Sharina didn't know how much time had passed. Her mental numbness was not far removed from the stasis which had held her after the demon snatched her into the queen's power. The wizard's voice droned like water plashing over black stones. Perhaps it was hypnotizing her.
Because of Sharina's state, her mind didn't process the gradual change in the world outside the ruby walls until well after her eyes had registered the differences. She snapped alert; her skin flickered hot, then cold, and seemed to crawl as though she'd just awakened from a faint.
The walls had vanished, but a red cast like the light thrown off by the queen's staff infused the world on which Sharina looked. Leaves trembled around a clearing in the jungles of Bight. Branches had begun to rise after the heavy rainstorm which had beaten them down.
A figure leaped into sight: a Hairy Man, an adult female whose pelt gleamed with the sheen of good health. She shrieked in mindless terror as she poised to fling herself into the foliage on the other side of the clearing. Startled flies whirled upward from the fruit rotting beneath a giant durian tree.
Her pursuer caught her with the sudden finality of a praying mantis snatching its victim. The motion was so quick that Sharina saw the hunter only at the instant it struck.
The pursuer was a demon: roughly human in shape, but taller than the tallest man and as thin as the wire armature on which the sculptor shapes the clay of his mold. Steam spouted where the demon's taloned feet stood straddled on the damp soil; hair singed from the victim's arms where fingers like knives gripped them. The female cried out with the despair of one to whom death would be a release from corroding terror.
The demon's lower jaw dropped on a double joint instead of hinging open at the back the way a human's would have. Its teeth were like chipped flint; they slid past one another like shears.
A stream of blue-white flame spewed from the demon's mouth, booming like a waterfall against the base of a dawn redwood. The tree's spongy bark exploded in steam and charred fragments. The victim's cries were lost in the thunder of destruction. The hose of fire ceased when the demon's mouth clamped shut, but the tree continued to crackle and hiss.
The demon's eyes glowed a red brighter than any other light in the jungle's gloom. It shifted its grip on its victim. From a groin which until then had been as sexless as the crotch of a tree the demon's penis extended and entered the female.
She stopped struggling. The rape had frozen her the way a wasp's sting paralyzes the spiders on which her offspring will feed.
The demon stepped back from its huddled victim. Its—his—member withdrew completely within the snake-thin abdomen. The demon's jaws opened and loosed another fiery lance of triumph, this time immolating a branch thirty feet in the air. Mosses and epiphytes rooted on the bark blazed in red horror, scattering carbonized leaves and tiny animals killed with painless abruptness.
At no time did the demon make a sound of its own, though its flame roared deafeningly. Life in the forest went silent, then chittered and squeaked at redoubled volume when the first wisps of smoke rose to the higher levels.
The demon's skin grew dull. The creature began to dissolve: no part clearly before the next, yet not all at once. For a moment the demon's eyes blazed from what might have been the rippling of heated air; then they too had vanished.
The victim lifted herself from the wet soil. Welts were rising on her forearms, and the fur on her haunches still smoldered.
Sharina felt sick. She said nothing, nor did she look toward the queen gloating triumphantly outside the circle.
Limping, the victim turned back the way from which she'd come. Another Hairy Man, then several, entered the clearing. They clucked questioningly at the female but jumped angrily away when she tried to embrace them.
The scene faded slowly.
Instead of resuming her chant or telling Sharina to begin the second portion of the incantation, the queen tapped her staff. From the mist congealed the interior of a spacious room.
Sharina and her captor hung in midair. The room had no windows but both end walls were open, looking out over a city where the eaves swept up like ships' prows. The moonlit roofs were made of palm fronds instead of the grass thatching common on houses in Barca's Hamlet.
Fixed to the walls were long, saw-toothed swords and shields with gold blazons worked into snarling beast heads. Twenty feet above the floor a small windmill bracketed to the central beam turned in the breeze through the long room. On each vane was writing that Sharina recognized as the script local to Sirimat, though she couldn't translate or even pronounce the words.
