The red-and-gold #33 entered the stadium at last, pant- ing, and staggering . . . and the music began. In an obvious attempt to regain dignity and strength, the contestant fol- lowed an undulating path across the sand. By the time he reached the tower ladder, he was able, with some grace, to writhe his way to the top, never losing the intricate rhythms of the accompaniment.

Granted he had no baseline from which to judge, but to Mikhyel, the young man looked very impressive. And his performance on the rings, though perhaps not as inspired as Temorii's practice session, certainly gained the approval of the audience.

When he was finished, the sand was dragged and the next contestant's number announced.

And so it was, with contestant after contestant, each seeming better than the preceding, until you realized it was the uniformity of skill that made the one currently compet- ing appear the best. There were no bad runs, as Temorii insisted he call them, not even mediocre ones. They were all one step short of awesome.

And it was that step, he began to think, that must set the true Rakshi dancers apart.

After each run, the sand was dragged to pristine beauty. The best runs left recognizable patterns in the sand . . . yet one more challenge, one more consideration for the dancer.

And after each run, the successful contestant was pre- sented a golden robe and led with ceremony to a ground- level viewing box to watch their competitors.

Another minor torment Rhyys thrust upon them. Tem- orii had said more than once that she hated watching other dancers on her rings. Temorii was, he thought, very possessive.

Six runs complete. Five more to go. The number 00 painted on a rag fluttered out from the pole, and a figure in leather and beads, with shoulder-length, shaded hair stepped from the central courtyard.

Thyerii. And as audacious as he'd been last night. Mi- khyel felt a smile tug at his mouth, and settled back in his chair to enjoy the show.

The street-lad's maze time, while not the fastest, com- pared with the best, and his trip was the most entertaining by far, as he darted and twisted and laughed his way past all obstacles. He seemed indefatigable, entering the sta- dium at a run and bolting for the rings, scorning the fancy dance across the sand, obviously with a single goal in mind. Leaving only gaps where he leaped the largest rings as they swept past him, his tracks made a direct line to the tower.

His trip up the tedder was one large, swaying arc after another, and at the top, he grabbed the safety lines from the attendant and lunged outward for the rings, fastening them himself as he fell.

The audience went wild.

His performance on the rings proved equally thrilling and energetic, and Mikhyel assumed he'd seen Temorii's com- petition, when, suddenly, a poorly calculated twist, a too- fast spinning ring, and the line was severed. The young man's body swung crazily through the rings, and he landed in a heap in the sand.

Silence, then, utter and complete, as a red stain spread slowly from beneath him.

Silence, while the surgeon's crew lifted the slight body onto a stretcher and took it from the stadium, and the grounds crew spread new sand to hide the stain.

When Mikhyel came to his senses, he discovered he was on his feet, at the front of the box, straining for a final glimpse of the young man he'd once mistaken for Temorii.

As suddenly as the vital, passionate young hiller had en- tered his life, he was gone.

In shock, he returned to his seat. As he eased into the deep-cushioned seat, his gaze registered Rhyys, and slipped past, appalled and disgusted. Rhyys was smiling, oblivious to the value of the life that had been lost. Or perhaps, he knew exactly what had been lost, and reveled in it.

And Mikhyel wondered whether Raulind and Sakhithe had come, as they'd considered doing, and tried not to imagine what Sakhithe was thinking and feeling now, if she had.

The next number appeared on the tower; Mikhyel couldn't read it, couldn't hear the announcement for the buzzing in his ears. And then, he did know what Sakhithe was feeling: If you love a dancer, you know that the rings won't hurt them, and if they die on the rings they die happy. . . .

And he hoped Sakhithe was here, and had seen Thyerii's dance to Rakshi.

The current contestant, oblivious to the fate of the pre- ceding one, had a pleasant, clean run through the maze, and what had become a fairly standard routine among the rings. And the next was equally innocuous. And Mikhyel wondered if the runs were truly that banal, or if he'd simply lost all enthusiasm for what he watched.

"Excuse me, sir . . ." A servant appeared at his side, with a teapot that wafted a familiar, stomach-settling scent into the air: Raulind had seen Thyerri's dance. And Rau- lind, with Raulind's unerring sense of his master's needs, had sent him exactly what he needed to make it through the rest of the competition.

He offered a silent blessing on Raulind's absent head, and accepted the cup and saucer the servant extended.

A thick napkin beneath made holding the cup awkward.

He sipped the level down, then endeavored to extricate the napkin with some grace.

Between its folds was an envelope.

Mikhyel swallowed hard.

Number twenty-seven, in white on black, fluttered out from the pole.

Temorii's number. His choice, at her request. His age.

As of tomorrow morning.

The door of the courtyard did not open.

Mikhyel drained the cup of tea, and slipped the envelope into his pocket as he set the cup aside.

The number was called a second time.

A messenger arrived in the booth and whispered in Rhyys' ear. Rhyys smiled, slowly, cruelly.

And a third droning announcement.

