"My swordsmanship needs work. While it's still light." Tears ran down a stern, unmoving face. "There is much work to do, and the day isn't over. Let's get to it."

"Quite right," Tennetty said, with a shrug and a smile. "Walk this way," she said, walking twenty steps away and then drawing her sword, mirroring Jason.

While steel rang on steel, the words seemed to echo: There is much work to do, and the day isn't over.

The crowd dispersed until only Bren Adahan, Thomen Furnael, Doria Perlstein, and the two Cullinane women were left with the dragon.

*Could that not have waited?* Ellegon looked down at Bren. *You leave him little time for private mourning.*

Perhaps. Bren nodded his head. But I'm not sure he has much time. He is Karl's heir.

*As are we all. The fire burns more brightly each year, doesn't it?*

I don't understand.

*Of course you do.*

Great wings folded tightly against his side, the dragon lowered his saurian head, turning toward Andrea. *I . . . am so sorry, Andrea. I loved him, too.*

Clumsily, her face and her tears buried in her daughter's hair, she reached up to pat a thick scale. "He's dead, Ellegon."

Doria reached out an awkward arm, and Andrea included the younger-seeming woman in her embrace.

At the sound of steel on steel, the dragon looked over at Jason Cullinane and Tennetty, their swords flashing in the daylight. Jason parried a high-line attack, stopped his own lunge just short of Tennetty's torso, then backed up a few feet, saluting before taking an en garde position once again.

Slowly, the majestic head turned to look down at Thomen Furnael, Aeia Cullinane, and finally at Bren Adahan.

Ellegon stretched his neck, the huge head moving slowly from side to side, the eyes, each easily the size of a dinner plate, staring unblinkingly.

*Andrea, the flame burns more brightly, year by year. You say that Karl is dead?* Ellegon unfurled his wings, braced himself against the smooth stones, then leaped into the air. Flame roared into the clear blue sky.

*My dear, dear Andrea, that is entirely a matter of opinion.*

In a House on Faculty Row Even a sight that spans worlds can be blurred by tears.

Arthur Simpson Deighton sat, half bent over his desk, his head buried in his arms, weeping.

A distant voice seemed to whisper: Strange. You treat some of them like pieces in a game, but you care about the others. It's most amusing, I suppose, and while I'm used to laws and rules shifting and changing, I never will understand the rules you live by, Arta Myrdhyn.

"I let myself care about him, t.i.tania. About all of them."

You grow soft, old human. Weak. Your caring is distant, pointless. It's not at all amusing.

"It shall be neither distant nor pointless, someday."

Idle threats. Idle promises. You know what is necessary, but you have yet to do it. Coward. Crazy, useless coward. Now, you have another excuse to wait.

Arthur Simpson Deighton wept until his aching eyes were dry of tears.

Later, in Pandathaway: Slavers' Guildhall "By the time we arrived, they were dead, every one. Before we were driven off, we were able to capture a couple of the Mel wh.o.r.es; they are outside, waiting your pleasure. They didn't see it, but they did report: Cullinane and a handful of his men took on more than a hundred of ours, and won."

"All dead? All?"

"Every one. The beach was scattered with rotting bodies. It was clear that many of them had died in some sort of gunfight, some in some kind of explosion. But the rest . . . there were those who had been killed by strangling, some with an axe, and some with a sword. I was trying to investigate further when the Mel attackeda"yes, with guns."

"Captured from Ahrmin's party?"

"I don't know if it was our powder or that accursed Cullinane powder."

"Ahrmin and a score of good guildsmen and a hundred mercenaries were killed, the Mel have gunsa"and you say that there is worse?"

"There is. I know there's no word of Karl Cullinane returning to Holtun-Biemea"they seem to think that he's dead."

"You say that he isn't?"

"I say that n.o.body else has seen this. We found it nailed to the chest of one of our men; he had been hung by the heels and slaughtered like a goat. We were meant to find it; the Mel didn't attack until after we discovered it.

"The symbols on the very bottom seem to be the signatures. There are three of them. Three: an axe, a knife, and a sword. I think the writing on top is that accursed Englits of his, but you can see what's written in Erendra."

