"You should talk about it," Balar said. "We can help you."

"From the baggage?" Llesho snapped, and then wanted to call it back.

"With someone, then."

Balar didn't come back at him, which made Llesho even madder. He really, really wanted to fight with somebody, the kind of fight where he could could spill what was bothering him, at the top of his lungs and spewed out along with a lot of meaningless stuff. Nobody would die and nobody would guess what of the fight was the important part and what was just noise. Balar refused to argue, so he was left alone with the dream that had sent him escaping into the night. spill what was bothering him, at the top of his lungs and spewed out along with a lot of meaningless stuff. Nobody would die and nobody would guess what of the fight was the important part and what was just noise. Balar refused to argue, so he was left alone with the dream that had sent him escaping into the night.

Wastrels lay dead in tall Harnish grass he hadn't seen since his seventh summer, their eyes wide open to the sun. Except that, instead of eyes, each orbit held a single black pearl. In his dream, Llesho went about the grassy field plucking pearls from dead men's sockets. When he came to Harlol, the Wastrel was still alive, though dying, and he reached up to his own eyes and plucked them out, handing them to Llesho as a gift. There'd been no more rest after that.

"Where's Pig when you need him?" he muttered under his breath, a formless complaint he hadn't meant his brother to hear.

But Balar was paying close attention. "Why don't you ask him? He's hanging around your neck, if we're to believe your stories."

Which might have been Balar taking the question seriously or being snide. Either way, it reminded Llesho that some things only seemed difficult until you realized they weren't. Maybe Pig was like that. Or maybe the person he really needed to talk to was Master Den.

"I'm going back." Balar seemed to realize that he wasn't going to get an answer. He stood up, his worried frown shadowed in the dim light. "Is there anything you need?"

Adar. Hmishi and Lling. Kungol. Menar. And his brother Ghrisz, whose name he hadn't heard in all his travels. Pointless to say those things to a brother who would hand them all to him on a plate if he had the power. Like Llesho's dreams, however, his heavenly gifts seemed of no earthly use. Balar was as helpless as he was to give him back what they had lost. And he confided in Lluka, whom Llesho didn't trust.

"The washerman, Master Den. If he will come." Not knowing who might be listening outside the dim glow of the funeral pyre, he didn't say aloud, ChiChu, the trickster god, my particular adviser. ChiChu, the trickster god, my particular adviser.

Balar nodded, hesitating as if he might think of something at the last minute to persuade Llesho back under cover. Llesho fixed his attention on the pyre until he heard his brother walk away.

He expected the solid tread of his teacher to follow, so the short shuffling steps of the dwarf took him by surprise. Dognut dragged his own low stool behind him, and Llesho smiled in spite of himself, reminded of the first time they had met. "No ladder today, Dognut?" he asked, half expecting the little man to look at him as if he were mad.

Dognut took the question for an invitation and settled himself next to Llesho. "No camel this time." He almost smiled, but a different memory slipped across his face. He sighed instead. If Llesho had it figured right, the dwarf was Shou's personal spy as well as his musician, and maybe more. The emperor looked to varied advisers, he was slowly discovering, and the people around him were never quite what they seemed.

"How is your master?" he asked.

Dognut hesitated only a moment in his answer. "He's well enough when the sun shines." He pulled a flute from the quiver at his back. The lesser moons had risen, shedding a faint light on the instrument as the dwarf ran his thick fingers along the stops. A mournful tune rose on liquid silver notes and fell away again. "But, Goddess knows, he can't stay awake forever."

Llesho said nothing. He had firsthand experience of the torment Master Markko could inflict, but he hadn't been with the fleeing Harn. He didn't know what Tsu-tan had actually done to the emperor or what dreams the magician visited on his sleep. Dognut wasn't settling for stubborn silence, however.

"You could help him."

"I have my own dreams to worry about."

"Ah, yes." Dognut sighed. "The stone men of the grasslands. They find the hearts of men a particular delicacy, or so the stories say, and leave a bit of a fingertip behind when they've plucked the living organ from their victims."

"I saw no stone men," Llesho objected. The dead he had seen plucked out their eyes, the pearls of the goddess in the orbits, and not their hearts.

"They are only stories," Dognut let it be known with the tone of his voice that he didn't believe his own words. "And from very far away. No one has ever seen one of these stone monsters, of course."

Had the dwarf seen such monsters himself? Llesho wondered, but Dognut wasn't through with him: "Shou is here, now, however, and he needs your help."

"I'm not a healer."

"You know Markko."

