Ring of Intrigue.

Dance of the Rings Book 2.

by Jane S. Fancher.

Dusk was closing rapidly as the small entourage ap- proached the outer wall of Rhomatum. A strangely deep duskthe leyroad lights, once bright beacons leading to the city, glimmered feebly in the distance. Even Tower Hill, an architectural mountain rising above foothills of concen- tric rooftops, seemed subdued, fewer lights and dimmer shining from those oldest, most elegant buildings of the city of Rhomatum.

Only the highest point in the City gleamed with undimin- ished silver leylight: the Rhomatum Ringchamber, upper- most room within Rhomatum Tower itself. Home of the Rhomatum Rings.

The source for all those other, failing, lights.

Lightning clouds roared in from the north. An hour be- fore, just as the entourage had crossed the Oreno leyline, the storm that had rumbled in the distance all afternoon had suddenly broken pattern, gaining organization and di- rection, forming a line of blinding ferocity, a constant bar- rage of ground strikes that chased the open carriage and its handful of outriders down the valley.

It was a race now to see whether they could reach Trisini Gate before the solid mass of atmospheric fury overtook them.

Deymorin had kept the team to their steady, running trot as long as he dared. Bracing his feet against the forward rail of the driver's box, he gave the anxious horses the signal they eagerly awaited, tired as they were.

Fool, he called himself, and worse, as he guided galloping horses grimly over and around the ruts and potholes of the cattle trail; fool, for choosing this side track over the smooth-graveled Trisini Leyroad.

In choosing the anonymity of off-ley roads, he'd made their trip from Armayel overlong and dangerously slow. He should have known that despite the clear morning skies, the storms that had made the last month an unpredictable, living hell for the valley would arrive before nightfall.

At least the storm would keep Anheliaa, or whoever was in control of Rhomatum Tower these days far too busy protecting the city to notice their arrival. So he trusted the seasoned team's instincts, and hoped he didn't shed a car- riage wheel or a brother in this final mad dash.

Kiyrstin, he'd never lose, so long as he had a coattail for her to grasp.

To the front and sides, the outsiders kept pace, calling out warning of ruts and mud holes. Nikki, a quiet and sane presencein every sensebrought up the rear and cast Deymorin silent reassurances regarding his passenger's safety.

Huddled in the back seat with Kiyrstin, Mikhyel was a black sink of nonemotion. Awake, holding his thoughts his own, that was all a brother could ask, a brother whose mind could afford no distractions.

The trail branched, one road toward the stockyards, the other toward the leyroad and the gate. The horses surged uphill, and the ground beneath the wheels rattled and bounced, then settled onto the smooth surface of a leyroad.

A mental sigh of relief reached him: Nikki's thought, Mik- hyel's, or both; or perhaps just his own.

But it was a short-lived relief. At the gate, chaos reigned, delivery vehicles jammed the opening, the silk balloons that normally rose above them, taking the strain off the axles, lay limp over the cargo or deflated even as they watched; further evidence, if they needed it, that the node's power umbrella was rapidly failing.

Or perhaps, Deymorin thought, as he raised his eyes to see stormciouds gathering above the city, that energy was being redirected.

"The Tower, Deymorin! Has the storm reached the Tower?" Mikhyel's voice pierced the near-deafening rum- ble. He spoke aloud, as was not altogether necessary, ex- cept from a biother who sought to hide his horror of the lightning.

Deymorin looked beyond the immediate area to the sky above the Tower.

"It's all right," he shouted back over his shoulder. "The sky's clear beyond the old wall."

Words or mental image penetrated the thunder and dark- ness, and Mikhyel's relief filtered back: a conscious leak in the blackness.

A relief all well and good for the safety of the rings and those individuals within the perimeter of the old wall, but the immediate danger to themselves and all those milling about them remained. The old wall, that marker of an ear- lier limit of the city's power umbrella, was a mile and more yet ahead.

But they didn't need to reach the umbrella. Not far from Trisini Gate lay their salvation, if only they could get to it.

As the lightning bore down on them, Deymorin added his voice to the general cacophony, ordering his men to help clear the vehicles and get the horses and their handlers inside the wall, and never mind the cargo.

"Can't, sir!" one shouted back. "Gatekeeper's de- manding to see papers!"

Deymorin cursed, then yelled at Nikki to change places with him. Handing the team off to his youngest brother, he made a flying mount into the saddle and forced the big horse through the mill to confront the gatekeeper personally.

"Papers!" the man shouted at him, and held out a hand, wide-eyed and automated as a mechanical doll.

"Don't be a fool!" Deymorin shouted back, and pointed at the approaching wall of lightning. "These people are going to fry, and you'll fry with them! Get them and the stock through the gate and into the underground. Now!"

The man stared at him blankly, obviously terrified into idiocy. Ignoring him, Deymorin began shouting orders at anyone within earshot. He found a manone of the idiot's assistantsfamiliar with the nearest entrance into Old Rho- matum, and set him at the forwardmost team, with orders to get the men and animals under cover.

