"I said inhale, not sniff!"

A sharp blow between his shoulders made Thyerri gasp.

"Better. Now hold it."

Fingers probed his ribs, gut, and back, seeking reaction, seeking weakness, but the aches were gone.

Mostly.

Thyerri flinched as those strong fingers dug deeper.

But he didn't exhale.

And Zeiin laughed.

"You'll do, lad," the old man said and told him he could breathe now, if he wanted, and Thyerri did want.

Badly.

While he gasped after breath, Zeiin asked about legs, arms, head, and any other residual aches, but there was nothing Thyerri would even consider mentioning.

Zeiin gave a brief nod, then jerked his head toward Bharlori's back door, where the afternoon sun's slanting rays warmed the wooden steps.

When they'd settled, Zeiin turned to him and asked, "Well, boy, what is it you want?"

"Want? I . . . don't know. I don't want to get pounded into the ground again."

"Do you simply want to escape?"

He shrugged, uncertain. Put that way, it sounded cowardly.

"To stop your attackers?"

He nodded emphatically.

"To punish your attackers?"

He chewed his lip. He didn't really want to hurt anyone.

"Kill?"

"No!"

Even the thought revolted him.

Zeiin stared at him, eyes narrowed, then jerked his head in a quick nod and pushed himself to his feet.

"Stand up," he commanded. "And face me."

Standing opposite him, Zeiin was, Thyerri realized, shorter than he expected: of a size with Thyerri, but broad.

The sort of body that challenged the perceptive line be- tween dangerous and merely immovable.

Neither was he as old as Thyerri once assumed. Silver- gray hair and lined face notwithstanding, he moved with the grace and lightness of foot of a man in his prime.

Zeiin lunged toward him; Thyerri dodged, startled.

A sudden whirl, and a foot flew outward from Zeiin's body like a bucket on a rope.

Thyerri leaped backward.

Another pause. Then he commanded, "Face me, boy, and shadow my moves."

It was like a dance exercise. Don't think. Follow. Let the body sense the shifts of weight, the follow-through that must occur. A sweep of the arm, fall back. Lunge forward, ease left. Rock heel to ball to toeand thrust. Toes catch the weight, ankle absorbs the momentum. And thrust again.

Side, side, forward, fall back. Turn and thrust, turn and hop . . . and turn and turn and turn and drop.

Thyerri, crouched on the ground panting, laughed.

Zeiin, three turns back, frowned.

Possibly, he shouldn't have added his embellishments.

Zeiin pointed at the ground in front of him. Feeling the heat rise in his face, Thyerri shuffled silently back and stood facing the older man.

"This time," Zeiin said, "countermove."

The patterns changed, and changed again, growing faster, more complex. Shadow again, and counter. Shadow.

Counter.

And Zeiin's frown never eased. Finally Zeiin barked, "Enough!" and dropped to the step, red-faced and sweating.

Thyerri stood, panting, hands braced on his knees. The moment his breathing eased, he began stretching, light moves, to keep his muscles from stiffening.

And all the while, Zeiin simply watched him. Until "Give me your hand, boy," Zeiin commanded.

Thyerri hesitated, then shrugged and obeyed. Zeiin turned his hand over, examining the calluses, the tiny, white scars that were his only visible legacy, constant reminders of the dance rings' honed edges.

"You were a dancer."

Thyerri shrugged.

Zeiin set their hands palm to palm. Like the rest of him, Zeiin's hand was short and broad. Thyerri's was slender, with long, supple fingers.

Zeiin stood, and gripped Thyerri's chin, holding his face for a closer examination.

"Raise your arms to the side," he said, in a tone not to be questioned, and he extended his strange examination to Thyerri's torso, running his hands down ribs, waist and hips.

Abruptly he said, "That will be all for today."

"But"

"I must think on what I've seen!" Zeiin said sharply.

"Not all students can be trained alike, ex-dancer of Khora- tum. You move differently. Strangely. I must think how to direct that strange motion. Now leave me to think!"

Different. Strange.

