Elysia nodded. No one escapes Azhkendir unchanged, she thought-but did not say so aloud.

"In order not to alarm the good doctor unduly, you will have to enter the street unaccompanied. Help will be close at hand, should you need it. I have placed a man or two in the vicinity." He leaned across and took her hands in his. "I would not put you at risk, Elysia, for all the world-but there is no other way."

The little carriage had turned off the wide avenue and was proceeding down a steeply winding street, overhung with dilapidated buildings that blocked out much of the daylight. Raucous street cries could be heard now, and pungent smells began to penetrate the carriage: frying onions; smoking fish; rotting refuse.

"Kazimir lodges above the Sign of the Orrery. It is a tavern on the corner of the quay; you cannot miss it. We will set you down before the quay and we will wait for you there. But if Kazimir turns violent, just open a window, any window, and cry out, 'Azhgorod!'"

"Now you're really beginning to alarm me," Elysia said, essaying a smile. The smell of herring from the smokehouses was beginning to make her feel a little queasy.

She climbed down from the coach and gazed uneasily around her. She had taken the precaution, as he advised her, of wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a veil. A new smell assaulted her nostrils: the stink of boiling pitch. Out in the middle of the river she could see a little island where many fine ships were moored for repairs. The boisterous wind was blowing tar-fumed smoke directly toward the quay.

Wrapping her veil more tightly about her face, she ventured out along the quay, head down. She had to pick her way across mud-slimed cobbles where gulls fought over fish guts discarded by the herring-wives who clustered together to do their messy work, chatting and laughing raucously. This, at any rate, was no different from the harbor in Vermeille.

When she passed two sailors staggering along, propping each other up, yelling a shanty, she knew she must be near her goal. Gazing upward, she saw the Orrery sign flapping wildly overhead in the gusts of wind.

She pushed open the door. The dark taproom was filled with a haze of pipe smoke that made her eyes water. Men turned toward her, staring.

"What do you want?" A thin-faced woman appeared, carrying mugs of ale. She glared at Elysia.

"Doctor Kazimir."

The woman gave her a quizzical look. "Out the back," she said. "To the left just before the yard."

Elysia hurried through the taproom and almost ran headfirst into a burly sailor hitching up his trousers, coming in from what the woman had euphemistically called "the yard."

Elysia shrank back to let him pass. When he had lumbered by, she saw, with relief, a blue-painted door to her left. Lifting the latch, she went through and found herself at the foot of a narrow wooden stair.

"Doctor Kazimir?" she called, wishing her voice sounded less hesitant.

There was no reply.

At the top of the stairs was a little door. The landing ceiling was so low she had to stoop to knock.

"Go away!" came a man's voice from within.

"Doctor Kazimir, I've come a very long way to see you."

"Go away!" repeated the voice irritably.

Elysia tried the door latch but it was locked. She would have to try a different tack.

"My name is Elysia Nagarian. Bogatyr Kostya Torzianin has kidnapped my son Gavril and taken him to Azhkendir." What was she doing, shouting her most intimate secrets through a wooden door to some eccentric scientist who had barricaded himself in?

"What's that to me?"

"I-" She stopped a moment, almost speechless with frustration. "I hoped you could help me. There's no one else in all Mirom who knows anything about Azhkendir."

There was a silence on the other side of the door.

"You're alone?"

"Yes," she said, trusting there was nothing sinister implied in his question.

There came another silence-and then she heard the sound of furniture being dragged across bare boards. Chains clinked, bolts were shot, and at last the door opened a little way, and a bespectacled man peered out at her from the gloom.

"You'd better come in."

Elysia squeezed inside-and could not help noticing how Doctor Kazimir put his head outside, checking the stair before closing the door, standing with his back to it, as if to prevent anyone else getting in.

Elysia raised her veil and looked at him quizzically. She hoped that she had not just walked into a madman's trap.

"I-I've got little in the way of refreshment to offer you, madame." He edged away from the door, his movements nervous and uncoordinated. "Not even tea. Only vodka."

Elysia shook her head. "Nothing, thank you."

He reached for a half-empty bottle of vodka and poured himself a glass, swallowing it down in one gulp.

"You-you must excuse me. This is not how I usually entertain visitors. P-please sit down."

