"I didn't know1 didn't know it was so different for you." It was all he could think of to say. "So much worse.'

"Worse?" Mikhyel shrugged. "Is it worse to know, or be known? I can't honestly answer that."

Thoughts of Nikki, then, and Nikki's constant resentment at being misunderstoodor understood too wellcame to Deymorin, along with recollections of how Nikki's resent- ments had colored and disrupted all their lives. He exam- ined his thoughts and decided he wasn't ashamed of those thoughts or of how he felt, and wasn't afraid for Mikhyel to know.

And with that insight, he banished his own resentment toward Mikhyel and Mikhyel's involuntary perception. Re- sentment that would never, he sincerely hoped, return, al- though he was realistic enough to know it would, from time to time.

On the other hand, reserved, self-possessed Mikhyel might well feel a need to conceal his truths, and particularly his feelings.

"I don't get nearly as much from you," he said, feeling obliged to voice that reassurance.

Mikhyel shrugged and slumped back against the wall staring broodingly at his loosely laced fingers.

Deymorin picked another stitch free. "You said you lost Nikki when, he went into the Tower?"

Mikhyel nodded, still brooding.

"Distance?"

Hesitation, then a slow shake of the head.

"Something in the door, do you think? Something about the building itself? The fact it's right above the node, maybe?"

Another unspoken negative. The strip of piping came free.

"Well? Why, then? Have you any idea?"

A flickering glance. Embarrassment, clear and quickly smothered. Mikhyel had an idea what was keeping him from Nikki's mind, but Mikhyel wasn't saying, because Mikhyel thought it would make him sound stupid.

And since that barrier was, for now, a point about which they could do nothing, prove nothing, one way or another, Deymorin was content to let the matter drop. He tossed Mikhyel the strip of gold piping from the cloak, thinking deliberately of Mikhyel's hair.

Mikhyel, without comment, caught the strip and secured his braid.

Just as he'd planned when he began picking that braid free. But Mikhyel's mind hadn't ascertained that simple goal, until he'd deliberately cast the thought along with the braid. And Mikhyel's certainty of Deymorin's thoughts had seemed to waver the entire time he'd been working on that purely functional task.

"You might make it easier on yourself, you know,"

Deymorin said.

"No, but I'm certain you'll tell me."

"You mean, you're not picking it up?"

"Deymorin, I try to leave your head alone, strange as that lack of curiosity might seem. Mostly, I get images.

Feelingsemotions as well as touch. Opinions come through as vague pros or cons1 assume on the topic under discussion. Since I've a fair number of associations from the past ten minutes, it's far easier to ask than to try to figure it out."

"Interesting. Well, as I was saying"

"Told you."

"As I was saying, you'd make things much easier on yourself if you'd try confiding once in a while."

"Confiding."

"The important parts of topics on which you don't want us to know everything, and want us speculating even less.

You'd keep our curiosity quieter."

"I'm . . . out of the habit."

"Managed tolerably well last night."

Mikhyel's frown was dubious at best.

"You could start with what really happened just now, between you and the ugly unfriend."

Mikhyel's frown deepened, his eyes stared off into dirt- filled corners. Deymorin waited patiently.

It wasn't as if he had any pressing appointments.

"He knows, Deymio."

"Knows?"

"Who we are. He heard us talking last night."

"Careless of us."

"Not necessarily. He'd have recognized me eventually anyway. Or someone would. Occupational hazard. Rule number one: Don't get arrested in your own district."

"I'll commission you a plaque for your wall."

"I appreciate that."

"And?"

"And he's in here for attempted murder."

"Attempted?"

"Of you."

"Oh. I'm glad he only attempted."

"Quite. Anheliaa hired him."

"Another unsurprise."

"And he's keeping the locals off us."

"Out of the goodness of his heart, no doubt. Redemp- tion, perhaps?"

"Favors. Currently unspecified, as I'm still rather limited in value. And hethreatened blackmail."

"About last night?"

Mikhyel shrugged. Last night, but there was something else: guilt, perhaps, but unspecified. A man didn't need the underneath sense to know that. Concern, about what Deymorin didn't know, and the unfriend did. Deymorin pulled the cloak to his lap again, and began picking idly at loose threads.

"I have only one question, Khyel," he said, and Mikhyel looked at him, straightly but with a hint of fear underneath.

Uncertainty. Another thread came free. "How did you talk them into it?"

A start. A tightening about the eyes. "You heard?" Mi- khyel tapped his temple with one long finger, but Dey- morin shrugged.

"No need. No man puts himself willingly between the jaws of a stranger, man or woman, without some sort of guarantee, brother. Must have been the fastest talk of your career."

Mikhyel's mouth opened ever-so-slightly. His breath caught in a little hiccup of a laugh. "You're amazing, Deymorin."

He grinned. "One of these days, I'll remind you you said that."

Laughter happened, reluctantly, at first, and gaining in- tensity as the tension slipped from their minds, and those internal pressures relaxed at last.

Mikhyel stopped first, and abruptly. And he sat there, staring into emptiness. A freak ray of light made the green rim around his gray eyes gleam.

{Nikki's awake.} It was his own room that greeted Nikki when he opened his eyes, and honest sunlight shining through the same win- dows he'd awakened to most days of his life.

