His mind stretched, struck walls. Reckless with sleep and the dream and the last rags of the darkness, he cast them down.

Silence. Utter stillness. No sound, no breath, no scent of alien presence. Thibaut lay in his blanket, unmoving. His mind- Silence.

"Thibaut," said Aidan. Louder: "Thibaut!"

Nothing, Aidan knew. He refused it. It could not be.

The dark head rolled as Aidan shook'the boy's shoulder. The eyes were open, wide and black and empty even of surprise.

Thibaut was gone. Emptied.

Dead.

In the smooth brown flesh above his heart, silver glimmered: the hilt of a Saracen dagger. And beside his body, still warm from the fire, the cake which was baked upon no hearth but one.

Aidan flung back his head and howled.

He had not, for all of that, gone mad. G.o.d had no such mercy. He had fretted over a woman. Fretting, he had brought down the wards. And the a.s.sa.s.sin had come into his very chamber, while he dreamed and tossed and l.u.s.ted after shad-ows, and taken Thibaut's life, and vanished away.

Utterly. No memory remained. The dagger was a lifeless thing, cold steel without scent or sense of its wiclder. The cake was flour and water and honey, and no more in it of its maker than if it had made itself.

72 TKibaut's blood had stained it. So Utdc blood, to mean so much. Aidan took a morsel in his mouth. He did not think why, only that he must. It was sweet.

He raised his eyes to a blur of faces. Mute, all of them; dazed; horrified- His mind, opened wide, reeled with grief, and grief, and grief resounding down every hall of memory. And fear. "nicy were afraid of the hunter in the night. Of the white beast with its mad cat-eyes, crouched over Thibaut's body, his mouth full of honey and of blood.

Some of them knew then, and shrank from what they knew: the stranger in their house, the tale that was half open to the sun, half whispered in the dark. He had come singing on the wings of death. Now he held it in his hands. He had wrought it, he and no other.

"No," said Margaret. She held out her hand. It was frightcn- ingly steady.

Mutely Aidan set the dagger in it. She barely flinched from the blood. "Damascus work," she said, soft and cool. "Sec, how the hut is ornamented, and the blade. But the steel is too good for western forging-Indian, surely, and that of the best.

It seems new."

"For each new murder," Aidan said, "a new blade." He rose with Thibaut in his arms. The boy's head lolled against his shoulder. He was as light as a leaf, as heavy as a worid.

They stared. Joanna above all, mute with honor; she could not take her eyes from her brother's face.

"Maybe he's not dead," she said. "Maybe he's only stunned.

Maybe h.e.l.l wake. Maybe-"

"He is dead." Aidan's voice was fiat.

Her hand went to her mouth, stemming the tide of words.

One of the serving women began to wail, Joanna whipped about. "Out, all of you. Out!"

They wavered. Margaret seemed oblivious. She turned the dagger in her fingers, staring at it, spellbound. Joanna lurched forward a step. The servants broke and fled.

She fumed ungracefully back. Margaret had not moved- Aidan could not muster the will. The servants would let it our in keening and in rousing this whole quarter of the city. Theythree had only silence. Gereint was grief. This was grief on grief. It went beyond words and almost beyond pain. It numbed the soul.

"G.o.d is great," said Margaret in a low and dreaming voice, in Arabic. 73.

The others scared, speechless.

She had not broken. Not quite yet. "It says so," she said, "here, on the blade. Most devout, our a.s.sa.s.sin, and most like to his G.o.d. He fattens on the blood of innocents."

Her hate was diamond-pure, diamond-hard. "Joanna," she said. "Fetch G.o.dcfroi, if he has had his fill of wailing and gnashing his teeth. Bid him bring my writing-case."

Joanna did not even begin to argue. She went.

Leaving Aidan and Margaret alone. With all the gentleness in the world, Aidan laid Thibaut in the high curtained bed, closed the wide and staring eyes, covered the lifeless body. He straightened slowly, fumed. Margaret regarded him with inter- est, and with a certain amount of pleasure.

This was her defense, this bitter calm. He spoke in it. "The blame is mine. My vigilance failed. His blood is on my head."

Her head shook infinitesimally. "I knew that he would be the next to fall, and I held fast to my resistance. V/c share this, you and I. But I the more. He was blood of my blood."

Aidan's heart spasmed. Thibaut, gentle Thibaut who had never spoken ill of any man. "Leave me my guilt," he said, low and raw.

