he hissed, not caring if he destroyed their illusions. "I dance when I please."

"Not tonight, my feisty little friend," the velvet voice from under the hood answered him. and something in that tone chilled Thyerri in a way Rhyys could never have done.

"I don't understand," he muttered, and though the quiver in his voice shamed him, he couldn't cure it. "Bharlo said"

"Bharlori sold you for the night, child. For tonight, you are, for all intents and purposes, our slave."

"Bharlori!" Thyerri shouted and bolted for the door. A bold move that might have worked, had it not been for the gods-be-damned fringe and his ocarshi-dulled reflexes. One guard caught a handful of fringe, a well-timed jerk made him stumble into the hold of the second, and in another heartbeat, he was immobilized between them, facing a deri- sive, laughing Rhyys.

"Bharlo!" he shouted again, and Rhyys snarled and back-handed him across the face. But Thyerri only fought harder, letting the man-mountains support his weight, kick- ing at anything his sandaled feet could encounter, con- vinced if he made enough noise, Bharlori would come and end this farce once and finally.

"Settle down, boy. I'm here." Bharlori's voice, weary and chagrined. "Please, m'lord, release him. He'll behave.

Won't you, Thyerri?"

"No . . ." he whispered, shaking his head in disbelief. "I mean, yes, of course, I will. I just want to leave." His voice trailed off as he realized that his freedom was not Bharl- ori's first priority. The pressure on his arms eased, and he could have escaped. Instead, he stood there, shaking in anger and betrayal.

"Is it true, then?" he asked in the whisper that was all the voice he could find.

"Just to dance, lad. It's a game. Play it well, and I'll make it worth your while, I promise you."

For a moment, Thyerri had no voice at all. Then: "And my pride? (Can you buy that back for me as well?"

Bharlori frowned, then turned to Rhyys. "Please, m'lord, may I talk with him in private a moment?"

"You know what it means if he doesn't come back?"

"Of course, m'lord."

Rhyys shrugged, and turned away. "Make it fast, ale- slinger."

Bharlori's frown darkened, but he took Thyerri's elbow in a numbing grip and pulled him into the passage.

"Ale-slinger?" Thyerri's anger exploded in the word.

"Are you just going to take that from"

"Understand, boy. Pride is a luxury only the powerful can afford. You and I, we have no power, therefore we have no pride. Survival, a modicum of comfort. That's what the likes of us hope for. If you refuse now, it's over for both of us. These men came here because of you. The repu- tation your dancing has given Bharlori's Tavern. Now, ei- ther you deliver, or we're both ruined."

Betrayed twice in a single evening. He shuddered, fearing what the third might be. A pattern had begun, budded in that careless challenge to Rakshi, and he feared nothing could halt its fruition.

Bharlori searched his face, then turned away, slumped and broken. Bharlori, who had given Thyerri a home, a haven, when the rest of the world rejected him, who had fed him, clothed him, and given him back his dance. His soul.

Thyerri placed a hand on the old man's shoulder, in- tending to head down the passage in his stead, then hesi- tated as Bharlori's paw covered it. And Bharlori's face was bright with relief.

"It's just a dance, Thyerri."

Thyerri stared at him. "Just a dance? Bharlo, I'm a dancer."

But the words meant nothing to an old man, who had worked hard all his life, had played more than fair with his employees, and saw a means now to secure all their futures.

Thyerri clenched his jaw against the anger, or perhaps it was tears that threatened, and slid his hand free.

~ Q ~.

(The cloaked figure slunk toward him. Dark, enigmatic. . .

(Deadly. Instinct warned.

(Fate, closing in, reflected in a thousand iridescent mirrors.) "M'lord? Khyel!" A hand on his shoulder gently wakened him.

He jumped: a spasm that encompassed his entire body.

Raulind. Not . . . fate.

"My apologies, sir," Raulind said, his voice very low.

"You fell asleep. Would you care to go to bed?"

He nodded, his throat too tight for words. He let Rau- lind's hands guide him from the pool, stood passively while Raulind set the robe about his shoulders.