The dingy room was meagerly furnished; the table was covered with a clutter of glasses and empty bottles. The clean smell of spirits did not quite obscure the stronger smell of unwashed flesh.

As Elysia sat down on a rickety chair, she noticed a battered traveling trunk in one corner, half-open, spilling out dirty linen and books. Doctor Kazimir had either recently arrived, or not bothered to unpack.

"How did you find me?" he asked warily. His voice, though light and a little tremulous, was not unpleasant. If he shaved, Elysia thought, looking at the several days' growth of fair stubble-if he let the barber attend to his long, straggling hair-he would prove quite well-favored.

"I have connections at court," Elysia said, equally warily.

Doctor Kazimir sat down at the table opposite her, one hand clutching the vodka bottle, the other his empty glass. He began to speak; yet due to his agitation, the words came out in a rush.

"I-I must tell you, madame, that when I left Azhkendir, Lord Volkh was alive. The news that he had been killed was a shock to me, a total shock. We did not part on the best of terms, you see, and now I regret that. Not only because the druzhina druzhina put a bloodprice on my head, but because your husband was in his own way an honorable man, forced to bear an intolerable burden-" put a bloodprice on my head, but because your husband was in his own way an honorable man, forced to bear an intolerable burden-"

"This is all well and good," Elysia said patiently, "but it is my son's plight that brings me here."

"Your son. I never met your son." Kazimir raked one hand through his lank, fair hair. "You must understand, Madame Nagarian, that I was on my way to Arkhelskoye when the news of Lord Volkh's murder broke. Suddenly I was a wanted man! I was forced to disguise myself and seek the first passage out-on a fur trader's vessel. The smell of the stinking pelts clings to me still. . . ."

"So you can't help me." Elysia, who till this moment had been clinging onto this one vain hope, felt herself engulfed in a wave of hopelessness. She rose, pulling the veil down to conceal the tears that had begun to well in her eyes.

"No, wait!" cried Kazimir, leaping up. "I am ashamed, madame, to receive you in this fashion. What must you think of me? It's just that I have been in constant fear for my life since the news broke, moving from one filthy tavern room to another-"

"So?" Elysia said coldly.

Kazimir lifted the bottle and shakily began to pour another glass. The bottle rattled against the glass and the liquor spilled onto the table.

After another gulp, he began to speak. "Your husband wanted to find a cure. He wanted to become human again. He wanted to stop-or even reverse-the unusual condition he had inherited. He believed from his research that the Drakhaons were in some way related to reptiles or serpents. The old legend . . ."

"The first Volkh Nagarian was called the Son of the Serpent," murmured Elysia.

"And that maybe the lethal venom with which he killed his enemies could also be used to produce an antidote."

"An antidote?"

"You had not seen him for many years?"

"No." For a moment she saw him again, saw those broodingly dark eyes, burning unnaturally blue in the darkness of their bedchamber. And she heard again his voice shiver through the icy Azhkendir night, the cry of a beast cursed with a human soul.

"He was . . . extraordinary." The doctor slowly shook his head, as if what he had seen was still beyond his comprehension. "Such a unique condition."

"How, unique?" Elysia was thinking of Gavril, not Volkh, now. For all these years she had been silently watching him, hoping against hope that the telltale signs of his father's deformities had not begun to manifest themselves.

"I have spent my life trying to explain and explore the mysteries of the natural sciences, madame. But I had never before encountered a condition such as this-one that defied defied scientific explanation. I could have spent a lifetime researching it. But Lord Volkh did not have a lifetime. He wanted a cure." scientific explanation. I could have spent a lifetime researching it. But Lord Volkh did not have a lifetime. He wanted a cure."

"Is such a thing possible?" Elysia had wanted to leave. Now, against her better judgment, she found herself compelled to listen to Kazimir's tale. If there were the slightest hope . . .

"We began to experiment with the . . ." and Kazimir's voice dropped, as if he were afraid they were being overheard, "the venom. In miniscule doses. A process of desensitization, if you care to call it that."

"And what effect did it have?" Elysia found that in spite of herself, she had drawn closer to the doctor.

"The desired effect. The physical changes began to be reversed. But as I had suspected, the more human Lord Volkh began to look, the more his powers dwindled. The elixir I developed restored his humanity but left him weak, unable to transform himself."