"There is enough for us all."

Briefly he wanted to scream aloud, seize her, shake her, beat her into acting as a mother should^act who has lost her only son. She stood where she had stood since she came, a small round woman in a loose dark robe. Her face was grey and old.

She let the dagger fall. It pierced the a.s.sa.s.sin's cake, breaking it. "I bore five sons," she said. "One only lived past his birth.

Daughters I had none, except Joanna. If she dies," said Marga- - ret, "I shall not want to live."

"Will you surrender, then?"

Her eyes lifted, black and wide. She smiled. He had never seen any face so terrible. "Surrender? Only," she said, "if I might be certain that, the night he bedded with me, he would die of yon dagger in his back."

So she wrote when G.o.defroi came, in Arabic but in the bare unvarnished phrases of the Frank. "Let him see for himself,"

she said, "that in taking from me my husband and my son, he has taken all that might persuade me to yield." She folded andsealed the letter, and gave it to her seneschal. "There will no doubt be a bird on the roof, with the mark of Masyaf on its leg. Give it what it waits for."

74 Judith Tan G.o.defroi's eyes were red with weeping, but he held himself stiffly erect. He bowed and went to do her bidding.

For her now there would be no tears, and no sleep. She set herself beside the bed. "Look after my daughter," she said to Aldan. Simply that. Even as she spoke, she turned her eyes and mind from him, toward her son.

Aidan moved without thinking, gathering up what garment came to hand: his cloak. He flung it over himself Joanna had turned already. He followed her.

*Just within the door of her chamber, she spun on her heel.

Aidan stood just without. She spoke abruptly. "I can look after myself."

"I don't doubt it," he said.

Joanna's lip curled. "You haven't been much good so far, have you?"

It was pain, that was all. She needed to lash out. He was there, the best of targets, and the closest. He set himself to endure it. It was no more than he deserved.

She shook her head once, hard, tossing away tears. "What could you have done? That man is the devil himself. You're scarcely even a lesser angel."

His head snapped up. That was not what he was braced for.

His expression made her laugh, even as she wept. "Oh, yes: how dare I imply that you're not invincible? Grubby mortal I, who should be bowing at your feet."

"Not . . . grubby," he said thickly. His grief rose, choking him. "Oh, G.o.d! It was I who let him die."

"Hush," she said. "Hush."

This was not proper. That he should be on his knees in her chamber, weeping. That she should hold him, and rock him, and murmur words of comfort. She was the child, the slave of her temper, headstrong and sullen.

Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were heavy still, aching with milk, that but for her stubborn will would have dried long since. She was a mother. She was not altogether a child or a lackwit or a fool.

Whereas he ...

"Stop it," she said, sharp as cold water in the face. But her hand was gentle, stroking his hair, moving down his back.She knew what she was doing. She saw that he knew. She barely blushed. She drew back, not easily, but firmly enough.

"I think," she said, "that we should try to get what sleep we can. When morning comes. Mother is going to need us both."

He raised his brows. His bed was occupied. Hers . . . 75.

She could follow his thoughts with alarming case, for a woman without magic. Her cheeks b.u.med scarlet. "Not here!"

It was too loud. "The roof-if any of the servants will-Dura!"

He rose, retreated past the door. The servant came from G.o.d knew where, red-eyed and stiff-backed as they all seemed to be. "Lay a pallet for my lord," said Joanna, "on the roof, where we used to sleep when we were children." The woman ducked her head and scuttled past Aidan: a scent of musk, a tang of fear, a heavy mist of grief.

Aidan lingered, unable to make himself go- "You, too^" he said. "Sleep. We're safe enough tonight. They won't strike again until they have your mother's message."

She understood. The blood drained from her face, but she did not tremble. She kissed him quickly, and chastely enough, on the forehead. Almost he reached, clutched; knowing that if he did, she would not let him go.

His hand fisted at his side. Without a word, he left her.

8.

Masyafwas a fortress, a stronghold. The village that served it, huddling round the knees of its mountain, h.o.a.rded every pre- cious sc.r.a.p of green, cherished every drop of water. But in the castle's heart, as in Alamut its master and its begetter, lay a garden like a many-colored jewel. It was smaller by far than the Garden of Allah in the Nest of Eagles, but perfect of its kind, and more than sufficient for its purpose. From the center of it, so cunningly was it made, one could not see its boundaries.