But as he left the pool cavern, as he rounded a curve in the path, something drew his attention back to the pool . . .

And a figure. Dark-cloaked. With glints of green where the eyes should be.

"Raul?" he whispered. "Do you see him?"

"Dreams, master Khyel. Come to bed."

Mikhyel biinked, and the figure was gone.

He shuddered, and let Raulind draw him up the stairs.

Chapter Eight.

The musicians saw him first.

They'd been trying to shift the mood with the sultry Kar- lindra, an amorphous melody that had the women oozing about the floor, Thyerri picked it up, reluctantly, feeling nothing, his heart deaf to the flute's breathy seduction.

But the flute mocked him, weaving its tones in and around his awkward, listless movements, sending a flut- tering trill across the room to infiltrate his arm and turn muscle and bone to rippling water; the drum insinuated a muted but insistent rhythm, and Thyerri was lost. He could no more stop his body from responding to that musical temptation than he could stop 'his heart from beating.

The music shepherded him gently around the room's pe- rimeter; he eddied in and oozed back out of the central mound of cloth, pillows and bodies, like a stream seeking passage.

He teased the edge of the mountain, but he didn't wend among its living folds. He wasn't a torrent, to deluge them in sensation and run downhill. He was a spring-fed stream, irresistibly eroding, certain, in the end, to find his own way to wherever he wanted to go.

And as he turned, dipped and slipped away, all other motion within the room slowed and stopped; all eyes shifted toward him.

Power. Pride. Bharlori had said those weren't his. But what was this, if not'power? What drove him now, except pride?

And as he tempted and refused, demanded and denied, he sensed a shifting response in his own body, a heated desire akin to those hated, late-night dreams. Akin, but not the same. This desire, this arousal was of the mind, not of the body. Driven by anger, not lust.

Thyerri had never danced in anger before. And out of anger grew cold intent. Determination to prove to Rhyys and that shadowed moth that they didn't own him, could never own him, and certainly could never control that which made him alive.

And that was his power, he realized as he swayed back- ward over that hooded moth, sending the strands of his hair to infiltrate the shadow beneath the hood: he was alive as they would not, could not be. And his body mocked them, his movements grew increasingly complex, contorted in ways he knew were awesome, yet beautiful.

You can't buy this, his actions cried out. You've commit- ted your life to lesser pursuits, you've stifled yout.body and your soul with petty goals, and you'll never be what I am.

Never have what I have. Never feel what this body can feel.

Desire permeated the room. Self-loathing did. Strangely, rather than assuage Thyerri's anger, his petty triumph fed it.

To use his talent to cause pain and arouse desire was to prostitute it as surely as those window-whores they'd compared him to. But it was Rhyys' self-hate and Rhyys'

bitterness tearing Rhyys apart, and Rhyys had denied him the life he'd been born to live, had forced him to waste that gift the Ley Mother had given him. Rhyys had brought him to this. If prostituting his dance could destroy Rhyys, it was well worth the sacrifice.

But it was himself he destroyed, something deep within him cried, not Rhyys, not the moth nor any of these others.

They already knew their fetid depths. They were consumers of life, not creators, and they were content with that role.

Proud of it.

On that realization, he drew himself upright, a writhing undulation that ended in a snap and extended clear to his fingertips. Tightening his body, he caught the drumbeat be- tween his hands and reformed it, finger-snapping it into a faster, more complex rhythm.

And without his conscious willing, that rhythm took the form of the challenge dance of the half-mad folk of Gosh- tari Valley. A challenge, man to man, woman to woman, man to womanor just oneself against the gods. Power against power. Skill against skill. Daring against daring.

Thyerri had heard the rhythms frequently as a child, had seen others dance, proud and tall, silhouettes against bon- fires. He'd never danced those rhythms, though the musi- cians had teased him nightly with its tantalizing complexities. But his feet and his body responded now with instincts evolved out of the mountains themselves.

A whirl. A stomp. A sudden pose that held the music in suspension. He drove the music. He controlled the room.

