Kiyrstin's scolding voice, rich and blessedly solid, broke through the internal cacophony. "Let me down, you overgrown . . . Don't you know you're supposed to be careful of us when we're in this condition? I expect to be coddled, treated like the most delicate web in the"

The lights went out.

Someone screamed; perhaps it was Mikhyel himself, for the agony that coursed through him. Agony. Fear. Deple- tion. Anger. Horror. Resistance.

Death.

Silence then. So complete, Mikhyel wondered if he was the only one still in the room.

Or the only one still alive.

{Khyel?} Deymorin. And a moment later, Nikki was there as well.

A sob.

"Kiyrsti?" Deymorin's whisper, and a rustle of cloth. A sense of warmth and relief.

Carpet rasped his hands when he tried to move them. A sense of gravity, of up and down. Of pressure along his body. The floor.

"Lidye?" Nikki's voice. Broken. There was no answer.

"Lidye!"

The lights flickered.

And slowly steadied.

Deymorin rose from the floor, drawing Kiyrstin up with him.

Mikhyel pushed himself off the floor, grasped a chair and pulled himself to his feet.

Nikki was likewise swaying upright. Deymorin and Kiyrs- tin. Lidye...

Lidye was standing, to all evidence, unaffected. She was staring at the door, a slight smile on her face.

The door opened: Mirym, out of the Tower for the first time since their return. And it was toward him she looked, a fact Mikhyel realized only after sorting out the three-way image of her. He closed his eyes and angrily shut out his brothers' minds, an effort that left his head pounding, but leaving only one image to contend with.

And when he opened his eyes and met hers, he heard her as he heard his brothers, without the benefit of touch.

Or perhaps, he simply knew.

"Darius save us all," he whispered. "Anheliaa's dead."

Interlude

"Ah-h-h . . ." Mother's sigh fluttered the leythium veils, and shimmered through the air. She inhaled, deep and gasping, the first unadulterated breath of ley that she'd had in two human generations.

Anheliaa was dead.

Mother had only enough time for that realization before the renewing leythium surged toward her in an intoxicating rush of total sensory glut. The tidal crest ebbed, and for an instant Mother sensed the tiniest of her threads vibrating with life again before the tap root that linked her to the progenitor surged a second time, and Mother rode that crest up and out of the pool and danced the ley as she'd never danced before.

Chapter One.

For Mikhyel, second son of Mheric, direct descendant of Darius I, gods and religion were just wordswords for cul- turally ingrained habits designed to ease the sleep of the masses. Death happened, the inevitable consequence of life; if any thing or any one governed either or both sides of that equation, he'd never perceived that it mattered one way or the other to the living.

He'd resolved, when he was nine years old and holding his mother's hand as it turned to ice, that dying and immer- sion were experiences to be avoided as long as possible.

Beyond that, he endeavored not to consider. He knew only that he never wanted to feel another hand do what his mother's had done in those final moments, never wanted to accompany another empty husk into the depths below the City.

His mother had been immersed in the common hypo- geum. She'd not been Rhomandi, in the literal sense, and therefore, Anheliaa had claimed and Mheric had not ar- gued, she'd not been worthy of Rhomandi immersion.

Anheliaa's life had been filled with just such petty pronouncements.

Mikhyel thought perhaps that he'd begun to hate Anhel- iaa that day. His mother had become, in those final years of her life, the focus of his entire life, and when on her dying bed she'd consigned the newborn Nikaenor into Mi- khyel's care, the bond between them had been forged for all time.

Anheliaa, by her arbitrary rejection of his mother from the Family hypogeum, had destroyed any chance she might have had of securing Mikhyel's loyalty. From that point, he had endured Anheliaa's decrees, but he'd never accepted them. Or her.

He'd followed his mother's funeral bier down a long tun- nel draped with the remnants of some previous procession.

Decorations of a joyous party, a cheerful celebration of the life that had been lived. A party that had culminated in a procession into the uppermost cavern, where the ley formed a shallow, faintly glowing lake, waiting to receive the remains of the deceased.

Rather like it daily received the City's sewage.

The same common pool into which Anheliaa insisted his mother would be set adrift.

But there was to be no party for the wife of Mheric, Princeps of Rhomatum. In that, she was Rhomandi, Mheric had insisted and Anheliaa had willingly agreed. There would be no redistribution of her wealth, no sharing of her personal treasures and trinkets, no loving reexamination of the life that had been lived. She was to be carried in somber propriety in the final hours of the day and released without ceremony to the ley.

Mikhyel had cried that night, in the privacy of his bed- room. Cried for the mother lost and the honor she'd been denied. And he'd learned the meaning of hate.

Somehow, carrying Anheliaa's bulk down the ancient, hand-operated lift, the thought of setting her adrift, didn't affect him in the least.

