"She was called Precious then."

The fire chick reacted to the name with a flash of blue-green flame that made Rap wonder when his hair would start smoking. His ear and neck were turning painfully red.

"Bright Water?" the gnome muttered. "Well! I did not know that. My master did not take me into his confidence." He grinned, showing innumerable little teeth, still white and needle sharp despite his age. "You wander around bearing strange secrets, Adept!"

He chuckled at Rap's horror. "Yes, I am poking around in your memories. Don't worrya"you have no more bizarre obscenities in there than most men do. Remarkably few, in fact." He showed even more of the tiny teeth. "Some minds can disgust even a gnome, Master Rap, but I congratulate you. Now I must attend to your injuries; but I'm not going to try it with a fire chick on your shoulder. Come away, Lily."

The dragon turned a sulky green, and crouched low, while trickles of Rap's blood oozed out around its tightening claws. The other fire chicks, meanwhile, were circling him in flickers of curious pink, gradually daring to approach more closely. He thought he would be scorched or shredded if they all tried to land on him.

"I'm not doing this, sir! Ishist, I mean."

The sorcerer scratched thoughtfully at the old carrion caked around his mouth. "I know you're not. It's very unusual, and probably a very real compliment. But we can't stay here all night. Be off with you all!"

Lily shot up from Rap's shoulder in a stream of purple fire, and the whole juvenile blaze of baby dragons went swirling high into the ghostly upper reaches of the chamber, to race around like six violet comets, while their squeaks of anger and fright echoed as discordant bell strokes inside Rap's head.

Ishist ignored them, frowning at Rap. "Now, Master Adept, it is safe to use a little power around you! Never entered my head that you might not be a full sorcerer. You terrified poor Primrose. Fools rush in where mages fear to tread . . ." While he was muttering, Rap's wounds were closing and healing, from his mangled feet to the dragon scratches on his shoulder. " . . .so I overdid the summoning spell . . . at least we know you're not holding back anything if you had to endure this . . . there. How does that feel?"

The black-b.u.t.ton eyes twinkled shrewdly, and Rap suddenly realized that even his fatigue had been lifted, or most of it, and he had lost his sense of smell also. That was the greatest blessing of all. He took a deep breath of relief.

"That's much better, Master Ishist. Thank you."

The gnome nodded with ironic amus.e.m.e.nt. "I was planning to throw you in a dungeon, but my wife is very anxious that you dine with us."

Athal'rian had been staying back, as if not wishing to interfere with business. Now she said, "Oh, yes!" breathlessly, and came over to cuddle against her husband and place a hand on his shoulder. Ishist took it and kissed it; she stooped to place a kiss on his bald pate, although it was plastered with what seemed to be old bird droppings. The elderly gnome and the much-younger elf woman were behaving like two lovesick adolescents, yet she had apparently already borne him seven . . . no, there were eight children present now. What was that baby eating?

"It will have to wait awhile, my love," Ishist said. "I must go and find Master Rap's two companions before the wildlife does."

Athal'rian wailed. "You won't be long, though, darling?"

"No, no! And it is still dark. I shall be as quick as I can, dearest." He patted her lovingly on the rump, as if she were a horse.

"But the food will spoil. And I did so want the children to see what a proper dinner party is like."

As a mother she seemed to have strange priorities. Ugish and the oldest girl were now fighting furiously, rolling around in the mire and biting each other, but Athal'rian was paying them no heed at all.

"It won't hurt them to stay up past dawn for once," Ishist said firmly. "Now, magic is magic, but sleep has its own magic. I'm sure that our guest would appreciate a little rest. Where are you planning to put the visitors?"

She hesitated, shuffling her toes in the dirt. "I thought . . . the northwest tower?" She waited anxiously for his opinion. "Very good choice, my dear. So you show Master Rap to his chamber. I promised Ugish he could come with me. Stop that, you two!" He separated the combatants with a couple of wellplaced kicks. Then he accepted a very long, tight embrace from his tearful wife, before plodding off toward the door. Young Ugish trailed after him, angrily licking a bleeding arm with a very long black tongue.