That was too close to Llesho's own thoughts. He refused to answer. Rescue arrived in the shape of a dark body that planted itself between Llesho and the pyre, eclipsing the faint moonlight. Master Den sat heavily, blocking the morbid view. He sometimes forgot how big the trickster god was; they were face-to-face, with Chi-Chu settled like a great stone pyramid on the ground and Llesho perched on his borrowed stool. He gave the musician at Llesho's side an almost imperceptible nod and Dognut returned the greeting with a bow from the waist. Then the teacher turned his attention on his pupil.

"They're not your dead," he said.

Llesho wondered if everyone had been reading his mind tonight. "Who else's?" he countered. "How many people have to die so that one exiled prince doesn't have to dive for pearls?"

"As I recall, one old man died of the fever. The rest belong to Master Markko. Don't confuse shame for surviving with blame for the acts of your murderers."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Llesho stood up slowly, his hands stiffening to rigid blades at his sides.

The fight that Balar had denied him surged in his bloodstream. He glared at Dognut, wishing the dwarf would go away so that he could yell if he wanted, make a fool of himself against the safe harbor of his teacher. Dognut didn't move, just sat watching him out of eyes that seemed to grow older the deeper Llesho looked.

So he stopped looking, took a wild swing that Master Den brushed aside with a negligent swat. Den shifted to his feet with a dangerous grin on his face, reminding Llesho that he fought the trickster god ChiChu, a master at the forms. Llesho knew he should be afraid, but he grinned back, reassured. He could beat himself to death against the mountainous figure of the god and do no damage in his turn.

"Come on, boy." Master Den circled carefully, his arms relaxed at his sides, palms out, his fingers curling an invitation. "Take me if you can."

Dognut snatched up his little stool and drew apart from the combatants. His eyes darted, measuring the battleground, cautious against sudden movements in his direction.

Llesho hooked a foot under the camp stool he'd scrounged and flipped it over the head of his teacher, providing a split second of distraction until it sailed out of sight behind him and clattered to rest on the pyre. Then Llesho attacked.

At first, he fought with deadly art, raining lethal blows upon his teacher in all the combat forms he knew. A leap, and the kick that followed it should have crushed his foe's throat. Master Den brushed the foot away a whisper before contact. The heel of his hand nearly landed on the breastbone of his teacher, but this, too, was deflected with a slapping blow.

Master Den countered with a sharp jab of pointed fingers that stopped, completely controlled, short of killing him. It hurt, and Llesho rubbed at his breastbone, circling cautiously while he caught his breath. Den waggled his brows with a predator's baring of teeth. "Is that all you've got, boy? A killer of multitudes who can't even bruise the washerman!"

It wasn't the taunt about his skills, but the reminder of the dead that finally drove Llesho into that space he needed to find.

"I'll kill you!" he screamed. "I'll kill you!" and he waded in. Art forgotten, desperation powered each blow. He didn't know if he was trying to forget, or to reach past his brain to the place he'd lost in the aftermath, where surviving counted more than the deaths it cost him.

When he finally grew aware that Master Den was returning none of his strikes, not even with the lesser blows of a teaching bout, he realized that he was held safe in the arms of his teacher, who absorbed the blows to his huge body without a word of reproach. "I'm sorry," Llesho whispered, his hands relaxing into fists that clutched at the master's coat.

"He's not the least bit sorry for trying to kill you, old friend," Dognut noted wryly from the sidelines.

"Nor should you be." The trickster god took Llesho's chin in his hand and gave it a little shake for emphasis. "When the gods ask more than you can give, you are within your right to take from them what you need to go on. But you've got to stop taking the credit for other people's stupidity. Particularly Shou's."

"He's right, Llesho. I've know the emperor since he was a boy, and no one could ever talk sense to him." Dognut opened his folding stool and sat down again, figuring, Llesho supposed, that the danger had passed. When the dwarf had made himself comfortable, he picked up his argument again, sharing his exasperation with Master Den over Llesho's head. "Doesn't get the concept of a wall until he's beat his head against it a few times and knocked himself out learning. The empire is no different than that wall to the revered Shou, but it's bigger. It's not you that put him here, it's the damned idea of being an emperor he's trying to work out with his fists instead of his brain. The Lady SienMa will not be pleased with the rest of us, but I think she meant Shou to get his head rattled. He's known the exhilaration of battle and the remote loss of troops, but war has never left its mark on him the way it has on you."

"And what of the Wastrels?" Llesho threw back the challenge. "They're going to die, and for what? It's not their fight."

"True?" Master Den asked.

The dwarf shrugged, unhappy but not denying it. "So the Dinha says."

Master Den sighed deeply, his shoulders drooping like a massive building settling into the ground. "That's not your fault either."