He held up a piece of sun-bleached leather, on which were written, in dark, dried blood, some English words that they couldn't understand.

And below the words they couldn't understand, also written in blood, were three Erendra words that they could: the warrior lives.

The Warrior Lives.

Vol. 5 of.

The Guardians of the Flame.

For Sprague and Catherine,

role models.

Acknowledgments.

I'd like to thank the people who helped: Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, who found me the place to finish this book; Pamela Dean and Nate Bucklin, for the last-minute proofreading; the rest of the Minneapolis SF crowd, for reasons both trivial and profound; Mark J. McGarry, who made it better, again; Felix Tang and John Jaser and the other good folks at Logix Microcomputer; Scott Raun, who quibbled a bit; Harry Leonard, who quibbled a lot; my editor, John Silbersack; my wife, Felicia; and always, particularly, my agent, Eleanor Wood.

PRELUDE.

Laheran.

Every man is like the company he is wont to keep.

a"Euripides.

"You have to find him," said Slavers' Guildmaster Yryn. "You have to stop him."

Yryn looked old, and stoop-shouldered. His neck seemed to have trouble holding up his ma.s.sive head, and his eyes were more of a dull gray than the sharp, piercing slate-gray that Laheran remembered from his apprenticeship in the guild.

As they walked through the garden, Yryn fondled the piece of sun-bleached leather, his nail-bitten fingers stroking it as if it were a magical talisman, which it wasn't.

There was little enough in the world to be sure of, Laheran thought, but the leather wasn't magical. It had been carefully examined by a competent wizard, a master in Pandathaway's Wizards' Guild, and while the wizards couldn't always be relied ona"they were notorious cowards, for one thinga"they could be trusted to know if something was magical.

The inner courtyard of Slavers' Guildhall was a quiet place, one for reflection. Marble benches surrounded a lawn that was always ankle-height, the garden guarded by cornered hedges, the precision of it all maintained each night by scissor-wielding slaves working under smoky torchlight.

Except for the flowers. A gardener, fealty-bound to the guild, had the responsibility for their care. Flowers were different, Laheran thought, as he bent to sniff the rich fragrance of a blood-red rose. They required loving attention, not just fearful care.

Laheran liked the garden. It was the one quiet place in the city, the only place he could get completely away from the noise and the bustle and the smells of Pandathaway.

"You have to stop Karl Cullinane," the guildmaster said, as though Laheran hadn't heard him.

"You said that." Laheran held up an admonishing finger, hoping that Yryn would slap him down for his insolence, silently begging the guildmaster to a.s.sert his authority.

But the older man just nodded.

Laheran could have cried. The guildmaster was losing his grip on himself. Could his grip on the guild be far behind?

It was a bad time to be leaving Pandathaway. Perhaps Laheran oughtn't have any delusions about having a chance at the guildmastershipa"there had never been a guildmaster in his twenties, and d.a.m.ned few in their thirtiesa"but as the youngest full master in the guild, it wasn't at all impossible that he could have some impact on the outcome of the contention.

If there was to be a contention. Perhaps what the guild needed now was stability, even if that meant that somebody would have to be the power behind the throne.

Laheran held out his hand to accept the piece of leather. It was about two handbreadths across, not of terribly high quality, probably cut from a leather food sack of some sort.

There was writing on the rough surface; Laheran recognized it as dried blood. He couldn't make out most of the writing, although he suspected it was in that Englits that Karl Cullinane and his friends were turning into a common trade language throughout the Eren regions and beyond.

But below the scratchings that he couldn't decipher, there were the words he could: The warrior lives, they said. Beneath were three crude drawings: a sword, an ax, and a knifea"a threat that Cullinane would kill them with whatever was handy.

It was the third such piece of leather Laheran had seen. The first he himself had brought back from Melawei; it had been pinned to the corpse of a brother slaver, a man who had been split with an ax from his brow almost to his waist.

