Did such a thing as home exist when one lived through the ages as a mortal god? The Lady SienMa had carried a bit of Thousand Lakes with her to Farshore, as if that reminder had mattered to her. His memories of that time contradicted one another, however. Sometimes he saw her as the woman who loved a husband and honored a father, and who taught him how to use a bow. At others, he remembered the icy goddess who had judged him at weapons and who had given him gifts that whispered to him of his own past deaths, and perhaps his death to come.

If he thought about it too much, it made his head hurt. With careful fingertips, therefore, he traced the flow of a stream across the tapestry, caressed banks thick with rushes on either side of the ripple of green thread. Little wooden bridges, their planks marked in shades of sepia and tan, crossed to a knotted island very like the one where Llesho and his cadre had learned to fight as a team. Llesho remembered weapons training with Lling and Hmishi, led by Kaydu and chivied on by Bixei and the others, with a warmth almost of home.

He pushed aside the curtain and entered. Inside the sacred cave a flame burned like a ghost. Gases escaping the thinnest crack in the floor of the cave fed the eternal flame in honor of spirits Llesho did not know. By its light he made out a pillar of stone at the center of the shrine, carved in relief from top to bottom with a scene of whirling warriors. The figures stirred in the dim light, and sounds and smells of the battlefield came faintly to him, as if from a distance. He'd lost Master Jaks to the armies of Markko the Magician in a battle like that. They'd buried him in an unmarked grave so that his enemies couldn't find him to mock his body. Llesho hoped he'd made his way to the warriors' last home and the comfort of his brothers.

"All debts are paid," he muttered to the dream figures on the pillar. He knew enough to dread what the cave would reveal to him next, but still he reeled with shock when he saw the scene painted on the plastered walls. Her ladyship's orchard.

If he hadn't remembered the trees, laden here with amber peaches and amethyst plums, the figures in the painting left no doubt. A small, dark boy with worshipful eyes lay at the foot of a heavy-laden tree, his head in the lap of a lady with a face white as a ghost and with ruby tears of blood falling from her eyes. A bow lay abandoned next to a bowl of jeweled fruit on the soft green grass. The boy, he saw, lay dying. A short spear pierced his heart and yellow light spilled from the wound.

Llesho knew he was the boy painted on the wall, and recognized the spear. Somewhere in the city below, the weapon waited for him, a fearful thing to keep so close, but too dangerous to trust in the hands of anyone else. He hoped this wasn't a prophetic dream.

As if reaching for a lifeline, Llesho slipped a hand inside his shirt and grasped the small bag that held the pearls of the goddess resting over his heart. The one with the silver scrollwork was missing. Slowly he backed out of the shrine, would have backed right off the hillside if he hadn't bumped into a tall dark figure on the path behind him.

"Not to your liking?" Pig wore no clothing, but was wound about with thin chains like the silver wires that wrapped the pearl.

"Are you responsible for this?" Llesho gestured at the cave he'd just exited. Only a plain and dusty rug of Tas-hek leaves and flowers covered the entrance when he looked at it again.

"It's not my dream," Pig reminded him. "I'm only here because you called me." He nudged Llesho up the mountainside a pace or two before nodding at a rug covered in Thebin embroideries in rich mountain wool. Brushing aside a fold of the tapestry, he disappeared into the darkness. Llesho followed and found himself in a small cave.

The tinted plaster copied the yellow mud that gave Kungol its golden glow in sunlight, but no other sign of the pilgrim who had made the shrine remained. Llesho wondered if the Thebin cave existed in the waking world or if Pig had created it out of dreamstuff, but the Jinn said nothing. Whoever had hollowed out this space hadn't meant it for strangers. It felt unbearably private. Stroking one hand down the nearest wall with all his in hisyearning-for his lost mother, his sister, his home fingertips, Llesho turned away.

"Don't you want to see what's here?" Pig asked him.

"There's nothing to see." Nothing but smooth, cool walls of Thebin gold. The back wall did have a painting on it, though, in subtle colors so like the yellow of the plaster that he hadn't made them out in the dim light. As the light grew stronger, however, the mountains that rose above Kungol appeared like a whisper on the back wall: pale and shrouded in mist at their peaks, fading at their lower reaches into the yellow mud of the city.