As with his mother, for Anheliaa dunMoren, the most celebrated of Rhomatum's celebrated ringmasters since Da- rius himself, there would be no party. There wasn't even a circle of friends and family to attend her immersion. Only their tiny party of four: his brothers, himself, and Nikki's servant, Jerrik, to steady the fourth corner of the bier.

That was the way of the Rhomandi Family. Since Darius I, they had buried their own in private, in a cavern far deeper than the common immersion lake, in a pool that lay directly below the rings themselves, a place as much Rhomandi property as Rhomandi House was.

A place too holy, according to Anheliaa, for Mheric's Outsider wife.

Anheliaa had died with the passage of Persitum from the web. They'd pieced that together, when they had gone to the Tower and discovered Persitum's ring lying dormant on the floor. That Anheliaa's simultaneous demise had not crashed Rhomatum itself was Mirym's doing. So he'd guessed and Mirym had silently verified.

If Lidye realized the source of that stability, she gave no indication. Lidye claimed the blackout was the result of Anheliaa's battle to keep Persitum from escaping her hold, and attributed the return of the other rings to stable orbits to the inherent stability of Rhomatum Node.

That claim, whether made out of ignorance or willful misdirection, did make him wonder about Lidye's future as Ringmaster of Rhomatum.

However, Lidye was in the Tower now, despite her voiced concerns for her unborn child. Lidye hadn't left the ringchamber in three days. Three days during which she'd neither slept nor eaten.

Three days since Anheliaa's death; three days before An- heliaa's immersion, the minimum wait allowed by laws so old even Darius hadn't dared to challenge them.

Three days, and from the calm skies and steady power, the rings had, indeed, accepted Lidye in Anheliaa's stead.

Perhaps, Mikhyel thought, a happier note on this slow descent into the depths of the Rhomatum Node, it had been Rhomatum's acceptance of Lidye that had put that strange look on Lidye's face the night of Anheliaa's death.

Perhaps the node itself had protected its new master from the death scream of its former master.

Perhapsbut Mikhyel had lived too long in Rhomatum Tower to count on any such benign explanation.

Queries had come in already, regarding the improve- ments in weather and available power, and news reports in general were optimistic for the first time in weeks. Queries had arrived as well from the masters of the satellite rings.

They sensed a difference in the web, but no living master could know what their rings felt like without Anheliaa in Rhomatum.

Anheliaa's death made his upcoming task both easier . . .

and more urgent.

For the moment, only a handful of people knew the truth, those like Diorak, Anheliaa's personal physician, who had officially pronounced her dead and prepared her body for immersion.

And those like Brolucci, captain of Anheliaa's personal guard. Brolucci had disappeared following an hour in the Tower with Lidye. He'd taken the rest of Anheliaa's guard with him. Lidye had assured Mikhyel via written message, that Brolucci wouldn'tcouldn'ttalk. And true to her promise, Lidye had replaced Anheliaa's guard with men of both Shatum and Rhomatum, and made all of those appointments subject to his, Deymorin's, and Nikki's approval.

Her father's opinion had not been solicited.

Politics, perhaps, but smart politics. And he was inclined to believe Lidye about Brolucci. Even so, he was glad Deymorin had set his own men to following Brolucci, men whose early reports indicated a mind in serious disarray.

Kinder, Mikhyel would think, to place the man in perma- nent custody, but the ringmaster held absolute power over the Tower Guard, a circumstance Brolucci had accepted with open eyes when he accepted Anheliaa's appointment.

It appeared, in retrospect, that Anheliaa had chosen her successor well. He wonderedin retrospectwhether An- heliaa had known how well.

Soon, of course, they'd have to issue a public announce- ment, but until that time they had decided to keep Anhel- iaa's passing quiet, to show the world that the Rhomatum Web would continue without herhad, in fact, continued for some time before the general public realized she was gone. That was important. He wanted no more riots. No more panic. Anheliaa was gone. Restoration could begin in earnest.

Under Rhomandi control.

The lights inside the lift went out, leaving them in a dark deeper than his own darkest dreams. Mikhyel stifled in- stinctive panic, even as Deymorin's thought reassured him: the extinction only indicated they neared their goal, a point at which the leyflow required to excite the tiny crystal within the bulbs eddied rather than flowed, making align- ment impossible.

It was Mikhyel's first time inside the ancient shaft that pierced the heart of Mount Rhomatum. A lift whose final destination was the Rhomandi hypogeum. Fourteen years ago, while Nikki and Deymorin had participated in Mhe- ric's immersion, Mikhyel had been in Barsitum Hospital fighting for his own life. Nikki had returned here often; Deymorin had, chasing Nikki down. But Mikhyel had re- fused to enter the private shaft, seeing no reason to go early to his own grave.

The lift jolted to a halt.

A rasp of metal on metal: Deymorin had opened the grating. Mikhyel adjusted the protective pad on his shoul- dera thicker pad than the others' to make up the differ- ence in heightand eased himself under the pall. At Deymorin's murmured signal, they lifted the bier free of the corner supports and moved out into the tunnel.