Clothing lay strewn about, same as always after an eve- ning on the outer rings with Jerrik. While he didn't remem- ber such an evening (which wasn't unusual), his head didn't hurt (which was).

His guitar rested in its bedside stand, as it always had, the little gray horses on the embroidered strap Anheliaa's servant, Mirym, had given him for his seventeenth birthday shimmered and danced in the sunlight as if they were alive.

The sheer bed curtains floated on a breeze; the windows were open. The bath gurgled beyond the open door. His sheets smelled of fresh rose petals, for all he did not.

Another, not particularly unusual, state of existence.

And he wondered, just for a moment, if it had all been a dream: the prison. Mother, the battle, even his wedding.

Perhaps today was his seventeenth birthday, and he'd go to breakfast, and Deymorin would have arrived from Dar- haven as he'd promised, and they'd spend the day market- grazing, and Deymorin would laugh at his taste in But, no, there was the strap Mirym had made for him for his birthday, and the stiffness in his shoulder from a Mauritumin bullet.

"Nikki?" His name was a whispered hiss rising like steam from the sunken bathing room. "Dammit, Nik, aren't you awake yetT'

"C'mon in, Jerri," he answered on a jaw-cracking yawn, and sat up, stretching joints that snapped and popped.

"Rings, what time is it?"

"Past midday and halfway to dinner," Jerrik dunDaleri's voice answered, still in a whisper. "And keep your voice down!"

"Hub? Jerri, get out here."

Jerrik appeared in the bath doorway, and eyed the suite's entrance suspiciously. Bare feet, loose shirt belted over loose hiller trousershe looked as if he were planning to stay in all day. But his clothes were stained at knees and elbows, and there was a smudge on his cheek.

"What'd you do?" Nikki asked. "Come through the passage?"

"Four weeks since I've seen or heard from you. This morning there're five guards at your door, and I've orders to be ready to dress you at a moment's notice. Damn right I came in the back, and I'll leave the same way, once I've an answer or two out of you, you lazy bastard."

"Guards?" Nikki repeated, a bit dazed.

"Nik, what's wrong with you? I've been stuck in that gods-be-damned room for four gods-be-damned weeks be- cause you wouldn't take me gods-be-damned with you to find your gods-be-damned brother. 'Watch Khyel,' you said.

But two days after you left, the hells above Rhomatum rained lightning, the web went down, and Khyel took off to Giephaetum. Now you're back. Alone. Acting the half- wit"

"The web?" The Rhomatum Web didn't go down.

Couldn't now Khoratum was capped, wasn't that what An- heliaa had always claimed?

"Dark as Outside here for three days. Rioters damn- near"

"You said, Mikhyel left?" he asked, the most confusing fact in the confusing flow of information. "For Giephaetum?"

"With Nethaalye dunErrif and her father. Not that I saw him before he left. I was locked in my room."

"But..."

But four weeks ago, Mikhyel had appeared in the sky over his head just before the Rhomatum Web had de- stroyed the Mauritumin lightning machine in a battle the sounds of which still echoed in Nikki's dreams.

Of course, he hadn't actually seen Mikhyel fall, he'd been tied in the back of a wagon under a cloth, but he'd felt himin the old, normal way, not the newland on top of him. Before the world exploded around him.

"I tell you, Nik, it's been crazy-making. That new wife of yours littered the place with her father's guardsmen. I can't imagine where he was keeping them all. They told me to stay put, and I didn't argue: stay low and keep quiet sounded sensible to me, considering what was going on elsewhere. Besides, I had those maps to copy, and since I can get out of here any time I want"

"Maps?" he repeated, trying to follow Jerrik's account.

"Out?"

But a cold feeling was creeping into his gut. He remem- bered thinking, just last night, that the Mikhyel in the Crypt with Deymorin simply wasn't the same as the Mikhyel he'd known all his life, but a changeling. He'd dismissed it as impossible, but if his Mikhyel was actually in Giephaetum, then the Crypt . . . Deymorin . . .

He raised a hand to a head strangely scattered.

"Wake up, Nik." Jerrik came into the room at last, a look of disgust on his face, hooked a stocking from under a chair with his bare toe, and flipped it up into his hand, then began dealing similarly with other clothing strewn about the room.

Trying to think past the cottony haze that passed for his mind this morning, Nikki remembered leaving his brothers in Sparingate, remembered coming into the Tower just be- fore dawn, under guard, remembered being escorted to his room where they left him alone at last. He remembered a glass of wine, welcome to his chilled toes, and shedding his clothes and falling into bed with his shirt still . . . half . . .

Wine. He stared at the drained and dropped goblet lying beside his bed, and suspicion flared.

Drugged. Someone had drugged the gods-be-damned wine!

He stared at Jerrik, wondering if he could have done it a thought as horrifying in its way as the idea that that person in the Crypt with Deymorin might not be Mikhyel.

Jerrik had been his best friend forever. He'd been counting on Jerrik to help him get Deymorin and Mikhyel out. If Jerrik was Anheliaa's now, too . . . or Lidye's . . . it was Lidye in charge, now. Or Lidye's father.