The light, he realized, was coming from the painting, and he couldn't turn away, had to reach out. A cold, thin wind off the mountains touched his face, and he shivered. The mist on the mountaintop seemed to clear for a moment, and a gate made of golden pillars appeared. Llesho walked toward it, passed through into a place he'd never seen before, but knew instantly.

"The gardens of heaven," he whispered, and Pig, beside him, nodded.

"They need tending," the Jinn answered more than the question. His little piggy eyes held such a complexity of emotions that Llesho could not bear to look at them. Longing, he knew, and the delight of coming home, but also dismay, and a great sorrow, as if in the moment of greeting Pig braced himself to bid the beloved gardens good-bye. From somewhere Pig had materialized a rake, and he wandered off with a nod of farewell, his mind already on the work that needed his attention.

Abandoned to the vast gardens that existed nowhere in his own plane of being, Llesho shivered and searched behind him for the gates by which he had entered. Common sense told him he didn't belong here. He needed to wake up, to get back down the hillside and into his bed. But the gates had disappeared. He saw only gardens run to weeds and tangles of thorny scrub in every direction he looked.

Nowhere could he find a sign of friendly life. Llesho reached for his sword and remembered he had come out in a dream, unarmed. He wished for a spear or even a rake, but had only his bare hands to protect him from the teeth and tusks of the creatures grumbling threats in the rustling undergrowth.

Resisting the sudden need to curl up in a tight ball in the fork of a tree until Pig came to find him, Llesho looked around for a landmark to guide him through his terror. He found himself looking into the eyes of a plain woman of middle years in the simple clothes of a beekeeper.

"You've come."

She lifted the thick veils that draped her beekeeper's hat and her smile seemed to light her up from the inside, like a party lantern. Llesho found himself uncertain, suddenly, of all the assumptions he had made in his first look at her, as if two images shared the same space and vied for his fractured attention. One, the beekeeper, he understood. The other made him tremble, and he didn't dare name it to himself.

"Pig brought me." He addressed the beekeeper, and gradually his awareness of the other, stranger presence subsided.

"Pig." She nodded, and he shivered with aftershocks of something he refused to see. "But you've come. At last."

"It's just a dream," he reminded himself, or answered the unspoken question in her words. "I can't stay." Not really here. Gone with the moonrise, into a waking reality a thousand li away from Kungol and the gates it had guarded for so long.

"Don't dismiss your dreams. All of heaven is counting on them." She held his gaze another moment, gave him a little nod to emphasize her words, and then she was gone, slipping away into the foliage. He followed, thrashing around in the underbrush like a wild boar, but he could find no sign of her except for the hive that buzzed with wild bees in the branches overhead. He remembered his first impulse, to hide himself in that tree. At least her appearance had saved him from the painful discovery that there was no hiding in heaven. By the time he stopped looking for her, he had lost his bearings completely, and couldn't tell which direction he had come from or where he had seen Pig go.

Nothing at eye level gave him a clue, but the roof of a garden pavilion rose above the treetops in the distance. An overgrown path led in that direction, and he followed, it seemed, for hours, though the bright light of midday never varied. That was part of his quest, after all: to find the String of Midnights- the goddess' scattered necklace of black pearls-and bring the night back to heaven. If anything, that knowledge made the constant daylight more ominous instead of less, however.

He struggled forward, against his own fears and the dense growth. Once or twice he thought he caught a glimpse of someone through the bushes ahead, but up close, he found no sign that anyone had been there. Toward what must be afternoon in the world where sun and moon brought night and day, storm clouds boiling on the horizon gave the illusion of nightfall to the gardens. Lightning stabbed from thick black clouds and rain came on fast, pelting him with hail that left bruises on his arms and beat down the grass. Llesho ran for cover through rain-black tangles of thorns that caught at him as he passed. He hoped the beekeeper had found shelter, and prayed that no bolt of lightning strike him down, no flood drown him. When rescue from the storm did not come, he offered up his misery to the goddess and struggled on.

Eventually, the storm passed. The sun came out, sucking the steam out of the muck to curl around his slipping feet. He was afraid he'd fall into quicksand, but the ground remained solid enough under a soupy film of mud. When he no longer needed the protection, of course, he stumbled upon the pavilion he had seen from afar on the other side of the storm.

