow on the Singer's road. He was not a Singer, he had never been called, nor had any Sakhalin child been marked by the gods for the Singer's calling for generations upon generations. It was the price they paid for remaining first among the tribes.

But he knelt down anyway, steeling himself, and placed his fingers on the latticework in the same pattern as Valentin had. Reflexively, he shut his eyes.

Nothing happened. Until he realized that he was mounted, and wearing armor. He opened his eyes, seeing first his hands on the reins and then, at his mount's shoulder, Valentin, peering up at him.

"I waited for you. Wow! Where'd you get that stuff? And the horse! Are you guising?"

He knew this mare. She was his favorite, not for beauty— she had no looks to speak of—but because she was a canny, vigorous, and stubborn campaigner. She had been mortally wounded at the battle outside Salkh. He had put her down himself, and she had burned on the great pyre of the dead, at his order. Now she flicked her ears, waiting patiently for his signal.

"How can I be wearing my armor?" Anatoly asked. "I didn't even bring it off Rhui. I brought only my saber and my saddle." Then he realized that Valentin himself was wearing, not the blocky tunic and knee-length pants that seemed to be the uniform of children on Earth, but the sort of clothes a jaran boy might wear.

"If you're not thinking about it when you go through the lock, then I guess you could come out on the other side looking like you think of yourself in your own mind. Is that how you think of yourself?"

Anatoly glanced down, seeing the lamellar stripes of his armor, polished leather and strips of metal.

It felt light and entirely natural. He lifted off his helmet and noted the white plume, signifying a commander of highest rank, which adorned it.

"I had not yet earned a white plume, but had I returned to the army it would have been given to me, as well as an army of my own."

"Why'd you come to Earth, then? You didn't have to, not like me."

"You didn't want to leave Rhui?"

Valentin shrugged.

"It is proper that a man go to live with his wife's tribe."

Valentin hesitated. "Can you show me a battle?"

"I don't have my slate with me."

"Neh. You don't need that here. You can make anything."

Anatoly lifted a hand to silence the boy and surveyed the landscape, except it was like no landscape he knew. It looked rather like the floor of the gazebo, white tiles spread out into a foreshortened horizon, their pale edges squared off in a seemingly infinite grid.

"There is nothing here."

"This is just the gateway. It's the second layer, it's nothing, it's all possibility. You gotta make something. Just think about something you seen once, and it'll start forming. That's what makes this nesh so neat. It must be something the Chapalii know how to do. It's like a Memory Palace, only way better."

"What is a Memory Palace?"

Like all Singers, Valentin shone with light when he spoke of the things the gods had gifted him with knowledge of. "It's a place set into the nesh where you can build easily, like the code or something is set in place so you can construct on top of it instead of having to create a basic environment first. But this place is even easier than that. You just form it in your mind and it begins to take shape right here. I mean, it's not that easy, but you can-—what would you build? What would you like to see? Where would you like to go? Is there some place you'd like to go back to?"

Back to the scene of his greatest triumph, the battle of the Aro River, where Kirill Zvertkov's army had swung wide to find a crossing downriver while Anatoly had driven his troops over a heavily defended bridge against the Lion Prince's personal guard.

Diana had told him once that a memory was just a pattern of electrical impulses, a chemical code acting within a portion of the brain. Now the battle rose up around him, he in the swirl of riders breaking past the bridge and fanning out to meet the disintegrating line of resistance. He pulled up, the boy hanging on to Sosha's bridle and staring, so as not to endanger the child. A thundering announced the arrival of the Xiriki prince's brother, with his thousand guardsmen arrayed in the blue of the Khai lineage, adorned with crescent moons on their silk surcoats.

They hit the front rank of the jaran riders, and at once there came the ringing of sword and saber, lance and shield, and arrows rained down on the khaja lines from the archers posted behind the front ranks. There he had fought, coming once within striking range of the Xiriki princeling: He thought he could see the golden plume of his own helmet, won by right of arms and by right of his Sakhalin name, bobbing in the center of the thickest knot of fighting.

The noise itself was deafening, but Sosha stood her ground, solid, afraid of nothing. More jaran riders poured over the bridge and swept out to push the khaja flanks back, and back, and although the engagement here would go on for half the morning already he saw the Xiriki camp where the khaja had foolishly trapped themselves within the tight circle of their own wagons, like animals in a corral. Already he saw Zvertkov's army coming up from the south and the two armies— his and Zvertkov's— combining to surround the encampment, dust and arrows and the constant clatter of battle hanging in the air round them.

And the panic, the rout, while the Lion Prince fled and his brother alone with his picked troops tried to hold off the pursuit, but it was already too late, because the khaja were already defeated in their hearts and maddened by fear. The jaran riders had slaughtered the fleeing soldiers with less trouble than it took to kill the most placid grazel, leaving bodies strewn for a day's ride westward like the broken trail marking their defeat. . . .

