had envisioned, pouring forth molten stone in such prodigious quantities that
the acid lake completely vanished beneath its fiery blanket.

Ruha felt control of her limbs return. Gasping for breath and trembling with
fatigue, she slipped back to the center of the wagon. Her mind was not entirely
free of its attacker, however. The dragon locked gazes with her again, and once
more his bat figure appeared inside her mind, rising from beneath the sea of
flaming rock like a phoenix reborn. An angry rumble rolled from



Cypress's throat; then the flaming bat transformed itself into an immense,
black-haired Cyclops. The brute floated down to the ground, then waded through
the lava toward the witch's volcano. He stood as tall as the summit, and his
knobby hands looked powerful enough to crush stone.

Ruha pictured the ground beneath his feet turning to quicksand, but this time
she experienced no strange tinglings in the pit other stomach. She felt only a
dull, nauseating ache, then a searing wave of pain as the last of her energy
drained from her muscles. The witch collapsed to her knees, so exhausted and
enervated that she could not find the strength to rise. The cyclops stopped
beside her volcano, then reached out and tore away a huge chunk of glowing
stone.

As I annihilate this mountain, so I annihilate your mind! the cyclops cackled.
When I finish, your head will be naught but a smoking hole, as empty and useless
as a spent sulfur pit!

Ruha tried again to change the scene inside her head, but succeeded only in
exhausting herself to the point that she almost dropped the fireball. The wagon
rocked as someone climbed in behind her, but the witch could not rip her gaze
away from Cypress's empty eye sockets to see who it was. She thought about
trying to drop the fireball before the dragon seized control of her body
again.
The resulting conflagration would kill her as well as the newcomer, but she felt
fairly certain that destroying the ylang blossoms would also delay the theft
ofYanseldara's spirit.

Prince Tang kneeled beside Ruha, holding several slender yellow leaves in his
hand. His eyes appeared glassy and vacant, and he seemed to be chewing some
thing. Cypress glanced away from Ruha and glared at
Tang. Inside the witch's mind, the cyclops stopped tearing apart her volcano.
She was too exhausted to take advantage of her foe's distraction, but she found
herself free to look away from his gaze. A small company of Shou guards had
appeared at the door and were cautiously


advancing into the shadowy spicehouse, squinting at the dragon as though they
could not quite believe their sundazzled eyes.

Whatever the dragon said to Tang, Ruha could not hear it, but the prince's
response was short and angry:

"No. If you want oil, you leave now—or I burn wagon myself." Tang raised one of
the slender leaves to Ruha's lips, then instructed, "Chew leaf, wu-jen."

Ruha clenched her teeth and considered thrusting her
fireball into Tang's face.
"Trust me. This no love potion. It is lasal. Leaf protects
against Invisible Art."

Ruha allowed the prince to slip the leaf into her mouth and began to chew. The
wail of a distant wind arose inside her mind, and the cyclops slowly turned
toward the sound. Cypress glanced at Wei Dao, who immediately stepped to the
wagon side and spoke to her husband in
Shou. The prince responded sharply and pointed toward the guards, who were
advancing on the unconcerned dragon with polearms leveled for battle. They
seemed rather unsteady on their feet, and even from halfway across the
spicehouse, their eyes appeared more glassy
than Tang's.

Inside Ruha's mind, the wail of the wind became a roar, then a howling sand
cloud billowed across the boiling plain. Cypress groaned, and the cyclops
turned to face the storm. The brute took a deep breath and began to blow, but
his breath was no match for the fury of the gale. The sand blasted over him, and
he vanished into
the tempest.

Cypress grunted, his empty-eyed head recoiling as though the storm had struck
him physically. He backed away from the wagon, trembling and sputtering and
madly scratching at his temples. Tang's guards charged, filling the spicehouse
with a tremendous clamor as their blades struck their foe's impenetrable scales.
Several of the blades snapped on impact, but most either bounced off or became
lodged without causing any damage. The


dragon lashed out with fangs, claws, and tail, littering the floor with the
shattered bodies of Tang's loyal guards.

Finding herself completely in control of her own body—if somewhat exhausted and
fuzzy-headed—Ruha rose to her feet and swung a leg over the side of the wagon.

"No!" Wei Dao shrieked.

The princess leapt toward Ruha, causing the witch to hesitate just long enough
for Tang to grab her by the shoulder.

"If you leave wagon, we all die." The prince's words were slurred, and he seemed
to be having trouble focusing his eyes. "Only fear of burning blossoms saves
us now."

"I know that." Ruha scowled, struggling against the roaring storm in her head to
remember why she had decided to throw the fireball in the first place. "But I
must attack… while we have the advantage."

You have nothing.

Cypress cast aside the bodies of two more guards, then pointed his long snout in
Tang's direction. The dragon was far from destroyed, but he looked as haggard as
Ruha, and more than a few of his thick scales had been pulled or cut away. Tang
called something to his surviving guards, who looked rather relieved and
backed away.

"But wu-jen is under my protection," the prince said, speaking in Common.

Your protection? This time, Ruha heard Cypress—though whether it was intended or
an accident of his anger, she did not know. She is a Harper, sent to take
Yanseldara away from me!

Tang cringed at the dragon's anger, but did not back down. "Nevertheless, while
she remains in Ginger
Palace, she is under my protection." The prince glanced at his battered guards
and nodded once. They leveled their weapons and took a single step forward. "If
you do not agree, we finish this now—and you lose Yanseldara anyway."

"Are you mad. Husband?" Wei Dao cried. "Give him


barbarian! She causes too much trouble already."

Tang glared at Wei Dao. "I hear enough from you, Wife.
I am Prince of Shou Lung, and to call me mad is treason."

Wei Dao's face darkened to an angry ocher, but she obediently lowered her gaze
and mumbled, "Please to forgive outburst, Merciful Husband."

Cypress observed the exchange in silence, then pointed his snout in Tang's
direction. Why all this trouble for a barbarian, Young Prince? he demanded,
still allowing
Ruha to eavesdrop. Could it be you have fallen in love?

"That is not your concern," Tang replied. "I have ylang oil by evening. Please
to bring Lady Feng, and we make
exchange."

Cypress stepped forward, bringing his nostrils almost to within arm's reach of
Ruha. You are fortunate that I
understand the power of love. Harper. Treat Tang well.

You owe him your life.

Ruha brought her fireball around. So exhausted was
Cypress that he barely pulled his head away in time to keep her from stuffing
the sphere into his nostrils.

"I'll treat Tang as well as he deserves, I assure you."

Ruha said.
The dragon backed away and swung his snout toward

Tang.

The prince listened for a moment, then pointed to the door. "You bring Lady
Feng. I see to wu-jen."

Cypress allowed his empty gaze to linger on Ruha for a moment, then turned away.
With a weary beat of his wings, he lifted himself into the air and flew out the
door.
Tang waited until he was gone, then turned to Ruha.

"Perhaps now you understand wisdom of my actions."
The prince's voice was smug and condescending. "Or do you still believe Cypress
is destroyed?"

Ruha shook her head. "I do not—but how could he have survived?" The lasal haze
inside her mind was already beginning to clear, but it had not yet grown thin
enough for her to understand what she had seen. "I
blasted him into a thousand pieces."



"You destroy body, not spirit," Tang explained, assuming a superior air.
"Cypress is dracolich. He hides spirit inside gem—"

"Wise Prince," Wei Dao interrupted. "Cypress says she is Harper. Is it prudent
to tell her so much?"

By the scowl Tang shot nis wife, Ruha could see that the prince wanted to
impress her with his proscribed knowledge—and she wanted him to. The witch
allowed an expectant gaze to linger on the prince's face for a moment, then
rolled her eyes and looked away, letting out a deliberately loud sigh of
disgust.

The silent put-down worked as no verbal upbraid could have. Tang's face
reddened, and he snapped at Wei Dao,
"I decide what is prudent!" When the princess lowered her gaze, Tang looked back
to Ruha. "Cypress hides his spirit inside gem. After his body is destroyed, he
possesses new corpse and consumes old one."

"But the sharks ate his old one," Ruha said, thinking aloud. "And that is why he
smells like rotten fish now. He is eating the creatures that ate him!"

Tang nodded. "It is impossible to stop process. Even if you burn old corpse and
spread ashes, he can find them and swallow them. When he has eaten enough, he
becomes dracolich again."

"How close is he now?"

Tang shrugged. "It does not matter to you. For your protection, I must not allow
you to leave Ginger Palace."

"Is that by Cypress's command, or yours?"

"By dragon's—and he warns me you have no gratitude.
He says you do not repay my bravery as woman should."

Ruha's eyes narrowed. "And how is that?"

The prince smiled. "Ginger Palace still has need ofwujen. Our union would be
most blissful."

"Prince Tang, that will never be," Ruha said, speaking sharply. She climbed out
of the wagon and moved several paces away. "But I have a better way to show my
gratitude. I shall let you leave the wagon before I throw my fireball into
it."

The VeUed Dragon

In the blink of an eye, Ruha was surrounded by Tang's battered and bloodied
guards, each holding a long-bladed halberd or square-tipped sword within an inch
other body. Wei Dao stood behind them, looking more than a little disappointed
that she had not been able to draw her dagger quickly enough to kill the witch
before her husband's soldiers got in the way.

Tang eyed the witch's fireball and did not climb from the wagon. "Burning
blossoms would be unfortunate mistake for all concerned—especially
Yanseldara."

Though the heat of the fireball felt as though it were melting her arm, Ruha
stopped short of flinging it into the wagon. "Do not lie to me. I heard you say
this morning that Cypress needs something more from you to complete his
spell." The witch waved her flaming sphere toward the wagon. "It seems obvious
enough that what he needs is fresh ylang oil."

"Yes, that is true." Tang scowled at Wei Dao and motioned for her to return her
dagger to its sheath.
"Cypress needs fresh ylang oil to make love spell."

"Love spell?" Ruha gasped.

"You know what ylang blossoms do," Tang replied. "You see that this morning."

"A dead dragon—a dracolich—wishes the love of a halfelf?"

Tang nodded. "He loves Yanseldara for many years, since she wounds him and sends
him away from Elversuit." Tang placed a hand over his heart. "Love unre
quited is most sad."

Wei Dao rolled her eyes, then gestured at the fireball still burning in Ruha's
palm. "We have no time for this foolishness, Wise Husband. Tell witch why she
cannot destroy ylang blossoms."

Tang looked into Ruha's eyes and, finding no sympathy there, reluctantly nodded.
"Very well. Love is matter of spirit. To save Yanseldara's spirit or to steal
it, same thing is needed—powerful love potion."

"Then there must be a difference in how it is used."



"It is not necessary that you know that," said Wei Dao.

The witch ignored Wei Dao and hefted her fireball.
"Perhaps you would prefer that I assume you are lying about the blossoms?"

Prince Tang looked genuinely hurt. "You call me liar? I
risk my life—life of royal Shou Prince—to save you, and this is how you repay my
love?"

Ruha lowered the fireball and used her free hand to snuff it out. She had
learned all she was going to about the blossoms, and it was just enough to keep
her from destroying the wagon.

"Prince Tang, you cannot love me, any more than
Cypress loves Yanseldara." Ruha spoke softly, for her intention was more to
explain than to hurt. "Only a man can love, and you have yet to become a man."

Tang leapt out of the wagon, pushing several guards aside as he stepped toward
Ruha. "Shou prince becomes man in tenth year. I am man for twenty years!"

Ruha shook her head. "You want me because I deny you, and that is the emotion of
a child, not a man."

Tang's face contracted into a shriveled mask of rage and pain. His mouth opened
as though he were going to speak, but all that emerged was an unintelligible
sputter.

Wei Dao stepped to the prince's side and took his arm.
"She knows nothing. Great Prince."

The princess motioned to the guards and spoke in
Shou. A pair of them sheathed their swords and seized
Ruha by her arms. They started to drag her from the spicehouse, and Prince Tang
made no move to stop them.

Ruha glanced over her shoulder. "A man takes responsibility for his actions,
Prince Tang."

As she spoke, the witch tried to summon to mind the incantation of a wind spell
and discovered she could not.
Only the faintest hint of the lasal haze remained in her mind, but it was enough
to prevent her from using her magic.

Keeping her gaze fixed on the prince's face, Ruha continued, "A man does not
allow his fear to dictate his

actions, and a man does not hide his mistakes from those who can help him
correct them."

Prince Tang looked away, and Wei Dao urged, "Pay her no attention. After Lady
Feng is returned—"

"Returned?" Ruha snapped her arms free of her captors and spun around, then
found the tips of several halberds pressed against her body. She ignored them.
"Prince Tang, if you believe Cypress intends to return your mother, then you
truly are a child."

The guards seized Ruha's wrists and started to drag her away, until Tang spoke
to them in Shou. The two men stopped, but still grasped the witch's arms so
tightly her bones ached.

"If he wants potion, Cypress must return Mother," said

Tang.

Ruha shook her head. "Does he not need her to cast the magic that will make
Yanseldara love him? And even if he can do it himself—which he cannot, or you
could not have been confident of her safety until now—remember why he attacked
the Ginger Lady. Does he not fear that
Hsieh intends to put someone else in charge of the Ginger Palace? Would Lady
Feng not make an excellent hostage to guarantee approval of the mandarin's
choice?"

Tang turned to his wife. They began to argue in Shou.

"You need help to recover your mother." Ruha spoke loudly to make herself heard
over the quarrel. "Admit that, and you have taken your first step to becoming a
man."

Tang jabbed his index finger against his wife's forehead and shouted something
angry at her, then whirled away and strode over to Ruha.

"I need no help to rescue Mother!" The prince glared at
Ruha for a moment, then stepped past her and started toward the door. "And I am
no child—I prove that soon enough!"

Ten

The dungeon beneath the Ginger
Palace was unlike any of those dank, deep, dark places from which the
Harpers had taught Ruha to escape.
Instead of mildew and offal, it smelled of cedar and lamp oil, and the sound
that filled its corridors was not the wail of tortured prisoners, but the silken
swishing of Shou robes. The doors hung on brass hinges rather than leather
straps, and they were made of red-lacquered mahogany instead of rusty iron—a
construction that would make them no less sturdy once they were barred shut.
The stone walls were smoothplastered, washed with white lime, and a foot
thick; the ceiling, nearly fifteen feet above, was formed by the exposed
underside of the floor planks above, and therein lay the only weakness Ruha
could find.




The long procession of guards reached an intersection and, when Wei Dao
attempted to turn right, came to a sudden halt. The leader of the soldiers spoke
to the princess in Shou. She replied sharply and pointed at
Ruha. The witch had again been gagged with her own veil, her arms were pinned
behind her by two separate men, and she was surrounded by a ring of warriors
holding naked sword blades within inches other throat.

Though the lasal haze had already faded from her mind, Ruha's escort had been
too attentive to allow her to

cast any spells, so she could not understand the conversation. Nevertheless,
she had explored the dungeon during her initial search for Yanseldara's staff
and could imagine what they were discussing. Down the left corridor lay the
palace's tidy prison cells; down the right lay the gruesome chambers of torture
and death, where there were certainly enough shackles, fetters, and jaw clamps
to keep even a wu-jen from escaping.

