DALLY SLID to the right, feinting, then lunged. Jame pivoted to meet him. Her left arm jerked up as she tried to snare his knife in the full sleeve of her d'hen. For a second the blade caught in the tough, mesh lining, then he twisted it free and jumped back. Hissing wickedly, her return strike skimmed the front of his tunic.
"Not bad!" he said, maneuvering warily at arm's length. "You're fast enough, but you always hold back. Come on, let's see some aggression!"
Back and forth they went over the flagstones of the Res aB'tyrr's courtyard, circling the well, avoiding the mound of manure that Ghillie had just mucked out of the stable. It was three and a half weeks after Winter's Eve, and the late afternoon air was growing chill, but still the lesson continued.
"C'mon, attack, attack!" Dally gasped, leaping in with a lateral strike, which Jame neatly blocked. "What's the matter with you?"
"I don't like knives!"
"Well, you've got to learn how to use one anyway, unless you want every flash-blade in town picking on you. You can't take them all on bare-handed . . ."
Jame, with a frustrated growl, drove her knife between two flagstones and sprang at him. A moment later, Dally found himself disarmed and face down on the pavement with the pile of manure inches from his nose and his right arm locked in a most uncomfortable position over his head.
". . . then again," he said in a muffled voice, "maybe you can."
"Am I—uh—interrupting something?" said an unfamiliar voice tentatively.
"I am, I think, about to be stood on my head in a dunghill," said Dally, wriggling futilely. "By all means, interrupt, interrupt!" His arm released, he scrambled to his feet, then froze, regarding the boy at the gate with disbelief.
"Canden, the Sirdan Theocandi's grandson, isn't it?" Jame said. "Meet Dallen, the brother of Master Men-dalis."
The kinsmen of the Guild's two bitterest rivals bowed to each other warily. Neither seemed quite sure what to do next.
"Cleppetty's just baked a damson tart," said Jame, amused. "Come in, both of you, and have some."
"It really was you in the alley that night, wasn't it?" Canden asked as he perched on the south hearth, gingerly juggling a slice of pastry. "I thought you were a ghost god. You gave me a real scare turning up at the Palace like that."
"I'll bet I did, and for all I know, you deserved it. What in all the names of God were you doing, hiding in the shadows while those two pug-nasties tried to murder your grand-uncle?"
"Oh, they wouldn't have hurt him." Canden gave Dally a quick, nervous glance. "It was all a trick, you see. In another minute I was supposed to jump out of the doorway and save him, thereby winning his gratitude and maybe a chance to become his apprentice. . . or so Grandfather hoped. I told him it wouldn't work, but he never listens to me. Now he's furious with me for failing and with you for being successful, but I don't care. In fact, I'm glad," he said with sudden, desperate defiance, quite losing control of the tart, which slide off his knee onto the floor. "I don't want to be a thief or trick Grand-Uncle Penari out of his secrets or be the next Sirdan when Grandfather dies. No one seems to understand that."
"Wait a minute," said Dally, startled out of his suspicious silence. "I thought Bane was Theocandi's chosen successor. After all, he's the old man's only pupil."
"Normally, that would be true, but he was forced on Grandfather by his father, Abbotir of the Gold Court, just before the Guild Council meeting six years ago in return for political support. The funny thing is that I don't think Bane wants to be a thief either. He has his own interests, his own . . . amusements. Three weeks ago, on Grandfather's name-day, his followers made me watch while he mutilated that child. The things they did to him before he died—and after. . ." He shuddered, then suddenly looked up. "I would have come sooner if Grandfather hadn't wanted me to, but to spy, to betray . . . that can't be what friendship is for. . . can it?"
Dally, who had been listening first with suspicion, then with embarrassment, now looked at that young, pleading face and said warmly, "Of course, it isn't."
At that moment Cleppetty appeared at the hall door. She stopped short, staring first at the half-empty pastry tin and then at the sticky mess on the floor at Canden's feet. In the midst of this explosive pause, Dally stepped up to her and gravely kissed the tip of her sharp nose. Then with one accord he and Jame bolted out the street door, dragging Canden with them.