In a miniature hammock draped with purple silk hung an infant. A nurse, the room's only other occupant, sat cross-legged beside the hammock, swinging it gently by a short cord gripped in the toes of her left foot. She hummed a repetitive tune, pausing frequently to take another bite of leaf-wrapped nut or to spit red juice into the street below.
She turned toward the opening, her lips pursed. The air between her and the sleeping city coalesced like ice forming on the surface of a pond. A demon with a bundle in its arms hunched forward.
The nurse cried out, dropping the remainder of her narcotic. She jumped up. The hammock flailed, rousing shrieks from the baby.
The demon extended its right leg the way a scorpion probes with its pincers. Its hooked hind toe opposed the other three like the talons of a bird. The foot closed over the nurse and squeezed shut. Her scream ended in a startled hiccup of sound as the claws cut her in half at the midriff.
The demon stepped to the hammock with the delicacy of a spider approaching something trapped in its web. It lifted out the infant with one clawed hand, carefully shaking the swaddling clothes from the tiny form. The rich fabrics were soaked with the nurse's blood.
The demon set the child-thing it had brought into the hammock. The human infant in its other hand continued to squeal. The demon's mouth opened. It thrust the infant into its great gape, then closed the jagged teeth around it. The cries stopped.
Men carrying bamboo bows and swords like the ones on the walls ran into the room from the balconies along both sides. The demon grinned at them, then dissolved as it had in the forest of Bight. Sword strokes and black-tipped arrows slashed the air where the creature had been.
The tiny changeling's face was first a demon's, then that of a Hairy Man. When terrified guards bent over the hammock, though, and a man dressed in the feathers of exotic birds rushed in with his aides to see what had happened, the face that looked up at them was that of a perfectly formed human child.
The baby cried for a moment more, then smiled at the men who thought they had rescued her. She was very beautiful.
"My father," the queen said. "The demon Xochial."
She tapped her staff. The scene melted into shadows and swirling mist. "Now, girl," she said, fixing Sharina with her cold eyes. "It's your turn."
Tenoctris finished chanting. She wavered sideways but caught herself before Cashel could. The corkscrew of blue light at the center of the small circle she'd scribed here deep in the cellars of the queen's palace shrank to a point. It vanished, leaving only a memory behind.
" 'Is the sun proud or the moon?' " Zahag muttered. " 'Even a poor man's hut is better than living among the ragged clouds.' "
Cashel's lips tightened. Tenoctris had said the ape was quoting poetry he'd heard in Pandah. It wasn't much for poetry, Cashel thought; and it kept reminding him that the ape was on the edge of breaking down completely. Cashel didn't blame Zahag for being afraid, but he wished the ape had stayed back with Garric if he was going to mumble nonsense.
"Do we move again?" Cashel asked, mostly to make sure that Tenoctris was really awake. She leaned on her outstretched hands, gasping quick, shallow breaths.
" 'Rise early, work hard, and think often of your soul...,' " Zahag said. Cashel's jaw clenched again.
"No, no," the old wizard said. Her smile warmed and brightened both Cashel's mood and the black walls of the cellars. "We're in the right place, and I think I've even found the key. I apologize for wasting so much of my time and yours, though."
"Huh!" Cashel said. "I don't have a better place to be than with you, mistress. And I'm not one myself to rush around doing things fast instead of doing them right."
He cleared his throat. "What is it you need me to do?" he asked. His duties thus far through the night and morning had been a lot like herding sheep: keeping an eye out while his charges went about their business slowly.
Cashel didn't know what he should be looking out for, but he knew there was something close by. His skin prickled, and the unseen eyes watching were hostile beyond reason; hostile to all life, not just to Cashel or-Kenset and his companions.
" 'If you can snatch a jewel from the seawolf's teeth,' " Zahag said. " 'If you can swim the Outer Sea in a tempest—' "
Cashel reached out. The ape cringed, expecting a blow. Cashel rubbed the beast's scalp instead. "It's all right to be scared, Zahag," he said. "But Tenoctris knows what she's doing."
The old wizard grinned. She was so worn that Cashel marveled that the lamplight didn't stream through her like a patch of fog.
"I think I do, yes," she said. "It remains to be seen whether I have the strength to do it, but—"
Her smile broadened. "I have to, don't I?"