Wei Dao prevailed over the commander and led the column to the right. Ruha
brought a two-syllable sun spell to mind and, as the clumsy ensemble around her
struggled to turn the corner, pretended to stumble. The ring of swordsmen jerked
their blades back—Prince Tang had been most emphatic in saying he expected the
prisoner alive when he returned—and that was all the room the witch needed.

Slipping her gag as she had once before, Ruha picked her feet off the brick
floor and kicked them both backward. Only one of her heels landed on target,
smashing the knee of one of the guards holding her arms. The other missed its
mark and slipped between the fellow's legs. As she pitched forward, the witch
brought her foot up, catching the soldier squarely in the groin. Both men
screamed and released her arms, then landed beside her on the floor.

At once, Ruha rolled onto her side, looked toward one of the oil lamps hanging
on the wall, then closed her eyes, covered her ears, and uttered her spell.
There was an ear-splitting boom and a flash of light so brilliant it pained the
witch's eyes even through their closed lids.

The next thing Ruha knew, she was lying beneath a heap of writhing Shou guards.
If they were screaming, the witch could not hear them; the ringing in her own
ears was so loud she could not have heard a thunderclap breaking over her head.
Half expecting to feel a long steel blade driving between her ribs, she opened
her eyes and crawled from beneath the heap of soldiers.

The entire line of guards lay on the white bricks, their


open mouths voicing screams the witch could not hear.
Some of the men held their ears and some covered their eyes, but they all
remained too stunned to do more than writhe in pain. The oil lamp she had used
for her spell was gone, leaving a huge sooty smudge above the sconce where it
had hung, but neither the wall nor the ceiling had suffered any material damage
from the detonation.

Ruha searched for Wei Dao's form at the head of the column, weighing the wisdom
of wading through the tangle of bodies to retrieve her late husband's jambiya
from the princess. Unfortunately, the witch could not be sure how soon her
captors would begin recovering from their shock. The effects would normally last
long enough for her to run an eighth league, but she had no way to tell how long
she herself had been incapacitated. Besides, there were a dozen more guards at
the entrance to the dungeon, and it would not be long before they arrived to
investigate the detonation.

Ruha pulled a dagger from a soldier's belt, then stepped over him and three
other quivering men and started down the left-hand corridor. As she moved, the
witch kept a careful watch on the floor, stopping to pry out any pebbles lodged
between bricks. It took only a few moments to fill her hand, for even the tidy
Shou could not keep from tracking tiny stones inside, and it hardly seemed worth
the effort to scrape them from the seams of a dungeon floor.

The witch glanced back down the corridor. Although
Wei Dao had not entirely recovered from her shock, she had risen and was picking
her way down the corridor.
The princess's eyes had the blank, inert stare of sightlessness, and she was
moving her open hands in front of her body in an ever changing pattern of
circular motions.
Ruha found her pursuer's determination more than a little alarming; only a very
good fighter would feel confident enough to carry the battle to a foe while
both blind and deaf.

Ruha shook her pebbles and uttered the incantation of

a sand spell. The stones began to oscillate in her palm, scrubbing off two
layers of skin before she could hurl them at the ceiling. They struck in a
circle as broad as her shoulders and continued to vibrate, much too fast for the
eye to follow. She heard a faint drone above the ringing in her ears, and a
steady shower of powdered wood rained down on her shoulders. The witch hiked up
the hem of her aba, then pressed her hands and feet against opposite walls and
began to chimney up the walls of the corridor.

Ruha had climbed about ten feet when Wei Dao passed beneath her, still circling
her hands before her body and staring vacantly ahead. The drone of the sand
spell must have been loud enough for the princess to hear, for she stopped
directly beneath the scouring pebbles and cocked her head. She turned her palm
up to catch some of the powdered wood raining down her, then seemed to guess
what was happening and started after the witch.

Ruha climbed to the ceiling and waited beside her circle of buzzing pebbles. The
stones had dug a deep labyrinth of wormy grooves into the wood, and it would not
be much longer before they scoured clear through.
Already, islands of plank were trembling as though they would fall at any
moment, but the witch did not dare reach up to pull them loose. The whirling
pebbles would take her fingers off.

A short distance below, Wei Dao had nearly climbed within arm's reach. She
carried Ruh&'s jambiya clenched between her teeth, and her blinking, squinting
eyes were fixed vaguely on the hem of the witch's aba. Down the corridor, the
guards were beginning to rise and rub their heads. Deciding to attack before
they gathered their wits,
Ruha pulled a foot away from the wall and thrust it at the princess's head.

Wei Dao continued to squint until the approaching kick had nearly reached her
face… then she calmly slipped the blow by looking away and allowing the witch's
heel to glance off her brow. Instantly, the


princess's hand snapped back, smashing the hard bone of her wrist into the
tendons of Ruha's ankle. A sharp, tingling pain shot up the witch's shin, and
her leg went numb below the knee.

As Ruha tried to pull her foot back, Wei Dao trapped the witch's ankle in the
crook of her elbow, then locked it in place by clasping her hand against the
back of her neck. She pulled her legs away from the walls and dropped, already
raising her free hand toward thejambiya between her teeth.

The witch pushed against the walls with all her might, barely keeping herself
from falling to the floor when Wei
Dao's weight hit the end other dangling leg. From behind
Ruha, barely audible over the ebbing roar inside her head, came the muted clamor
of the guards gathering themselves up to help the princess.

Wei Dao took thejambiya from between her teeth.

Ruha swung her second leg away from the wall and smashed her heel into the back
other foe's skull. Wei
Dao's head snapped forward; then the knife slipped from her hand and her body
went limp. The princess dropped a man's height to the floor, landing in the
semi-rigid heap of someone caught halfway between consciousness and
unconsciousness. A pair of guards appeared beside her immediately.

Ruha looked up and saw light shining through the grooved planks above her head.
The pebbles were gone, having eaten all the way through the wood. The witch did
not wait to see if the soldiers below would attack her or tend to their
mistress. She braced her good foot against the wall—the leg that Wei Dao had
struck was too numb to trust—then made a fist and punched it through the boards
above her head. The wood fell apart easily, and she had no trouble widening the
hole until she came to a solid edge. The witch grabbed hold and glanced down to
see several guards climbing after her.

Although Ruha did not know any wood magic, she sprinkled a handful of decaying
wood on their heads and

muttered a few mystic-sounding syllables. That was enough to make them drop
back into the corridor and scurry for cover. Having bought herself more time,
the witch pushed her second hand through the hole—then gasped as her wrists were
seized from above by a pair of small, callused hands. Without bothering to tear
away what remained of the weakened planks, her unseen captor pulled her up
through the floor.

Ruha found herself standing before a blank-faced soldier dressed in Minister
Hsieh's yellow, silk-jacketed armor. She was in a fair-sized room furnished only
with kneeling mats, several low tables, and bookshelves, surrounded by a dozen
more of the mandarin's guards, all with long, square-tipped swords in their
hands. Along with Yu Po, Hsieh himself stood a half-dozen paces behind his
guards.

"When strange events occur, it seems you are always near." Although Hsieh did
not speak loudly, the ringing in Ruha's ears had faded to the point where, with
a little effort, she could understand his words. The mandarin pointed overhead,
where the witch's pebbles were scouring a fresh set of grooves into the
coffered ceiling.
"Please to stop magic before it ruins Princess Wei Dao's apartment."

The man who had pulled Ruha out of the floor released her hands and stepped
back, but the witch did not even consider casting a spell at the mandarin or any
of his men. Although Tang had ordered his guards not to harm her, Hsieh's
soldiers had received no such instructions and would undoubtedly strike her down
at the first sign of danger to their master. Ruha gestured at the ceiling and
spoke a single sibilant syllable. The pebbles fell out of the air, dropping
through the hole to clatter off the dungeon's brick floor.

"So much better." Hsieh kneeled at one of the room's low tables and waved Ruha
to the other side. "Please."

Ruha allowed herself to be escorted to the table, then sat cross-legged on one
of the reed mats. Although she

was not overly fond of the chairs that Heartland hosts always thrust at their
visitors, she found the Shou habit of kneeling even less comfortable.

Hsieh waited for her to arrange her aba and veil, and then said, "Please to
explain your return to Ginger
Palace. I am under impression that Vaerana Hawklyn takes me hostage to get you
out."

"She came too soon." As the witch spoke, she was frantically trying to
calculate how much she should tell Hsieh about events in Elversult. Though he
lacked the same reasons as Prince Tang and Wei Dao to conceal Lady
Feng's abduction, he might easily conclude that the best way to recover her was
to let Cypress have what he wanted. "I had not concluded my business."

Hsieh nodded thoughtfully. "And this business—whatever it is—do you finish it
now?"

Ruha shook her head. "No, I was… interrupted."

Hsieh allowed himself a tiny smile, but made no remark about the interruption
involving a trip to the dungeon. "Perhaps this business is something I can help
you conclude."

Ruha lifted her brow. "Do you not wish to know what I
am doing?"

"You are spying," Hsieh replied simply. "I have need of
spy."

After a moment's consideration, Ruha asked, "And who am I to spy upon?"

"I come to speak to Lady Feng, but she is not here." He leaned forward and spoke
so quietly that Ruha could barely make out the words. "I understand she is in
Elversuit. Perhaps she dishonors Peerless Emperor of Civilized World."

Ruha frowned, confused by the mandarin's implication and uncertain what he
wanted from her. "What do you think she has done to dishonor your emperor?"

The mandarin flushed and looked at the tabletop. "Perhaps she takes lover."

"A lover?" Ruha scoffed.


Hsieh frowned and glanced toward his guards. "For spy, you are most imprudent."

"She is more than spy!" accused Wei Dao's voice.

The witch turned to see the princess pushing her head out of the hole in the
floor. Her hair was disheveled and there was a red mark on her brow where Ruha's
heel had glanced off, but otherwise she showed little sign of their battle.

Wei Dao allowed two of Hsieh's men to help her into the room, then pulled Ruha's
jambiya from her sash and pointed the curved blade at the witch. "Lady Ruha is
insidious assassin!"

The accusation caused several of the guards to reach for the witch, but Hsieh
raised a finger and waved them off. "If Lady Ruha wishes me dead, she has many
chances better than this to attack."

Ruha inclined her head to the minister. "I am grateful—"

Hsieh warned her off with a scowl and quick shake of his head. "Must wait for
princess. To Shou, form is all."
The mandarin looked at Wei Dao, then gestured at one of the mats beside their
table. "Please."

The princess slipped the jambiya into her sash, then took several moments to
straighten her hair and collect herself. For a time, Ruha thought she might be
stalling until her own guards entered the room, but no one climbed into the room
after her, nor did Hsieh's men give any indication that they expected—or would
welcome—any of the princess's soldiers to join them. At last, Wei
Dao came to the table and bowed to Hsieh, then calmly kneeled on a mat beside
Ruha as though she had not just accused the witch of being a murderess.

"Esteemed Mandarin, please to forgive Prince and me."
By the continuing blare of Wei Dao's voice, it was clear that her ears were
suffering from the detonation even more than Ruha's. "We do not tell you all."

"Then do so now—more quietly," Hsieh urged.

Wei Dao kept her eyes lowered, "Lady Feng does not visit sick friend in
Elversult."



Hsieh barely kept from smirking. "Truly?"

"Truly. Prince Tang learns of plan to kill Third Virtuous Concubine, and he
sends her into hiding." Wei Dao raised her chin and glared at Ruha. "Treacherous
witch is assassin."

Ruha could not stomach the lie. "That is—"

Hsieh waved a cautioning finger at the witch. "You ignore form. Lady Ruha."
Though his voice was stern, his face remained as blank as ever. "Please to let
Princess explain why someone—presumably Vaerana Hawklyn—wishes to kill Lady
Feng."

Wei Dao was ready with another lie. "To stop trade in poisons. Vaerana threatens
many times to'take measures' if we do not stop, but Honorable Husband does not
let savages dictate business of Ginger Palace."

"How wise." Hsieh's tone was as flat as his expression was blank.

Wei Dao continued, "After we must exchange witch for person of Esteemed
Minister, we think she give up and leave—then we find her hiding in ylang
blossoms." The princess peered at Ruha from the corner of her eye. "She is most
resolute killer."

Hsieh nodded sagely. "Most."

"We are taking her to Chamber of One Thousand
Deaths when she makes lamp explode and escapes again," Wei Dao continued.
"Please to lend me sword. I
promise Honorable Husband that I kill barbarian before he returns with Virtuous
Mother."

Yu Po immediately reached for his sword, but Minister
Hsieh quickly raised a hand to restrain him. The adjutant's jaw fell slack, as
did those of several guards.

"Do you not wish to hear what Lady Ruha says?" Hsieh asked.

Yu Po and the guards glanced at each other as though the thought had never
crossed their minds. "But Lady
Ruha is barbarian!" Yu Po gasped. "Princess Dao is wife of son of Third Virtuous
Concubine."

Hsieh nodded as though he were in complete agree-


ment with his adjutant, then bit his lips as though struggling with a
difficult decision. "What you say is most true. It does not matter that Lady
Ruha saves our lives when dragon attacks Ginger Lady."

The mandarin allowed his gaze to linger on Wei Dao, who took several quiet
breaths and tried not to look concerned as the color drained from her face.

"If Shou princess claims barbarian witch intends to kill Lady Feng, then we must
believe her." Hsieh continued to glare at the princess. "If she feels certain
we understand her correctly—and if she is certain she says what she means."

Wei Dao's painted lips began to quiver, but she did not look away from Hsieh's
penetrating gaze. "I… I am certain."

Yu Po placed a hand on the hilt of his sword, but cast a questioning look at
Hsieh and stopped short of drawing it. The mandarin remained as motionless as a
statue and continued to glare at Wei Dao. Ruha hardly dared to breathe. She did
not understand all the nuances of the exchange, but it seemed clear enough that
the minister was trying to save her life—whether because he wished to repay her
or because he needed a spy, she did not know. It hardly mattered, and the witch
sensed that even the slightest movement on her part might well bring the contest
to an unfavorable end.

As frightened as Wei Dao appeared, it was Hsieh who looked away first. "It
appears the princess is most confident of herself."

Yu Po drew his sword. Before Ruha could summon the incantation of even a simple
spell to mind, two guards grabbed her arms and pushed her forward, laying her
head flat upon the table. The witch uttered a silent prayer, begging the
forgiveness of Lander, her dead lover, for failing as a Harper, then took her
last breath and prepared to die.

The blow did not fall. After a time, Ruha opened her eyes—she did not remember
closing them—and craned


her neck against the restraining hands of her guards
She saw Hsieh and the others standing over her beside the table. The mandarin
had taken Yu Po's wrist to restrain him from giving the sword to Wei Dao.

"The Emperor's justice cannot be denied, but we are in land of savages," said
Hsieh. "We must allow Lady Ruha to speak, so her friend Vaerana Hawklyn may not
protest that our execution is unjust."

"Esteemed Mandarin, why do we care if Vaerana
Hawklyn protests?" Wei Dao's voice continued to be overloud. "She is
barbarian!"