Still holding his wisp of dirty rag, Rap followed his hostess along innumerable corridors and up narrow, winding staircases. The walls were rough stonework, the floors soft with dirt as if they had not been cleaned since the founding of the Impire. Mummified carca.s.ses and gnawed bones lay in drier comers, while wetter parts were ankle-deep in sewage and the doors had rotted away to rusty relics of hinges. In other places the ceilings had collapsed, requiring painful climbs over heaps of rubble.

He could not a.s.sess the full extent of the huge ruin, but he could easily believe that it was old enough to have known the Dragon Wars. Everywhere he detected ancient occult barriers, although once in a while he caught shadowy vistas running off for incredible distances between them. Sometimes then he glimpsed far-off groups of gnomes going about their business.

Many parts were more or less illuminated by the sort of sorcerous mist he had seen in the Mews; others were pitch black. Athal'rian seemed to find her way through those mostly by memory and touch, but he followed her with farsight, trying to ignore the details: the rashes under the dirt, the close-packed insect bites, the elven grace of her slender hips. She glided like a moonbeam, confirming all the tales he had heard about elves and dancing.

She sickened hima"how could any human being exist in such condition? But in a gruesome fashion he found her fascinating. He kept trying to imagine her cleaned up and properly clad.

If Ugish was thirteen or so, then his mother must be over thirty, surely, but she had a figure any adolescent could envy. Perhaps sorcery had helped there, and bearing tiny gnome babies might not be very taxing to a woman of a tall race. Also, he had a vague idea that elves were long-lived.

Although he kept reproaching himself, he still felt very uncomfortable at the idea of an elf marrying a gnome. He was convinced that her obvious infatuation must be a product of sorcery, and yet Ishist himself seemed equally besotted. Could a sorcerer bespell himself? Would he ever want to? And who was Rap to question the follies of love when he had been crazy enough to fall in love with a queen?

Finally, at the top of a breathlessly winding spiral staircase, Athal'rian brought him to a place that was uncomfortably reminiscent of Inisso's chamber in Krasnegar and almost as large, the uppermost room of a circular tower. The floor creaked alarmingly under his feet. Starlight seeped in through gaps in the corbeled roof, but the four tiny cas.e.m.e.nts were tightly sealed, opaque with grime. The only furniture was a giant four-poster bed whose draperies were mostly cobwebs.

She waited by the door, peering doubtfully at him.

"It's magnificent, my lady," he said gamely. "I shall feel like a king in such royal quarters."

Relief showed through the dirt, but her laugh had an awkward ring. "I know how difficult it can be to adjust to gnomish ways, Adept. No one has been here for a long time, I'm sure."

He saw no need to mention that he had been relieved of his sense of smell. "It is a beautiful room," he insisted. "And it must have a wonderful view."

He walked over to one of the cas.e.m.e.nts and rubbed the gla.s.s. His farsight was blocked and he could see nothing in the starlight except that the walls were enormously thick, doubtless dragonproof.

His approval had filled the simple Athal'rian with delight, although she was smiling in the wrong direction, not having heard him move. "Well, you will want to rest. I'll send Ugish or Oshat to call you when dinner is ready." She floated into a curtsy.

He bowed, clumsy as a drunken troll. He thanked her and watched for a moment as she padded down off down the stairs on her bare feet. Then he took another look around the room. The holes in the ceiling had admitted bats, and some were already flitting around over his head, returning from their nocturnal outings. He could certainly use some sleepa"but where? The bed would collapse if he laid as much as a hand on it. Beetles had fretted the woodwork; the thick feather mattress had been tunneled out by centuries of mice. There were hundreds of them still in there.

The floor might be as soft as the bed, though; both of them were inches deep in bat dung. He tried to pull the top cover from the bed and his hand came away holding a fragment of rag no larger than a kerchief. He sighed, chose the floor, and lay down.

3.

Endlessly rolling from side to back and then back to her side, Inos had never spent a more miserable night, wondering a million times if she had somehow lost the ability to go to sleep without the aid of Elkarath's sorcery. Whenever she did begin to slide below the surface of drowsiness, the four pixies were there at once, all around her, gloating and hurting, repeating their cruelties of the day and going on to achieve worse and worse things, until she awoke in spasms of terror, soaked and shaking and choking back screams. She despised herself then for such cowardice, but that did not help her escape the nightmares.