"Well," said Jame several blocks later when they had stopped running, "now that you gentlemen have arranged things so that I can't go home for a few hours—or maybe a few days—how do you suggest we spend the rest of the afternoon?"
"I hear that the Askebathes' temple has been desanctified for repairs," said Canden eagerly. "They might let us in to have a look around. . . if there isn't something you'd rather do."
"Why not?" said Dally, smiling at the boy. "We're free until this evening and can pay our respects to my father while we're in the district."
"Is he a priest?"
"No. He's Dalis-sar, the sun god of the New Pantheon."
Jame grinned, remembering how she reacted the first time he had sprung this bit of information on her. All she could think of to say, in a tone of profound confusion, had been, "How did that happen?"
"Oh, the usual way," Dally had said lightly. "My mother was a handmaiden in his temple in Tai-abendra. Actually, I wasn't born until after she'd left to marry a local tradesman, but she arranged for my adoption so I and Mendy, who's a true god's son, would be full brothers."
"Handmaiden" was the usual clerical euphemism for a temple prostitute.
So they visited the house of the Askebathes and then that of Dally's father. Jame was unable to see much of anything in the latter because of the blinding light cast by the wheels of Dalis-sar's war chariot. Today it was especially bad, Dally told her, because the god himself was standing in the golden vehicle.
"It would be even worse," he added, "if he were facing us directly. Instead, yes, he's still glaring back over his own shoulder. That's been going on for a good six years now. No one knows why."
Jame herself could see neither god nor chariot because of the glare. When she held up her hands to blot out the heart of the fire, however, it seemed to her that behind it was not the rear of the temple but the city itself, as though seen from a great height, with the details of the Lower Town preternaturally distinct.
But the sanctuary was alive with more than radiance. Anger shook the air like the steady, immense rumble of a volcano, penetrating flesh, jarring bone, yet unheard. It was the darkness at the heart of the light. Once Dally had proudly told Jame that, like all the deities of the New Pantheon, Dalis-sar had once been a man, and that man, a Kencyr. She had smiled at the idea of a monotheist being drafted as a god. Now, however, the cold darkness of that rage, so like her own the day the beam had fallen, left no room for doubt. Shaken, she left the temple, her fingertips on Dally's arm, for the brightness had left her temporarily blind.
Outside, all was enemy territory. She had never felt it so much as now, walking sightless and vulnerable between the two young men. The gods of Tai-tastigon were all around her. The shadow of their power brushed her mind in the red-shot darkness. If any of them, even Dalis-sar, proved to be real in the same way that her own god was, she would have to admit that the entire culture and history of her people— thirty millennia of hardship, sacrifice, and honor—were built on self-delusion. But how did one go about proving the entire populace of a large city wrong; and if she failed to do so, how could her faith in her own heritage, in herself, remain intact?
They were passing the temple of Gorgo the Lugubrious. Speculatively, Jame looked at it, blinking away the last of her blindness.
Canden left them at the district gate, and Jame and Dally walked on, discussing their new acquaintance. Dally clearly wanted to take the Sirdan's grandson at his word, but felt he owed it to his brother to keep some suspicions alive. Jame, who as yet had no stake in Guild politics, smiled at her friend's reluctant caution.
They arrived early that evening at the headquarters of the New Faction, a fortress like house near the Sun Gate in the Gold Ringing District.
"One has to make a good impression," said Dally as he escorted her through the richly appointed corridors. "It isn't easy, though, competing with a man who has the whole Guild treasury as his privy purse."
Men-dalis received them in his private study. It was the first time the leader of the New Faction and Master Penari's apprentice had met. Dally watched them both eagerly, noting the graceful formality with which they exchanged greetings. All was going well, he thought.
Jame would have agreed—at first. As fair as his brother was dark, blessed with sapphire blue eyes and movements a dancer might envy, Men-dalis was without doubt the handsomest man she had ever seen. The very room with its rich furnishings of blue and silver seemed to take on an added luster from him. No one would ever doubt that this indeed was a true son of Dalis-sar, Lord of the Golden Chariot.
