"That's Cashel!" Garric said in amazement. As unlikely as it seemed, there was no mistaking his friend's big form coming through the crowd filling Palace Square. He wore a breechclout and a crisscross of bandages over his chest.
One of the mansions was afire. Not Ilna'sas Garric first thought with a tensing of his heartbut a place a few doors down which also backed up to the main canal.
Flames leaped from one end of the second story. Members of the Fire Watch worked on the blaze while hundreds of City Patrolmen and soldiers from the palace barracks tried vainly to keep order. The crowd brought out by the excitement wasn't yet a dangerous mob, but the fire was an excuse for ordinary citizens to ransack a rich man's houseand they were doing so.
Garric understood that, but he was surprised to see Cashel carrying a roll of fabric. Cashel was the last person Garric could imagine looting. The last person besides Ilna, at any rate.
"Cashel!" he called, striding ahead of Liane and Tenoctris. There was a woman with Cashel, a tall
"Sharina!" Garric shouted. "Shepherd guide me! Tenoctris, it's Sharina!"
Cashel grinned broadly. He changed direction but didn't break into a run as Garric and Sharina did, shoving people out of the way in their haste.
Garric hugged his sister, lifting her off the pavement. Until the day she left he'd never thought he'd miss Sharina, and even the emptiness he'd felt as the trireme sailed off gave him no inkling of how good it would feel to see her again.
"What are you doing here?" he said. They both started to laugh half-hysterically, because Sharina had said the same thing simultaneously.
"Garric," Tenoctris said. "I don't believe Liane has met your sister."
Garric put Sharina down. Cashel had joined them. Garric clasped arms with his friendflesh this time, not a dreamand looked over his shoulder toward the two women. Liane's expression was withdrawn and as cold as the moonlight that illuminated it.
"Ah," Garric said. "Liane, this is my sister Sharina. Liane came to Barca's Hamlet, ah, after you left."
He tried to think how to explain to Sharina what had happened to him since she'd sailed away. The complexity of the whole businessthings that he didn't understand, things that weren't over yet; things which might not have happened at all, like the dream in which he got the swordstunned him silent.
Sharina wore a heavy knife under her sash. Garric blinked at it. Much else besides about his sister looked different from the last time he'd seen her, but that was a specific, identifiable change.
Sharina followed the line of his eyes. She touched the hilt and said, "Nonnus is dead, Garric. He died because, because..."
"Ah," Garric said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know him very well."
"Come," Cashel said with a rumbling confidence he used to have only when herding sheep. "There's a, well, the man who employed me; a Serian named Latias. His compound's close, and I think I need to lie down."
The five of them were a strange enough mix that under other circumstances the Patrol would certainly have been asking questions. Garric realized that there hadn't been time to cancel the pickup order for him and Liane, though the fire and the surging mob provided a degree of protection from the authorities at the moment.
Cashel strode through the fringes of the crowd, leading them in the direction he and Sharina had been headed when Garric saw them. On Cashel's back the bandages were soaked through with blood, some of it still seeping from the wounds below. The injuries must have been extremely painful, though apart from a certain stiffness Cashel seemed the same as usual.
The stiffness was usual enough too. Cashel was the sort who plodded along, never hurrying and never stopping till he'd gotten where he was going.
"Want me to take that?" Garric offered, patting the roll of fabric under his friend's left arm. It didn't look heavy, but somebody hurt as badly as Cashel was didn't need extra burdens.
Cashel looked down at the bolt with a smile that Garric couldn't read. The cloth had gleamed with highlights from the fire. Now that they'd left the square and were walking up one of the boulevards feeding it, the moon's softer light lay across it like a shimmering stream.
"It's all right," he said. "The house we were in caught fire, I guess from the fighting before I got there. I thought I'd bring this along in case..."
Cashel cleared his throat, uncertain for the first time since Garric had met him here. "In case it was important to some friends of mine that it not burn."
"Meder caused the fire," Sharina said with a tremble that wasn't fear. "With his wizardry. His last wizardry."
"If Master Latias will give us privacy," Tenoctris said, "that will be very helpful. The things I'm afraid we have to do next will be difficult enough without outsiders becoming involved."
Cashel looked at the old woman over his shoulder. "He'll give us whatever I ask, I think," he said.
"There's more to take care of?" Garric said. He wasn't frightened. He was just getting information together so that he'd know what he was to do.
"Yes," said Tenoctris. "The dark power which now holds Ilna."