Cashel smiled back at her. He liked people who didn't quit. Tenoctris, well; Tenoctris wouldn't quit till she was dead.
Tenoctris took a deep breath and settled herself straighter. "There's a path that leads to the queen," she said. "If the queen can be—dealt with, distracted even, she'll lose control over the Hairy Men. They'll no longer be a threat, even if they do reach Ornifal."
Tenoctris' tone was calm though not nonchalant: she spoke as a master craftsman explaining an apprentice's duties in a fashion that he could understand. "I'll open the path and I hope to keep it open, but you'll have to walk it alone, Cashel."
"Not alone!" Zahag shrieked. "Not alone! Not alone! I'll not be alone in this place!"
Cashel looked at Tenoctris. She nodded. "If Zahag wants to accompany you," she said, "there's no reason he shouldn't. But I don't think he understands—"
"I understand that I'm not going to be alone!" the ape said. "Not in this hellpit, not anywhere on this island. Can't you feel it? Don't you know what's waiting out there?"
"Yes," said Tenoctris quietly. "I do."
Cashel shrugged. "I'd like to get on with it, then," he said. He tried not to sound impatient, but when you knew a fight was coming it was the hardest thing in the world to wait for. He hefted his quarterstaff, giving it a final critical examination by lamplight.
"The caps are iron, aren't they?" Tenoctris said with a frown. "That may be useful, if you're strong enough."
Cashel looked at her. "Guess we'll learn, won't we?" he said. His voice was a low growl. "Let's get on with it!"
"Yes," the old wizard said. She took a fresh bamboo skewer from the bundle in her satchel and settled herself before the circle she'd drawn in the dust. "I will."
" 'You still can't change the mind of a born fool,' " the ape quoted, squeezing tightly against Cashel's bare calf. He was shivering. Cashel rubbed his scalp again.
Poor little monkey... But he wasn't giving up either.
"Ochusoioio nuchie name, eaeaa..." Tenoctris said, touching her bamboo wand to a different character with every syllable. Her voice was as calm as a deep pond, but her face writhed with the effort of pronouncing the words of power. "Aritho skirbeu!"
The basalt walls dimmed. Cashel could still see them as shadows at the corners of his eyes, but a bright web of forces filled the vision of his mind. The pattern spread without boundaries. Lines of red and blue light met, sometimes joining but often filling the same apparent space without contact.
Tenoctris continued to chant. The pattern throbbed in unison with the words of power.
What Cashel saw was as beautiful and as terrible as the constellations of the night sky. He stood in awe, but even in his wonder he wished that Ilna could watch it also. What would she make of this pattern that was so far beyond her brother's grasp?
In front of Cashel was a tube of red light, one strand of the infinite web. At a distance the lines of power seemed as thin as spider silk, but the opening here in the palace cellars was the size of the inlet to the ancient tide-powered mill owned now by Cashel's uncle. A man could walk upright into it—if he was a man.
Cashel stepped forward. His hair stood on end and blue fire crackled as his foot touched the insubstantial surface. He laughed deep in his throat and walked on. Zahag, gibbering in terror and refusing to look into the shrinking distance before them, scampered at his side.
From outside the tube had seemed to rise into the distance, but once within Cashel felt only the pressure of the light on him. It was like wading through deep water.
He grinned. He'd done that, carrying a flood-snatched ewe on his back besides.
Cashel couldn't see any end to the passage ahead of them. When curiosity drove him to glance over his shoulder, he couldn't make out Tenoctris stolidly chanting in the cellars either.
"We can't go back now," Zahag muttered in resignation. "It's too late for that."
"I just wondered what it looked like," Cashel said. "I didn't want to go back."
The ape wrinkled his long, solemn-looking face. "No, you wouldn't," he said. "That's why you're the chief. And anyway, we have to go on or there won't be anything left."
Cashel looked at him, but Zahag apparently had nothing to add as he ambled along on all four limbs, looking at the smooth floor of light. Occasionally his lips moved, but he was only mumbling another snatch of verse.