Once it must have graced the garden with its soaring beauty. Now, rain-swept leaves rotted against the risers and the excrement of predators raised a greater stink than the mud-rot. He hesitated at the bottom of a short flight of steps, embarrassed to mark the pale treads with his muddy footprints, even though there wasn't much more damage he could do the decaying structure. Picking his way carefully through the debris, therefore, Llesho made his way inside.

Trees, driven by the terrible storms, had crashed through the roof, strewing broken limbs and shattered tiles on the floor. A divan, chewed and defiled by nesting vermin, sat in a far corner. Llesho made his way toward it past the debris. He had thought he might find the beekeeper sheltering from the storm, but the pavilion stood abandoned. Without her there to ask directions, he didn't know how he would find his way back to the gates or to Pig. Nudging the shreds of draperies aside, he sat heavily on the smelly divan.

"What has happened here?" he asked, softly because he was only talking to himself.

"Too much despair, not enough attention to duty."

At the sound of a voice behind him, Llesho leaped to his feet in fighting stance, his leg raised for a side kick. Pig. The Jinn had found clothes, the rough pants and shirt of a common worker bound by a cloth belt and streaked with mud. Mud clotted between the teeth of his rake and the toes of the cloven hooves he walked on. Llesho relaxed his striking leg, so that he had both feet on the floor, but otherwise gave no quarter. "What happened here?" he demanded. "Where have you brought me?" He said nothing about the beekeeper, afraid that he'd created her out of his own imagination.

"We are in the gardens of heaven, as you well know." Pig leaned on his rake, exhaustion carved into his smooth round face. Llesho saw blood on the rake handle and blisters on the thick fingered black hands where a proper pig would have a second set of hooves. "As for what has happened here, it is despair. I've shaken things up a bit among the under-gardeners, though, and we've had some rain."

"I'd noticed." Llesho wrung out his shirt, distaste twisting his mouth. "It soaked me through. I thought the sun always shone in heaven."

"You have seen what happens when the sun shines all the time, Llesho: the Gansau Wastes. Even heaven needs rain. Its gardeners sometimes need a kick in a tender spot to get them moving as well, but these gardens, at least, should be set to rights soon. For a little while."

"Why just for a while?" It seemed pointless to maintain a threatening posture when Pig looked like he could barely stand on his two hooves. Llesho threw himself down on the corner of the divan and cleared the spot next to him for the Jinn, who did not sit, but paced his anger out the length of the pavilion.

"Because, when you awaken from your dream, we will both be in Ahkenbad again. I have given my assistants the flat of my rake, but heaven remains hostage to the demon at the gate, and no help can come until Thebin is free of the Harn who called him. When we are gone, lethargy will reclaim the lesser gardeners, and they will soon return to the state in which I found them, gaming among themselves, drinking, and weeping.

"Fools!" Pig threw himself down on the divan, nearly toppling them both into a snarl of bat droppings and chewed satin. "Not a one of them has left heaven by choice since called to serve the Great Goddess in her gardens. Now that they cannot leave, however, they mourn a freedom they never valued when they had it."

"And the goddess?" Llesho asked. He'd expected to see her, thought she might come out to greet him. That she hadn't only confirmed his own belief, despite his advisers' insistence to the contrary, that she had found him lacking as a husband.

"I thought-" Surprised, Pig cleared his throat, squirming uncomfortably so that the divan they sat on groaned under his shifting weight. "No one approached you?"

"I haven't seen anyone but you. While I was looking for you, after you had gone off without me, I stumbled on a beekeeper trying to coax a wild hive out of a tree, but no one else."

"A beekeeper." Pig looked at him thoughtfully, and it was Llesho's turn to squirm. "Did she say anything to you?"

"She seemed to think that I had come to free heaven in my dreams. That isn't possible, is it?"

Pig shrugged his shoulders. "I've never heard that it could be done. Until I tried it, however, I didn't know that I could turn myself into a pearl, or that I could escape by rolling into a spring that flows between the worlds of heaven and earth."

"You're a Jinn," Llesho pointed out practically. "Magic comes with the territory. Until a handful of seasons ago, I was a pearl diver and a slave. I can fight now, but my real talent seems to be as live bait that Habiba can dangle in front of Master Markko." His journey to Ahkenbad slung wrong way over the back of a camel still rankled. "I excel as baggage as well."

"The . . . beekeeper . . . thought you were more, though?"