This was no seduction, the most drug-blind man in the room knew that. The mood changed, darkened. The view- ers were still captives of his visual spell, but the men recog- nized the challenge, and as men, responded. Their hands created new rhythms, tried to seize control, to punish, but Thyerri's feet stole it back. Their voices tried to break his concentration, grasping hands tried to trip him.

He denied them all.

Until at last, hands and voices conceded, and he con- trolled the room, utterly and without compromise. He had won, honestly, as the gods measured such things.

And even as his mind reveled in that realization, his own human frailty brought him down. Muscle and bone had limitations the spirit did not always acknowledge. He knew, a heartbeat away, that the end had come, whirled into an open spot and with a shout of sheer triumph, collapsed.

Exhaustion, total and debilitating. The vitality flowed out of him, leaving him empty, and he was consumed with a lassitude horribly reminiscent of the dreams, a satiation that distorted his victory, warped it away from his purpose.

And in that distortion he knew, as he lay there, twisted, joints screaming from the contorted position, unable to move, the only sound in the room his own harsh gasps after breath, that what he'd just done was terribly, horribly, unforgivably wrong.

Shame engulfed him. Guilt, overwhelming guilt, unfo- cused and painful.

Mikhyel groaned and rolled upright on the sleeping pallet.

"M'lord? Are you well?" Raulind's voice, from the shad- owed depths.

"I'm . . . fine," he murmured, for all he wasn't certain that was true.

Overhead, the curved ceiling of the Barsitumin caves glowed silver, light reflected off the bathing pools. There were no buildings in Barsitum. Not even a Tower, The rings were in the deepest cavern, the monks, and all their visitors slept within the caves.

The mother's womb, the brothers called it.

He shuddered.

"I don't, you know," he said to Raul.

"Don't what, sir?"

"Think I'm better than you. Or Ganfrion."

"I know, sir. So does Gan. Go to sleep, sir. Morning comes early for the brothers."

~ 8 ~.

"Interesting," the velvet voice caressed the air of the room, and stole back f~*e moment. "Is this a common talent among your hill-folk?

A choking sound that might have been Rhyys, a rustling of cloth and clinking of pottery and metal as the guests strove to return some normalcy to the moment.

Thyerri made an effort, managed to straighten one leg, but no more. He curled over, crossed arms pressed to his aching middle, terrified at what he might have done to his own body in that mindless battle.

Once, legend held, challenges had been to the death.

"Remove him," Rhyys' nasal tones cut through the ring- ing in Thyerri's ears, and before he'd registered the sounds'

meaning, the huge vices he associated with the man- mountains' hands had jerked him upright. They dragged him to the perimeter, where he tried to take his own weight as they released him, but his numb legs failed, and he went down again.

He'd have curled there, gladly, and slept, or passed out, but Sakhithe was beside him, urging him to sit up and drink something he couldn't identify, his mouth being as senseless as the rest of him.

Somewhere in the room, Rhyys was shouting for the mu- sicians to play and the women to dance. "Something enter- taining this time," he added sullenly, and Sakhithe, with a whispered, "Sorry, Thyerri," left him.

The guards had dropped him near the servant passage and the only chilling draft in the close air of the room. He curled into a ball and tucked his face into his elbow, shiv- ering, trying to forget what he'd done, knowing the fact that he had done it, the fact that he'd allowed his darkest inner self to drive his dance proved what he'd feared every morning since that first dream.

A radical dancer could never lose control like that. Lives were lost that way. A radical dance captivated an audience and glorified the dance and Rakshi and the very essence of life. A radical dancer never willfully used the gift to con- quer those darker sides and rouse those other senses.

"I don't know, Khoratum. Even a mediocre horse gets a blanket after a hard ride."

It was the velvet voice, and speaking from directly over- head. Thyerri started awake and struggled to rise to his feet, but a heavy darkness fell over him in smothering folds and the added weight was more than his chilled muscles could fight. Ocarshi-laden though i~was, the cloak was warm, and he huddled in that warmtn, trying to feel grati- tude and finding that civilized emotion too far from his reach.