Cashel stretched his arms out to his sides, then bent them back to work other muscles as well. He wondered what they'd find at the end of the passage.
"I guess we'll know soon enough," he repeated aloud.
"Sooner than that, chief," Zahag said, lucid again. "Much too soon for my taste."
Ilna supposed you could say that there were more important things for her to be doing than cleaning the rooms the steward had assigned her, but nobody thus far had told her what those things were. She didn't intend to spend another night in a pigsty unless she heard a very good reason for it.
The royal palace was a sprawl of individual buildings, more all told as there were houses in Barca's Hamlet. The women's quarters were in the eastern corner of the compound, separated from the remainder by a wall faced with tiles glazed in a garden scene. For all practical purposes this section had been unoccupied in the years since the queen built her own mansion in the center of Valles.
It irritated Ilna that the steward automatically chose to put her, Liane, and she supposed Tenoctris here simply because of the words "the Women's Quarters." She didn't suppose buildings elsewhere within the palace walls were in better condition than this one, though. The attendant who'd led Ilna to this three-room cottage was a member of Chancellor Royhas' personal household. She'd been drafted to help out because virtually all the royal servants had deserted Valence during the lowering threats of the past year.
Ilna swept briskly, sending the last of the dust and cobwebs out the cottage's open door. It was a good rye-straw broom, not a twig besom like those some folks in Barca's Hamlet used because they were sturdier and lasted longer. Not Ilna, of course.
She'd kept the broom and sent the servant girl on her way. Ilna had never found a servant who worked to Ilna os-Kenset's standards; and besides, she didn't like the feeling of someone else doing her work.
She gave the outer room, a combination of anteroom and reception area, a final inspection. She'd swept it, beaten dust out of the cushions, and removed the moth-tattered hangings from the walls.
It was a crime what people allowed to happen to skillful craftsmanship! One of the tapestries, an ancient hero setting out from the harbor of Valles, was work that Ilna would have been proud to have woven herself.
Well, it could be repaired. Ilna walked into the bedroom. Moths had been at the cover of the feather bed as well, but that didn't disturb Ilna particularly. The loose feathers would take some hunting down, but for sleeping she much preferred a mattress of woven straw or simply the bare wooden floor where she'd spent the past night.
There was a sound from outside. Ilna turned. Admiral Nitker and half a dozen other men entered through the open front door.
"Yes?" Ilna said, leaning her broom against the wall. A full-length mirror of silvered bronze stood between piers to the side of the door. In it she looked coldly furious.
That was true enough. Ilna didn't know what Nitker thought his business was, but in Barca's Hamlet you didn't enter someone else's dwelling uninvited.
The admiral had changed clothes since Ilna saw him the night before. He no longer wore armor, but there was a sword of simple pattern in his scabbard. Five of the men with him were obvious sailors—tattooed, weather-beaten, and in two cases missing fingers. They also were armed.
That didn't concern Ilna. She wasn't afraid of the weapons or of anything else about the intruders.
The seventh man was a Dalopan: small, swarthy—darker even than Ilna's own Haft complexion—and wearing sheaves of carefully splintered bones through his earlobes. If he'd been an insect, Ilna would have crushed him without a moment's thought.
She reached into the sleeve of her tunic and brought out several short cords. Her fingers began to knot them while her eyes glared at her visitors.
"Mistress Ilna," Nitker said, bowing to her. "Master Silyon—"
He gestured to the Dalopan. The five common sailors had spread out to either side of the doorway, though they weren't for the moment moving toward Ilna.
"—believes you can help us. He was King Valence's wizard until the current troubles transpired and the king turned against him. Silyon came to me because I understood how serious the danger was. Silyon's found the power which alone can defeat the queen. Material weapons are useless, useless."
One of the sailors began to shiver. He nodded fiercely when the admiral repeated "useless."
"That's nothing to me," Ilna said in the tone she'd have used to a man propositioning her for sex. "Talk to Garric—Prince Garric, that is, to you. And if Valence turned against the dirt that's standing beside you leering, then he wasn't quite the despicable wretch I'd heard he'd become. I've seen wizards' games, and I have no desire to see more."