The little room was so packed with its four small beds that to move around without climbing over them was almost impossible. Two had remained empty, as a gesture of respect to royalty. Kade snored peacefully on the fourth, not stopping once all night. After months in a tent, the stuffy garret seemed confining as a coffin, and although its little dormer window looked out only on a sagging tile roof, it had an inexplicable ability to gather up the racket of the street below: sounds of carousing sailors until an hour before dawn, and then the wheels of wagons rattling over cobblestones. Where now were the peace and serenity of the desert?

Demons haunted the night, spinning giddy circles of mockery in her mind. She had not escaped from Rasha, nor from Rasha's plans. Rasha would proceed to trade her to Warlock Olybino, and he in turn would marry her off to a goblin. Rasha might reasonably resent Inos's attempted flight, and be in future even less considerate than before.

What spiteful punishment would she inflict now on Azak? Perhaps Inos should have married the sultan while she had the chance. For both their sakes.

Inos and Kade were royal guests, but also prisoners, for the door was locked. Only a cat could depart through that window. Having refused to give his parole, Azak had been led off to a dungeon somewhere.

Escape would not be so easy at Ullacarn as it had been at Three Cranes, with Elkarath now alert and watching for it. To slip away in a strange town with no friends or plan would be madness. No, the next escape must be prepared much more carefully than the madcap flight from the oasis, and Inos had no idea how much time she might have to plan. Perhaps noneOlybino might appear in the morning to take delivery.

Azak might no longer be a willing ally. Since Elkarath had suggested that Inos could use magic, the sultan had spoken not a single word to her. Had there been any truth in the accusation, then Inos could have understood. She knew how she herself had felt about the late Sir Andor and his foul sorcery, but in her case the suggestion was ludicrous. Kade had not helped by hinting that Azak was just angry at himself for his own shortcomings. Azak now regarded Inos as one of those shortcomings. And that hurt.

The House of Elkarath in Ullacarn was a great rambling old building, yet it seemed to be crammed with people from cellar to gable. The cramped little attic room was not exactly the Palace of Palms in Arakkaran, nor yet even Kinvale, but it was comfortable enough for just two. An attic was certainly preferable to a dungeon, a dungeon with fleas and chains and rats, Elkarath had said.

Azak had chosen the dungeon. Pigheaded idiot!

A mage could probably detect lies. Would Azak have given his parole to a mundane, meaning to break it as soon as he could find the opportunity? Were all men so stubborn?

And here was Inos, dancing naked on the gra.s.s and shouting unthinkable promises to dozens of young men, as they came running toward her to accept. But they kept turning to stone and sinking into the meadow as they drew near. Hundreds and thousands of them drowning in the ground, and every one of them was Azak. Then she awoke again, gasping and shaking.

Would she ever again be able to stand close to a man without expecting rape, without breaking out in a sweat of terror?

She had remote relatives in Hub, some of them very influential people. Senator Somebody, for example. Kade had innumerable friends there also. Ullacarn was allied with the Impire, and so the post must call here. If Kade could write a letter, enclosing a pet.i.tion to the imperor or the other wardens, then they might be able to deliver it for her. That was one possibility. Ullacarn was a busy port. That was another.

But how could one ever deceive a mage and a sorceress? Again Inos was back in the forest meadow, and this time Rasha was there also, laughing uproariously. She had rooted Inos's feet to the ground, as she had once done in Krasnegar. She was watching and gloating as the pixies . . . but they were not pixies, now they were goblins.

A faint glimmer of dawn smiled in through the window. The entire Imperial army seemed to be shoeing its mounts down in the street, but the yearlong night was ending at last.

And again Inos was back in the forest, and this time the men tormenting her were djinns, and the glowing figure riding up to rescue her on a shining white horse was Rap.

Rap, who had remained loyal when the imps and jotnar of Krasnegar had turned against their queen.