"It appears, dunMheric," Rhyys said, "that there is no one left in"

The door opened. A black figure emerged, and the crowd roared.

Time lost. Mother and her grand gestures. Still, Mikhyel easily returned Rhyys' smile. In triplicate.

Temorii tried one gate, the locked one, tried the other, cracked it . . . and waited. The blade swung, she grinned, a smile that required no viewing glass to see, and took a leaping dive over the locked gate; her shaded hair, pulled up into a tail, whipped behind her head. She rolled on the far side, then skipped and tumbled the length of the pas- sage to the next turn.

A foolish risk: there could have been a different sort of deathtrap on the far side of the locked gate, but it was a flamboyant action that sent the crowd to its feet. If Temorii could see or hear them, she gave no indication. She seemed to have no fear, constantly second-guessing the designers of the maze, sometimes winning the gamble, sometimes los- ing the gamble, but always winning the game with a show of strength, dexterity, and fast thinking.

But she took her time, using breath-catching lulls to stealthily move along, making a show of great suspicion and overcaution: an illusion she'd shatter the moment her breathing eased. Her actions proclaimed to all and sundry: I only get one chance to do this, and I'm going to enjoy it.

And that thrill spread to those watching.

This was the imp that ordered servants about, then flopped to the floor at his side to catch bits of ham in its mouth. This was the rakehell-in-training who challenged Ganfrion, the crazed fool who tripped lightly along moun- tain cliffs. This was the essence of life on the edge and the engagingly insane who lived there.

A second message slowly came clear, at least to him.

Somehow, Temorii knew what had happened to Thyerri.

Twice, three times, her response to the maze exactly du- plicated that of Thyerri's fatal run. By the third time, he could almost hear her telling them: remember the run, remember the challenge. Remember the skill and joy with which he faced that challengeand this one, and thisand won.

And with that realization, the last of Mikhyel's reserva- tions vanished. He sat on the edge of his seat, running that maze with her, jumping, dodging, twisting and spinning, laughing when she laughed, gasping when she gasped. He felt it all. Whether that sharing was deliberate, and only between the two of them, or a by-product of her skill that everyone in the audience shared, he neither knew nor really cared.

No one watched the clock, no one cared, except the mu- sicians, who began playing the moment she reached the entrance to the arena.

She paused in the shadow of that opening, then darted back into the maze, as if to stay there and play. A cry of protest erupted from the crowd, and within moments, uni- son clapping urged her, in time with the music, to come out to them.

The second time she appeared, the daring imp who had laughed her way through the maze had vanished, and in her place was the living embodiment of the music that filled the stadium. The slender, black figure undulated, spun and flitted her way about the white sand. Her iridescent sash came free to float in trailing spirals around her.

Like the radical streamer in the Tower.

Her hair was loose now, and it shimmered, itself almost iridescent in the sunlight.

Ley-touched, he'd heard some people call such an effect, and he wondered if they knew how accurate a description that was.

By the time she reached the stadium seats, her tracks in the groomed sand had left a pattern: a stylized web sur- rounded by concentric rings. Mikhyel swallowed hard, and wondered if anyone else in the stadium recognized the Rhomandi crest; a chuckle from the area of the ocarshi brazier assured him that at least one other someone had.

And as Temorii passed beneath them, they could all see the trim at her throat and wrists that echoed the leythium- touched cut-work of Mikhyel dunMheric's garment.

Subtlety, he decided, was not his Temorii's long suit.

Laughter reached him, indicating his thoughts were not alone, but Temorii's twisting path spun her away, as the music shifted to a rhythmic staccato, and in a final tumbling run, she struck the bottom, ground-sweeping ring and rode it nearly to the top where she launched herself toward the tower.

Her loft was high, much too high, but before anyone had time to react, she'd grabbed the central pole of the tower and spun her way downward to land lightly on the platform.

The music spun to a close with her.

Surrounded by silence, she stood quietly while the atten- dant affixed the lines to the light harness that was part of every costume.

Refusing, again, to be hurried.

And then, instead of leaping immediately out among the rings, she took a wrap of the safety line in her hand, and lowered herself slowly from the platform, one foot looped in a length of the line. A light shove carried the swinging boom that supported the line outward.

Then, she began to sway. The music began as a nearly inaudible hum, and rose slowly, matching her pendulum motion's growing intensity and exploded into sound as her ever-increasing arc finally intersected the rings.

From that point, any hope for her competition ended.

To that point, all she'd done might have been show, might, the envious would say, have been to delay her getting on the rings, to baffle the audience with early flash so that the true purpose of the competition was forgotten.

She performed what he'd come to think of as the stan- dard moves, showing competence equal to all who had come before, but it was in her variations that her true art- istry came to life, and by the time she slipped the harness free and rode the outermost ring down, cradled like a childor a loverin its curve, she was the radical dancer of Khoratum.

Even after the music's final notes faded, the crowd re- mained silent. Temorii, free of the ring's support, staggered . . . and collapsed into the sand at the exact spot where Thyerri had fallen. Mikhyel ached for her, longed to be able to pick her up and carry her out. But he couldn't.