Silyon cackled merrily. Ilna doubted that the fellow was sane, though she didn't suppose it mattered now. Her fingers wove the cords.
"You don't understand, mistress," Nitker said. His tongue licked his dry lips. The admiral was if anything more frightened than he'd been when Ilna saw him arrive the night before, though at present he held a civilized veneer over the fear. "Prince Garric still thinks swords can—"
"I've never met a man that a sword couldn't kill," Ilna said sharply. "Or a monkey either, I daresay. So long as there's a man wielding the sword, that is. Which may be why you failed so miserably."
"Get her," Nitker ordered in a grim voice. The sailors started forward. Ilna threw the knotted cords in the air before them.
The men screamed and fell back, trying to draw the swords they hadn't thought they needed. Ilna stepped to the wall peg where she'd hung her silken noose. She took it down, watching the scene with a bleak smile.
The cords fell to the floor. In the mirror Ilna saw what the men saw: an ammonite whose coiled shell filled the room. Its tentacles writhed about Nitker and his sailors, threatening to draw them into its gaping beak.
Silyon alone ignored the illusion. He edged into a corner to keep from being trampled by the screaming sailors. He was no more willing to close with Ilna herself than the men who'd accompanied him could face the monster they imagined.
"Turn around!" Silyon cried in a high-pitched voice. "Don't look at her!"
Liane walked in the front door. "Ilna?" she said. "Are you—"
"Run, Liane!" Ilna said. In the same shard of time Silyon shrieked, "Take that woman instead. Quickly! The Beast—"
A sailor, already turning to flee the ammonite of his fancy, grabbed Liane by the shoulders. He gasped and doubled up, but two more sailors and the admiral himself had Liane's arms before she could break free.
A sailor twisted the bloody stiletto out of Liane's hand. The girl bit him. Another sailor clouted her across the forehead with the hilt of his cutlass.
Ilna settled her noose over Nitker's neck and pulled hard. The admiral flopped backward, clutching the rope. Ilna braced a foot on Nitker's chest. Her victim's face turned purple.
Four sailors were bundling Liane out the door, wrapped in a long shawl they must have brought for the purpose. The last man was on his knees, weeping in terror as he tried to stuff coils of intestine back through the slit in his belly. The engraved blade of Liane's dagger was no longer than a girl's finger—but that was long enough, and it was as sharp as remorse.
Ilna eyed Silyon, weighing her options. The Dalopan wizard threw a pinch of dust toward the mirror. The metal surface flashed with the silent brilliance of the sun, blinding Ilna.
She lurched backward into a wall; she'd lost her sense of balance with her sight. She closed her eyes—too late! She hadn't expected that attack. Orange and purple blotches danced in her mind.
Ilna heard Silyon and the sailors escaping through the overgrown gardens that separated the structures within the palace compound. The man Liane knifed had collapsed and was wheezing bubbles in his pooling blood. Nitker had ceased to struggle.
Ilna slipped the noose free and stepped forward. She could make out shapes again, though their outlines flip-flopped orange to purple and back every time her heart beat.
"Guards!" she shouted from the doorway. "Guards!"
Figures were running toward her. She ran the noose through her fingers, making sure that neither blood nor vomit had gummed its easy action.
"Mistress?" said a young male voice she didn't recognize. "What's the matter?"
There were three of them, carrying spears. Most of the troops who'd ordinarily be guarding the palace were off training and stiffening the city militias against the threat drifting down on the currents of the Inner Sea.
"Did you see five men run away carrying a woman in a cloth?" Ilna said, furious at her inability to see clearly. She didn't even know which direction the wizard and his minions had gone.
"Mistress?" the guard repeated. The men were still only forms, though Ilna was beginning to contrast the gleam of armor from the duller blur of their faces.
"Take me to Garric at once!" Ilna said. "I can't see, so you'll have to guide me."
A gasp from the cottage reminded her of Nitker. She supposed it was a good thing that he'd survived to explain the attack, though for her own part Ilna wouldn't have lost any sleep if she'd killed the admiral as she'd intended to do.
She gestured behind her. "Take that one, too. Garric will want to question him. And don't let him get away!"