He didn't sound as sure as Dognut had been about the emperor. Now that he was thinking a little more clearly, Llesho could see the dwarfs point about Shou. But the Wastrels were all his.

"You have to understand about the Wastrels." Master Den cast around looking for something, then retrieved Llesho's stool from the pyre and patted out the sparks that had caught on the legs. He took for himself the other stool that Balar had used. It was too small for him, but he balanced himself over its three wobbly legs anyway, whether to retain the advantage of his greater height or because Llesho'd actually managed to land an irksome blow he didn't show. Rather, with his elbows propped on his knees, and his eyes turned away from the fire, he sank into a storytelling reverie. Llesho remembered another time, and other teachings. He prepared to pay close attention.

Den started with a question: "What do you know about the Wastrels?"

"They take their name from the Gansau Wastes. They are a religious fighting order, sworn to the Dinha as her children." He recited what he knew like a lesson, and Master Den gave him a little nod, gentle encouragement to continue.

"They travel throughout the known world, mostly alone, though they move freely from land to land by taking on lesser roles, like drovers. Since they don't seem to show any inclination to work more than they need, or acquire any possessions, outsiders think the name comes from the common usage for time wasters. But they learn about the outside world that way, and return home to report what they've found to the Dinha."

He stopped, surprised. Somehow he'd thought he knew more than that. Did, in ways that he couldn't exactly say, about loyalty and pride and survival. Strung all together like that, though, he sensed a hole in the middle of his understanding.

"There's another meaning of 'waste,' " Dognut hinted.

Master Den raised an eyebrow, daring Llesho to answer. But he didn't have an answer he liked, so he waited for Master Den to fill his own silence.

"Their birth families don't depend on them for survival." Den filled in what he'd already seen. "They make no families of their own and, in a land of dreamers, they seldom give themselves to dreaming."

"Expendable." Llesho got it. Hated it, but he'd had it figured.

"They're not the squeal of the pig-" the only part of a pig, some would say, that no one has a use for, "- but more like a handful of copper pennies." Master Den pantomimed the weighing of coins in the palm of his hand. "Not useful in themselves but valuable when spent."

"The Dinha knew they would die, and meant me to spend their lives when she'd already lost all of Ahken-bad. Why? What does Thebin mean to Ahkenbad that it would spend its warriors for our freedom?"

"If freedom it is-" Dognut waved his flute like a magic wand in emphasis, "-to replace a foreign tyrant with a local monarch. But then, I've heard that freedom is highly overrated, especially by the Tashek."

"I would be no tyrant-"

"You would be no king at all, if given half a choice," Dognut chastised him. Llesho winced. He'd thought his misgivings had gone unnoticed.

"Perhaps Thebin means nothing to the Tashek," Master Den didn't look at him right away. "Perhaps everything. The Dinha would have known the outcome before she ever sent for you, but you'd have to ask for yourself why reading your dreams was more important than her own life."

He didn't bother explaining that he'd done that and didn't understand the answer, except that it had hurt Kagar more than death to offer up her cousin like a sacrifice to willful spirits. Master Den had reached the end of his patience with a reluctant student, however, and ChiChu, perhaps, never had any patience to begin with. It was time to move this conversation past the quicksand of self-pity.

"What about Shou?"

"What about him?" ChiChu tossed back the question, challenged him to start thinking again. "Aren't we out here among the dead so that you can avoid dealing with the living?"

Definitely out of patience, and cutting right to the bone. Shou wasn't a mystic, so Markko probably couldn't kill him that way. Maybe he just needed to know that he wasn't alone, that someone else dreamed horrors that night and survived with him.

"All right." Llesho stood up, dusted off his coat and breeches, and headed back.

He nodded as he passed Harlol, who lounged with his Wastrels, pretending to off duty socializing while they watched the rear of the command tent. Dognut stopped among them, his offer of a song for a cup of tea accepted with enthusiasm. He'd play a soothing melody, Llesho knew, to sweeten Shou's troubled sleep.

Bixei and Stipes had guard of the entrance, and Llesho whispered a greeting as he entered with Master Den at his back.

Habiba acknowledged the newcomers with a flick of the eyes but Bor-ka-mar, who stood at attention at the foot of his emperor's bed, showed by not a twitch of a lash that he had noted their entrance.

Carina had returned from her work in the camp and she gave them a fleeting smile before she, too, quickly returned her glance to the man on the camp bed. Shou was awake, sitting on the bed with his feet on the ground and his fingers sunk deep in his hair. His sleep had given him no rest: he was pale around the mouth, his eyes sunk into dark pits. In the chancy light of a single oil lamp, he looked like a mummified corpse.

