Eventually, Grateful Peace dusted the top of her head with the palm of his hand and said: "Would you like to see how you look?"

"I think not," Elise replied honestly. "Not quite yet. Can you do my makeup?"

Peace nodded.

"I can begin, but I will need to attend to Goody Wendee's hair unless you intend to do so."

"You're much faster than I am," Elise laughed, aware that the sound held a nervous lilt.

She felt acutely aware of the pa.s.sage of time, knowing that every moment brought her closer to a challenge she was uncertain she was really prepared for. With a hot flush of shame, she recalled how she had collapsed when they had been taken prisoner by the bandits. Would she fall apart now?Doc didn't think so. Firekeeper hadn't questioned her partic.i.p.ation. Even so, Elise found herself sneaking glances at the wolf-woman, looking for some sign that the other shared her doubt.

Firekeeper looked distinctly odd with her new haircut and partially painted face. The absence of front hair made her head look somehow longer. It also robbed her of much of her femininity.

Is that because only men go bald and now we look like balding men? Elise thought a trace hysterically.

Firekeeper turned back to Wendee, indicating with a gesture that the older woman could return to applying the makeup. As Wendee stroked the red paint onto Firekeeper's shaven head with fingers that had lost none of their expertise, the wolf-woman spoke: "What the winged folk tell is good and not good. Good is that there are few people in the upper portions of the tower. Not so good is that in lower part," she gestured toward Edlin's map, "is a room with many people in it."

Elise felt Grateful Peace's fingers stop their work for a moment as he turned to glance at the map. They picked up the tempo again almost immediately.

"That is a conference room. It takes up about half of that level of the tower. The rest is given over to a corridor and two smaller rooms which I believe are being used for little more than storage."

Firekeeper grunted acknowledgment.

"Think you that we can go past without those inside knowing?"

"Quite possibly," Peace agreed. "I could even go inside the room and pretend to be interested in the course of their debate."

Elise heard a ring of pride in his voice.

"I go everywhere and no one dares question. While I am in the conference room I can check whether they have one of the artifacts with them."

"Good," Firekeeper replied. "How much longer till we go?"

Grateful Peace paused again in his work.

"If Goody Wendee is nearly finished with your makeup and Lady Elise can complete my work here, we should not be long."

"Please, take care of Wendee's hair," Elise said. "I'll finish my own makeup and check Firekeeper's."

"Here, then," said Peace, "is a mirror. I believe Sir Jared is done with it."

Jared replied, "That's right. I'm going to get my kit together. I want to carry at least a few bandages and such."

As she accepted the mirror, Elise realized that she was avoiding turning in Sir Jared's direction. At Peace's suggestion, he had removed his beard and mustache. The one glimpse of him she had caught had made him seem quite the stranger. She didn't know what he'd think of her.

One thing seemed certain-if he'd fallen in love with her for her beauty, this shearing was certain to kill that love.Elise managed to keep from gasping with horror when she saw her own reflection. Grateful Peace had pulled her hair back into a queue before beginning his shaving. Therefore it was a nearly hairless, scarlet-faced demon who blinked out at her from the mirror. If Elise hadn't grown somewhat accustomed to finding the features beneath the omnipresent New Kelvinese ornamentation she would not have known herself.

"Take the red stick," Peace said to her, his hands never pausing in their rhythm, "and darken the line of your brows. Give your features some definition by filling in the creases alongside your mouth. Paint in your lips as well, but do so lightly. If you apply too much, you'll end up with paint on your teeth."

Having a specific task steadied Elise. As she complied with the thaumaturge's orders, he continued: "The most important thing all of you must remember if you are to pa.s.s for one of us is that you must keep your hands away from your face. We learn this from our earliest childhood so that it is automatic. The constant rubbing of lip or eyelid or bridge of nose that you people do sets you apart."

Wendee agreed. "That's just what my director told us. When we did Parted by the White Water he said that the best way to show that Guyus was New Kelvinese even when he wasn't wearing any paint was to make certain he never raised his hands above neck level. It was amazing how effective it was."

Before long, they were ready. Peace had selected the most appropriate robes from Wendee's collection and supervised their donning so that the fabric remained untouched by the paint. Because of the cold and because of the possible need for a fast escape, the robes were donned over trousers and shirts. It transformed them all-even curvaceous Wendee Jay-into bulky androgynous figures.

Weapons were concealed beneath the robes. These were few enough, mostly knives. Bows would be useless indoors and, in any case, the researchers would not be armed. Lady Melina was another matter.

The women were more or less accustomed to long skirts, but Doc clearly felt enc.u.mbered. Hearing him curse as he stumbled, Elise turned to him.

She saw his eyes widen as he took in her new appearance and fancied that his expression mirrored her own. However, as he said nothing, neither did she.