Two soldiers entered the cottage while the third took Ilna's hand.
Garric wasn't going to like what Ilna had to tell him. She touched her waist. The sash she'd woven as a twin to Liane's was still in place. Ilna guessed that she'd shortly be able to make up for the unjust hostility she'd shown toward Liane from the beginning.
She smiled. She'd either help Liane escape from the present danger, or she'd die. Either result would cancel the debt Ilna felt she owed the girl.
Garric rested his hand on Ilna's shoulder. He'd put it there to support his friend while a healer applied ointment to her eyes, but now it was Garric himself who needed the contact.
"The Beast is the only one who can defeat the queen's forces," Admiral Nitker said in a rasping whisper. "Silyon said he could raise the Beast through his mirror of art, but the Beast won't help unless..."
Nitker subsided, coughing. Ilna's noose had left a bleeding purple welt the full circuit of his neck. The healer had given Nitker a draft of effervescent salts in wine to gargle before the man could speak, but the swelling flesh still threatened to finish the job that the silk had begun.
The healer held a ceramic bowl in which he'd mixed more of his potion. He looked at Garric. Garric shook his head curtly.
"Talk," Garric said, "or there's no reason for you to live further. If you pretend again that you can't go on, I'll kill you with my own hand."
The voice and words were his. King Carus nodded grimly at the edges of Garric's awareness, but the cold anger Garric felt was a thing of his own.
"The Beast must be fed," Nitker whispered. "Silyon said we should bring the woman Ilna to the Beast's vault, but she raised a monster against us. When the other girl came to the door, I suppose Silyon decided she'd be better than nothing."
"Why?" said Ilna. "Why me?"
Her eyes were red and the sockets glistened with the ointment, but she could see again. Garric wouldn't have wanted Ilna looking at him the way she did the admiral; but then, Garric's own expression was much the same.
Halphemos and the crippled Cerix entered the conference room. The courier Garric had sent for them at Ilna's direction bowed himself out and closed the door.
"I don't know," Nitker said, huddling with his hands clasped in his lap. "And I don't know where the vault was. I'm not a wizard!"
He isn't a man, either, Garric thought with a cold bitterness. Though Nitker must have had courage at one time, or he'd not have claimed the throne when Valence had virtually abdicated.
The door opened for Royhas. To Garric's surprise, King Valence was with the chancellor. The king walked with the small steps of man twice his real age. Two worried-looking attendants followed, ready to catch him if he fell.
"I thought His Majesty should be present," Royhas said. "He's ... for the most part, he's himself again."
"The Beast is coming," Valence said quietly. Everyone in the room was watching him. "It'll be over soon."
"One way or another, it may," Garric said softly. "Your Majesty, do you know where Silyon would have gone with—"
His tongue wanted to choke on the words, but he forced them out without a pause.
"—the sacrifice?"
"To an underground chamber in the palace of the Tyrants of Valles," Valence said. "Attaper knows the place; most of the Blood Eagles do, I suppose. I took them there often enough."
The king wore a tunic decorated only by simple embroidery at the sleeves and neckline. There were neither food stains nor other signs of his recent degradation. "That's where the Beast will enter our world, Silyon told me."
"Right," said Garric, rising from the seat he'd forced himself to take. He drew his sword a finger's breadth, then let it slide back; just making sure it was free in its sheath. "I'll take a few Blood Eagles and be back as soon as I can."
"He'll already have lowered her to the Beast, Prince Garric," Valence said with the simple clarity of a man who has accepted his end and no longer feels the concerns that rack the living. "Once in the vault, she won't be able to return. Nothing can leave that prison until the Beast itself breaks through the walls that hold it."
Garric clasped his hands. He'd sent for Tenoctris, but he knew it would be at least an hour before she could arrive from the queen's mansion. As great as Garric's need for advice from a wizard he could trust, he knew also that Tenoctris had chosen to deal with the queen first and only then to face the Beast.
Ilna had unbound her sash. She threw it on the floor in the middle of the gathering. To Garric's surprise, the fabric began to unravel. The twisting fibers looked almost like—
"Those are words in the Old Script!" Garric said.