He began to speak of his plans for the Guild after the Grand Council awarded him the sirdanate that coming winter. Jame had heard them all before from Dally, but never so glowingly described. The eloquence of the speaker first tugged at her imagination, then swept it forward into a bright, nebulous future compared to which Theocandi's forty year regime seemed the merest dross.
Then, abruptly, something brought her back to the present with a start. A face was peering over Men-dalis's shoulder. Far back in the shadows of the room, perched on the edge of a table like an escaped gargoyle, was a tiny, skull-faced man. His hands, more bone than flesh, lay twisted together on bony knees under a sharp chin. His expression, which only her Kencyr eyes could have seen in the dark, was one of unalloyed malignity.
Soon after that, Men-dalis's monologue ended and they were graciously dismissed. Jame, glancing back from the doorway, saw the New Faction leader already deep in conference with the man from the shadows, who, she suddenly realized, must be the head of his spy network, a man known in the streets of Tai-tastigon only as the Creeper.
"Dally . . ." she said as they left the house. "Would you say that I frighten easily?"
"Gods, no. Why?"
"Your brother scares me. I think he might be capable of anything."
Dally looked startled, then said, "Of course he is!" and launched into an enthusiastic description of all the glorious things that Men-dalis would do when he had power. Jame tried to listen, but her mind only saw that radiant, preternaturally handsome face, cheek to cheek with a living death's head, whose eyes, pools of hatred and envy, had not once left Dally's face.
MEN-DALIS did not request that Jame visit him again. Clearly, he did not attach much importance to her and was content to win her loyalty, if at all, through Dally.
Theocandi also kept his distance, but with less indifference. Through Canden, Jame learned of the life-long rivalry between the Sirdan and her new master. Theocandi had always been jealous of Penari's reputation and raged at his older brother's refusal to envy him his own position and power. All his life, the younger brother had tried to excel the elder—in skill, arcane studies, renown—and always he had failed. Now in the evening of his days, nothing was more important to him than mastering the secrets that had always made Penari his superior in all things that had ever really mattered to either of them. In the end, however, Theocandi could not believe that Penari would give what he considered to be family secrets to an outsider. Consequently Jame was left alone, for the time being at least.
Meanwhile, she, Canden, and Dally were getting on splendidly together. Dally, too good-natured to hold his suspicions for long, had taken an almost fraternal interest in the younger boy, while Jame responded to his loneliness, so reminiscent of her own at an earlier age. She also discovered that Canden had in him a spirit of inquiry not unlike her own and a fascination with the past that if anything surpassed his mistrust of the present.
"Do you know what the oldest building in Tai-tastigon is?" he asked Jame one day. "That temple of yours. As far as I can tell, it was here before the city walls went up, before the Old Empire was established, before the Kencyrath itself even arrived. How is that possible?"
"Maybe the scrollsmen and Arrin-ken know who built it," said Jame. "I don't. Every time we've had to shift worlds, though, the temples have always been waiting for us. The one here is probably as old as Rathillien itself. The other Tastigon priests don't even like to acknowledge its existence."
"Maybe that's why they chose a different part of the city for the Temple District," said Canden thoughtfully. "I've heard that there's another even larger Kencyr temple to the south, in the ruins of Tai-than."
He talked a great deal about this lost city, the great southern capital of the Old Empire, who's decaying towers no man had seen in half a millennium. An expedition was currently being organized to search for it, and Canden desperately wanted to be part of it. It was an announcement of these preparations that he had brought to show his grandfather the night he had interrupted the old man's attempts to bribe Jame. Theocandi would probably never have let him go anyway, but now he was too incensed by the boy's failure in the alley even to consider it. Jame felt responsible for all this. Trying to make it up to the boy, she gave him her friendship and, in an attempt to placate Theocandi for his sake, passed on to him some of the things that Master Penari taught her.