"She said my dreams were important. Here." He gestured with a nod of his head to encompass the gardens that surrounded them.

"Believe it." Pig nodded, as if the words only confirmed something he already knew. "Though I'm surprised she hasn't changed her mind about you, now that she knows your wits are dull as a fence post."

Llesho pondered this for a long moment. "You don't mean-" Pig couldn't mean what he thought. The Great Goddess must be beautiful, or at least as terrible as the Lady SienMa. Not plain, in homely dress and at homely work. Before he could pursue the question with Pig however, a familiar voice broke into his reverie.

"Llesho!" Habiba's voice called from some distance he couldn't measure, "Wake up! Hurry!"

"We have to get back," Pig agreed, as he heard the voice, too.

"There you are." The sorcerer appeared at the edge of the foliage that encroached on the pavilion where he sat with Pig. "There's been an attack. We've got to get you out of here and let the dream readers close the portal."

What portal? And how did Habiba get into his dream? The magician's urgency brought him to his feet even as the questions bounced around in his head. "Lead the way, my lord."

Habiba gave him a very strange look. "It's your your dream, Llesho. All you have to do is wake up." dream, Llesho. All you have to do is wake up."

"I can't, my lord." Llesho gave an apologetic twitch of his shoulders. "I'm lost."

"We're going to have to work on that. Later, though. No time now." The magician seemed to be speaking to someone Llesho couldn't see. He felt a sudden pinch that brought him up off the divan with a yelp. Then Habiba was gone, and he was standing alone, high on the sacred mountain of Ahkenbad.

Kaydu met him halfway down the trail that wound through the cliff of caves.

"Llesho!" she called to him. "Are you awake yet!"

She grabbed his arm and shook it anyway, and he realized that the shock of finding himself in the hills instead of in his bed must have shown on his face.

"I'm awake. How did I get here?"

"Walked in your sleep, according to my father. You nearly gave him a heart attack when he didn't find you between the horns of the dragon. The Dinha told him you'd be wandering in the caves."

She gave him a strange look, wide-eyed with the urgency of the moment, but still filled with secrets. "Father walks in his sleep, too."

"Oh." He walks in other people's sleep as well, He walks in other people's sleep as well, he could have told her, but he thought she knew that already. he could have told her, but he thought she knew that already.

"This way. There's no time." At a run that should have sent them headlong off the mountainside she led him down, down, the cliffside path, into the dragon's chamber he had left in his sleep.

"What's happened?" he gasped as he followed her through the crystal cave.

"Master Markko attacked the dream readers. They held him off as long as they could, but he knows where we are."

"How'd he find Ahkenbad? I thought the city was hidden."

"The dream readers were holding the portal open to your visions. Master Markko stumbled onto the portal and slipped past their defenses."

He'd been looking for Llesho. At what cost to their own people had the dream readers defended him? Llesho stopped to pick up his spear and his sword, then he tumbled down the stone stairway behind her.

He expected to find soldiers fighting, the clash of weapons in the moonlight, but all was in silence. Too silent, he realized. The dream readers lying on their mats were dead. Acolytes moved among them in a daze, offering fumbling help their masters were beyond accepting. Bloody tear tracks streaking their faces gave the only sign of the violence that had left the student dream readers shattered within.

"This is my fault." Llesho reached out a hand, as if the evidence of touch might disprove what he saw. "I should never have come here."

"You didn't choose to come here." Lluka stepped away from a tight cluster of figures in the shadows, his face a mask of horror. "It was our idea to bring you here." His gesture included Balar, and Harlol, who wiped at the blood dripping from the corner of his eye as he followed the princes into the dim light. Llesho wasn't accepting the excuses his brothers made for him.

"I could have gone-"

Absently, Harlol brushed a streak of blood from his chin. "It wouldn't have made a difference. The magician was trying to find you when he attacked. If you were a million li from here, he would have attacked just the same. He only knows where you are now because of what he found in our minds. The dream readers resisted, but they had to choose between-" He stopped, his complexion turning green under the bronze, as if he had only that moment realized the import of what he had to say.

"They had to choose between protecting my dreams from him, or protecting themselves. And they chose to die." Llesho jerked his head in a sketchy nod, all he could manage of courtesy while he struggled to contain his grief and rage.