"Vaerana Hawklyn is barbarian with army. If she makes hostage of Shou Mandarin,
does she hesitate to sack Ginger Palace?" Hsieh paused to let the others con
sider his point, then continued, "But if we follow form of barbarians and let
prisoner speak, perhaps we appease
Vaerana's superiors. Perhaps we avoid battle."

The mandarin released his adjutant's wrist. Yu Po lowered his sword, but did
not return the blade to its scabbard. He and the other Shou no longer seemed
quite so confused by Hsieh's perverse defense of the witch's life.
Ruha dared to hope their reaction meant the minister had finally prevailed in
the strange battle of protocol between him and Wei Dao.

The princess frowned, but seemed unable to effectively oppose the suggestion.
"Ask, but her answer is lie."

Hsieh smiled grimly. "Yes, if you say it is." He leaned over Ruha. "Lady Ruha,
does Princess tell truth?"

"No." The witch's answer reverberated through the tabletop and returned to her
ear sounding loud and deep.
"Lady Feng has been abducted."

Ruha's assertion elicited no cries of outrage or gasps of surprise. The Shou
remained as silent as stones, and by their silence the witch knew that none of
them, even
Hsieh, gave any credence to her claims.

Wei Dao reached for Yu Po's sword.

"I can prove what I say!" Ruha exclaimed.

It was Hsieh who scorned the witch's claim. "How can

you prove what is not possible?"

The mandarin's tone was severe and impatient, as though he had expected her to
say something else. Cold fingers of panic began to creep through the witch's
belly.
Yu Po was awaiting permission to yield his sword, and
Ruha could not imagine what Hsieh wished to hear. Wei
Dao had already declared anything the witch said to be a lie, and the Shou
seemed unwilling, perhaps even unable, to believe otherwise. The truth, even if
it could be proved, did not matter—and Ruha suddenly realized what the minister
wanted her to say.

"Princess Wei Dao is protecting her mother-in-law," the witch said. "Lady Feng
has taken a lover."

Hsieh gasped much too loudly, prompting Yu Po to step back and sheath his sword.

"Lady Ruha, you are certain?" Hsieh did not even bother to feign his shock well.
"Princess Dao is . ••. mistaken?"

"Is that not a good reason for her to have me silenced?"

"Indeed, but it does not work. I suspect this myself."
Hsieh whirled on Wei Dao and fixed her with a stony glare. "Do I not warn you
about lying to me?"

"I am Shou Princess." Though her chin was trembling,
Wei Dao held it high. "I do not lie, Esteemed Mandarin."

"No?" Hsieh glanced at the guards pinning Ruha to the table, who promptly
released the witch and stepped back.
"Lady Ruha, please to show proof of Lady Feng's imprudence."

Ruha straightened her aba and started to remind the mandarin that what she had
offered to prove was not
Lady Feng's infidelity, but her abduction—then she thought twice about confusing
the issue and held her tongue. To the Shou, the witch was beginning to realize,
truth was a relative thing. As long as she had Hsieh's support, any evidence she
offered would no doubt be taken as proof of whatever the mandarin wished.

Ruha started to lead the way out of the room, then remembered her manners and
bowed to Wei Dao, gesturing


toward the door. "If the princess will show us to Lady
Feng's apartment?"

Wei Dao frowned in confusion, then turned to lead the way out of the room.

Halfway to the door, she suddenly stopped. Her forehead was slick with sweat
and her face was sick with fear. "This is not right. I cannot show others into
Lady
Feng's apartment."

"Then I shall." Behind her veil, Ruha allowed herself a small smile. "I know the
way, as I'm sure you remember."

As the witch moved to step past, she saw Wei Dao's hand drop toward her sash.

In the next instant, two of Hsieh's guards lay on the floor holding their bloody
throats, and Wei Dao was leaping through the air, slashing at Ruha's throat
with her ov/njambiya. The witch twisted her body to the side and reached out to
meet the assault at the wrist, but the princess's reflexes were as quick as
lightning. She circled the blade beneath Ruha's blocking arm and reversed it,
driving the tip toward her victim's heart as though she had been fighting
withjambiyas all her life. The witch saved herself only by falling to the floor
and madly flailing her feet in a desperate attempt to trip her attacker.

There was no need. Moving with a deliberate grace that appeared almost languid,
Hsieh slipped behind the princess. He clamped one hand over the wrist of Wei
Dao's weapon hand, then shot his other forearm around her throat and brought it
up under herjawline so hard her feet came off the ground.

Wei Dao's eyes bulged and her tongue appeared between her lips. She flung her
head back in an attempt to smash her captor's nose, but Hsieh simply tipped his
face out of the way. The princess made a brief, rasping attempt to breathe, but
the veins in her neck were being pinched shut by the mandarin's arm, causing her
head to run out of blood long before her lungs ran out of air. Her face turned a
shocking shade of purple-gray, and the Jam biya slipped from her hand. Her
eyes rolled back in their

sockets; then she stopped struggling and began to spasm.

Hsieh dropped her at a guard's feet. "Greatly unexpected. I am most curious to
see what we find in Lady
Feng's chamber."

Ruha could not take her eyes off Wei Dao's unconscious form. During all her
training with the Harpers, she had never seen a woman move with such deadly
speed and grace. Had she not seen the ease with which Hsieh disabled her, the
witch would not have believed anyone—especially a one-eyed man of Hsieh's
age—could move more swiftly.

"Minister Hsieh, I thank you for my life," Ruha said.
"You are a man of many hidden talents."

The mandarin smiled. "In Shou Lung, we long ago learn wisdom of being better
warriors than those who guard us." He turned to Yu Po and gestured at Wei Dao.
"Bind princess well and take her to apartment. Inspect her chambers to see that
she is… safe."

Yu Po bowed, then began issuing orders in Shou. As
Hsieh's guards scurried into action, the mandarin selected a half-dozen men to
accompany him, then led the way up an immense staircase to the second story,
where he astonished the palace sentries by allowing
Ruha to use her wind magic to open the door to the Third
Virtuous Concubine's apartment. The minister scowled at the macabre frescoes
that decorated Lady Feng's antechamber, then followed the witch through the
dressing closet into the bedchamber.

Ruha went straight to the corner and pulled Lady
Feng's writing desk from the wall. When she did not hear any scratching or
whining on the other side of the secret door, she began to fear that Wei Dao had
done something with Chalk Ears. The witch took a deep breath and, wondering
how Hsieh would react if it turned out she could prove neither Lady Feng's
indiscretion nor her abduction, pushed open the hidden panel.

The secret chamber looked as though a whirlwind had erupted inside. The
worktable in the center of the room


had been swept clean of its cauldrons and balances, which now sat upon the
floor amid a knee-deep jumble of books and broken glass. Heaps of severed bat
wings, blackened fingernails, and silk-wrapped spider eggs were scattered
everywhere, often coated by stripes ofrainbowhued dusts and powders. One of
the cabinets had even been pulled over and now lay broken into two splintered
pieces.

Save for a sleeping cushion, sandbox, and two silver bowls containing untouched
supplies of food and water, there was no sign of Chalk Ears. Although the jagged
shards of glass had been broken out of the window through which Ruha had
escaped, the casement itself remained open and not repaired.

"Is this what you bring me to see?" Hsieh asked.

"No. What I brought you to see is gone."

Ruha could almost see what had happened. After she jumped through the window,
Wei Dao, or some other guards, had tried to capture Chalk Ears. The familiar had
panicked, and the ensuing struggle had destroyed
Lady Feng's laboratory. In the end, the little creature had escaped through the
broken window, and the princess had elected to leave it open in the hope that
the beast would return.

The witch picked her way across the room. "I had hoped to show you Lady Feng's
familiar." She picked up the red sleeping cushion. "But I fear Chalk Ears has
fled."

"Chalk Ears? Perhaps you mean Winter Blossom?"

Ruha held her hands about a foot apart. "It was a little creature that could
have been a cross between a monkey and a raccoon. I found it here when I—" The
witch stopped short of admitting what she had been doing in Lady Feng's
chambers. "It looked like it had not eaten for a week."

"He," Hsieh corrected. The mandarin waded into the room and kneeled beside the
familiar's lair. "Winter Blossom is male lemur—though I think Eye Biter is
better name."

The VeUed Dragon

Ruha caught herself staring at Hsieh's silken eye patch and looked away. "Winter
Blossom is more than a pet to Lady Feng. Had she departed the Ginger Palace
willingly, I doubt she would have left him behind."

Hsieh sighed heavily. "But familiar is not here."

The mandarin waved his guards into the room, and
Ruha's mouth went dry. She glanced out the empty window pane, already
summoning to mind the same wind spell she had used to escape Wei Dao, then
swallowed her fear and told herself not to panic. The guards arrived and arrayed
themselves around Hsieh, at the same time blocking the witch's path through the
window.

Ruha squatted beside Winter Blossom's silver bowls and waved her hand over the
contents. "The familiar escaped after Lady Feng's departure, or these would not
be full. Wei Dao hopes to lure him back."

Hsieh met Ruha's gaze. "I do not doubt what you say. If
Lady Feng takes Winter Blossom, she takes his bed." He picked up the lemur's
sleeping cushion, then tossed it to a guard. "So, where is Lady Feng, and why
does she not take familiar?"

"I told you—she was abducted."

"So you do, but I think you are lying. It is so much better if she takes
lover." Hsieh shook his head in disappointment, then gave Ruha a stern glance.
"Perhaps you tell me what you are doing in Ginger Palace—and no lies.
Today, I grow impatient with lies."

When Ruha paused to consider how much she should say, the mandarin rose. "Please
do not refuse." He glanced at two guards, who took Ruha by the arms and jerked
her to her feet. "Truth potions are most damaging to mind, and you cannot
escape."

"It was not my intention to try to escape—and let us both hope that does not
become necessary." Ruha fixed an icy glare on Hsieh and remained silent. When he
finally waved his guards off, she began, "Not long ago, a staff of some
sentimental value was stolen from the Lady Yanseldara . . ."


The witch told Hsieh of how someone was using the staff to steal Yanseldara's
spirit, and ofVaerana's belief that Lady Feng was responsible, and of her own
effort to recover the staff from the Ginger Palace, and, finally, of her
subsequent discovery of the Third Virtuous Concubine's abduction. The mandarin
listened patiently and closely. He did not interrupt, even when she told him of
Tang's involvement in the Cult of the Dragon and how the prince had attempted to
conceal his mother's kidnapping.

When Ruha finished, the mandarin contemplated her account in silence for many
moments, then raised his hand and held up three splayed fingers. "I have ques
tions. Where is Prince Tang now?"

"He seems to have decided that the only way to redeem himself is to personally
rescue his mother." Ruha did not say in whose eyes the prince wished to redeem
himself.
The less Hsieh knew about the prince's attraction to her, the better. "I believe
he has taken a company of guards and gone to attempt that."

Hsieh winced, but nodded and folded down one of his fingers. "Second question.
Theft of spirit takes no more than two or three days. Why has Lady Feng not fin
ished?"

"I am not certain. But I do know Prince Tang was awaiting the fresh ylang
blossoms aboard the Ginger
Lady." When the mandarin furrowed his brow, Ruha hastened to add, "The
kidnapper believes he is in love with
Yanseldara. Perhaps they are for a love potion?"

Hsieh shook his head. "Then why does he steal spirit?
Only reason to use love potion on spirit is to bind it to another spirit, for
long journey through Ten Courts of
Afterlife."

A feeling of nausea crept over Ruha. "The thief is…
he is not living. He is one of the undead."

An expression of pity passed over Hsieh's face, and he folded down his second
finger. "Final question. Who is kidnapper?"



This was the question Ruha had been dreading. She had omitted any mention of
Cypress's identity, fearing that the mandarin would decide it was safer for Lady
Feng to cooperate with the dragon than to help Vaerana save Yanseldara.
Nevertheless, the witch had no choice except to hope she could persuade Hsieh to
ally with her, for it was growing clearer all the time that she did not
understand enough about Lady Feng's magic to save

Yanseldara.

"Who take Lady Feng?" Hsieh demanded.
Ruha swallowed, then said, "The same barbarian who
tried to assassinate you."

Hsieh frowned at her. "No one tries to kill me."
Ruha nodded. "On the Ginger Lady. The dragon."
"You are greatly mistaken." Hsieh's rebuke was both confident and gentle.
"Dragon is after gold and jewels—"

"And you," Ruha replied. "His name is Cypress, and he is the leader of the Cult
of the Dragon. He fears you have come to replace Tang and stop the palace's
trade in poisons, and so he tried to kill you."

"That is most impossible." Hsieh shook his head stubbornly. "I send messenger
with word of my visit only one day before dragon attack. Because I travel with
only light bodyguard, I instruct Prince and Princess to tell no one of my
journey—unless they tell Lady Feng?"

Ruha shook her head. "I overheard them say Lady
Feng was abducted before your message arrived."

"Then dragon cannot know I am coming. Who tell
him?"
That was when Yu Po appeared at the door. "Esteemed

Minister, I beg permission to report."

Hsieh frowned and started to hold him off, but Ruha, who needed time to think,
said, "Yu Po is not interrupting. Let him speak."

Hsieh nodded to his adjutant, who quickly picked his way across the debris and
bowed. "Princess Wei Dao is most comfortable in her apartment," Yu Po reported.
"As
I was inspecting her chambers to be certain of her safety,



I find this."

The adjutant opened his hand, revealing the exotic
Calimshan gold that Tombor had put into Ruha's coffer to impress Wei Dao.

Hsieh studied the coin, then scowled at his adjutant.
"Wei Dao is Princess, Yu Po. Do you expect to find no gold in her chamber?"

"Not gold like this."

Yu Po pinched the edges of the coin with both hands and pulled. The coin came
apart, revealing a tiny compartment where a small paper message might be con
cealed.

Hsieh took the two halves from his adjutant. "Most ingenious. Do you find what
is inside?"

"No," Yu Po admitted.

"But I know who sent it to her," Ruha said. "And if I
am correct, Esteemed Mandarin, I also know who told
Cypress you were aboard the Ginger Lady."

"Wei Dao?" Hsieh asked.

"That coin was given to me by someone who promised it would win the princess's
hospitality," Ruha said. "It did."

"How come Yu Po finds it in her chamber?"

"I saw her sneak it from my gold coffer. The person who gave it to me said the
princess had a fondness for foreign coins," Ruha explained. "Now I think it
contained a message from a spy in Moonstorm House, warning Wei
Dao of my identity. The princess has been most insistent about wishing to kill
me—regardless of Prince Tang's commands to the contrary."

Hsieh pushed the two halves of the coin together and folded it into his palm,
then waved the witch toward the door. "It seems our mutual problem is solved,
does it not,
Lady Ruha?"

Ruha did not move. "No. How could it be?"

"If dragon kidnaps Lady Feng, then kidnapper is no threat."

The witch was confused by the mandarin's misunder-



standing—until she recalled that Hsieh had seen her destroy Cypress on the
Dragonmere. She had said nothing about the dragon taking another body, and
Ruha certainly saw no reason to broach the subject now.

"Do you not understand, Lady Ruha?" Hsieh asked.
"We have only to locate dragon's lair; then we find both
Lady Feng and Yanseldara's stolen staff."