None of these could be classified as a secret. In fact, nothing she had learned so far seemed to fit into that category, and Jame was beginning to wonder if the old man meant to keep his own council after all. This disappointed her, of course, but on the other hand the training he was prepared to give her left neither time nor grounds for dissatisfaction.
Eventually, Penari introduced an intense course on the rules of Jame's new profession, however, which gave her hope that her lessons were about to move in new directions. She learned that everything an apprentice stole over a certain value became the property of his master, whose duty it was to send the booty to one of the five Guild courts, each one of which specialized in a different kind of merchandise. There it was assessed and the length of time determined for which its possession was punishable by law. This crucial time, called the period of jeopardy, began as soon as the object came into the apprentice's hands. In Tai-tastigon, possession was the sole proof of guilt. Complicity was sometimes punished as well, but only if the accused had been in physical contact with the stolen article. Penalties ranged from fines to the loss of a finger, hand, or the whole of one's skin, for robberies involving undue violence or the injuring of a guardsman. The worst punishment of all—public flaying preceded by whatever mutilations a mob of concerned citizens could inflict—was reserved for anyone who tried to assassinate one of the Five or a Guild-lord.
Hearing this, Jame's eyes darkened with memory. Not long before, an embittered young journeyman had attacked the Sirdan in the Guild Hall itself. It would be a long time before she forgot that pitiful figure, already blind, tongue-less, and castrated, writhing under the knife and cauterizing irons on the Mercy Seat.
Realizing that he had lost her attention, Penari ended his lecture with a snarl. Scooping a handful of gems out of a desk drawer (along with several marbles and a mouse's skull), he threw them down on the floor before her, then immediately swept them up again and demanded to know exactly what she had seen. This was an old exercise between them, and Jame usually did very well at it. Today, however, she could only name eighteen out of thirty or so stones. Various things were distracting her, not the least of which was Monster, who had fallen asleep with his head balanced precariously on her shoulder.
Penari, thoroughly exasperated by now, snatched up the large translucent rock he used for paperweight and threw it, nearly braining them both. Upon extricating herself from the python's sleepy coils and recovering this stone, Jame suddenly realized that it was not the piece of quartz she had always taken it for. She was in fact holding an enormous uncut diamond, the Eye of Abarraden itself.
That day's lesson ended with Penari sending her out into the Maze with instructions to find her way from one point to another and, on returning, to describe to him turn for turn where she had been. She went, knowing that the old man would detect any mistake in her eventual recitation instantly. The same was true when he had her go out to memorize sections of the city. He would name a street and ask her how she would get from it to another, sometimes insisting that her route lay over the rooftops or even through the houses themselves as if she were escaping from a very determined pursuer. In the course of these games, she had suddenly realized something very odd: for her master, Tai-tastigon was the same, structure by structure, as it had been when he had first gone into seclusion over fifty years before and nothing would convince him otherwise. This knowledge cleared up some of her confusion. It didn't help much, however, when he made her describe routes through areas long since reduced to rabble by one of the city's numerous disasters and subsequently rebuilt. Today, she was happy enough to contend only with the Maze and did so well in it that Penari, mollified, let her go early.
Standing on the threshold, turning up the collar of her d'hen against the cool evening air, Jame reflected that she was receiving an education every bit as eccentric in some ways as it was excellent in others.
A tall figure passed by the end of the street, instantly recognizable by his cream-velvet d'hen. Jame called after him to wait, and a few minutes later she was walking westward beside Darinby, a journeyman of Master Galishan. Darinby was one of the Guild's finest, a true craftsman with family tradition behind him and glory ahead according to most savants, who predicted that he would soon become the Guild's youngest master. Jame had always admired his skill, style, and integrity. He was the sort of thief she hoped to become if the length of her stay in Tai-tastigon permitted it; and it pleased her very much that he in turn seemed to like her. They walked on together, discussing the upcoming Guild elections.