Not again. He couldn't take it again, not the deaths of more innocents on his hands. There was nothing, nothing he could do that could repay the lives sacrificed for him, and he resented it, resented the burden they put on him, the expectations they never quite spelled out. All those souls waiting between the worlds for him to do something or be something that would set them free, and he had to make it worth their sacrifice. But he didn't know how he was going to survive the weight of their deaths long enough to redeem them.

"Kagar?" Llesho asked, afraid to add another soul to his tally.

Harlol had that one bit of comfort to offer. "The Dinha had forbidden the acolytes to join in the dream reading tonight. Some are hurt, all are in shock, but Kagar and the others are alive. They'll need help."

Llesho felt the Wastrel pulling away and gave him permission to go with a quick nod. "Help where you can," he said, and added, "I'm as safe as I'm going to be," to Harlol's retreating back. When he had disappeared into the dim night, Llesho turned to his brothers.

"The Dinha-"

Habiba's low voice rumbled out of the dark. "She's alive."

There was little hope in his voice when he said it. Peering intently into the corner, Llesho saw the Dinha lying as still as the dead, huddled in a heap of drapes and robes. The dwarf, Bright Morning to the Tashek dream readers, sat with her head in his lap while he gently stroked the hair from her forehead. Habiba sat at her side, her hand wrapped in his long, skilled fingers.

As he watched in an anguish of remorse, the Dinha's eyes drifted open. "Take the boy," she said. "Run. Worlds hang by his life's thread."

"You should have let him have me," he accused. "It should not have come to this."

"We could not allow him to follow you through the gates," she whispered.

It was true. The mere thought of Master Markko tainting the gardens of heaven made him shudder. The beekeeper-at the thought, her image filled his mind, and the spear hummed with life at his back. He'd do anything to keep her safe. Oh. His eyes, shocked at the recognition, met the Dinha's warm understanding. Then, with a little sigh, her eyes drifted shut.

"Will she be all right?"

"Yes." Dognut kissed her brow and lay her down gently into the nest of pillows. "She's fine."

Liar! She was dead! But Llesho was beginning to understand, a little, what she had meant his dreams to teach him. The body died, the spirit went on. She would travel far and return again with wisdom to the wheel of life. He ought to believe that, and maybe in a hundred seasons he would.

Slowly, a tremor underfoot drew him out of his desperate reverie. The keening wail from everywhere at once, it seemed, started so low that he scarcely noticed it at first, but rose in pitch and volume until he thought it would deafen him. The acolytes couldn't raise that much noise. He threw his hands over his ears, but it didn't help. When he thought he could take no more, the ground rumbled and snapped beneath his feet like a flag in the wind.

"Ah!" the rugs on the cavern floor cushioned his fall, but his left wrist hurt when he tried to put his weight on it to get up again. Then a rough hand had him by the shoulder, and Balar was dragging him to his feet.

"Llesho. We have to leave." Kagar appeared between the stone teeth guarding the entrance to the chamber. She had washed and put on the robes of a dream reader, but he saw the faint tracks where the blood had leaked from her eyes and nose. Her eyes glittered with fear and wonder in the dark. "The spirits have awakened the dragon. He stirs."

Llesho thought she was talking in mystical riddles until a great gust of wind passed out through the gullet of the cave, rattling the roof and emitting a roar that singed the hair on the back of his head.

"Quickly! Quickly!"

The ground heaved. With Kaydu's hand pushing in the middle of his back and Balar gripping his shoulder, he stumbled out of the Dragon Cave, onto the Stone River road.

"Dognut!" he cried, "Did Dognut get out of the cave?"

"I've got him!" Habiba swept by, the dwarf looking alarmed but safe enough tucked into the crook of the magician's arm.

Servants and acolytes spilled out all around them. Still weak from the shock of Master Markko's spirit attack, they stumbled and ran, linking arms for physical support and to ease their terror as the horrific roar mingled with the shrieking cries of unearthly voices. Horses and camels added their screams to the chaos, fighting the soldiers who struggled to control them.

Rocks were falling and they hunched their heads low between their shoulders as they ran. Llesho bounced off an armored figure who grabbed hi i and spun him around, thrusting the reins of a horsie into his hands. "Get up. We have to get out of here-the mountain is coming down!" It was Stipes, and Bixei was near, holding two more horses against the panic. He mounted, and saw that others were taking to horse as well.