"Cerix," Ilna said in the cold calm of her anger. "Does this mean anything to you?"
The cripple bent closer in his chair. He licked his lips and said, "Mistress, I believe it's the first phrase of the Yellow King's Key, a spell of opening. But..."
Ilna balled the fabric in her hands and flung it down again. "And this?" she said as the wool writhed into a different pattern.
"Yes, the next phrase," Cerix said. The pain that twisted his face now was not that of physical agony from his missing legs. "Those two portions are all that remains of the Key. But mistress, even if you can form the whole sequence, there's no wizard alive who can chant it out."
Cerix slammed his fists on the stumps of his legs. He was crying. "I'll fail!" he said. "I'll fail, no matter how much I want to help!"
"If you can write the words for me, Cerix," Halphemos said quietly, "I'll speak them. As we've always done."
"Alos, even for you!" Cerix said in a tone of desperate grief. "No one since the Yellow King could chant this spell, and he was a myth!"
The younger wizard looked at Ilna. "This is what you want, mistress?" he said.
"Yes," Ilna said. "It is."
Halphemos nodded. To Garric he said, "We'll need a carriage for Cerix. I have my athame."
He gestured with the knife of ivory he held in his hand. "Cerix, will I need anything else?"
"More strength than I believe you have, Alos," the cripple said. "I wish I could believe in the Gods."
"Right," said Garric. "Let's—"
"Garric," Royhas said. He didn't raise his voice. "Prince. You have an army to command and a country to rule. Leave this business for others."
"I didn't stop being a man when you made me a prince!" Garric said.
Royhas didn't flinch. "You know that I'm right," he said. He stood in front of the door. Garric could push past him—or cut him down!—but the chancellor wasn't going to move of his own volition.
And Garric knew that he wouldn't be so angry if he didn't in his heart agree with Royhas.
"You think I'm letting everything else go because I care about Liane," he said. "All right, I do care about her! But you're all looking at what the queen may do, and I'll tell you, the Beast Silyon called up is as great a danger. You know that, Royhas!"
No one spoke. The image of King Carus, grim as a granite crag, watched from the edges of Garric's mind. This time Carus offered no advice. There were some decisions a king—
With a leap of understanding in his heart, Garric turned to Valence. "Your Majesty," he said, "your people face a great danger. Go out and lead them. You'll have the best of generals and advisors, but they can't be king."
Valence looked at Garric with eyes that were a century old. "Me?" he said musingly. "I've never been king, not really."
"I don't believe that's true," Garric said, hearing his tone grow hard though not harsh. "And even if it were, Your Majesty—this would be a good time to start. Your people need you."
Valence turned to the man at his side. "Royhas, you'll help me?" he said. "I always trusted you, you know."
"You can still trust me, Your Majesty," the chancellor said quietly. "We'll get you into your regalia. Having you to encourage the troops is better than another ten thousand men on the walls!"
They started from the audience room arm in arm; as friends rather than sick man and attendant. Royhas turned his head and gave Garric a quick nod of appreciation.
He really was the king's friend, Garric realized. A better friend than any toady could have been. Even though at the end Royhas had been willing to replace Valence in order to preserve the kingdom.
Garric looked at the others who waited for him to act. His mouth quirked in a smile. "Let's go, then," he said. "The sooner we start, the sooner we'll—"
He laughed, checking his sword again by a reflex not originally his own.
"—finish, whatever that means, right?" Garric said, completing the thought.
In his mind, King Carus joined in Garric's laughter.
"Allasan," Sharina said. It was the third time she'd spoken the words of the incantation; each iteration grew harder. She felt as though her mouth were full of dry pebbles. "Eomaltha beth iopa kerbeth...."
She noticed that the fierce chill was gone and her skin felt warm again. The light changed, shifting from red to blue as though a gossamer screen had dropped and been replaced by one of a different color.
Sharina and the queen watched a moonlit garden, facing the front of a free-standing loggia. At either end of the structure, stone nymphs played in a fountain whose waters spilled into channels among the beds of azaleas.