"No, I haven't chosen a side," said Darinby, "and probably won't either. Theocandi's too corrupt for my taste, and Men-dalis is too ambitious. My master will probably support the latter—if he can get his mind off M'lady Melissand long enough—but you and I, Talisman, should be glad we've no voice in the matter."
"Huh. Sometimes I wonder if anyone else realizes that."
"Your position is rather peculiar, isn't it?" he said, smiling. "Strictly speaking, Penari has no more power than Galishan, just one vote out of a hundred among the landed masters for their two representatives; but others will be swayed by his decision, and you're the only person in the city close enough to him to influence it. Bad times are coming. I don't envy you, Talisman, no, not at all."
They parted at the Serpent Fountain.
"Oh, by the way," the journeyman said, stopping suddenly and turning back toward her. "There's a rumor that since you enrolled at the Guild Hall, Bane has given up young boys. I should walk wary if I were you, Talisman."
She watched him go, his d'hen glimmering in the dusk.
Wind devils whirled about the fountain, mixing its spray with the thin rain that had begun to fall. Jame spun about.
Surely someone was watching her. Often over the last few weeks she had felt the sudden chill of eyes but never seen the face behind them. No more so now. Darinby's words, however, had unlocked a memory. The first time her flesh had crept this way had been in the Sirdan's Palace, walking down a corridor with the whisper of footsteps behind her. Names of God, but her nerves must be raw. The square was empty, its shadows tenantless. She set out for home briskly, not deigning to look back.
IT WAS MID-EVENING when Jame reached the Res aB'tyrr after a breathless game of Follow-my-lead across the rain-slick rooftops with a trio of Cloudie friends. The first thing that struck her as she opened the kitchen door was the uproar within; the second was a large, half-roasted goose. Her immediate impression was that someone had thrown the fowl at her. Then she realized that the headless creature was in fact under its own power and making a very credible attempt to escape. After several hectic moments of being hauled about the courtyard, frequently off her feet, she finally pinioned the greasy, squirming carcass and marched it back to the door.
Inside Kithra—formerly of the Skyrrman—was struggling to hold down the lid of a pot from which a score of naked chicken wings protruded, flapping madly, while Cleppetty pursued an escaped quail about the kitchen with a broom, and Ghillie, huddled in a corner, frantically read names out loud from a book of household exorcisms.
"Look under fowls, not fantods," gasped the widow, flailing away determinedly. "You brought it home, you get rid of it!"
Ghillie flipped over several pages and began to read again, even faster than before: ". . . Afanci-Ainsel-Allisoun-Assgingel. . . ah!"
A wind full of chittering sounds rushed through the kitchen and up the three chimneys. Cleppetty's bird plopped to the floor. Kithra's kettle stopped jumping. And the goose suddenly went limp in Jame's arms.
"Ah, indeed," said the widow with satisfaction. "But, oh, what a mess!" She ruefully surveyed her once immaculate kitchen, spattered now with fragments of pastry, goose, and bits of stuffing.
"So this is how you amuse yourselves when I'm not around," said Jame, dropping her now inert captive on the table. "What happened?"
"Bogles," said Cleppetty succinctly. "And this is nothing: you should have been here when the pigeon pie decamped. Now upstairs and off with that shirt, missy; you're better basted than that damned bird."
The gods of Tai-tastigon were for the most part properly templed; but now and then, presumably when they slept, wisps of power escaped. These sometimes attached themselves to passers-by and were carried out of the District to become the dreaded bogles—malignant, mischievous, or simply mindless impulses that would wreak havoc until the speaking of their proper name dispelled them. Nothing had ever followed Jame home—nothing would have dared—but Ghillie, clearly, had been less fortunate.
As she changed clothes up in the loft, Jame heard clapping and cheers from across the square. Though still not completely furnished, the ground floor of the Skyrrman blazed with light. The uproar receded, leaving behind the sound of a harp running thoughtfully through its trills. Jane listened, hardly breathing. The master harpist was playing well tonight, more than living up both to his reputation and to the staggering sum that Marplet sen Tenko must have paid to bring him upriver from his home in Endiscar to perform here. With such competition, it was hardly surprising that the Res aB'tyrr was almost deserted tonight and had been for the last two weeks. The music ended, its last note dying away into silence before the storm of applause began again.