The second had been discovered in Ehvenor, tied to the hilt of a sword that had been struck through three bodies; the killers had either discovered the slavers in a dark alley or drawn them into it, leaving them behind dead, dead, and dead.

This third one had been found in Lundeyll, in a rented room at an inn there, again pinned to the corpse of a slaver, this time by a knife that projected from the dead man's open mouth like a bloodied metal tongue. Nimyn was his name; Laheran knew him slightly. He was a journeyman on a routine trading mission, traveling down the coast toward Ehvenor with a string of a dozen well-tamed male slaves, most of whom were born into servitude. There were two other slavers with Nimyn, but they were left alone.

The guildmaster finally put it as a question. "Will you find him? Stop him?"

"Yes," Laheran said, stooping to pick a rose, twisting the stem loose from the bush with deft fingers that managed to avoid the thorns. He fixed it to the collar of his cloak with a long silver pin.

He wished he had a mirror with him; he was pleased with the way he looked. He knew what he would have seen: a tall, slim, elegant young man in blue and gray, his hair the color of autumn flax, his short, neatly trimmed beard only a few shades darker. A light, crimson cloaka"more of a cape, reallya"fastened with a braided silver rope, hung elegantly from his right shoulder, the cut of his tunic and mid-calf breeches more elegant, more careful than was usual among guildsmen.

He rested his palm for a moment on the hilt of his sword, striking a pose. He knew he looked somewhat younger than his twenty-five years, and knew that his age and his foppishness tempted others to either underrate or overrate him. That suited him.

"I believe that I will," he said finally. "What resources do I have?"

"Come with me," the guildmaster said.

The two of them pa.s.sed into the dark cool of the marble halls.

The walls were spotless and the floors only barely dirtied by the day's traffic, but there was a strange smell in the hallsa"beyond the usual stink of human sweat, of pain and feara"that never could be scrubbed out of the tiles. Whip a slave to deatha"although with the economics of slavery these days, that was the luxury of a bygone eraa"and he would leave his smell not only on the rough stone walls where you chained him, but throughout the rest of the hall.

But there was something else. As the two slavers pa.s.sed by an open door, the scribes working at their desks in the room looked up, a quick flash of panic pa.s.sing across their faces.

This was Slavers' Guildhall; there should have been no trace of fear on the face of a guildsman.

But there was: the place also stank of slaver's fear.

It somehow smelled different than the fear of a slave.

They all feared that Karl Cullinane would come for them, and not just outside, somewhere in the field. That would have been different. That was frightening, but acceptable. You had to learn to look over your shoulder when you were away. Raiding or trading, you had to sleep lightly, listening for the quiet patter of unshod feet on deck, the m.u.f.fled whisper of a sword leaving its scabbard, the snick of a c.o.c.ked hammer.

No, it wasn't only an a.s.sault in the field they feared now, but one in the guildhall itself.

Laheran followed Yryn upstairs into the master's meeting room, where ten men sat around the wide oak table.

None of them were master slavers, but they were all reliable journeymen, most of them well scarred: tough and blooded, men who made their business as raiders and tamers, not just as sellers.

The guildmaster introduced him around the table; Laheran exchanged guild grips with each man in turn. And each man in turn gripped Laheran's hand just a bit too hard, as though grabbing for rea.s.surance, not simply confirming Laheran's guild membership, or returning his courtesy.

"I can have a hundred more men for you in two tendays," the guildmaster said.

Laheran shook his head. "No. The guild has tried that before. A small group this time, with a small, fast ship. We'll go quietly from Pandathaway, not loudly announcing who we are. We take his trail, find him, and kill him." There was no great rush. If it was possible to catch Cullinanea"and it had to be possible to catch Cullinanea"then Cullinane was headed north.

Possibly by way of Pandathaway and the guildhall? No, that was unlikely. There were too many defenses, both physical and magical, at Slavers' Guildhall. Cullinane wouldn't be able to get in here.

But, conceivably, he would stop off in Pandathaway and kill a slaver or two, hunt them down outside the guildhall. And that could work to Laheran's advantage: the larger the monster, the larger the reward for killing it.