The swirl of the battle faded, and the actors became insubstantial ghosts and, at last, faded into the white tile grid.

"Hey, cool! Can we do it again?"

Anatoly stared at the blank landscape. He didn't want to do it again. It was boring. It wasn't real, it was worse, it was just something that had already happened, that didn't mean anything now. "It's like being dead," he whispered. "This isn't right. We must leave here. This is not the place where the Singers go; it is the land where the demons live."

"No, no." Valentin tugged on Sosha's bridle, looking worried. "We can't go now. I'm trying to build a bridge to the other land."

"What other land?"

"The deepest one. It's hard to get to. But I'm almost there. I really am—just let me—"

"No."

"Just let me—"

"No, Valentin! When you ride with the jahar, you obey the dyan instantly."

"But I know how to get to the map!" Valentin sounded desperate, and Anatoly almost gave in, but he had no idea how much time had passed in the real world. Suddenly he wondered what lay beneath this grid. Another world? A deeper world?

"We must go back. But we will come here again, to the place where you say there is a map."

Valentin let go of the bridle and stepped back, and Anatoly braced himself in the saddle, expecting the boy to flee. But instead a plain stone arch coalesced on the grid and Valentin retreated through it and was—gone. Quickly, Anatoly rode after him.

And opened his eyes.

The latticework wavered and then steadied into a white web, solid under his fingers, and he let go.

Valentin was coughing and gulping, but he managed a weak smile.

"Did I do all right?" he asked.

Anatoly frowned. "What is wrong?" But even as he said it, the boy's color got better and he wiped his mouth and stood up, looking fit enough.

"Next time we can go straight to the map. It's like a big thing, like a model I guess Yana would call it." The boy paused suddenly. His lips twitched. "Is it true that my mother gave you flowers so you'd think Yana gave them to you?"

Anatoly flushed. "I would never presume to criticize a woman, but that was ill-done of her. Do you understand why?"

"Yana is in love with you," added Valentin with all the wicked glee of a younger brother revealing dark secrets.

Anatoly flushed even more, and was grateful that it was dark. "Do you understand why?"

"Yeah, yeah. It's supposed to be the girl's choice. That's not how they do it on Earth, though."

"How khaja do it is not my concern." He cocked his head to one side. "Did you hear that?"

"Yeah. I heard it before. They're all back. I wonder how that barge floats. David says it isn't mag-lev."

Anatoly jumped back from the latticework just as the first figures came through the archway that led into the courtyard. There was no celebration tonight, but a more combative feeling, as if the actors wrestled with what they had wrought this night and what they might hope to achieve in the future.

"Valentin! Hello. Anatoly." David paused beside them, peering at them curiously. In the luminescent glow from the gazebo, his expression looked quizzical. "Shouldn't you be in bed, Valentin?"

Valentin hesitated, glanced at Anatoly, then mumbled a good night and left.

David waited until the boy was gone and the actors had faded into their rooms or settled down in the far corner of the courtyard to talk. "I hope you didn't find him here."

"I used him as a guide."

"You what?"

"If I cannot get through the dome, and if, as you suggest, only certain portions of the palace are even habitable by us, then I must scout inside, by using the nesh."

David considered. "Fair enough. But don't take the boy. Please don't."

"Why not? It is time he had something to do, that he began to learn to be a man."

David pulled a hand through his hair. "It isn't that easy. Neshing makes him ill. He's too young to nesh except on a supervised and extremely constrained basis. He's gone far too far already, and it could actually kill him."

"Truly?"

"I don't know. I only wormed this information out of his sister a few days ago. I don't know how bad it is, and Yana claims that their parents are incapable of safeguarding him. So I guess that leaves

... me."

Anatoly bowed his head. He thought about the hungry look on Valentin's face. "Perhaps you and I can find a way to guide him out of his need for the nesh. What we saw in there wasn't real."

David shook his head, not quite grinning. "It depends on what you're looking for. Frankly, I think it might be possible to use this nesh port to scout the palace. We'll have to arrange something. But not tonight. I'm tired."

"The play went well?"

"How to know? It went. Good night."

Diana, laughing, came in through the arch with the lighting designer, waving at him, and went out again. Out beyond the arch music started up, a guitar and hand-drums, a chant.

But Anatoly didn't really see her, although he lifted a hand in greeting and left it half raised, then curled it into a fist. The sharp satisfaction of purpose flooded him: Valentin said there was a map somewhere below the surface world. David said it might be possible, within the nesh lattice, to truly scout the palace.

He intended to do so, even if he had to do it alone.