"After hours, sir!" The man shouted. "Locked!"

"Then break the damned doors down!" Deymorin answered.

"Yes, sir!"

In a few moments, the frightened horses, free of harness, were forming a steady stream toward the underground city and stables, the oldest legacy of Darius' followers, and newly restored for the delight and amusement of tourists.

Tourists be damned, it got them out of the storm.

Deymorin spotted Nikki with .his unharnessed team in hand, waved him into line, then searched the madness for Kiyrstin and Mikhyel. Targeting on Kiyrstin's red hair, a spot of color in the lightning glare, he pushed his way through to them.

"We're all right, JD," Kiyrstin shouted, and Mikhyel's determined calm seeped past the gut-jolting thunder.

"We'll get underground, wait for you there!"

Meaning *'** get your shattering brother to safety, and don't you dare waste time worrying about us.

Deymorin grabbed a fistful of her hair long enough to press his lips hard to hers.

As the rain began to fall, he let her go, then shouted, "Love you!", and ran to help free another panicked team from wind-whipped balloon silk.

"I remind you, our identification is all in that carriage outside. Do you care to go retrieve it?"

Mikhyel dunMheric's velvety voice carried a hint of con- tempt that could cut through the most imperturbable indi- vidual's confidence.

The keeper of Trisini Gate was not what one would call imperturbable.

"Iit doesn't matter. The law says"

"I know full well what the law says. I wrote it. Shall I quote it for you?"

Somewhere beneath the city of Rhomatum, Kiyrstine romGaretti, estranged wife of Ringmaster Garetti rom- Maurii of Mauritum, leaned against a stack of hay bales and watched the Trisini gatekeeper squirm.

"Better yet," Mikhyel continued, and he held out his hand. "I'll read it to you."

The gatekeeper stared at him.

"Naturally you have the paperwork you are by law re- quired to hand out to every individual entering the city without proper identification, do you not?" Mikhyel asked, and Kiyrstin bit her lip to keep from smiling, then winced as her teeth encountered the bruise left there by Deymor- in's parting kiss.

His adrenaline rush, or her ownhard to recall, in retro- spect, which was responsible. They were still learning each other's limits.

As her exploring tongue found the misaligned tooth re- sponsible for her bruised lip and marked it for future refer- ence, the brown-eyed visage that lurked constantly at the back of her mind crept forward. Kiyrstin made no effort to push the image back. Mikhyel didn't need her at the mo- ment. Mikhyel's keen mind was back on track, now they were out of the storm, and she had total confidence in his ability to win so minor a skirmish.

And as it had a tendency to do these days when relieved of other distractions, Kiyrstin's mind, like a pubescent schoolgirl's, turned to Deymorin Rhomandi dunMheric.

Deymorin presented an intriguing dichotomy. She'd known the man only two monthsless than two months in Rhomatum's odd calendarand yet it seemed, at times, as if she'd known him all her life. At others, it seemed that three lifetimes wouldn't be long enough.

Raised to be the head of the Rhomandi Family, premier Family in the Rhomatum Web, Deymorin exuded a confi- dence and power to command she'd witnessed in only a handful of individuals in a lifetime among the rich and pow- erful of Rhomatum's rival nation, Mauritum.

There could be no doubt, at times such as this, where men seeking an anchor in time of crisis reacted with instinc- tive trust to his deep-voiced confidence, that he was com- fortable with that fate.

And yet he was a virtual stranger to his own people.

Years ago, for a complexity of reasons that no one outside the family could ever understand in their entirety, Dey- morin had abdicated his inherited responsibilities to Mikhyel and retired to the Rhomandi country estates. Consequently, while Deymorin was still in every legal sense the Rhomandi of Rhomatum, Mikhyel's face was far better known to the Rhomatumin populace.

Or should have been. Kiyrstin couldn't blame the con- fused gatekeeper for questioning Mikhyel's identity claims.

She'd seen some of the popular renditions of Mikhyel dun- Mheric, and cartoonists and serious portraitists alike had clung to Mikhyel's elegant, feature-defining beard and mus- tache as his distinguishing characteristic, a look, Deymorin had told her, that had spawned a new fashion throughout the City.

And now Mikhyel dunMheric was as smooth-faced as a child, the hope that his facial hair would return fading with each passing day. Four long Rhomatumin weeks had passed since the battle at Boreton turnout, four weeks since Mik- hyel had fallen from the sky, burned almost beyond recog- nition and nearly dead.

He had survived, had healed miraculously unscarredon the outsidebut his body hair was gone. Everything, he'd revealed once in answer to her unabashed query, except his eyebrows and lashes, and the silky black mane confined now in a braid at his back.