Thunder rumbled to the west, and Thyerri glanced toward distant, darkening skies, wondering what he was going to tell Sakhithe when she asked how the lesson went.

Another rumble, a flash of distant lightning, a pause, and another rumble.

Because she would ask, as surely as they would have rain before nightfall.

d 8 9 Lightning flashed to the north and west. There'd be an- other storm before the day was out. But Lidye insisted the storms were diminishing in both ferocity and number, evidence, Mikhyel dunMheric sincerely hoped, that the web was growing more stable, if not stronger.

Outside the window of the Rhomandi floater-coach, the buildings of Tower Hill passed in antique splendor. Marble statuary, stately columns, rose gardens, and fountains . . .

it was a splendor for which Mikhyel dunMheric had an insatiable appetite.

Over the years, Anheliaa had reminded him daily that his family owed the City nothing, that Rhomatum would not exist without Darius and his descendants, and as long as the rings kept spinning, the Rhomandi had fulfilled their side of the eternal bargain.

She had reminded him, but she'd never convinced him.

A Rhomandi had led the exodus out of Mauritum three hundred years ago. Those believers and their descendants had looked to a Rhomandi ever since for leadership.

Mikhyel had learned, long before his life with Anheliaa, the true value of Darius' modern descendants, and had de- cided that neither his father's cavalier ways nor his aunt's ruthless attitudes would be his own. His duty, his life, did belong to the City and the web.

And he was content with that arrangement.

He had no wife, no children, and had never felt the lack.

He'd been engaged as a child to Nethaalye dunErrif of Giephaetum Node. While he'd had no objection to the match, neither had he felt compelled to pursue it, as any normal man might. And now, Nethaalye had retreated to Giephaetum with her father, and would, he fully expected, declare their engagement off.

And his only reaction to that realization was a vague regret for the loss of her friendship. At times he wondered if he was unnatural in some way, and then he wondered, if he were normal, like Deymorin or Nikki, who would fill out the City's paperwork?

Another flash of lightning. The floater-coach simultane- ously lurched and swayed. Coincidence, not cause and ef- fect. He knew from previous experience that the track was flawed at that point, a less-than-perfect connection he'd re- ported to City maintenance almost two months ago.

Normally, such routine maintenance would have been re- paired within a week. Of course, when that section worked free and sent a floater careening out of control about the Hill, someone might no longer consider it a minor problem.

Priorities. Within the next handful of days, all Rhoma- tum's priorities would have to be reexamined, as would those of all the Node Cities. Mikhyel wondered how many of those now in power would survive the upcoming changes, changes that must come if any of them were to survive.

His single greatest obstacle to everything he needed to accomplish was, as it had always been, Anheliaa. Anheliaa and whatever private deals she might have made over the years to secure private as well as Syndicate support for her obsessions.

The most recent of those contracts and the one of most personal note, was Nikki's marriage contract. Mikhyel had wondered, as he'd structured that contract according to An- heliaa's specifications, why his aunt had bothered choosing women from other nodes for her nephews' spouses. After declaring the marriage would solidify faltering Syndicate relations, she'd turned about and insisted on including the precise clauses guaranteed to demean the gesture.

By that contract, Lidye could never negate the contract, and any offspring were exclusively Rhomandi. Lidye's fam- ilyand Shatumrelinquished any claim to the children, and to their inheritance.

Which agreement had made Mikhyel wonder, with the future of the Syndicate on the line, what Anheliaa might have promised Shatum in private in order to secure those clauses, and to wonder what might be the unwritten subtext in a marriage contract made, not with Lidye, not with Li- dye's father, but with the entire Shatumin Guild Alliance.

In the days leading up to Nikki's wedding, Mikhyel had looked for evidence of such agreements, but even as he searched drawers and archives alike for notes or secret con- tracts, he'd known the effort wasted. He'd known Anheliaa to sign such agreements, if signing was the price of her desire, but Anheliaa would never keep a copy.