Rap, the only man who had ever accepted a kiss from her without expecting more.

Rap, who had died for her.

Rap, whose wraith had haunted her the night she left Arakkaran.

Crazy dreams!

4.

"Why aren't you sleeping in the bed?" Ugish demanded, nudging Rap with a toe.

Rap groaned, rubbed his smarting eyes, and sat up. Then he sneezed six times in rapid succession. Faint traces of dawn showed through the eastern window. He was stiff and chilled, and filthy as a gnome.

"Is that for me?"

"Uh-huh." Ugish had brought a robe, a fine-looking linen garment whose obvious newness suggested that it had been specially made by his father. Unfortunately Ugish had been dragging it, and that showed also.

There would be no chance for shaving or washing here. Rap heaved himself to his feet and took the robe. "You can have your loincloth back, thank you very much."

Ugish shrugged. "Don't want it. Why do I have to get all dressed up just because we have visitors?"

"Mothers are funny about things like that."

"Uh-huh. Why didn't you sleep in the bed?"

Rap ran fingers through his hair and regretted the action. "Because it's full of mice."

The little gnome's glorious bronze eyes widened. "Babies; too?"

"Yes," said Rap. "But you'd better save them for later. If you spoil your appet.i.te now, your mother will scold."

Ugish nodded reluctantly. "Awrighta"if you promise not to tell the others!"

As Rap walked out onto the great terrace, the first pinks and peaches of the rising sun were just starting to blossom on a forest of crumbling towers and turrets behind him. Warth Redoubt was ten times vaster than he had even guessed, a sprawling landscape in its own right. Once it must have clasped a whole city within its throbbing heart, but it had long since fallen into ruin. Shattered pillars and broken statuary lay thrown around in weedstrewn rubble.

Warth perched like an eyrie on the lip of a huge natural arena. On all sides jagged peaks stood dark against the brightening sky.

Ishisi was waiting, with Darad and Gathmor. The two jotnar had been healed and restored, as Rap had been, and they wore white robes like his. Their faces showed great relief when they saw him.

"I thought you might like to watch the dawn rising," the sorcerer remarked. "We are sheltered here."

Rap had already registered the occult barrier enclosing the terrace, and he supposed that there would be other spells that he could not sense, for it was not the sun they would be watching rise.

Far below, the blasted, barren valley was still dark except where awakening dragons were glowing and breathing jets of many-colored fire. Their rumbling anger echoed from the rocky walls. He wondered if the worms .themselves could have excavated so enormous a pit, even if they had started before the coming of the G.o.ds.

"This is Warth Nest, of course," Ishist said, "home of the largest surviving blaze. In its prime it nurtured several times as many as it does now. It was from here that Olis'laine drew the sky army that he used to waste the Cities of the'Ambly Pact. From here too came the Legions of Death in the Second Dragon War." He droned on for a while, obviously enjoying having an audience, however unappreciative. Rap did not know much history, and soon concluded that he did not want to.

Then a dragon spiraled up and up, until it was a dark shape against brightness; and yet the sun flashed brightest on its scales and wings. It was followed rapidly by others, and the sorcerer fell silent. Deadly the monsters undoubtedly were, but their beauty was undeniable, too. Soon the sky was filled with them, a hundred or more, and they danced for the dawn. They soared too high for sight, they swooped like falcons girt in thunder, they spun and rolled in pairs or groups, in wild confusion like schooling fish or in the rigid ranks of geese. Some were as small as ponies, others longer than longships and older than storied cities. Their voices roared and rang like every instrument ever known, reverberating in chorus from the peaks, and Rap thought he also heard some hint of mental song, the secret melody of dragon serenading dragon.

They shone in the hues of pearls and dew and the wings of b.u.t.terflies; they blazed like a Winterfest ball. They were at once the most awesome thing he had ever witnessed and the most glorious. He felt tears run down into his stubble and he did not care. He wished Jalon had been here to see this, or Inos to share it with. And when the blaze had scattered and noise had faded and the last few were vanishing into the distance, he felt both crushed into insignificance and yet strangely uplifted.

He wiped his cheeks as he looked at the tiny old sorcerer. "Thank you, my lord. Thank you!"