Black-haired and gray-eyed, with his black clothing and beard, and that indefinable attitude, he must have once made an imposing figure, despite his average height. These days he looked more like a harassed cleric. Handsome enough, if a woman's taste ran toward light-boned and slen- der, and with a look about his eyes that could, when he was distracted, become sad and a bit haunted.

But his eyes were keen enough now, gleaming with en- gaged intellect, and neither the loss of a beard nor this strange venue could undermine the effect of a voice sea- soned in the courts of Rhomatum.

The gatekeeper's worries had passed beyond the Rho- mandi brothers to the chaos of men and animals and legali- ties of forced entry into city property. Leaving Mikhyel to persuade the harassed civil servant that the way to handle the situation was not to incarcerate each and every one of the individuals trapped in this underground museum, Kiyr- stin edged toward the aisle down which she thought she'd heard Deymorin's voice.

There were stalls, and she saw Nikki's blond head bob- bing on the far side of a broad horse-back, but no Dey- morin. The sound must have been an echo from somewhere else in this strange underground maze.

She leaned crossed arms on a stony outcrop, and scanned this newest revelation of Rhomatum. The decor was unique, to say the least. Stable, those around her had called it. Except that in addition to stalls and hay, there were restaurants and gift shops lining the entrance corridor and a sign beside the hay bales that read: Tours start here.

The light came from oil lamps rather than the ley crystal bulbs she would expect to light the shadows within a node's power umbrella. Oil lamps were a curious affectation within a Node City's limits, but a welcome one, considering this city's currently-constricted power.

She'd hate to be caught in the absolute black that must exist here when those lamps were extinguished. A honeycomb of stone, organic shapes that bore no resemblance to any rooms she'd ever known, sounds that echoed endlessly . . . a person could be lost very quickly in this maze with no hope of logicking herself free.

"Well, we've a respite, at least," Mikhyel's velvet voice said at her shoulder. The gatekeeper had left. "When the storm has passed, he'll send a messenger to the Tower.

They'll have someone come down to identify us."

"What about the box in the carriage? The papers Anheliaa sent? Deymorin's seal"

Mikhyel's black brows knit.

"I . . . very much fear it won't be there."

"You think someone will steal it?"

"No. I" He seemed uncharacteristically reluctant to meet her eyes. "Rings, I can't believe I'm such a fool. I had it. And then, the lightning, the jostling . . . I lost it somewhere, Kiyrstin." He waved a hand toward the stony ceiling. "Somewhere up there."

That hand was shaking. He was. Cold. Shock. Reaction to the lightning and the storm. Perhaps just the chill of the rain that had caught them at the last. And possibly a re- lapse of the debilitating weakness that had plagued him off and on since the incident at the Boreton turnout.

"Anything in the box that could be dangerous in the wrong hands?" she asked.

"Not really. None of those papers Anheliaa sent are much good if you can't match our signatures."

"And the seal?"

"Old. Outdated by about a hundred years. It might turn the right person a handsome profit on the black market, but nothing else." He rubbed a hand across his eyes, and swept stray hair back from his face. "We deliberately avoided including anything compromising. Only such items as might, along with the papers, support our claims to someone like"

He tipped his head in the general direction of the gatekeeper.

"Then I suggest you sit down and relax. Looking a bit pale around the gills, laddybuck."

Mikhyel smiled wryly. "That's news?"

"I wish it were. Sit, Khyel. Before you fall."

She led him to a spot among the hay bales and pushed him down, wrapping his cloak around him, fussing about him, until he laughed and grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him.

It was hard to remember, sometimes, that Mikhyel only appeared fragile, with that bruised look about his eyes and with features that were so different from his older brother's.

There was a steel core to Mikhyel dunMheric; a core tem- pered in a childhood as Mheric Rhomandi's second son, and honed to a fine edge by Anheliaa, Mheric's father's sister, and Ringmaster of Rhomatum.

And Mikhyel had met Deymorin head to head in the political arena and won. At least, the result of that long- ago debate had been the event that drove Deymorin out of Rhomatum.

He'd make a fierce and dangerous enemy in defense of his idealsif he didn't burn himself out first. She sincerely hoped, for Deymorin's sake as well as Mikhyel's own, that events would not push those ideals beyond his physical limits.

Mikhyel's eyes closed, and, with a shiver, he pulled his cloak more tightly about his shoulders, tucking his chin into the folds. After a moment, his eyes lifted and stared unfo- cused down a corridor of walls.

Odd eyes. Unique, in her experience. Gray with pale green around the edges.

"So, what's he up to?" Kiyrstin asked.

A blink, and he as back to her. "Horses," he said flatly, and his mouth tightened into a slight smile. "What else?

But he's going to be cold. Actually, he already is and doesn't know it."

Which meant, Deymorin had gotten wet and chilled, and Mikhyel was inheriting that discomfort, absorbing it like a sponge.

"You do him no favor, you know," sge said, and Mikhyel laughed, a short, bitter sound.