"Take smaller steps," she counseled. "You are striding as if in breeches or trousers. That's why you keep treading on your hem."

Doc tried to do as she had advised, achieving a mincing gait that sent Firekeeper into peals of laughter.

"No, Doc, smaller steps, not tiny-you look as if your boots are too tight!"

Sir Jared grumbled, "I'll never manage this!"

Grateful Peace turned a serious face toward him.

"If you think not, Sir Jared, then you must remain."

Relief flooded Elise as Sir Jared straightened and glowered at the New Kelvinese.

"I am going," he said. "I just hope I don't end up on my backside in the snow."

"We won't be out in the snow for long," Peace a.s.sured him. "As we have prepared, I have considered possible routes. Initially, I thought to take us above ground until we were fairly near the Earth Spires.

However, this would create more opportunities for you to be seen. Your disguises are adequate, but notperfect. Therefore, we will descend at a point closer to this neighborhood. Once below ground, I want you to tuck up your robes."

"So we don't walk on them?" Doc asked wryly.

"Not only that," Peace said. "I will be doing the same. It would not do for any of us to track in sewer dirt.

Footwear can be sc.r.a.ped or, at worst, discarded, but robes cannot be."

They said their farewells to Derian and Jared. Both young men wore matching expressions, mixing apprehension with guilt.

"I say," Edlin said, pumping Elise's hand-she'd had to forestall him from an embrace lest he smear her paint-"I feel a complete cad letting you go without me."

"You'll have trouble enough," she reminded him, "getting everything out in time. Are Hasamemorri and her maids asleep?"

"Like babes," he a.s.sured her. "I prowled up there a moment ago."

Edlin glanced over to where Firekeeper stood by the door, her hand resting lightly on Blind Seer's head.

"Take care of Little Sister," he said with affected lightness.

"No need," Firekeeper replied, though Elise could have sworn she wasn't near enough to hear. "We take care of ourselves. You and Derian take care and we see you when we come."

As they took their leave, Elise noted that Derian bore on his cheek the faintest mark of two red lips.

Firekeeper, then, had said her good-byes.

Despite their cloaks, which they wore with the hoods pulled up around their heads, the night air was so cold that the moisture from their breath froze in tiny crystals on the wool.

"It is colder than usual for this time of year," Grateful Peace commented conversationally. "Good. All but those with important business will be indoors."

He led the way to a side street at the end of which a trapdoor interrupted the orderly cobbles.

"Service entrance," he explained, raising the ring. "The traps are a bit heavy."

Elise was surprised that Firekeeper, who normally enjoyed showing off her considerable strength, let Sir Jared be the one who came forward to help raise the stone. Then she saw that the wolf-woman was in conference with Elation.

The falcon departed in an explosion of wings and Firekeeper padded over to join them.

"Elation say," she informed them, "that Lady Melina is there-not in her room-she is in tower."

As Elise descended the ladder into the depths, she glanced up and glimpsed Firekeeper's expression in the moonlight. The wolf-woman's eyes were shining and her teeth were bared, deadly white against her reddened face.

Chapter x.x.xI

Subconsciously, Grateful Peace had Expected the sewer to be cold and dank. In reality, it was actually somewhat warmer than the area above, insulated as it was by the living rock upon which the city was built. Nor was the subterranean tunnel terribly clammy. Even though the temperature here was somewhat warmer than Peace had expected, it was cold enough to draw most of the moisture from the air. It had even frozen the stench-somewhat.

He began to lead the way down the rounded length of the tunnel, guiding his small band along the narrow but perfectly serviceable walkway that ran along both sides. Each of them carried a torch from the ample supply stocked by the city's sewer workers.

Peace began to lead, but he had hardly taken two steps when the girl, Firekeeper, pushed him gently to one side. She and the wolf glided to the front.

"I can see in this light," she explained in the soft voice people always seem to use when in darkness, the type of voice that acknowledges that darkness carries with it the purest element of the unknown, "if I not look into the torch fire."

Grateful Peace let her pa.s.s.

He had wondered how the wolf was going to get down into the tunnel. The ladder was very steep-hardly more than a series of metal rungs beaten into the wall. The platform below was slightly wider than the walkway they now traversed, but hardly wide enough to allow a leaping wolf a margin for error.

He had thought of several alternatives. Somehow he had never considered that Lady Blysse would carry the wolf, supporting it with one arm, guiding herself down the rungs with the other.

That would take superhuman strength, amazing confidence, and trust, so he had never considered it as an option. But she had done it, and if he had not watched the operation with his own eyes he still wouldn't believe it.

True, at the end Firekeeper had been panting hard and the front of her print robe was covered with grey wolf hair, but she had done it. She hadn't even messed her face paint too badly, though there were small patches of red on the wolf's flank where his fur had pressed against her face.