On the loggia's bench a richly dressed couple made love.
The shadowed figures were anonymous. Cut in the roof molding was a ring on a shield, the coats of arms of the ancient royal line of Haft. Beside it, easily distinguishable because the carving was fresh in decorations otherwise softened by lichen, was the narwhal of the bor-Nallials, an Ornifal noble house.
The couple gasped and moved apart. Both were fully clothed. The woman smoothed the front of her gown while the man laced up the fly of the horseman's breeches he wore with a short jerkin. Embroidery and appliques of metallic fabrics ornamented the garments of both.
Night-flying insects buzzed among the plantings. Occasionally a bat swooped through them, its staggering flight obviously different from a bird's.
The man turned, looked around cautiously, and walked from the loggia. Sharina recognized him from the miniature portrait she'd long ago found among her mother's belongings: he was Niard bor-Nallial, Count of Haft by his marriage to the Countess Tera. He had been killed eighteen years before in the riots during which Sharina's parents had fled Carcosa.
Niard strode away without looking back. For some time only the insects and the breeze-ruffled blossoms moved in the night. After a safe interval the woman stepped out of the loggia and walked in the opposite direction.
Sharina's breath caught. The woman was a maid from Countess Tera's household, not the countess herself.
The woman with Count Niard was Sharina's mother, Lora.
The queen was apparently ignorant of the real meaning of what she had just displayed. She smiled at Sharina and flicked her crystal staff, melting the idyllic scene into one of chaos. Sharina's heart was cold.
A midwife wearing the black apron of her profession attended Lora on piled straw in the stableyard of a palace. Men armed with a mixture of weapons and household implements—knives, turning spits, and table legs broken off for clubs—streamed past the open gate. Some carried torches; flames gleamed already in many of the palace windows.
Lora thrust with a great cry. The midwife eased the child halfway through the birth canal. Lora gave a final contraction and slumped back in the straw, gasping as the midwife cut and knotted the umbilical cord.
A mule waited, its eyes bandaged. The animal was harnessed to a two-wheeled cart like those couriers used on the western side of Haft where the roads were better than anything near Barca's Hamlet. Shouting and the smell of smoke made the mule restive despite being blindfolded.
A man came from the palace carrying a bundle wrapped in silk brocade. The midwife bleated in fear, then relaxed when light from the burning building fell across his face.
Sharina recognized the man also, though not so quickly as she had Lora. The intervening years had worn hard on the visage of Reise or-Laver, the man Sharina had always thought was her father.
The midwife had wrapped Lora's child in fine wool. Reise handed the woman his bundle, another newborn infant. He bent and helped the barely conscious Lora first to her feet, then into the cart.
The vehicle had a narrow bench and, behind it, a basket for the courier to place letters and parcels. Now it was filled with straw. Reise took the infants from the midwife and tucked them into the basket one at a time. Lora moaned and clutched herself, swaying on the seat.
Reise handed the midwife a coin; moonlight winked on gold. He walked to the front and tugged awkwardly on the reins to guide the blindfolded mule. It obeyed, though nervously. As the cart passed into the riot-torn street, the infant swaddled in rich damask kicked away its coverings.
The queen's art provided diamond-sharp observation. In the firelight there could be no doubt at all that the child Reise had brought from within the palace was male.
The vision faded into mist. Sharina faced the queen. For a moment the wizard's visage was one of human rage; then it changed and the queen's whole form changed, becoming a demon consumed by demonic fury.
"You're not of the royal line!" the demon cried in a voice like grease burning. "Your brother is the descendant of King Lorcan, not you!"
It was like staring into a lightning bolt. Sharina said nothing, waiting for the anger to blast her to dust.
The queen and the red sphere vanished. Sharina stood in the chamber where she had first been imprisoned. Now she was able to move. Beyond the slitted windows was a landscape of smooth, featureless red.
Sharina tried to squeeze through a window. Her slender body fit between the edges of stone, but a barrier as hard as polished ruby stopped her there. She pushed until her muscles trembled and spots danced in front of her eyes; then she sank back on the floor of her cell.
Somewhere Sharina heard chanting.