"Of course!" Ruha did her best to sound astonished.
"And if you will me tell more about these ylang blossoms, perhaps I know someone
who can be tricked into leading us to the lair."

Eleven

Tang's punt came to another fork in the slough. His boatpushers jammed their
poles into the black water, the butts angled forward to halt the little dugout
while he guessed at the way to
Cypress's lair. Behind him arose a gentle sloshing as his men struggled to stop
their heavy log rafts. Save for the unremitting hum ofmosquitos, no other sound
broke the silence of the swamp. The evening light lay upon the glassy waters as
sinuous and wispy as smoke, yielding no hint of the sun's location. Along the
banks of the channels rose tangled webs of prop roots, supporting thickets of
vine-choked bog cane as impenetrable to the eye as walls of stone. Even the sky
itself was hidden from view, concealed behind a murky canopy of moss-draped
boughs.
Somewhere nearby loomed the Giant's Run Mountains, a chain of high peaks lying
half a day's canter southeast of the Ginger Palace, but Tang could not find the
way to their steep slopes. Though he had commanded his men to remain confident,
he could feel their trust ebbing with every minute he remained lost, and even he
was losing faith in his abilities. The swamp was so small that it had no
name—indeed, few outside the Cult of the
Dragon knew it existed at all—and twice the prince had come to Lair here with
fellow cult members. It seemed impossible that its meager maze of waterways
should





disorient him or anyone else, yet Tang had been trying to locate Cypress's
hole for more than two hours.

The punt rocked beneath the prince's feet. He glanced back to see the commander
of the palace garrison, General Fui D'hang, stepping into the dugout from a
wagonsized raft of lashed logs. A squat, flat-cheeked man with an unwavering
scowl and granite eyes, he wore a helmet of silver-trimmed brass and an
oversized battle tunic over leather armor. Most of the men behind him were
dressed in a similar manner, save their helmets were steel with brass trim.

The general bowed. "May it please the Prince to hear
me."

As with all Fui said, the statement was a command,
not a request. Prince Tang nodded, but looked away to emphasize that he would
not allow the general to bully
him.

"Night falls soon, and men are uneasy at being lost—"

"Do I say we are lost?" Tang whirled on the general so fast that, had his
boatpushers not had their poles planted on the bottom, the punt would have
capsized. "We are not lost. Dragon uses Invisible Art to confuse honorable sol
diers. They may eat another lasal leaf."

Fui did not turn to issue the command. "Since you are not lost, perhaps you
guide us to dry land. It is better to camp outside swamp."

"No. We must rescue Lady Feng tonight."

The general's eyes remained stony. "If we perish in dark—"

"Tonight."

Fui's Ups tightened. "Surely, Wise Prince knows it is inauspicious to attack
eminent dragon at all, but to attack at night…"

"This dragon is different!" snapped Tang. "Cypress does not have favor of
Celestial Bureaucracy!"

"Perhaps Wise Prince explains why it takes so long to reach dragon's palace?"
Fui insisted. "This swamp is size of peasant village. By now, we should find
dragon's home


through tenacity alone."

"It is question of patience, not 'finding!' " Prince Tang turned away from
General Fui, silently cursing the absence of a wu-jen. A little magic would go
far toward helping him find his goal. "Tell men to be ready. Not far now!"

Selecting a direction at random, the prince pointed down the fork on the right.
General Fui barely had time to leap back to his own raft before Tang's
boatpushers guided the punt into the channel. As they traveled down the curving
slough, the mosquito hum became a maddening drone. Though the Shou berry juice
the prince had rubbed into his flesh protected him from bites, clouds of the
insects dragged across his skin like chiffon.

Tang began to sense an enormous, dark presence ahead. The canopy arched higher
above the water, and the swamp grew steadily murkier and more forlorn. The
beards of moss vanished from the branches alongside the passage, replaced by the
curtainlike webs of brilliantly striped spiders with abdomens as large as a
man's fist.
Ahead of the punt, dark chevrons appeared in the water as startled snakes swam
for cover. The ends of submerged logs sprouted eyes and watched the flotilla
pass.
A half-remembered murmur echoed through the trees from somewhere ahead: the purl
of water trickling down some steep slope.

Tang felt butterflies fluttering in his stomach and beads of sweat sliding down
his brow. He withdrew a handful oflasal leaves from a basket in the bottom of
the dugout and distributed them among his boatpushers, then placed two into his
own mouth and chewed. As the protective fog arose inside his head, he began to
regard the impending battle with increasing giddiness. Soon, he would have
vengeance on his enemy. After his men destroyed Cypress's new body, he himself
would find and smash the spirit gem. Then, when Yen-Wang-Yeh's servants came
to drag Cypress's wayward spirit down to the
Ten Courts of the Afterlife, Tang would recount all the

dragon's crimes against himself and Shou Lung, thus insuring a stern verdict
that would condemn his foe to ten thousand centuries of torment in the
Eighteenth

Hell.

The rancid stench of rotting fish began to waft through the air. The channel
widened into a broad basin of black water strewn with mats of bog scum and
studded by the naked gray trunks of a bald cypress stand. On the far side of the
pool, a steep, green-blanketed scarp rose abruptly from the murky water and
disappeared above the swamp's gloomy canopy. Down the face of this slope snaked
a tiny ribbon of silver water, the same small brook casting its purl throughout
the slough. To the left of the stream, barely visible through the whirling
clouds of mosquitos, was a huge, half-submerged grotto, the moss curtain that
dangled over its mouth tattered and frayed by the constant passage of some huge
body.

Tang ordered his boatpushers to stop. Though the area had been darker and more
crowded on the two occasions the prince had visited it before, he recognized it
instantly.
Just outside the cavern lay a toppled cypress where the dragon roosted during
Lair, with the entire cult arrayed before him upon the same rafts now occupied
by General
Fui and his men. Rising from the waters around the perch were heaps of large
fish skeletons, some with bits of gray, gritty hide still clinging to the thick
bones, and hanging in the limbs of nearby trees were hundreds of long-toothed
jaws.

Tang was most distressed to see that Cypress had already devoured so many
sharks. From what the prince had learned during his brief association with the
cult, when a dracolich's body was destroyed, he lost the ability to speak, cast
magic spells, and use his terrible breath weapon. Unfortunately, he could regain
those capabilities by consuming a mere tenth of his previous body, which he
could always locate via a strange mystical bond—even if the corpse had been
burned, shredded, or eaten. Judging by the number of skeletons lying in the
water, Cypress


could not be far from a full recovery.

General Fui's raft pulled alongside the punt, and Tang pointed at the cavern.
"That is dragon's palace." The prince allowed himself the pleasure of a touch of
sarcasm at the term 'palace.' "Men a^e ready?"

The general glanced at the four rafts behind his, each bearing fifteen anxious
warriors, and flashed a hand signal. A gentle clatter rustled over the pond as
his men reached for their halberds and pushed lasal leaves into their mouths.
Fui watched a moment, then slipped a leaf between his own lips and nodded.

Tang drew his sword, then looked back to the cave and waited for General Fui to
lead the soldiers forward
Thanks to his lasal-induced daze, the prince realized he could actually see the
murk gathering over the swamp. It looked like a thick, oily smoke seeping from
the fetid depths of Cypress's lair, where the dragon rested upon his bed of
gold, dreaming ofYanseldara and filling the air with the dank gloom of his
wicked obsession.

The prince's thoughts turned to his mother, and he found himself wondering what
effect the unnatural murk would have on her. If the fumes darkened her fair
skin, she would never forgive—most cursed lasal! That was the trouble with it;
the user found it difficult to keep his mind focused on the task at hand, and he
sometimes found his head filled with ridiculous ideas.

Noting that Fui still had not given the order to advance, Prince Tang looked to
his general. "Why do you wait?" He waved his sword at the cavern. "Go kill
dragon!"

Fui's head slowly turned toward Tang's punt. The general's pupils were nearly
as large as his irises, and a blank, almost muddled expression had fallen over
his normally resolute face.

"You do not lead us into cavern, Brave Prince?"

"Me?" Tang looked at the sword in his hand and understood the reason for the
general's confusion. "I cannot lead way into danger. I am Prince!"


"That is what I try to say in Ginger Palace." Under the lasal's influence, Fui
spoke more freely than he would have otherwise. "Do I not suggest it is foolish
for you to take field? Do I not hint that your inadequate preparations oblige
men to take extra risks to protect you?"

The lasal haze inside Tang's mind began to darken and churn. "I am Prince!
Soldiers die at my will!"

"True, but Honorable Prince does not waste their lives!" the general spat. "If
you desire Lady Pong's rescue, you must stand aside and let someone who knows—"

A chorus of snickers filled the air behind Fui. The general stopped speaking
in midsentence, and his widening eyes betrayed his astonishment at the words
coming from his mouth. He dropped to his knees and kowtowed on the raft,
pressing his forehead down so close to the edge that his silver-trimmed helmet
fell off and slipped beneath the inky waters.

"Mighty Prince, I do not know these words! They are not my own!"

Tang hardly heard the apology. The lasal clouds inside his mind had worked
themselves into a storm, and he could think of nothing but his fury.

"Words belong to him who speaks them." Tang glanced at the rafts behind Fui,
where more than seventy soldiers were studying the swamp's gloomy canopy and
biting their cheeks to keep from laughing. Bolts of lightning began to flash
inside the prince's head. "Lasal loosens tongue. It cannot change secret
thoughts of any man."

"Merciful Prince, I command garrison of Ginger Palace since it is built, and
before that I humbly serve in personal guard of Lady Feng. Please to allow me
honor of dying in battle." Fui lifted his head and dared to meet
Tang's eyes. "Let me lead soldiers into dragon's palace."

"I myself lead way into lair." Tang glared at his general until the last soldier
no longer found it necessary to bite his cheeks; then he pronounced Fui's
sentence: "Shou general must respect master with heart as well as tongue, so
that he does not forget himself and make men


laugh at Worthy Prince. To fail in this is treason."

Fui's face went as stiff as a mask. He whispered a prayer, beseeching his
ancestors to find a place for him in the Celestial Bureaucracy, then touched his
brow to the log. "I am ready."

Tang looked past Fui to Yuan Ti, the moon-faced commander of the sentries who
protected his lizard park.
Since the young officer had already faced the dragon and lived, General Fui had
selected him as second in command for this mission.

Yuan swallowed and reached for his sword, but his hand began to tremble, and he
did not draw the weapon.
The youth clenched his teeth as though fighting a wave of nausea, and tears
welled in his eyes.

Tang scowled at the hesitation. "Why do you delay?
Punish General Fui's insolence!"

Yuan managed to pull his sword halfway from its sheath, then turned away
sobbing. The youth's profile accentuated his flat cheeks, and it was then Tang
realized the boy's identity. The fury faded from the lasal induced storm
inside the prince's head, and the tempest became instead a drizzle that clouded
his thoughts with cold, sick regret. It was not uncommon for Shou generals to
make places for their sons in their own commands, but how was Tang to know the
youth's identity? A Shou prince did not trouble himself with the domestic lives
of his inferiors. He could hardly be expected to know every son that his
officers brought to the Ginger Palace.

Tang allowed General Fui's boy to weep, grateful for a few moments to struggle
with this new dilemma. As much as he disliked the idea of ordering a son to slay
hi?
own father, he could hardly retract the command now.
The men had already come close to treason when they laughed at him earlier; to
tolerate any further insubordination would only convince them that he was a
weak and inept leader. Yuan would have to obey the command. If there was another
way to solve the problem, the prince could not see it through the lasal haze.


In a gentle but loud voice. Tang said, "You are a Shou soldier. You must do as I
order."

The youth choked back his sobs and turned to face
Tang. "Merciful Prince, the lasal leaves—"

General Fui raised his head. "Silence, Yuan!" His voice had assumed the hard
edge of command. "Do not dishonor our ancestors by arguing with your Prince!"

The general pressed his brow to the logs again. The thought flashed through
Tang's mind that there must be a way to show mercy without showing weakness, but
it was chased into the lasal haze by a great cry from Yuan's mouth. In a motion
too fast to see, the youth unsheathed his sword and brought the blade down on
his father's neck. There was a wet crack, and Fui's head toppled off the raft
into the swamp. The general's body shuddered once, then went limp and slipped
out of its kowtow, slowly stretching forward to push its headless shoulders into
the dark pool.

Fui's head rolled in the water, bringing his granite eyes around to stare
vacantly upward. Tang's stomach began to feel queasy, but he clenched his teeth
against the feeling and forced himself not to look away. The whole point of the
punishment had been to show his soldiers that he was a strong leader, and he
would not accomplish that by allowing the gaze of a dead man to intimidate him.

Yuan ripped the front off his silken battle tunic and used it to dab his
father's blood off the blade. When he finished, he sheathed his sword, then
carefully folded the cloth and slipped it beneath his leather corselet.

The adjutant bowed to Tang, his eyes now as hard as his father's. "I obey your
command. My Prince."

Tang honored the youth by returning his bow. "The
Minister of War shall—" The prince had to interrupt himself to take a deep
breath and regain control of his churning stomach. "He shall hear of your
dedication to duty."

Yuan's eyes showed no sign of softening, but they did shift away from the
prince's face toward the water, where


a dozen shapes were rapidly drifting toward General
Fui's body. At first. Tang took the forms for floating logs
Then he noticed the eyes and nostrils protruding above the bog scum, and also
the powerful tails snaking back and forth behind their bodies.

The first beast slid between the prince's dugout and
Yuan's raft. Silently, it took Fui's head into its jaws and slid beneath the
dark water, vanishing from sight almost before Tang realized he was looking at
an alligator.

Yuan reached down to pull the rest of his father's body back onto the raft, then
almost lost a hand as another of the monsters latched on to the corpse's
shoulder. The cadaver slid off the logs and disappeared beneath the surface in a
quick swirl. A second creature, easily as long as Tang's dugout, dove after the
body-stealer, and the water erupted into a bloody, churning froth as the two
animals tore the cadaver to pieces.

Tang finally lost control of his rebellious stomach and turned away while it
purged itself—then nearly lost his head as a pair of tooth-filled jaws rose from
the water tr snap at his face. He slashed at it ineffectually with the sword in
his hand, and his boatpushers stepped over to hold the thing at bay while he
finished retching. Behind the prince sounded a startled scream, followed by a
loud splash and the brief gurgle of a man's voice.

An astonished murmur rustled through the swamp;
then half the soldiers in the company cried out in fear
The rippling siffle of halberds slashing water filled the air. Several men fell
into the pond and shrieked as they were dragged beneath the surface.

When Tang's stomach finally finished with him, he wiped his mouth on a
boatpusher's sleeve, then turned to see his entire company of soldiers besieged
by alligators.
The men were standing back-to-back in the center of all five rafts, thrusting
the tips of their long halberds at the throng of circling alligators—several of
which looked longer than the vessels themselves. Many of the logs were smeared
with blood, while the water was littered

with broken halberd shafts, ribbons of shredded silk, and alligators writhing
in pain.