Grateful Peace followed the wolf-woman along the tunnel. It was rounded, a great pipe that in an emergency could carry far more water than it usually bore. It had been designed with snowmelt floods in mind, perhaps, or perhaps in antic.i.p.ation that someday Dragon's Breath would become a far larger city than it had ever been or ever would be.

Peace didn't really know which was the answer.

We humans are such odd creatures, he thought. Consider the energy we spend speculating on things that are not, that may never happen, that cannot be. Is that what sets this young woman apart from us? She seems to live precisely in the moment, on the cusp of each breath.

"Which way?" came the husky voice from out of the near darkness in front of him.

They had come to a crossing of the tunnels. A new one entered from the east. A bridge had been built here for the convenience of those who must sometimes descend to carry away what blocked the easy flow of this subterranean river.

"Go straight," Peace replied. "We continue north almost all the way."A grunt was his only reply; then there was the faint sound of soft-soled boots on stone and the occasional click that he imagined might be the tapping of the wolf's toenail against the floor.

In reality, he might be imagining it or transferring sounds from behind to in front The acoustics here were tricky. He'd heard that the Sodality of Songweavers sent their apprentices into the tunnels alone and after dark as part of their test to be accepted as thaumaturges. If they could navigate by sound alone, they were promoted. If not, they could remain in the choir, but were never promoted.

It might be true. Some of the finest musicians in the choir never wore the thaumaturge's mark. On the other hand, it might just be one of those stories that all the sodalities spread around lest their a.s.sociates think them too soft, too undemanding.

Occasionally, their party pa.s.sed under another trapdoor. Each time, Firekeeper would pause beneath it, unspeaking, waiting to be told if this was the one. She did the same at each crossroad. Eventually, her silence got on Peace's nerves.

She's watching me, he thought. I'd forgotten what it is like to be watched. I wonder if she is doing it deliberately.

Something of her grin, just glimpsed in the torchlight as she once again turned away and began padding down the tunnel, made him think this was so.

Eventually, they came to a cl.u.s.ter of tunnels radiating from a central point. In the flickering light of their gathered torches, several trapdoors could just be glimpsed.

"We're under the Earth Spires now," Peace said. "Although I do not expect to meet with anyone, progress now in complete silence. I am not the only one who uses these ways."

The air stunk now with a greater concentration of fecal matter. It bore a hint of another scent, too, sulphur blended with a hint of molten copper and a dry musk unlike anything else known.

The sewer workers called it the breath of the dragon. The Sodality of Lapidaries said it was simply a concentration of the same gases that warmed the hot springs and caused mud to boil in certain pools.

Certainly, the area surrounding the Earth Spires was rather more active than the rest of the city. This was either because the Star Wizard really imprisoned a dragon here or because the Founders had liked hot water nearby for their baths and experiments.

Either way, Peace was accustomed to the smell. His companions were not. He had to hush them again when they made disparaging comments about the rotten-egg reek. Whispers sometimes carried farther in these tunnels than did louder sounds. Why they did so was a mystery, but mystery or not, it was still truth.

Firekeeper was now staying closer to him. At first Peace thought she was afraid; then he realized that she was simply closing on the circle of light, getting her eyes accustomed to it so that if they emerged into a lit place she would not be disadvantaged.

She must sense-He stopped himself in midthought. Sense! By the skull of the first Healed One- realize, not sense. I am falling under some superst.i.tious reverence for the creature. True, she speaks to animals. True, she is more like something from one of the tales of the Founders' time than I had ever seen before, but there is no magic to her. She is simply strange. She is intelligent enough to realize that we must reach our way up fairly soon, that's all.

Even so, Peace realized he was unnerved. Firekeeper alone would not have done it, but Firekeeper'spowers combined with what he had seen Lady Melina do, with what he had heard that Sir Jared could do... It rocked the foundations of his reality.

All my life I have believed myself part of the sorcerers' empire. Now I must face the truth that sorcery is not in us-not at least that I have seen. The kingdom of sorcery lies just across the White Water River and the great irony is they pretend to hate magic!

Firekeeper was waiting under another trapdoor. Peace checked the signs carved into the stone beside it.

He nodded and unfastened his cloak.

"This is the door I want," he said softly. "Let me go first. I'll see if anyone is there. Leave your cloaks behind when you come up. They wouldn't be worn in the building."

He didn't say more, hoping they understood that even if someone was in the cellar they would not find it odd if the Dragon's Eye rose from the depths-or if they found it odd, they would not comment.

Reaching up, Grateful Peace set his torch in the. sconce prepared for precisely this purpose. Little bits of burning ash fell on his sleeve and died in the cold of the fabric. Finding the first rungs of the ladder took him a moment, but after that he could have climbed from memory.