In a dark, third story window of the Skyrrman, a shadowy figure raised its hand to Jame in a mocking salute. She returned it, one palm down in the Kencyr fashion to show appreciation, and then descended to the kitchen.
"We're still being watched," she said, reentering the room. "This time by Marplet himself, I think. Why do you suppose they do it?"
"The gods only know," said Cleppetty, scraping food off the wall. "Why, for that matter, have they been making a list of our patrons this past fortnight, and what business has our precious Bortis at the Skyrrman?"
"Bortis?" It took Jame a moment to remember Taniscent's former lover.
"That's right," said Ghillie, coming in from the courtyard with a bucket of water, which he poured into the scullery cauldron as Kithra stoked the fire under it. "In case you haven't noticed he practically lives there now."
"Something's up, all right," said the widow, sitting back on her heels. "But what? Marplet's well on his way to ruining us as it is, what with all his grand, imported talent. Of course, he can't keep it up forever, even with his brother-in-law's support; but if we lose enough business long enough, Tubain won't be able to renew our charter when it falls due come Spring's Eve . . . and if he can't, Marplet will snatch it up as fast as hot bricks in a blizzard. Without that bit of paper, the Res aB'tyrr has no legal protection. It will be the end of us. Surely that should satisfy him."
"But it won't," said Kithra suddenly, her voice hardening. "He played cat-and-mouse with you, and the mouse drew first blood. After what happened to Niggen, his pride is at stake now too. No, he won't be so easily satisfied."
Jame was inclined to believe her. If anyone knew the workings of Marplet's mind, it was his former servant. Kithra had come from her home in Tenzi canton a year ago to work at his inn, and by dint of some very skillful seduction had finally ended up in his bed. This should have greatly improved her social position, but she had reckoned without Marplet's intense misogyny. Her ploy had only earned his contempt. The girl's hatred for him now, after the way he had expelled her, was frightening in its intensity. Just the same, it had not taken the edge off her natural ambition. Jame believe she was currently trying to decide if it would be more advantageous to marry Rothan, become Tubain's mistress, or take on both roles simultaneously. She looked at Kithra askance, wondering just what her attack on Niggen had unleashed on this normally tranquil household.
And then there was Marplet sen Tenko. Slowly she was beginning to understand him better—the love of perfection that had led him to construct his inn so slowly, using only the finest materials; the almost feline quality of mind that allowed him to take such pleasure in his many schemes; his shame at having to call that lump of flesh Niggen his son. She could almost feel the sense of anger and betrayal that gripped him each time he saw that ungainly boy in his perfect house. What she did not feel, strangely enough, was any sort of personal animosity toward her whenever their eyes met across the square.
"Female or not," Cleppetty had said in grim amusement when she mentioned this one day, "now that he's taken your measure, I think he's rather come to like you. You'd look better sitting on his hearth next to that mangy torn cat of his than Niggen does, and more natural than you do here, for that matter. A tiger cub in a field full of tabbies, that's you."
"Meow!" Jame had said, and rolled Boo over on his back.
Now she folded up her sleeves and helped the others scrub down the kitchen, half listening to their talk, thinking her own thoughts. Finally the inn closed its doors for the night.
Up in the loft, on the edge of sleep, a sudden coldness jolted her awake, made her throw back the blanket and stand staring out. The Skyrrman was dark. She was alone and yet, somehow, as beside the Serpent Fountain earlier that evening and a dozen times before that, she was being watched.
"Are you thinking of me, butcher of children?" she asked the night. "I am of you. "Thought crosses thought, like steel in the dark. "Why can't you leave me alone . . . and why am I afraid that you will?"
The rain had turned to snow. White crystals fell on her black hair, on bare arms and breasts. Shivering she lay down again, wrapped in her blanket, but did not sleep until the eastern sky was tinged with light and cocks had begun to crow at the edge of the city.