As Tang watched, a swimming alligator whipped its body around, driving its head
and forequarters onto a raft. The attack was met by a flurry of driving
halberds, most of which pierced the beast's armored hide and sank to a depth of
several inches. The monster clutched at the logs with the claws of its stubby
forelegs and dragged itself forward. The men braced themselves, trying to shove
their blades deeper into their attacker's flesh.

The creature ignored the assault and continued to claw its way onto the raft.
One warrior lost his footing and slid across the raft, where another alligator
seized his ankle and dragged him, screaming, into the scumcovered waters.
Several others, finding their halberds'
damp shafts slipping backward through their grasp, dropped their polearms to
reach for their swords. Only one man could drive his weapon deep enough to cause
the behemoth any injury. The alligator simply snapped its head to one side and
jerked the weapon out of the soldier's hands, then retreated into the water.

Tang peered over the side of his dugout and saw several alligators floating
alongside, their ravenous gazes searching for something to snatch. Fortunately,
the punt's sides were high enough to conceal his vulnerable legs, or one of the
beasts would certainly have pulled him into the swamp by now. As it was, he took
the precaution of raising his arms above his chest and ordering his boat
pushers to do the same, lest one of the creatures attempt to snatch a dangling
hand and capsize the punt.

"Perhaps Wise Prince cares to give order?"

Yuan stood in the center of his own blood-streaked raft, apparently oblivious to
the screams of the legless man at his feet. The young officer was watching Tang
with what could only be called a look of impertinent impatience, as though he
understood exactly what needed to be done and knew his commander for too much of
a fool to see it.



Tang scowled in thought, determined not to lose an^
more face by asking Yuan's advice. The prince could not order an advance without
forcing the men to step within reach of the alligators' snapping jaws, but
neither did he see any sense in remaining where they were and allowing the
monsters to pluck them off the rafts one-by-one.
What they needed was magic. A wu-jen could drive the beasts away, so his
soldiers could get on with the important business of finding and slaying the
dragon.

An angry light flared in Yuan's eyes. "When enemy attacks, it is customary for
commander to issue order."

"Alligators are not enemy!" Tang snapped, waving his sword at the beasts between
their vessels. "They are stupid animals."

A loud thump sounded in the bottom of Tang's dugout.
He looked down to see a scaly brown cord gathering itself into a coil. Whether
because of the lasal haze in his mind or the shock of having the thing drop into
his boat, the prince did not recognize the writhing tendril until it showed the
pink lining of its mouth. Tang calmly brought his sword down, catching the snake
behind the head.

The prince did not enjoy snakes as much as he did lizards, but he knew enough
about the species to recognize the white-mouthed viper as more of a swimmer
than a tree climber. He scowled and looked up, then cried out in surprise as
three more dark, writhing ropes dropped out of the canopy overhead. One of the
snakes splashed into the water beside the dugout, where it was promptly snapped
up by an alligator, but the other two plopped into the bottom of the punt.

Almost before he realized it, Tang's sword had lashed out to sever the head from
one serpent. The other recovered from its fall quickly enough to bury its
fangs into a boatpusher's leg. Unlike the other two snakes, this one was gray,
with a black diamond pattern and rattles on its tail. The victim screeched and
reached for his dagger.
Before the man could draw his weapon, Tang grasped the viper behind its head and
yanked it free. He tossed the

serpent into the water, where a ravenous alligator quickly avenged its attack
on the prince's servant.

The snake bite bled profusely, instantly coating the boatpusher's foot in sticky
red syrup. The man opened his mouth to thank Tang, then cried out and dropped
into the bottom of the punt. He clutched his leg and began to squirm, causing
the dugout to rock dangerously.

"Stop, fool!" Tang ordered. By the panicked cries echoing across the pond, the
prince knew that his boatpusher was not the only soldier to suffer a snake bite.
"Do you mean to capsize us?"

The man looked up. "What does it matter? I die anyway We all die!"

Tang slapped the man. "Poison makes bite bleed and hurt, but it does not
kill—unless you spill us into swamp with alligators!" Though he was not
particularly fond of serpents, the prince's poison trade had taught him more
than a little about their venom. "Now stand up and return to duty."

Tang glanced up and saw another ropy form dropping out of the gloomy boughs
overhead. He caught this snake on his sword and flicked it away, then quickly
returned his eyes to the canopy. Though it was difficult to see into the murk
above, it seemed to him that the branches were alive with slinking, writhing
forms, all working their way into positions over his small flotilla of rafts.
The behavior seemed most unnatural for snakes, which were usually more anxious
to avoid trouble than start it.

Tang hazarded a glance at the rafts and was horrified to see his soldiers in a
panic. They were lying prone on the logs, groaning over their bleeding bites and
begging their ancestors for help, or they were dancing madly about on the logs,
hacking at serpents and trying to stay beyond the reach of the voracious
alligators. Many had failed already. The water was thick with severed limbs and
shredded leather corselets, and some of the behemoths in the water were even
beginning to drift away, each clutching a drowned man in its crooked jaws.


"This is dragon's doing!" Tang yelled. "He fears to show himself!"

Another pair of snakes dropped into his dugout. He dispatched one, while the
bitten boatpusher used his pole to fling the other to the alligators.

"Take up poles and go to cavern!" the prince commanded. "Do not fear snakes!
If you are bitten, you can still fight."

Incredibly, the soldiers ignored their attackers and obeyed. The alligators
continued to pull men into the water, and the snakes continued to rain down on
their heads, but the rafts started to drift forward. Now that the company had
orders, the entire troop was focused on its goal, and it did not seem to matter
how many ofthe>r comrades fell. Thinking that perhaps he had a natur il aptitude
for military leadership, Prince Tang flicki < another serpent into the water and
commanded his boc.'pushers forward, then turned to face the cavern.

He found Cypress roosting on the toppled tree outs-He the cavern. The dragon
looked half-agam as large as he had in the spicehouse, with scales so dark they
seemed almost shadows in the murky swamp light. Perched beside Cypress were a
pair of small wyverns that had been fluttering about the swamp during the
prince's earlier visits. The creatures looked like huge iguanas, save that
their thick tails ended in needle-sharp barbs and they had wings instead of
forelegs.

Cypress's empty eye sockets swung toward the prince
Am I to assume you don't have the ylang oil?

Tang's knees nearly buckled. His grip grew so we A
that he dropped his sword into the bottom of the boat.

"I have come for Lady Feng. Then we talk about oil."

There is nothing to talk about. Without the oil, you will find only death.

"I prefer that fate to disgrace of leaving venerable mother with you."

Tang retrieved his weapon, quietly relieved that
Cypress had not yet recovered his voice. Without his

breath weapon and magic spells, the dragon would not prove so difficult to
defeat. The prince glanced over his shoulder, and when he saw the remains of his
small company still behind him, he raised his sword. His hand was trembling so
badly that the blade wobbled like the mast of a tempest-tossed caravel, but he
did not let that stop him from pointing it at Cypress.

"There is enemy! Do not be frightened. He cannot spray you with acid, and he
cannot hurt you with magic!"

Tang's soldiers raised their spears and cheered bravely, then allowed their
rafts to drift to a stop and glowered at the dracolich. Cypress opened his
muzzle slightly, returning the troop's glare with a mocking, yellow-toothed
grin.
The two wyverns licked their chops, and the alligators pulled two more men into
the water.

The prince scowled at his men, unable to understand why they had stopped
advancing. "Attack!"

"In what manner, Honorable Prince?" The question came from Yuan, who stood on
the raft closest to Tang's dugout.

The order seemed clear enough to the prince. "Attack with swords and halberds,
of course!"

Yuan allowed himself the briefest shake of his head, then turned to the troops.
"Number One Raft, assault to right. Number Two Raft to center. Number Three to
left, and others remain in reserve." When the men began to maneuver as ordered,
the adjutant bowed to Tang. "Perhaps Brave Prince wishes to move to safer
position behind reserves?"

Tang almost said yes, then remembered how his men had struggled to hide their
laughter during General Fui's u-nfortunate slip of tongue. "No. I lead attack,
as I say earlier."

Tang ordered his punt forward and was surprised by the strength of the fear that
boiled up inside him. It suffused his entire being, filling him with a hot,
queasy sensation as foul as bile. He felt flushed and dizzy and achy, as
though he were physically ill, and it seemed that his

whole body had suddenly gone weak. Cypress remained on his roost, flanked by
his two wyverns and calmly awaiting the battle, his empty eye sockets never
straying from the prince's dugout.

Tang chewed another lasal leaf, hoping that the sickening dread he felt was
the result of a mind attack and not his own weak constitution. The haze inside
his mind grew thicker, but his fear did not subside.

Cypress allowed the prince's dugout to advance almost into halberd-hurling
range, then nudged the two wyverns. The beasts folded their wings and tipped
forward, slipping into the swamp as quietly as alligators
They dove beneath the surface, then swam toward Tang's boat, the bristling
crests along their spines slicing through the scummy water like shark fins.

Tang dropped his sword and grabbed a boatpusher's halberd, then willed his heavy
legs to carry him to the front of the punt. He braced his feet against the walls
and tried to ignore the voice calling through the lasal haze inside his head,
urging him to remember himsel*
and take his proper place behind the reserves. The prince raised his halberd and
watched the wyverns approach
They came more or less straight on, their spine crests cutting through the water
to each side of the dugout. He angled his weapon to the right and thrust the
blade into the water, aiming for the space between the creature's shoulder
blades.

The halberd bit deep into the wyvem's thick hide and nearly jumped from Tang's
hands. An unexpected scream of wild, brutal exhilaration burst from the prince's
lips.
He clamped down on the weapon's shaft and dropped into a squat, both to drive
the blade deeper and to keep from being jerked out of the dugout. The creature's
head erupted from the water, filling the swamp with a loud, sizzling hiss.

Tang jerked his halberd free and swung the blade, axelike, at the creature's
head. The beast retracted its sinuous neck. Instead of counterstriking, it
hissed again,

wagging a forked tongue as long as a pennon flag.

Tang had seen whiptail lizards wag their tongues at prey often enough to know
what was coming next. He dove into the bottom of the dugout and heard the
wyvern's barbed tail swishing over his back. The sound ended in a slurpy thud,
then a boatpusher—the snakebitten one, judging by his delirious
voice—screamed.

With a trembling hand, the prince grabbed his sword, dropped it, grabbed it
again, and came up swinging in time to see the wyvem's tail jerk his boatpusher
from the punt. The fellow landed facedown and did not move. So deadly and quick
was the wyvern's poison that the man puffed up before Tang's eyes. The flesh on
his hands and neck grew black and slimy, while the red stain blossoming around
the man's head suggested his nose was bleeding profusely.

The wyvern flicked its victim off its tail, then dove back beneath the water and
swam toward Number Three
Raft. Tang remembered the other beast and spun around, half-expecting to feel a
tail barb piercing his own flesh.
He found only an empty dugout, with a forsaken halberd and a pool of black slime
to mark where the second boatpusher had been standing a moment before.

Tang's earlier jubilation had vanished like smoke into fog; now he felt helpless
and frightened. If a halberd could barely scratch a wyvern, how would it pierce
a dragon's thick armor? He had been a fool to come into this swamp without a
wu-jen.

The men on Number Two and Number Three Rafts voiced their battle cries and
thrust their halberds into the swamp. A pair of tails lashed out of the water
almost as one, each driving a barb through a soldier's leather armor. Tang saw
scales rippling as the wyverns pumped their victims full of poison, then a
flurry of blades as his soldiers hacked at the beasts' sinuous tails.

In the next instant, the back end of Number Three
Raft rose on a wyvern's back. The creature's wings beat the swamp as it
struggled to raise the boat higher. Men


tumbled into the water, screaming and slashing at alligators. Finally, when
the raft had grown light enough, the wyvern twisted sideways and flipped it.

Number Two Raft suffered a similar fate; then the two creatures dove beneath the
surface and swam toward the rafts Yuan had held in reserve.

Tang grabbed a halberd and used it to push his punt after Number One Raft, which
had nearly reached
Cypress's roost. It was difficult to say whether the dragon was watching the
approaching vessel or not. He held his head turned to one side and slightly
cocked, so that one empty eye socket was turned toward the dark water and the
other on the murky canopy. His scaly lips were slightly curled, as though he
found the cacophony of howling voices a pleasant evening serenade.

Number One Raft scraped past a heap of shark skeletons and stopped beside
Cypress's roost, less than twenty paces from the dragon. Several men quickly
formed a wall at the front of the craft while their companions gathered behind
them.

Tang pushed harder, trying to catch up before they launched their attack. The
voice in his lasal-clouded head kept urging him to turn back. The closer he came
to his foe, the less he cared about the disrespect his men had shown him
earlier—or the shame he would bring upon himself by failing to rescue his
mother. Nevertheless, the prince continued forward, not because he cared about
his men or was suddenly determined to prove that he was no coward, but because
he knew that the only way to leave the swamp alive was to kill his foe.

Tang had almost caught Number One Raft when the men in the front hurled their
halberds like spears. As the shafts arced toward the dragon, half a dozen
soldiers leaped onto the toppled tree and rushed forward to attack. The
boatpushers again started to move their clumsy vessel forward.

Cypress calmly brought a wing around to shield himself from the flying
halberds. The steel blades pierced the

leathery scales easily enough, but lacked the force to drag the heavy shafts
through the tough hide and penetrate the dragon's body. One weapon splashed
into the swamp, but most simply lodged themselves in a wing and dangled there
like needles in an oxhide.

Cypress lowered his wing and swept the line of charging warriors off the
toppled tree, then hopped off his roost and landed in the middle of the raft.
The boat settled a few inches beneath the water, but did not sink, and its
occupants whirled on their foe in a flurry of flashing steel. Growling and
hissing like one of his wyverns, the dragon lashed out with tail and wings and
sent bodies splashing into the water on all sides.

Tang gave his punt another shove and stepped into the bow, praying his weak
knees would have enough strength to hold him up when he leaped onto Number One
Raft.
Before he arrived, Cypress raked his black talons down the length of the raft,
severing the lashings that held it together.

The logs rolled apart, plunging all who had been standing upon them into the
swamp. Tang's punt continued to glide forward, and somehow—perhaps because he
was too frightened to move—the prince found himself standing fast in the bow,
with a clear flank shot and
Cypress looking the other way. The prince clamped his arms around his halberd
and gathered his rubbery legs beneath him, determined that the dragon would not
shrug off this strike as easily as the wyvern had shrugged off his first.

Tang was staring at the scale through which he intended to drive his halberd, so
he did not see Cypress's wing sweeping toward him on the backswing. He simply
heard an earsplitting thump, then found himself sailing over the toppled tree
trunk with his gold-trimmed helmet flying in one direction and his weapon in
another. He splashed into the warm water, sank to the bottom, and nearly got
tangled in a bed of fish skeletons before he recovered his wits and kicked free.



His head ringing and his body aching. Tang broke the surface and peered over the
log. The bog scum had erupted into a pink-tinged froth, with the dragon stand
ing waist-deep in blood and shark skeletons, battering his foes with wings and
tail and calmly tearing their bodies apart with gore-dripping talons. The
prince's warriors could do little to defend themselves. The legs of most were
hopelessly tangled among the fish bones, and the rest could barely hold their
chins above the water, much less swing their heavy blades powerfully enough to
pierce
Cypress's thick scales.