Elysia shuddered, remembering the nightmare she had tried to block from her mind all these years. Transformation. That was a rational, prosaic way of describing something so darkly visceral, so profoundly terrifying, that it had deprived her of speech for several days. Volkh had warned her that there was a side of his life that she could never share-and she, foolishly, had thought he referred only to his military campaigning, never imagining . . .

"Of course, at the time I could only see the advantages of my discovery. I never imagined, madame, that anyone would use my elixir to assassinate Lord Volkh."

"Assassinate?" His last words jolted Elysia from her reverie. She looked up to see Altan Kazimir staring at her, his eyes wild and grim. "You believe someone stole your elixir to kill Volkh?"

"They think it was me!" he burst out. "They think that because we quarreled that I bore him a grudge. They think I wanted Lilias all to myself-"

"Wait a moment." Elysia held up a hand, trying to stem the flow. "Who is Lilias?"

Kazimir tipped the bottle into his glass again, shaking it till the last few drops were gone.

"His mistress," he said thickly.

"Oh." Elysia sat down again. Silly, really, to imagine that Volkh would not look for love elsewhere after she had left him. Why should he still pine for her, inconsolable, all these years? Hadn't she found companionship with Lukan?

"We were just lonely, Lilias and I," Kazimir mumbled into the glass. "Two strangers in a strange land. I never intended-"

"Be that as it may," Elysia said briskly, "how effective do you judge your elixir to be? If it could reverse the deterioration in a man of Volkh's age, could it prevent it completely in a younger man?"

"Your son?" he said, trying to focus on her above the rim of the glass. "It depends. If he has never . . . been transformed, then there might be a chance. But the elixir must be made from the venom in his own bloodstream, and it must be very carefully diluted and monitored. What worked for the father could well kill the son."

"Was there any of the original elixir left in Kastel Drakhaon?" Elysia cried, alarmed.

"I don't know. I was obliged to leave so fast I had only my valise with me. There was no time to go back and collect my papers. . . ."

"But suppose Gavril found your papers, suppose he tried to re-create the elixir-"

"Madame Nagarian, please don't distress yourself."

"You must help him," she said.

"Me? Return to Azhkendir?" Kazimir began to laugh in a strange, high voice. "Never."

"Altan! Altan! Altan!"

Someone stormed up the stairs. The door burst open and a dark-haired man came in, out of breath. Elysia rose, fearing some kind of trap.

"Who is she she?" he demanded, stabbing his finger at her.

"A f-friend," Kazimir said, waving a hand vaguely in the air.

"Who sent her? How did she know how to find you here?"

"I was just leaving," Elysia said, wondering if she could reach the window in time to yell for help if the newcomer attacked her.

"What do you want with him?" The man stared at her, eyes dark with suspicion.

"That's my business," she said, staring back.

"His agents are on the quay. You'll have to move on, Altan." agents are on the quay. You'll have to move on, Altan."

"Can't keep running," Kazimir said, his words slurring. "Too tired."

"Drinking again?" The stranger snatched the glass from his hand. "What use are you to us when you're drunk all the time?"

"I'm sorry, Matyev. Really sorry." Kazimir seemed on the verge of tears. "I'm such a stupid fool. I had it all-in the palm of my hand-and I just threw it away."

He crashed forward onto the table suddenly, insensible.

"Altan?" Matyev shook him; the only response was a shuddering snore. Matyev slowly lowered him back down. Kazimir's fair hair spilled onto the stained oilcloth tabletop.

"One of the best minds in Mirom, and look at him. Drunk as a pig." He looked up at Elysia, glaring. "Whatever your business is, lady, it's over for today. Doctor Kazimir's not at home to visitors."

"When can I-"

"Just go."

Biting back her frustration, Elysia turned on her heel and hurried away.

Outside the wind had changed direction, and a bitterly cold gust tasting of snow and salt almost blew Elysia's flimsy hat from her head. She grabbed hold of it with both hands and marched blindly out along the cobbled quay. She was angry now, angry with Kazimir, angry with herself for feeling so powerless. She stopped a moment, gazing out at the tall ships on the river, sails filling with the autumn wind.

There must be a way to get a warning to Gavril.

The rumble of carriage wheels over the cobbles startled her. Horses snorted just behind her, stamping their hooves, breath misting the cold air. The carriage door opened and Count Velemir leaned out, offering his hand.

"We had quite given you up. I was about to send one of my men in to find you."