"Emperor," Llesho said, dropping to one knee, more to meet the emperor's gaze at eye level than to offer obeisance.

"I'm glad you're here." Shou straightened his back and dropped his hands to his thighs. "We have to talk." His expression was bland.

If Llesho didn't remember what it felt like to be under Master Markko's instruments, he might have believed the act, that nothing preyed upon the emperor's mind. But he had been in that place, and his eyes bled memories. The emperor flinched away, then his face grew more unyielding. He wasn't going to talk about it, and Llesho relaxed a little. He hadn't wanted to recall that time, and didn't think Shou would appreciate the sympathy anyway.

The emperor seemed to read in his face that Llesho had joined him in a conspiracy that was more than denial but less than fortitude. He closed the subject with a quick nod and shifted his attention to the material present. "I'm going back."

It made sense, but Llesho found nothing to say that would make things any better.

"There's nothing more I can do here." Shou gave his head a shake: apology, and to clear the mist from his eyes. "Guynm is at risk. The empire is slipping away, and SienMa is waiting for me." Not just back to Guynm, but to take back the reins of his empire.

Llesho knew that, thought it was past time for it. "An empire can't survive on its own."

He hadn't meant to chastise the emperor, but it came out sounding that way. Shou, however, agreed with him.

"I finally figured that out. It's time to leave the adventuring to those with fewer obligations."

Like the Wastrels, Llesho thought, his lips pressed closed against some unpleasant truth he didn't want to look at. No responsibilities, except that they took on the dangers so that others would have the knowledge to guide their people. Like Hmishi and Lling, expendable. Maybe some day he'd come to the same realization that Shou had finally reached, about where his duty lay. At the moment, he felt more in common with the Wastrels than with the emperor. Llesho thought, his lips pressed closed against some unpleasant truth he didn't want to look at. No responsibilities, except that they took on the dangers so that others would have the knowledge to guide their people. Like Hmishi and Lling, expendable. Maybe some day he'd come to the same realization that Shou had finally reached, about where his duty lay. At the moment, he felt more in common with the Wastrels than with the emperor.

With his decision made, Shou was finally able to admit, "I'm afraid of him."

Llesho gave a little twitch of his shoulder. "So am I. But that's not why you're doing this." They understood each other. "Try to sleep."

"You do the same." Shou actually smiled at him, not much of one, but enough to signal the quieting of some inner storm, for now at least.

Llesho did sleep. When he awoke, the emperor was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

"SHOU'S gone." Kaydu broke off her discussion with Lluka and Dognut over the morning cook fire. Fumbling awkwardly with the strings of the quiver tied between her breasts, she rose to greet Llesho with the news. "The imperial troops went with him."

"I can see that." He blinked in the morning sunlight.

More than half their forces had packed up and vanished while he slept. Those who remained had gathered in rows on a patch of flat road at the outskirts of the camp. Master Den was leading them in morning prayer forms to the seven mortal gods and Llesho watched, frozen where he stood by a wash of conflicting emotions. The patterns twitched in his muscles with a comforting familiarity even while he felt a distance both physical and spiritual from the soldiers who performed their prayers.

With their numbers gathered under Master Den's watchful eye, Llesho managed a quick count. Thirty in Thebin uniform with Shokar in their lead. A handful of Farshore mercenaries, with Stipes among them and Bixei at their head, also followed Master Den in the exercises. With these forms his soldiers honored the mortal gods and all the mortal earth that shaped the Way of the Goddess. A slight change in the style, Llesho knew, shaped the hand-to-hand combat of the Way. Bixei had learned the forms with Llesho in the gladiators' compound at Pearl Island and he had passed on that knowledge to the Thebin troops he had trained in Shan. Master Den looked pleased with the results.

Another ten, Tashek under Harlol, kept to themselves and performed their own rituals. He couldn't be sure at this distance, but it seemed that Balar was among them, not as skilled as the more highly trained Wastrels but striving gamely to keep up. With Lluka, he reckoned there were about fifty in all. Kaydu wore the only imperial militia uniform anywhere in the camp; he hadn't decided if he should count her among their number or not.

"Drink, it's good for you." Dognut handed him a cup and Llesho took it, scarcely knowing what he did.

Absently, he took a sip. It made his nose run and his eyes water, but, more importantly, the spicy shock snapped him out of his immobility.

"Thank you," he gasped. He sat next to his brother and took another sip.

Lluka relaxed a little, as if Llesho had overcome some crisis more calmly than they'd expected. They were wrong about that, but a fit of temper wasn't going to bring the imperial militia back. Kaydu would not quite meet his eyes. She remained standing, as if braced for a blow, and Llesho figured it was better to get it over with.