There, in summer's warmth, the Master of the a.s.sa.s.sins of Syria raised his tent. No silken pavilion, that, but a simple dwelling of the desert, woven of goat's hair, black and un- adorned. Naught lay within but his worn prayer rug and a single carpet, and the slave who attended his needs.

He had slept briefly after the prayer of the night, and risen again to pray, bowing southward to thrice-holy Mecca. His prayer as always was only that what Allah had willed to be, might be. IfRashid al-Din Sinan willed it also, then praise be to G.o.d.

He straightened, raising his face to the stars. Sweetness 76 JwUth Tarr wafted over him: roses, jasmine, the blossom of orange andcitron. The nightingale sang in her secret place.

His heart sang with it, ineffably sweet. "Thanks be to G.o.d,"

he said, "that He has set me in such a world as this."

"Thanks be to G.o.d," said a voice out of the night, "that you may take such Joy in it."

That joy withered and died. Such had been her intent, he was certain. He would not admit to fear of the strangest of the slaves of Alamut, the oldest and the strongest and the most inextricably bound to the cause, but it was granted to any man to be wary of such a creature as entered the circle of his lamp's light. The form she wore now was that which she had worn before the first of the Masters of the a.s.sa.s.sins, Hasan-i-Sabbah himself, on whose name be peace; and that was nigh a hundred years agone. A woman, it seemed to be, a maiden of some seventeen summers, too slender and cat-faced for beauty as it was reckoned in Persia, but beautiful for all of that, a beauty as fierce as it was strange. A man would want her, inevitably, but he might not be so swift to take her. The houris of Sinan's garden, like those of Alamut, were cast in a gentler mold.

She was more beautiful than ever, more wild and more strange. Sometimes she wore the turban; less often, as now, she let her hair fall as it would, staining her white garments like dark blood.

She bowed as was proper, kissing the earth between her hands. "It is done," she said.

His breath left him in a long sigh- "So. Is it well done?"

She raised her eyes. He met them, knowing that he was strong, that she could not match his will. Such eyes, green as emeralds, clear as gla.s.s, drawing him in, down and down and down. And at the bottom of them, a light: a face, a body, a boy of rather exceptional beauty. But to those eyes, nothing at all, save only prey. A heart, beating. A life for the taking. He took it, he who for this eternal instant was she; and he tasted its sweetness, and its gagging bitterness.

"He was," said Morgiana, voice without substance, clear as water, and as cold, and as still, "thirteen years old. Yesterday he confessed to his priest a terrible sin: he had exchanged sharp words with his sister. Such a tender lamb; it was almost a pity to rid the world of him."

Sinan reeled. He was free, in his own self, in his own garden where he and no other was lord. His slave knelt at his feet, and 77.

again her eyes were lowered, their power bound and hidden, as if it had never been.

Perhaps, after all, he had dreamed it. She was ifritah and undying, spirit of air and fire, but above all, she was his. His slave, utterly, without will save what was his, without self save what he granted her.Or so she had been. She had risen up not long ago, as shock- ing as if Masyaf itself had stirred and stood and begun to speak, and announced that she would shed no more Muslim blood.

She had not spoken as if she expected to be refused. Sinan, taken aback, had set her on Christians instead, and she had seemed content.

Yet now he might almost have thought that she was bitter; that the glitter in her eyes was tears. Could an ifritah weep?

Her eyes lifted once more- He flinched; but there was no power in them- They were hard and flat, green-gleaming like a cat's. "That is the last of my murders," she said. "Now you will set me free."

For a moment Sinan could not comprehend plain Arabic.

"Will? I? Set you free?"

"Release me from my oath. Let me go."

Yes. She had said it. "But," he said, "this is not the last of them. A daughter remains, and the mother herself."

"This is the last life I will take. I am done with killing. Set me free."

Sinan stood wordless in the face of such insolence. She did not even bow her head, still less address him as she always had, with deep and humble respect. She held herself as straight as a man,, and spoke in a clear voice, not loud, simply telling him what she would have.

He had her name, and his own name written on the seal about her neck, the Seal of Suleiman which bound all races of the )inn. He had no fear other. So he told himself, as he faced her and said, "No. You arc not done."

She went whiter than he would have believed possible. He tensed. Seal or no Seal, she was deadly, always; and never more than now. But she did not move. She was utterly still.

"When this game is over," he said, "I will consider your plea.