The voice inside Tang's head shrieked through the lasal haze, reminding him that
he was a Shou prince and should have fled long ago. He managed to ignore it for
a short time, but when the alligators appeared at the fringe of the battle and
began to drag away the wounded, the voice began to sound wise. Tang pushed away
from the log and, moving very slowly to avoid attracting alligators, he
slipped beneath the surface and swam toward the mountain.

Twelve

A sliver of pearly light split the midnight gloom between the gate towers, and
Ruha realized the guards of Moonstorm House were opening the gates for her.
She lashed her mount with the ends other reins, urging the exhausted
Shou prancer into the ragged semblance of a gallop. The two packhorses behind
her snorted in protest, but had little trouble adjusting to the new pace. They
were both larger than the witch's mount and, loaded with four sacks of ylang
blossoms each, far less heavily burdened.




From behind Ruha came the clatter of firing crossbows, followed instantly by
the ringing echoes of iron bolts skipping across cobblestones. One of the
packhorses screamed, and the witch's prancer stumbled as the train slowed. She
twisted around and saw the last beast hobbling badly. Like the animal ahead of
it, its chest was covered in lather, and its eyes were bulging with fear and
exhaustion.

Thirty paces down the deserted street, two dozen of
Hsieh's guards lashed their mounts madly, making a last desperate effort to
catch Ruha. As planned, they were closing the distance and doing everything
possible to make it appear they truly wanted to succeed. The lead rider accepted
a loaded crossbow from the man at his flank, then raised the weapon and fired. A
dark streak


flashed between him and the hobbling horse. The beast screeched and would have
fallen had the other animals not dragged it along, stumbling and staggering.

Cursing her pursuers for heartless killers, Ruha blew a sharp breath in their
direction and uttered a simple wind spell. A howling gust tore down the street,
blasting the first three riders half out of their saddles. As they struggled to
regain their balance, they were overtaken by the galloping throng at their
backs; two more soldiers raised their crossbows. Hsieh had commanded his men to
make a convincing show of the chase, and Shou were nothing if not obedient.

A chorus of strumming bowstrings sounded from atop the gate towers. The leading
Shou riders sprouted arrows in their chests and fell from their wooden saddles.
The rest of Hsieh's men whipped their reins around, guiding their horses into a
sheltering alleyway.

Ruha's prancer clattered through the dark gateway of
Moonstorm House into a spacious, hexagonal courtyard of ornamental trees and
twining garden pathways. The witch reined in her mount, bringing the entire
train to a halt and drawing a relieved nicker from the wounded packhorse. The
enormous garden was enclosed by a milky wall, with slender, cone-roofed towers
standing at each of the six corners. The castle had no central keep, nor, as far
as the witch could tell, any sort of inner defensework at all.

Despite the excitement of the phony chase, Ruha found herself completely and
utterly exhausted by the long ride from the Ginger Palace. This was her second
night without sleep. She kept yawning behind her veil, and her eyes were
burning with the need to close. She braced her hands on her saddle pommel and
fought to clear her head; she could not allow herself to even think of resting,
not until she had laid her trap.

Captain Fowler rushed from a gate tower's narrow doorway, followed closely by
Vaerana Hawklyn, Tombor the Jolly, and Pierstar Hallowhand. Though the hour was

well past midnight, they were still dressed in jerkins, tunics, and trousers.
They had, no doubt, been up planning tomorrow's assault on the Ginger Palace.

Fowler stopped beside Ruha and took her mount's foam-covered reins. "Are you
well, Witch?" The half-ore scowled at the lather on his hand, then wiped it on
his pants. "And what have you done to this poor beast?"

"Galloped him all the way from the Ginger Palace, by the looks of it," said
Vaerana, joining them. She turned to
Pierstar. "You'd better have someone rouse John the farrier and his boys.
These horses need some attention."

Pierstar stopped beside the wounded beast and winced at the two bolts lodged in
its rump, then turned toward a tower in the back of the castle.

"I'll do it myself," he said. "And I'll send a patrol of
Maces after those riders. I doubt we'll catch them, but I
don't want them in the city. Those Shou can be sneaky."

Tombor the Jolly went to the first horse and stood on his toes so he could reach
the knots. "Perhaps we should unload. Since Ruha risked her life to bring us
this cargo,
I assume it is of some importance."

"It is." The witch glanced at the cleric just long enough to nod, then stifled a
yawn and dismounted. "It's the last ingredient the Cult of the Dragon needs to
steal Yanseldara's spirit—ylang blossoms. They arrived on the Ginger Lady
with Minister Hsieh."

"Then you've saved Yanseldara!" Fowler's outburst was as much question as
exclamation, but that did not stop him from folding Ruha into his arms. "Maybe
now you can get me my gold."

"Not so fast." Vaerana went to help Tombor unload the pack train. "As I
understand things, stopping the cult's not the same as saving Yanseldara."

"That is correct. I have bought us more time, but
Yanseldara is still in danger until we recover the staff."

Vaerana tossed a sack of ylang blossoms on the ground.
"I don't suppose you can tell us where it is?"

The witch shook her head. "I am sorry. Lady Feng's


familiar was gone. It was all I could do to return with the ylang blossoms."

Vaerana sighed wearily. "I guess I'll have to do this myself."

"I am sorry I failed you."

Vaerana shrugged. "I'm sure you did your best."

The Lady Constable probably did not mean to be insulting, but her patronizing
tone vexed Ruha and made the witch burn to expose Tombor's treachery. Unfortu
nately, vindication would have to wait. Until the cleric was gone, Ruha could
not tell Vaerana about his treachery, or about her plan to trick him into
leading them to
Cypress's lair.

"What are you planning to do?" Ruha tried to sound genuinely sorry for her
failure. Once she sprang her trap and exposed Tombor, it would be Vaerana's turn
to apologize. "Perhaps I can help?"

Vaerana rolled her eyes, but managed to make a civil reply. "Why don't you get
some rest? You look like you need it, and this is better done alone."

"Then you'll try to snatch a member of the cult?" asked
Fowler.

Vaerana nodded and reached across a horse to untie another sack of ylang
blossoms. "I know a couple of likely places to find one."

Tombor shook his head. "Even if you're lucky enough to catch someone who knows
where the lair is, he won't tell you. If you want to make him talk, take me
along."

"Sorry, Tombor. We'll be moving fast tonight." Vaerana patted the cleric's
stomach. "I don't think you can keep up."

"You'll have to torture them."

Vaerana nodded grimly. "I won't enjoy it."

Somehow, Ruha suspected the Lady Constable of being less than honest.

"Vaerana, before you go, we should talk." Ruha could hardly explain why in front
of Tombor, but the last thing she wanted was for Vaerana to leave Moonstorm
House.


"I should tell you of some other things I learned in the
Ginger Palace."

"Then talk." Vaerana continued to help Tombor unload.
"I don't have all night."

Ruha forced herself not to look in Tombor's direction.
"First, Cypress is back."

Vaerana's jaw fell, and she let a sack of blossoms slip from her grasp.

"I saw him in the spicehouse," Ruha explained. "He was smaller than the first
time I saw him. He could not speak or use his magic, but it was definitely
Cypress. By kidnapping his cult members, you may be drawing his attention to
you."

Vaerana turned back to the pack train. "Better to face him in Elversult than in
his lair." There was not much conviction in her voice. "What else?"

"Cypress is not stealing Yanseldara's spirit so his cult can control Elversult."
Ruha was frantically trying to think of something that would keep the Lady
Constable inside Moonstorm House without arousing Tombor's suspicions. "The
dragon wants her spirit for himself."

"For himself?" Vaerana echoed.

Ruha nodded. "I think Cypress is in love with Yanseldara, or believes he is."

Tombor raised his brow. "You seem to have learned quite a lot during your
visit!"

Behind her veil, Ruha bit her lip and wondered if she had said too much. Her
mind was as weary as her body, and she found it difficult to be subtle when her
thoughts were so sluggish.

"I overheard a conversation between the prince and the dragon." Then, doing her
best to sound indignant,
Ruha said, "I am not entirely inept."

"No one said you were—er, at least not lately." Vaerana motioned Fowler over to
hold the wounded packhorse.
"But Cypress doesn't have any reason to love Yanseldara.
She's the one that killed him!"

"You don't know much about men, do you Lady Con-


stable?" Fowler gave her a roguish, yellow-fanged grin.
"There's a fine half-elf tavern wench over in Saerloon who slams an ale tankard
against my head every time I
see her, and I keep coming back for more. What's that tell you?"

"That you let your orcish blood get the best of you."
Vaerana growled. "You ought to know when to quit."

Fowler shrugged, trying not to look hurt. "Maybe, but what I'm saying is that I
don't quit. I keep wanting what will never be mine. Seems like that's what
Cypress is doing. Yanseldara killed him—maybe Sharee'll kill me with that
tankard someday—and now he's trying to steal her, just as he stole all that
treasure that belonged to someone else. He wants what he can't have. It's part
of being male."

Vaerana pulled the last of the ylang blossoms off the wounded horse. "Fair
enough. Let's say I don't understand men—not that I'd want to—what does it
matter?"
The Lady Constable dropped the sack on the ground. "It doesn't change anything
I've got to do tonight."

Vaerana turned to walk toward one of the towers, and
Ruha, desperate to keep her from leaving, caught her by the arm.

The Lady Constable frowned at the witch's hand.
"What now?"

"Do you have an oil press?" Ruha asked.

"In the kitchens," Tombor answered. "Why?"

The witch hesitated. She had already baited the trap, and she worried that in
her exhaustion, she would explain too much and alert Tombor to her trap. On the
other hand, if she did not explain, Vaerana would not stay to see the traitor
take the bait.

"The members of the Cult of the Dragon are not the only ones who need the ylang
oil. After we recover the staff, we must pour the ylang oil over Yanseldara to
draw her spirit back into her body." Ruha continued to hold
Vaerana's arm. "But if the oil is poured over a vessel containing the spirits
of both Yanseldara and Cypress, the

two will be joined together forever. That is why I believe the dragon is in
love with Yanseldara."

"And how did you learn so much about the uses of ylang oil?" Tombor asked.

"I am a witch," Ruha replied, trying to dodge the question with a cryptic
reply. "So is Lady Feng."

In fact, Minister Hsieh had explained how to use the ylang oil. He had also
provided Ruha with another Shou potion, one with which she was to send a message
through Yanseldara to Lady Feng.

Vaerana studied Ruha for several moments, then asked, "So, you're saying we need
to press the oil ourselves—and be damned sure the cult doesn't steal it back?"

"Yes." Actually, this was only what Ruha wanted Tombor to believe. The
blossoms in the sacks were the old, unsuitable ones; the fresh ylang was still
in the Ginger
Palace, being pressed in the spicehouse refinery. "That is what I'm saying."

"Fine." Vaerana looked to Tombor. "See to it that the blossoms are pressed and
well guarded."

If there had been any lingering doubts in Ruha's mind that Tombor was the spy,
they vanished when she saw the delighted twinkle in his eye. "The oil will be
ready when you get back."

Vaerana turned back to Ruha. "If you're satisfied, now
I've got to go."

With that, Vaerana pulled her arm out of Ruha's grasp and started across the
courtyard. The witch stared after her in bewilderment, then scurried to catch
up.

"Wait, Vaerana! There is one more thing."

The Lady Constable stopped beneath the dark branches of a fragrant sweetbay
tree. "What is it?"

Before the witch could explain, Tombor called, "There's no need to delay
Vaerana. If you need something, I'm sure I can help."

Ruha glanced over her shoulder and saw Tombor coming after them, his jolly
face bent into a mask of solicitous


concern. The witch cursed under her breath and turned her back on him.

"Before you leave, you must visit me in my chamber."
she whispered to Vaerana, "alone!"

Vaerana shook her head. "I don't have time—"
Ruha took her arm again. "You must! Promise me."
Vaerana glanced down at the witch's hand. "Then will
you let me go?"

Ruha nodded and removed her hand. "It is important."
"If you say so." Vaerana looked past Ruha's shoulder to

Tombor, who was already upon them. "Lodge the witch in

Pearl Tower."

"Pearl Tower?" Tombor echoed, clearly surprised.

"Pearl Tower." Vaerana turned to leave. "Are you having trouble with your
ears?"

The cleric took Ruha's arm, gripping it more tightly than was necessary. "I'll
show you to a chamber as soon as we've seen to the blossoms."

"Perhaps we could go to the tower first," Ruha suggested, worried she would
not be there when Vaerana came to see her. "I have not slept in two days."

Tombor shook his head. "You said yourself we can't let these blossoms fall into
the hands of the Cult of the
Dragon. Besides, the kitchen is on the way to Pearl
Tower. It'll take only a few minutes to stop and set up the press."

Ruha accompanied the cleric back to the horses. She removed a small satchel of
supplies from her saddle, then helped Fowler and Tombor gather up the bulky
sacks of ylang blossoms. Leaving the beasts with a guard, they walked down a
chain of meandering pathways to a thatch-roofed shed against the back wall of
the fortress.
The place smelled of animal grease, smoke, and fresh
Heartland spices.

Tombor stopped at the entrance and banged on the wooden door. "Up with you,
Silavia! I've business in your kitchen!"

"The cook bars the door when she sleeps," explained


Fowler. "Otherwise, the night guards pilfer her breakfast
tarts."

They had to wait several minutes before a sleepy voice sounded on the other side
of the door. "Go away, Tombor. I
won't have you calling in the middle of the night. You only want something to
eat."

Tombor looked slightly embarrassed. "I've—uh—guests with me, Silavia. We need
the oil press. It's for
Lady Yanseldara."

Silavia hesitated a moment, then asked, "Truly?"

"Truly," replied Ruha. "The matter is urgent, I assure you."

"Very well." Silavia sounded more put-upon than curious. "Let me throw on an
apron."

From inside the building came several moments of bustling and whispering, which
elicited a resentful scowl from Tombor. When a muffled thump finally announced
the withdrawal of the bar, the cleric pushed the door open and stepped inside,
where a stout, tousle-haired woman stood in a nightshirt and crisp white apron.
The flickering taper in her hand illuminated an ashen, moonshaped face with a
bottle nose and plump-lipped frown.

Tombor dropped his sacks inside the door, then snatched the candle from the cook
and went to light several others. A flickering yellow glow soon filled the
room, revealing a neatly kept chamber filled with cutting tables, kneading
troughs, and spice barrels. The embers of several spent fires glowed in three
different fireplaces, one with a roasting spit over the hearth, one with soup
cauldrons sitting in the firebox, and one built beneath a brick oven. Silavia's
sleeping pallet lay behind a dough bench, where a burly, black-bearded man stood
looking down at a half-eaten honeycake and two empty mead pitchers.

Tombor glared at the embarrassed man for a moment, then growled, "You'd better
get yourself to the gate, John.
There's a wounded horse there, and Pierstar's looking for you."



"My thanks for telling me so, Tombor." The farrier, looking happy for any excuse
to leave, started toward the door.

Tombor watched the man leave, then turned to Silavia
"What was he doing here?"