No one could. He couldn't even reach out with that internal sense to lend her strength; she'd reject it if he tried.

Survival: the final test. The dancer had to walk out of the arena on her own strength.

And as the silence dragged on, one of the other contes- tants stood slowly and began clapping in rhythm, announc- ing to all his concession. Temorii pushed herself up to her knees.

One &t a time, the other contestants rose to join the first, clapping in unison. Temorii lifted a hand covered with red- stained sand, and touched the sand to her lips.

The crowd picked up the dancers' rhythm, and with their approval, raised Temorii to her feet, and carried her out of the stadium.

He'd waited too long, or perhaps simply been outmaneu- vered. When Rhyys invited him to take part in the award ceremony, he knew there was no option.

Foolishly, perhaps, he wasn't truly worried. Let Rhyys arrest them: Mother would get them out. And even though he knew that to count on such a fickle resource was irre- sponsible in the extreme, something had to explain the ea- gerness with which he followed Rhyys out of the ringmaster's box.

Perhaps his ill-advised confidence had nothing to do with Mother and everything to do with the wild imp who had stolen his heart and taken over his better sense, his excite- ment now a backlash of the confidence that had sent Tem- orii flying from one part of the maze to the next.

Confidence that, in the end, she could cope with what- ever Rakshi threw at her. Confidence that he could. Confi- dence that this was where he was meant to be.

In the time it took for them to walk down the steps and through the tunnels beneath the stadium and into the arena, an elaborately decorated podium had been wheeled out onto the sand. Standing atop that podium, while the officials droned on about voting rules, historical precedent and ties, Mikhyel found himself hard pressed not to search the area for Temorii.

But the dancers had all been taken away, the official said.

They'd be brought up on the podium, one at a time, in the order they'd danced, and the applause of the masses would determine the winner.

The official vote began. One at a time, the contestants came up to stand beside the official pollster, who duly noted the relative volume of the rhythmic applause each incited by adjusting the order of the numbers on the tower.

The ordering seemed rather arbitrary to Mikhyel, and he wondered if that was always the case, and if so, protests must be frequent. But there were no protests today.

The number 00 was called. And a somber man stepped forward to say that the spirit of contestant #00 had joined Rakshi that day, and that the body of contestant #00 would be immersed in three days. There was silence, then deafen- ing applause, acknowledgment of the greatness of the spirit that had touched them that day.

But the name Thyerri was never mentioned. It did seem a rather inhuman approach to loss.

Two more numbers, two more shifts of the numbers on the tower . . .

The final number was lost in the screams of the crowd. In places along the perimeter, guards were forced to physically restrain members of the audience. Temorii, coming up the back stairs as had all the others, hesitated. She appeared stunned, even frightened of the reaction she'd engendered.

Mikhyel, standing at the rear of the podium, edged over and held out a handand a thoughtto steady her. She took the hand, and her fears and startlement at the audi- ence's actions came through in a breath-stealing rush.

There was elation at seeing him, but fear as well, and a dismayed: {You should be gone!} reached him.

And yet, she clung to his hand as if it were the dancer's safety line, as he led her to the center of the stage, where her new subjects could adore her.

{I'm not a queen*king*royal!} came down the line of thought to him, and he answered: {Tell them that. Relax, my darling dancer, enjoy it. Rak- shi knows you've earned it.} A chuckle, nervous but real, shook her shoulders. A hand pressed his shoulder, and cold metal touched his hand. A coronet. Another round of silent laughter passed between them: queen, indeed.

He glanced up, discovered the hand on his shoulder was not, as he'd expected, Rhyys', but dunGarshin's. Rhyys stood well down the podium, sulky, angryand yet not interfering, for all he'd obviously expected to be at center stage for this moment.

And on dunGarshin's hand, the one resting on his shoul- der, was the Rhomandi ring. Beyond that ring, the twisted mouth pulled in what might be termed a smile. Mikhyel knew, then, that whatever trap they planned had already sprung and their prey simply hadn't yet felt the bite of cold steel into his flesh.

Dismay, horror, and {All my fault} came down his hold on Temorii's hand.

{Never,} he returned. {I knew the risk, and would do it all again.} (I felt you with me. Especially when I began to tire.} {Is that why I'm so exhausted?} But he knew it wasn't true. That she hadn't drawn when he willingly would have given. She'd needed to do it on her own . . .

{Not entirely. Did you enjoy the run, my lazy Khy?} With a completely unforced grin, he released her hand to face her. Taking the coronet into both hands, he lifted it above her head.

The crowd roared.

He settled it on her shaded hair.

A second approving wave of sound surged to engulf them, and surged again. A sound that failed to compete with the pounding in his ears: his bart and hers, beating in synchrony.

Only this morning, they'd shunned him, condemning him for rumors. Now, the facts disproved the rumors, or so the mob believed, and he was acceptable. What they'd wit- nessed, their mutable logic declared, couldn't be tainted.