If Anheliaa decided not to honor her side of a bargain, she would require the other party to come to her to collect the debt. Few had ever had the courage to face her again, let alone challenge her. But once she was gone, once a weaker master ruled in Rhomatum Tower, those past agreements might rise to haunt them all.

Mikhyel had become all too familiar with Anheliaa's tac- tics over the years. Since Mheric had died, Mikhyel had spent every morning and two full days out of every week at Anheliaa's side, first as her companion, and then, when he'd grown past childhood, as her lawyer and adviser.

In adult retrospect, he recognized his presence in the Tower as one more ploy in the game of a master manipula- tor. By impressing on him from childhood the fruitlessness of opposing her, she'd endeavored to create the perfect tool, her voice in all matters outside Rhomandi House. As an adult, Mikhyel could resent that control of his mind and body, but as a Rhomandi, he could understand the urgency Anheliaa had felt to create such a tool.

Because Anheliaa was trapped inside the Tower, partially by choice, but physically as well. Some ringmasters con- trolled the rings without personal repercussion; Anheliaa was not one of those lucky individuals. She'd entered the Tower for the first time as a child, and by the time she had taken control of the Tower at seventeen, the rings had al- ready begun to take a massive toll on her health.

By the time she'd capped Khoratum, her arthritis-riddled body had had to be carried all the way to the mountain node, and the capping itself had completed the crippling of her body.

Confined to mobility chairs and Rhomandi House, An- heliaa had desperately needed someone to present and push through her Tower-enhancing policies. And since, in Anheliaa's philosophy, the sole purpose of the Rhomandi Family was the enhancement of the Rhomatum Rings, she'd undoubtedly felt fully justified in all her actions.

As he had matured, Mikhyel had supplied that voice. His presence, and his logic had given her plans a legitimacy they otherwise lacked. And if any Councillor or Syndic or influential citizen had argued with him, balked, she'd have that opposition brought to her ringchamber for reasoning.

Rather as she'd had criminals brought to her.

And criminal and Councillor alike had been given simi- lar options.

Her only witness to all these confrontations had been Mikhyel. He'd been there, he eventually realized, to act as judge and jury. His had been the authority to deem her acts justified. He'd never revealed what he'd seen, not to Deymorin, or anyone else, but he had argued with Anhel- iaa over the ethics of her "necessary experimentation".

Somehow, she'd invariably swayed his thinking.

He could see that dynamic now, with a perspective of time and distance and following whole days where his life was not dictated by Anheliaa dunMoren. And after a month of mental intervention on the part of his brothers'

desires, he wondered whether his acquiescence to Anhel- iaa's demands might also have been part of her "experi- mentation," wondered whether any opinion he'd ever taken from the Tower had been his alone.

And yet even in the coldest of blood, he could under- stand her. He could comprehend the necessity governing everything Anheliaa had done throughout her long tenure as Rhomatum Ringmaster, including Nikki's marriage to a woman several years his senior.

The Rhomatum Web, completed at such great personal sacrifice on her part, was Anheliaa's legacy, the only child she'd ever have. Every project she had supported, every experiment she had made had been to enhance that legacy.

Blackmail, physical threats, briberyeven Nikki's wedding night abominationsuch tactics had simply been expedient means for protecting and nurturing that leythium-coated child.

Her child. As Rhomatum was his.

"Nearly there, sir." The pedaler's announcement came through the speaking tube.

Mikhyel acknowledged, then leaned forward to catch his first glimpse of the Pharmonelli Building, eager for the comfort of its stark, familiar walls, for the smell of ink that sometimes filtered up from the presses in the basement lev- els and mixed with the rose bouquets, the stronger scent of the stimulating pacciimi brew that kept busy clerks awake into the early hours of the morning. . . .

Ink, roses, pacciimi . . . perhaps it was just the scent of power that set Pharmonelli apart: those who had it, those who wanted it, and those who believed it resided beneath every rosebush. Pharmonelli housed the elite of both Syndi- cate and Council. Deals and decisions were made here.

The anchor caught and the coach touched down smoothly into a docking berth.

He was home.

"Oh, come. Rags. Big fellow like you can do better than that."