"You are welcome, lad," the gnome said wryly. "You enjoyed it."

"It was so beautiful! How many men have seen that?"

"Very few in these times." Ishist glanced at the stunned horrified expressions on the faces of the two jotnar, and he chuckled. "Not many deserve it. Let us go and have this meal my wife is so excited about."

Oftentimes the banquet hall had rung to the laughter of famed heroes, Ishist said, and mighty kings. From here Alsth'aer had marched to meet his doom foretold. Olis'laine had feasted here, and the grim Jiel, and their n.o.ble companies had cheered them, clashing silver goblets in toast and making sterner metals ring in pledge of honor. Here the brave and the beautiful had trod and sung and sworn historic oaths. Trumpets had brayed to the banners on the hammerbeams, viols had lamented, and many a nimble dancer had been showered with gold. Warlock Thraine of high renown had visited Warth more than once, *twas said, and had wrought many marvels in this very chamber for Allena the Fair.

But now the fine-arched windows held no gla.s.s and the subtle panels had all fallen from the walls. Now it belonged to the rodents, the birds, and the gnomes. In places the planks had rotted away, and a careless step might drop a man four stories to the cellars.

But in the center of the dusty, windswept desolation stood a long and shining table. Gold plate glinted on damask, and crystal sparkled. The sorcerer had been at work, Rap saw, and he wondered whether the gold was shielded from the dragons or was merely an illusion that would not deceive them. As the men approached, Athal'rian was adjusting eight children around her, while clutching a baby. Her family seemed to increase each time Rap turned his back. The smaller ones kept pulling off their wraps, and she kept telling Ugish and the older girls to dress them again. Ugish himself was setting a poor example.

She handed the baby to one of the older children so she could embrace her husband. By the time the long kiss was ended, more than half the children had stripped again and one of the toddlers was heading for a chasm. Rap himself went after it and brought it back. It bit him.

"Now, are we ready?" Ishist inquired. "Chairs, dearest?" Athal'rian said. "Chairs of course. Describe them."

Athal'rian became fl.u.s.tered and made vague gestures. "Blue velvet. Oak. About so high. Backs carved, tall . . ."

Three chairs appeared at one end of the table, and about a dozen at the other.

Her greasy face lighted up. "Thank you, my love. Master Adept, perhaps you and your friends would like to sit at that end, where the children will not disturb you?" Such tact was oddly touching in a woman so obviously addled.

Rap seated himself at one end of the long table, with Darad and Gathmor flanking him. Both seemed too overcome by emotion to speak, and from the greenish tinge of their cheeks, Rap suspected that their noses were working at normal efficiency.

There was a fair breeze blowing through the ruin, but even so the idea of dining with gnomes was enough to stun anyone. For the first time he now saw inhabitants of Warth Redoubt other than the dragonward and his family. He had already sensed them with farsight, and the Mews floor had certainly suggested a large population. A troop of servant gnomes brought in dishes and laid them before the diners, and then mercifully departed. The first course was a thin soup. It was cold and greasy, but Rap gulped it down manfully, choking on the gristly lumps and ignoring floating feathers. The others copied him with grim dedication. The wine had a sour flavor but it was drinkable, and probably occult.

Then the gruesome company of ragged footman returned with the second course. And departed.

"This was . . . is . . . fish," Rap remarked cheerfully. "Her ladyship tells me that she uses freshly ensorceled supplies, prepared according to famed elvish recipes." He gave each companion in turn a steely look, and each groaned softly and grudgingly addressed his high-piled plate. The fish was a sort of pike, mostly bones, and smothered in sickly caramel sauce.

At the other end of the table the children were having great difficulty adjusting to the idea of chairs, and reasonably so, for the small ones could not see the fare even if they stood on the seats. Ignoring their mother's ineffectual protests, some of them settled on the floor as usual, but most crawled up to sit on the table itself, eating out of the serving dishes. The food at that end was traditional gnomish cuisine, and Rap wished his farsight was not so efficient. Sweat p.r.i.c.kled on his forehead as he tried to force sticky, bony pike down his throat.