Mikhyel had some idea what to expect, from Nikki's po- etic descriptions of his adventures as well as the many and varied images he'd received from both his brothers for the past three days.

But nothing could truly prepare a man for stepping off a solid platform into utter blackness.

Fortunately, Deymorin moved confidently ahead, and all Mikhyel needed to do was keep pace with his left-front corner.

The bier was lighter than he'd expected. Stylistically sim- ple, following another Rhomandi tradition, it added as little weight as possible to Anheliaa's own bulk. But even she was lighter, her body, once the vitality of the ley ceased to flow through it, evidencing the effects of weeks without normal sustenance.

Effects for which his shoulder was grateful.

His head felt odd. Light. Devoid of his brothers. It was as if a haze had settled about his thoughts when they stepped from the lift into the tunnel, insulating him and his thoughts from his brothers, and theirs from him.

Light touched the edges of his vision, and soft streamers gradually took form and color: a lacework of light covering the tunnel walls. A web. Leythium. growing naturally here, and pulsing with the ebb and flow of ley-energy.

Like blood through living veins.

By that light, he could see Deymorin's profiled face on the far side of the bier. There was a throbbing, a fluctuation of coloras if he could see the blood pulsing just beneath the surface of Deymorin's tanned skin. Throbbing in time with the pulse of the ley.

Mikhyel shuddered and turned his face toward a brighter glow just ahead, beyond a bend in the tunnel, a gentle curve that easily accommodated the bier's length, and then opened out into the hypogeum.

He paused, an involuntary reaction. The bier stopped as well, Deymorin granting him a moment to take in the spectacleor perhaps, Deymorin himself had been simi- larly mesmerized.

The cavern's perimeter seemed to fluctuate with that same pulsating radiance. It was similar to, yet utterly unlike Nikki's poetic depiction. More like Mirym's mental picture, yet not that either. And he wondered, as Deymorin set them into motion, whether Mirym's leythium lace was any more accurate an image than Nikki's improbably perfect round pool.

A luminous pool indeed dominated the cavern floor and illuminated their footing, but unlike Nikki's poetic version, its shore was amorphous, a mass of tendrils that extended into shadowed perimeters. Those tendrils retreated from their feet as they approached.

Deymorin guided them to the right, toward a natural stone bridge spanning the widest tendril. Strange, Mikhyel thought, that he hadn't noticed that bridge before. That bridge, or any of the dozen or more spanning other tendrils.

He was just beginning to account himself unobservant, when another scan of the cavern counted fewer bridges, and a third found none.

Except the one toward which they headed. It was as if something had given them a choice, and once that choice had been made eliminated the other options.

Somethingor someone. As a sense of Anhheliaa had permeated Rhomandi House upon his return, so now some other presence resonated here. He wanted to ask Deymorin if he felt that presence, wondered if Nikki did, but that mental veil continued to hide their thoughts from him. And he was somehow disinclined to voice the question aloud.

Besides, there was about that presence a sense of vast age, a feeling that had been here since the founding of Rhomatum, probably longer. And Rhomandi had been im- mersed here without recorded incident since Darius the first. Best, Mikhyel decided, just to finish their business and escape as quickly as possible.

So he kept his gaze on that bridge, willing it to be real as Deymorin set foot on the seemingly solid arch, and sighed with relief when Deymorin indeed rose above that strangely shifting shore. Mikhyel kept pace, watching that stone beneath his feet, the leythium eddying on either side, a substance that wasin this semi-liquid statenear-instant death, absorbing human flesh as easily as it absorbed human waste.

Or so he'd always been told; he'd never had any inclina- tion to test the theory.

As his feet touched the far side of the bridge, the bridge vanished, leaving himself and Deymorin on one side of the tendril, Nikki and Jerrik on the other. Lifting the pall from his shoulder, Mikhyel turned to face Deymorin, who had likewise freed himself.

At Deymorin's signal, they knelt and released the bier to the ley. Mikhyel kept his fingers well away from the pool, but when Deymorin's came dangerously close, the liquid retreated, sank away from his hand as the shoreline had retreated from their feet.

As if the ley wasn't interested in living flesh.

Which made a man wonder, as some unseen and inexpli- cable current caught the bier and carried it out to the cen- ter of the pool, where and how his ancestors had learned not to touch it.

Mikhyel supposed, had anyone asked, that he'd expected they would leave Anheliaa's body here, floating, until one day, they'd come back and it would have disappeared, con- sumed into the ley. That's what happened to those im- mersed in the upper pool, as he'd learned during his daily visits following his mother's immersion.

He hadn't tried to speak with her: he wasn't like the pilgrims he'd walked among, who came to ask advice of their dead ancestors. He'd just thought someone should be with her as long as there was anything left to be with.