"It's none of your concern who I give my honeycakes to!" Silavia retorted. "Not
that there wouldn't be some foi you, if you ever came around at a decent hour."

"It's this trouble with Yanseldara's catalepsy!" the cleric protested. "I've
been busy."

"So have I," Silavia snorted. She led the way to a small storage pantry and
unlocked the door with a key from her apron. "The oil press is in here, if you
want it. Don't expect me to help you with it."

Tombor motioned to Fowler, who dropped his ylang blossoms beside the cleric's
and followed him into the little room. Ruha put her own sacks on the floor and
tried not to yawn as Silavia glared at her.

Tou a friend of Tombor or Tuskface?" the cook asked.

"I am closer to Fowler. I do not know Tombor very well
Is he an important person in Elversult?"

"You could say that," Silavia replied proudly. Tombor's the one who saved
Vaerana when the assassins first got after her. He's done the same twice
since—at the risk of his own life, I might add."

The witch smiled, anticipating the apology she would be due when she exposed
Tombor's heroism as a cull ploy
"I had not realized he is so well thought of."

Fowler emerged from the storage pantry, carrying a small oil press in his arms.
The device was a mere fraction the size of the screw press in the spicehouse
at the
Ginger Palace, being small enough so that a single cook could move it without
help. Tombor followed a moment later, holding a small, empty cask beneath one
arm. The two men set their burdens on a vacant table, then the cleric motioned
Silavia to his side.

"How do I work this thing?"

Silavia fetched a large bowl from a shelf, then set it

beneath the drainage spout. "It's simple enough. First you put the raw goods
in here."

She pulled the handle, raising the platen and displaying a small wooden box.
The bed had a grid of channels cut into the bottom, and it was tilted so that
the oil would run into a collection trough at one end.

"Then you lower the top plate, and it squeezes the oil out." Silavia
demonstrated, then stepped aside. "And when you're done, you clean up after
yourself."

Tombor cast a wary eye at the eight bags of ylang blossoms, then looked to
Ruha. "How much oil do we need?"

"Enough to cover Yanseldara from head to foot," she replied. "I suggest you
press all of the blossoms."

Silavia smiled at the cleric. "It looks like you're going to be here a while.
Maybe I can find some honeycakes for
you."

Tombor's eyes lit up. "That would make our task more
enjoyable."

"If I may be excused, I shall leave it to you to press the oil." Ruha did not
bother to stifle the yawn that came over her. "I am very tired. Perhaps Captain
Fowler can show me to Pearl Tower."

Silavia raised her brow. "Pearl Tower? I think not.
Jarvis isn't likely to let a pair of strangers in there."

"No, but you can take her, Silavia." Tombor tried to remove a gold ring from his
chubby finger, but had to moisten the knuckle with saliva before he could tug it
off.
"Show this to Jarvis, and hell know you speak for me."

Scowling at the imposition, Silavia accepted the ring and threw a cloak over her
shoulders. Ruha retrieved the small satchel she had taken from her horse, then
waved at Fowler to come along and followed her guide into the gloomy courtyard.
They passed several dark sheds similar to the kitchen before turning onto a
serpentine path of white crushed rock.

The witch paused there and allowed Silavia to march a dozen paces ahead, then
whispered to Fowler, "You must return to the kitchens and help Tombor with the
blossoms."



The half-ore frowned. "You couldn't tell me that before we left?"

"I could not. Tombor is a cult spy."

"What?"

"I lack the time to explain, but I am certain. He and
Wei Dao were working together." Ruha pushed the halfore back toward the
kitchen. "Now, return to the kitchen.
When he opens the last sack of blossoms, come get me."

Fowler did not move. "Why?"

"So we can follow him to Yanseldara's staff, of course."
Ruha whispered. "Go!"

"We?" he grumbled, starting back toward the kitchen.
"Collecting the gold you owe me's getting to be as much work as stealing Storm
Sprite in the first place."

"You stole your ship?" Ruha gasped.

Fowler frowned. "Aye—you don't think I could've bought a ship like her, do you?"

"Truthfully, I had not given the matter much thought."

Ruha turned to find Silavia waiting fifteen paces up the path, hands on hips.

"Are you coming or not? I thought you were tired."

"I am tired—extremely tired." Ruha scurried to catch up. "That must be why it
did not occur to me to leave
Captain Fowler with Tombor. I'm sure his work will go faster with an assistant."

"Not much," snorted the cook. "You can squeeze oil only so fast."

Ruha followed Silavia down the path, past several intersections to a slender
tower faced with gleaming abalone shell. To reach the building's entrance, they
had to climb a detached stairway to the second story, then cross a small
drawbridge to an open portcullis. A pair of
Maces stood beside the entrance, fully armored in scalemail and equipped with
more weapons than they could have used with six hands. As the witch and her
guide approached, the guards continued to stare straight ahead.

The largest, a swarthy giant of a man with brown eyes

and dark straight hair, spoke in an officious voice. "By the order ofVaerana
Hawklyn, household staff is no longer permitted in Pearl Tower."

The two guards crossed their lances before the doorway; then the speaker
scowled at the cook.

"You know that, Silavia—and especially at this time of
night."

"Don't get haughty with me, Jarvis!" The cook produced Tombor's ring and
shoved it under Jarvis's nose.
"Take a look at that and do as I say."

Jarvis pulled back so he could inspect the ring, then snapped his lance back to
his side and returned to attention. The smaller man followed suit.

"You have a command from the Jolly One?" asked

Jarvis.

Silavia smiled as though she were thinking of telling the huge guard to jump off
the drawbridge, but she only stepped back and waved a hand at Ruha. "Tombor
wants this woman shown to—" Silavia stopped in midsentence and scowled at the
witch. "Not to his chamber?"

Ruha shook her head quickly. "No, and it was Vaerana who asked Tombor to see
that I was lodged here."

If Jarvis was impressed, he did not show it. He simply waved Ruha into the
tower, then picked up a candle and lit it from one burning in a wall sconce.
Shielding the flame with his free hand, he led the witch up a spiraling
staircase. The passage was so narrow that his mail-clad shoulders rasped against
both walls at once.

Once they were safely out of Silavia's earshot, Ruha said, "I am expecting a—"
she yawned, "—a visit from
Vaerana."

Jarvis missed a step and nearly fell, filling the stairwell with a ringing
clamor as he thrust a hand out to catch himself.

"Is something wrong?" Ruha found the guard's consternation puzzling. "Has she
been here already?"

Jarvis shook his head and smoothed his tabard. "I
haven't seen the Lady Constable, but that doesn't mean


she hasn't been here. She might come through the passage from Moon Tower,
and I would never know it."

Ruha considered this worrisome possibility, then rejected it as quickly as it
entered her mind. Had Vaerana already come and gone, she would certainly have
left a message with the guards.

Jarvis stopped at a landing and opened a doorway into the main part of the
tower, where a short corridor led to a vaulted alcove that served as one of the
fortress's exterior arrow loops. He escorted Ruha past three doors, two with
loud rumbling snores reverberating through the wood, then opened a fourth. The
chamber inside was as lavishly furnished as it was small, with wool tapestries
on the walls, a true wooden bed, a small table with a pitcher and basin, and a
stone bench built into the alcove of another arrow loop.

Jarvis lit a tallow pot hanging inside the door, then stepped aside to let Ruha
enter. "I'll tell Vaerana which room you're in."

"That is very kind. And do you know Captain Fowler?"
Jarvis's eyes widened slightly. "The half-ore?"
"Yes. If he asks for me, please fetch me at ence."
The guard nodded, then backed into the hall and pulled the door shut. Ruha sat
on the stone bench and peered out the arrow loop at the side of a wooded hill.
She leaned her head back against the wall and felt her heavy eyelids beginning
to descend. She did not have the strength to raise them.

*****

Tang lay facedown on the dark mountainside, his toes kicked deep into the
slippery mud to keep from sliding through the ferns down into the swamp. Though
he had his palms pressed tightly over his ears, he could not shut out the voices
of the dead. The spirits of his soldiers kept wailing at him. Their words were
incoherent, but he knew what they wanted. He could feel their craving, deep

down in his abdomen where his own shrunken spirit cowered like that of a
frightened peasant. They needed him to look at them, to acknowledge the futility
of their sacrifice, to intercede with Yen-Wang-Yeh and tell the Great
Judge that they had died bravely and well and that their mission had failed
through no fault of their own.

Tang could not bring himself to utter the prayer. To concede their valor was to
admit he had suffered defeat at the hands of a barbarian; worse, it was to admit
defeat at his own hands. When his soldiers laughed at him, he had let his
embarrassment dictate General Fui's death.
The price for that arrogance had been the failure of his assault, and the prince
did not care to admit—to himself or his ancestors—that he been had such a fool.
If that made him a coward, so be it; Shou princes were taught to be cowards, and
forgetting that lesson had been the cause of his ignoble defeat.

Tang's resolve only made the voices echo louder inside his head. He rolled onto
his back and sat up. Midnight gloom filled the swamp below like a funeral pyre's
black smoke, spreading an oily, clinging ink over everything it touched. The
darkness was broken only by a faint fox fire glow that illuminated the floating
corpses of the screaming dead soldiers.

"Silence, I command!" Tang hissed. "Present yourselves at Ten Courts and leave
me in peace!"

A gentle sloshing sounded below. Something broke the surface of the black water,
sending a crazy pattern of rippling, ghost-faint lights bouncing off invisible
cypress trunks. Tang froze, praying the disturbance had been caused by a
restless alligator.

It was impossible to say how long the prince stared into the darkness. He was
not conscious of breathing until long after the air had grown heavy with silence
and the pond had returned to its glassy stillness. It occurred to him that the
voices of his dead soldiers had fallen quiet; then he sensed a pair of long
reptilian necks rising from the black water. He did not see the creatures so


much as feel a pair of lighter, warmer presences among the cypress trees
below, but he knew without doubt that his craven outburst of whispering had
drawn the attention of Cypress's wyverns.

Tang had not expected the two reptiles to emerge froni the cave that night. They
had both suffered a substantial battering during the destruction of the Shou
assault party, so the prince had assumed they would lie up for the night and
lick their wounds. Still, with a ready supply of fresh meat floating outside
their door, it was not surprising they had come out to feed. Tang was glad he
had decided not to hazard moving at night. If the creatures had been outside
when he started rustling through the brush, they would surely have killed him.

No sooner had Tang finished congratulating himself on his wisdom than the ground
trembled beneath his legs
He stifled a cry and, thinking one of the reptiles had landed nearby, reached
for his only weapon, a pitifully inadequate dagger. Instead of feeling the sharp
sting of a wyvern's tail barb, however, he heard a series of faint, muffled
knells—such as a distant bell or gong might make.

The tolling had hardly begun to fade before a loud purl rolled from the mouth of
the grotto below. Cypress's form—a huge, shadowy darkness far blacker than the
surrounding swamp—emerged from the lair and seemed to pause outside the cavern.

The wyverns hissed in frustration and swam, rather noisily, back into the
cavern. A loud, basal throb reverberated through the swamp as Cypress's mighty
wings beat the air. Visions of the dragon swooping down out of the darkness
filled the prince's mind, at least until he realized the pulsing was growing
softer and more distant. The dragon was flying away.

Tang sighed in relief, then kicked his heels deep into the mud and felt
something slithering across his leg. The prince remained motionless until he
located the creature's head, then calmly grabbed it behind the jaws and

flung the writhing thing down the hill. He had nothing to fear from
snakes—perhaps from the spirits of his dead soldiers, whose voices were again
filling his ears—but not from snakes.
se****

Ruha slept without dreaming and awoke sometime later, lying on the soft bed with
the heavy woolen quilt pulled high beneath her chin. Her first thought was not
that she usually took off her aba before sleeping, or that she never pulled the
blanket up to her chin, but that she had slept the night away. She threw the
cover off and rushed to the alcove, where, to her relief, she saw the treetops
still dancing in silver moonlight. Only then did she notice that someone had
removed her veil and realized that the tallow lamp had been extinguished—she
could not have been asleep long enough for it to burn itself out!—and it
occurred to her Vaerana had already come and gone.

Ruha fumbled around in the darkness until she found her veil on the stone bench,
then felt her way out the door, into the hallway, and down the spiraling
staircase.
Jarvis and his partner were leaning on their lances outside the portcullis.

The witch paused to put on her veil, then demanded,
"How long have I been asleep?"

Startled by Ruha's question, they whirled around with lance tips lowered. When
she cautiously stepped into the flickering light of their candle, both men
sighed and snapped to attention.

"How long ago did Vaerana put me in my bed?" Ruha demanded.

The two guards glanced nervously at each other, then
Jarvis said, "Actually, I laid you in the bed."

Ruha raised a hand to her face. "You removed my veil?"

Jarvis looked first confused, then embarrassed. "The



Lady Constable commanded me to—er, she said that you deserved your rest—"

"Vaerana said that?" Ruha could hardly imagine those words coming from the Lady
Constable's lips.

"Yes, about three hours ago. She rushed up the stairs and right back down
again." Jarvis glanced at his companion, then added, "She ordered me to see
that you rested comfortably, and to tell you she would look in on you when she
returned."

"Kozah take her for an impatient she-camel!"

Jarvis scowled at that outburst. "There's no need for calling names. She was
only trying to be considerate—and that's a rare thing for Vaerana Hawklyn."

"It would have been considerate to wake me!" Ruha retorted. "She was taking
advantage of my fatigue. How soon will she return?"

Jarvis shrugged. "She was dressed for battle."

Ruha cursed again, this time under her breath. "And what of Captain Fowler? I
told you to fetch me if he asked."

"He has not asked," Jarvis replied stiffly.

Ruha sighed in relief. If Fowler had not come for her, she could still spring
her trap. "I want one of you to come with me, so you can show Vaerana where I am
hiding."

"Hiding?"

"It is for the good ofYanseldara. That is all you need to know, Jarvis."

Ruha started across the drawbridge without waiting for the guard to agree.
Before she reached the other side,
Jarvis's heavy steps were booming across the thick planks behind her.

"We're not supposed to leave our posts," he complained.

"And Vaerana was supposed to speak with me before she left. Because she did not,
we must now improvise."

They descended the stairs and retraced the meandering path to Silavia's
kitchen. With the door and shutters all closed, the place looked as dark and
silent as the other sheds built along this section of the wall. Wonder-


ing how those inside could tolerate the cloying smell of vlang oil without
opening the windows, Ruha slipped beneath an unruly wax myrtle. She settled into
a hiding olace so deliberately uncomfortable that she would not fall asleep,
then sent Jarvis back to Pearl Tower.

A long, bone-aching time later, Ruha began to debate the wisdom of going to
check on Tombor's progress. She had expected it to take him quite some time to
press all eight sacks of ylang blossoms, but the first gray hint of false dawn
had already appeared in the eastern sky.
Household servants were beginning to trudge about their morning tasks, and it
would not be long before some passing groom or maid discovered the witch lurking
in the bushes.

Ruha heard the crunch of heavy boots coming down the path. She backed out from
beneath the wax myrtle and saw Jarvis and Vaerana approaching. All thoughts of
chiding the Lady Constable about last night's departure quickly vanished from
Ruha's mind. Vaerana was limping badly, with one arm hanging slack at her side
and the side of her face so swollen it looked as if she had been kicked by a
horse. What remained of her tattered jerkin was black with half-dried blood, and
even her boots looked as though someone had tried to cut them off her feet.

"What happened to you?"

Vaerana squatted beside Ruha. "Ambush." The word came out mushy and difficult to
understand. "They were waiting."

"And I know who told them you were coming." Ruha resisted the temptation to
point out that Vaerana could have avoided the beating by awakening her last
night.
"The Cult of the Dragon has a spy inside Moonstorm
House."

A murderous glint flared in Vaerana's eyes. "Who?"

Ruha pointed toward the kitchen, where a pair of scullery wenches were just
entering the door. "The spy will reveal himself soon enough."



Vaerana's hand drifted toward the blood-smeared hilt of her sword. "What's the
sense in waiting? Let's get him now."

Ruha laid a restraining hand on the Lady Constable's arm. "Wait. He is going to
lead us to the dragon's lair
That's what I was trying to tell you last night."

Vaerana scowled. "Then why didn't you?"

"Because I would have ruined the trap," Ruha explained. "The traitor was—"

The witch was interrupted by a muffled shriek from inside the kitchen. The door
burst open and both scullery wenches came rushing outside. One woman held her
hands over her mouth, while the other waved her arms at the door and yelled
incoherently. With a sinking stomach, Ruha leapt up and raced toward the shed
behind
Vaerana and Jarvis. Vaerana pulled the crying wench out of the way and led
Jarvis and Ruha into the kitchen.

The room was as dark as pitch, for all of the candles and tallow lamps had been
extinguished. The cloying perfume ofylang blossoms lingered in the air, though
not heavily enough to disguise a coppery, more familiar scent: blood. A few
steps inside the door, the Lady Constable suddenly stopped and squatted on her
haunches.

"Fetch a light."

As Jarvis left to do his mistress's bidding, Ruha knelt close to Vaerana and ran
her hands over the floor. It did not take long to find Silavia's plump, cool
body lying facedown on the wooden planks. There was a soft, sticky mess where
the back other head should have been.

"Who did this?" Vaerana demanded.

"A cult spy." Ruha no longer felt any joy in her coming vindication, in large
part because they were going to find another body in the kitchen and she knew
who it would be. "This is my fault. Had I not fallen asleep—"

"This is no time for blaming yourself!" Vaerana snapped. "Just tell me about
this spy."

"There were only two people in the kitchen with
Silavia: Tombor and Fowler."


"You think Tusks did this?" Vaerana scoffed. "And I
was beginning to think you might not be such a bungler!"

Ruha bit her tongue. A sharp retort would do nothing to bring Fowler back, and
even less to convince Vaerana ofTombor's betrayal. The Lady Constable would
realize the truth for herself soon enough.

Jarvis returned with a lit candle, which he promptly used to find and light
several tallow lamps. As the flickering light illuminated the room, it became
apparent that Silavia had been struck down as she fled, for she had left a short
trail of bloody footsteps behind her. The rest of the kitchen looked normal
enough; there were no tables overturned, the room was not strewn with uten
sils, and the walls were mercifully unspattered with blood.

Ruha took Jarvis's candle and led the way toward the pantry. The oil press was
not on the table where it should have been, but she quickly forgot about that as
she stepped around the corner of the table and saw Fowler's stout body sprawled
on the floor. The captain was lying amidst a pool of dark blood, with the handle
of a long butcher knife protruding from the middle of his back. His neck was
turned at an impossible angle, and his astonished gray eyes were staring
straight ahead.

Vaerana slipped past Ruha and crouched down beside
Fowler. "So much for your spy."

"I did not say that Fowler was the spy." Ruha's tone was sharper than she
intended, for she was boiling over with anger and guilt. "I was speaking of your
friend,
Tombor the Jolly."

Vaerana's jaw dropped. "You think Tombor…?"

Ruha nodded. "He was the only one in the room."

The Lady Constable rose, shaking her head. "Not Tombor. He saved—"

"I know; he saved you from the cult's assassins, more than once." Ruha paused,
giving Vaerana time to draw her own conclusions. When the witch saw no sudden
gleam of understanding in the Lady Constable's eyes, she


said, "The attacks weren't real. They were a trick to win your confidence."

A look of humiliation flashed across Vaerana's face, but it vanished as abruptly
as it had appeared. "You don'tknow that."

"Don't I?" Ruha waved her hand around the kitchen
"Where are the ylang blossoms?"

Vaerana's gaze roamed across the chamber, her complexion turning as white as
alabaster when she did not find the eight bulky sacks. Finally, the Lady
Constable whirled on Ruha.

"You knew he would steal the blossoms—and you let him?" Vaerana looked almost
relieved to have someone upon whom to vent her anger. "You let him kill Fowler?"

"I did not let him kill anyone!" the witch snapped
Vaerana's words hurt more than they should have, perhaps because Ruha feared
there was more truth to them than she would have liked. "I had hoped we could
follow him to Yanseldara's staff—which we might have done, had you bothered to
awaken me and hear my plan!"

Jarvis interposed his armored bulk between the two women. "Tombor was gone by
then. I doubt he stayed much longer than it took him to kill the half-ore and
Silavia."

Ruha turned to the empty table and, seeing no mess upon the surface, nodded. "He
was in a hurry to get out of here. He took the oil press with him."

"The press maybe, but not even Tombor could sneak eight sacks of ylang blossoms
out the gate," said Vaerana,
"The sentries would ask too many questions. They saw what you went through to
bring those sacks to us."

"Perhaps he took them out some other way," Ruha suggested.

"Yes, and I think I see how," said Jarvis. The burly guard took Ruha's candle
and went to the back wall, where a mass of roofing straw lay scattered around a
butchering bench. He climbed onto the table and stuck his head up between the
rafters, then raised the candle

hieh enough to illuminate his shoulders sticking up through a hole in the
roof. "He climbed onto the roof and threw the sacks over the wall."

"Fowler's tnck!" Ruha gasped.

A long, heartsick groan slipped from Vaerana's lips.
She hung her head and braced her hands on the table edge. "I failed her."

"Not yet." Ruha went to the Lady Constable's side and, rather uncertainly, laid
a hand on her shoulder. "Tombor took the wrong blossoms."

Vaerana raised her brow. "The wrong blossoms?"

Ruha nodded. "The ones Tombor took were only bait.
They were picked in the evening, and they are not potent enough to serve the
dragon's wishes. Cypress needs blossoms picked in the morning, and those
remain at the
Ginger Palace."

Vaerana stood up straight. "Then what are we waiting for?" She turned to Jarvis.
"Find Pierstar and tell him to call out the Maces! We've got a palace to storm!"

Ruha caught Jarvis's arm. "That won't be necessary.
Minister Hsieh has promised to give us the blossoms, in exchange for returning
Lady Feng to him unharmed."

"How are we going to do that?" Vaerana demanded.
"Isn't she with Yanseldara's staff in Cypress's lair?"

Ruha nodded. "When we recover one, we rescue the other. It costs us no extra
effort."

Vaerana considered this for a moment, then scowled.
"That'd be fine—if we knew where to find the lair. And since you were trying to
trick Tombor into leading us there…"

Ruha raised a hand to silence Vaerana. "There may be another way. In my room, I
have a potion. If we can get
Yanseldara to drink it, we can contact Lady Feng and perhaps discover the
location of Cypress's lair."

Vaerana studied Ruha out of one swollen eye. "Where did you get this potion?"

"From Minister Hsieh," Ruha answered. "Now that he is helping us—"



"Helping us!" Vaerana thundered. "It's Shou mag that's done this to Yanseldara!"

"Yes, but—"

The Lady Constable shook her head. "How do you know this won't hurt her?"

"I do not," Ruha admitted. "Minister Hsieh said that if the connection between
Yanseldara's body and spirit is too weak, we could sever it entirely—but that is
unlikely as long as she remains strong enough—"

"No!" Vaerana shook her head vehemently, then stepped away from the table and
started toward the dooi
"When will you learn? You can't trust a Shou—ever."

"What other choice do we have?" Ruha started after
Vaerana, who did not even acknowledge the question
"Wait! Where are you going?"

The Lady Constable did not even slow down as shf stepped through the door.
"Where do you think? To have
Pierstar wake his trackers!"

Thirteen

Tang saw the serpent dart beneath a ti plant and hopped across the stream after
it. He stirred the spearshaped leaves until the viper struck at his snake
stick, then flipped the Yshaped head around and pinned the creature's neck to
the ground. He kneeled beside his captive and grabbed it behind the head. This
snake was the largest yet, so great in diameter that he could not close his hand
around its slime-scaled throat. There would be plenty of venom.




The prince twined the serpent's writhing body around the shaft of his stick and,
picking his footing very carefully, carried the heavy thing across the stream
to his workbench. Atop the flat rock lay two sacks of supple leather cut from
the collars of a pair of boots. With sharpened sticks protruding from them at
all angles, the bags looked like melon-sized cockleburs. They were stuffed with
wads of silk ripped from the battle tunics of dead soldiers, whose voices Tang
still heard screeching above the drone of the mosquitos.

"Be patient, my troops. Soon I intercede for you." If
Tang could find the strength to see his plan through, his ancestors would be so
overjoyed that he would no longer need to hide his failure from them. "Soon I
pray to Yen-
Wang-Yeh; I testify to your bravery, and he renders honorable verdict."



The spirits took no comfort in the prince's promise.
They continued to screech.

Tang sighed and set his snake stick aside. He took the sack by the long,
unsharpened stake that served as a handle—it was not wise to touch the bladder
with bare hands—and held it close to his captive's face. The frightened viper
struck instantly, sinking its fangs through the supple leather and into the wad
of cloth inside. The prince shook the serpent to encourage the release of more
venom, then repeated the process several more times.
When he had milked the last of the creature's toxins, he flung it down the hill
and stooped over to inspect his handiwork. Both sacks were so full of poison
that cloudy beads of venom were seeping back through the fang holes.

Tang carried the poison-filled bladders down to the swamp, where the cadavers of
his dead soldiers lay scattered across the pond as thick as lily pads. Most of
the corpses had been savagely mangled by alligators or bitten cleanly in two
by the wyverns, but a few were blackened and bloated from dozens of snake
bites, often to such an extent that runnels of thick black fluid spilled from
splits in the skin. These had been molested by neither alligator nor wyvern,
and it was the observation of this fact that had kindled again the prince's
hopes of redeeming himself.

After retrieving his dugout and making a careful search along the edge of the
swamp, Tang had located two relatively whole bodies that were not bloated with
snake poison. One man had managed to swim to dry land after being eviscerated,
while the other had either drowned or died of fright—the prince had found him
caught beneath a cypress root with no obvious wounds.

Tang stuffed one of his poison bladders into the abdomen of the eviscerated
soldier, then used his dagger to create a place for the second ball in the other
man's stomach. He closed the wounds with small wooden pins and dressed the pair
in the cleanest, least-tattered battle tunics he had been able to find. If the
men's spirits


objected to having their bodies used as bait, the prince could not tell over
the din of voices already assailing his ears. He loaded the cadavers into the
dugout, leaning one man over the bow and propping the other in the stern.
Into the bottom of the punt, he placed a halberd and some supplies he had
gathered from his dead troops, including a rope, torches, oil, and a waterskin.

After peering through gray mosquito haze to make certain no alligators lurked
nearby—most had retreated to their dens to gorge themselves on last night's
catch—
Tang slipped into the bog scum. As the water rose above his waist, the stench of
decaying plants and rotten fish grew immensely more powerful. He gagged and
nearly emptied his stomach, then slapped a hand over his nose and forced himself
to breathe through his mouth until he grew accustomed to the reek. He pushed the
dugout toward Cypress's cavern, moving so slowly that even he could not see the
water rippling. A familiar, cold weakness crept over his limbs, and his heart
began to pound so loudly it drowned out the wails of the dead soldiers. In
response, they raised their voices until it seemed the entire swamp reverberated
with their howls.

"Worthy ancestors, please to silence spirits," the prince begged. "It is
difficult to be brave with such din."

If anything, the spirits wailed more loudly, yet not loudly enough to drown out
the small, whispering voice that kept telling Tang he was a fool to face the
wyverns alone. It was not the place of Shou princes to wade through swamps
filled with the choking stench of death and rot, or to brave black waters
infested with leeches and alligators.

The bottom vanished beneath Tang's feet. He forced his legs and arms into
service and swam toward the cave.
The closer he came to the moss-draped maw, the weaker his limbs felt. He doubted
he would have the strength to enter the grotto, but that was not required. All
he had to do was push the dugout into view of the wyverns, and they would do the
rest.



As the prince consoled himself with these thoughts, it occurred to him there was
a weakness in his plan. How would he know when—or even if—the wyverns took his
bait? The poison would be both painful and quick. Once the stakes punctured the
lining of their stomachs, the great reptiles would thrash about and screech
madly for a short time, but Tang would not hear them. The dead soldiers were
wailing too loudly; the prince would not have heard it if Cypress himself roared
in his ear.

Tang allowed the dugout to drift to a stop, then hung from its stern. He had two
choices: go into the cave with the corpses, or make his report to Yen-Wang-Yeh
so the soldiers would be silent.

Or sneak out of the swamp while Cypress was away, added the insidious voice
inside his head.

"I do not go back!"

Feeling proud for avoiding the obvious choice of a coward, Tang took the
second most cowardly course and swam the dugout toward the yawning cavern. It
seemed entirely possible the wyverns would kill him, but that was preferable to
disgracing his ancestors by admitting that he had turned out to be a fool.

The punt nosed in front of the cavern mouth. When the wyverns did not
immediately come swooping out of the darkness, Tang took a deep breath, then
slipped beneath the water and pushed the dugout around the corner. The din of
his dead soldiers faded to a watery roar, and the cowardly voice in his head
stopped urging him to flee.
The prince continued to ease forward, hoping his feet did not break the surface
when he kicked, struggling to keep his hand from slipping on the boat's slimy
bottom. His lungs were already burning for air, but he knew it was only the
coward in him looking for an excuse to flee.

Tang continued to kick, praying he would feel the wyverns' strike rock the
dugout before his craven lips opened and sucked a mouthful of fetid water into
his lungs. It occurred to him that the wyverns might be gorged already. But they
had to be ravenous after last

night's burst of fighting, and the two lizards had not yet finished feeding
when Cypress sent them inside to guard the lair. Unless the prince had
misinterpreted last night's events, they would be voracious enough to devour the
punt as well as its contents.

So why hadn't they attacked?

Tang's yearning for air grew so overwhelming that he nearly opened his mouth.
Instead, he blew his breath out through his nostrils and continued to swim.

At this point, he expected the coward inside to remind him that it was treason
to risk the life of a Shou prince, to urge him to swim for the swamp. The
whispering voice remained mercifully silent, perhaps because it knew
Tang had come too far. The punt was his only camouflage. If he was not behind
its sheltering bulk when he pushed his head above water, the wyverns would swoop
down to bite him in two, just as they had bitten apart those bodies in the swamp