Bolghai blinked at him for a moment, as if absorbing the complaints of his student, then he held out the broom. "Out here, where the grass is sweet," he instructed, and walked away from the burrow.

"Did you listen to a word I said! I am not going to dance with a broom!"

"ChiChu said that you were stubborn," the shaman noted, which confirmed that he knew more about their party than they'd told him, at least in Llesho's hearing. But the shaman relented a little, enough to give a word of explanation. "Of all the sacred objects in my burrow, only this broom called to your spirit. That means you must be connected to it in some way. How, we will find out. But not until you dance."

"It didn't call me. I bumped into it. A clumsy accident."

"You're not a clumsy boy." Bolghai waited, one eyebrow cocked.

"This is humiliating," Llesho grumbled. The whole day from start to finish had been one embarrassment after another. "Can you at least tell me why you want me to dance at all, let alone with a broom?"

"Many of your companions-your brothers Lluka and Balar, Carina, whose word I trust, ChiChu and Bright Morning-believe you to be . So far, however, your dreams come and go as they choose. You don't control them; they control you."

The Dinha had said much the same, but the one thing he had learned good and solid during this quest was never to trust a simple answer. "What does that mean?"

"We don't know yet. There have been prophecies known to the shaman of the grasslands and the spirit guides of many distant lands and neighbors. But they say even less than prophecies usually do." Bolghai bared his teeth in a gesture that owed more to the warning snarl of the stoat than to a human smile. "All we know for certain is thatwill stand between heaven and earth and the Great Dark. And the Great Dark is coming soon."

Llesho didn't like the sound of that. It occurred to him, as it doubtless was meant to do, that this Great Dark sounded a lot like the absence of a future that his brothers described as the loss of the powers granted them by the goddess.

"Lluka and Balar say their gifts have deserted them."

"Or maybe they haven't," Bolghai agreed.

If Master Den thought that learning to dance with a broom could somehow hold back the end of the world, he would have to try. But not before he made a last effort at understanding what he was at the center of.

"So, if I dance with the broom, it will call forth my spirit, which will learn to fly. In my dreams?"

Bolghai nodded.

"This is all to teach me to control my dreams, so that I can hold back the Great Dark and keep the end of the world from happening."

"More or less. You won't have to save the world alone." Bolghai half suppressed a smile, and Llesho had to admit the idea sounded absurd to him as well. "The dream readers of Ahkenbad would have taught you how to dream travel at rest, but their methods are too passive for a young man on a quest to save the world. For the battle ahead, you will need to control your travels while awake."

Llesho had enough trouble with dreams while he was sleeping. He didn't want them to infest his waking world as well. If he learned to control them, maybe that wouldn't happen. It struck him that coincidence was the comfort of the mindless, however, when he asked, "How would I have learned all this if Master Markko had gone in a different direction and we hadn't followed him into the grasslands?"

"You carry the answer to your riddle in your own party. There was never a doubt of the magician's direction."

Bixei. He'd noticed the first time he'd seen them together-not father and son, maybe not even clan relations. If Bixei was Harnish, though, so was Markko.

"Goddess," Llesho breathed. "He's come home to lead the assault on heaven." It had been bad enough when he'd thought all Master Markko wanted was the Shan Empire. And he was in deep trouble if he could say that with an "only" in front of it.

"Seems likely," Bolghai agreed. "But first he must take the grasslands. Shall we dance?"

Chimbai-Khan must have known Master Markko's intentions all along, and would have fought him with or without Llesho's tiny band. He'd been prepared to lose his son for the shaman's prophecies and, as much as Master Den, he'd been responsible for sending him out to learn what Bolghai had to teach him. When he added it all up, Llesho didn't see that he had much choice. He took the broom.

"What do I have to do?"

"Just dance."

The shaman started to play on his fiddle, choosing an old folk tune from Llesho's childhood in Kungol. On the feast day of the goddess, his father and his mother had led a thousand dancers in the wide public square that lay between the Palace of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon. The king and queen had worn wide pantaloons in the peasant style, but of a cloth that shimmered when they moved, with coats narrow to the waist and split from ankle to hip on both sides. His mother had worn ribbons fluttering from her formal headdress and on her shoulders, and his father had carried a three-tiered umbrella with which to shade his partner when they came together in the dance.

Though he hadn't danced since the raiders had come, Llesho saw the steps from that long ago festival in his mind, and he followed them-step, twirl, half turn, step, step-over the sweet grass. The broom came to his hand as a partner, and he bowed and swept it along with him through the night, imagining the twigs were hair, and the handle a slender waist.

Bolghai changed the tune, and he danced faster, though weariness dragged at him. His feet ached like two huge bruises at the end of his legs, which knotted up with cramps in the calf muscles and his thighs. His breath grew short and his mind grew distant, but still he danced. Looking toward the sound of the music, he saw that Bolghai danced as he played, leaping, and darting here and there with the quick movements of the stoat at play. Llesho struggled to keep pace, but the dance, which fit the shaman as hand comes to hand, so entangled him that Llesho wondered how he managed to trip himself so frequently with just two legs.

"Not a small creature, then," Bolghai muttered, and changed the tune to one more stately, like a camel or a horse.

Llesho moved, experimenting with the rhythm, his feet leaving bloody prints behind him as he picked carefully over the ground he had broken with his dancing through the night. In spite of the exhaustion that wept in his bones for rest, Llesho's heart beat more rapidly with anticipation, as if it waited only for the magic of the perfect song to take flight. And then the tune shifted again, and the world seemed to vanish, leaving him alone in a place of such profound stillness that he would have cried out for the peace of it. The pain was gone: he felt lighter, springier, as if mind as well as muscle had broken free of the restraints that living placed on them. And in that painless place, he leaped and curvetted, tossing his head against the unaccustomed weight at his brow.

Shocked, Llesho froze and sniffed cautiously at the night. The music was suddenly full of tones he hadn't heard before. He lost the sense of it, couldn't make out the tune or the rhythm with the distraction of air grown rich with strange new smells pungent with the tang of hidden memories. Great Moon seemed to cast a brighter light about her of a sudden, while all the things awash in her glow had grown soft and vague in their outlines. When he opened his mouth to call Bolghai, only the high call of an animal escaped his throat.

"Easy, child."

Bolghai stopped his playing and approached with cautious steps, but the movement startled Llesho. He ran for the river and freedom on the other side.

Up, up, he flew. The river was beneath him, but he did not fall, sailing across on the bounding leap of four strong legs that seemed to have discovered the skill of running on air. When he landed, he dashed away into the forest. Branches hit him as he passed and he changed his course as they struck him, plunging deeper into the wood, until he had no sense of where he was or where he was going, except away from a threat that . . . was no threat at all, but the shaman.

Somehow, it had worked. As the false dawn filtered through the trees, Llesho realized that he had left his humanity on the far shore of the river and become a creature of the forest. Its king, the roebuck. He stood, his head held high under the many-pointed antlers he now sported, and waited for the shaman to find him.

It didn't take long. A rustle in the carpet of fallen leaves warned him of the approaching stoat, and Bolghai was there, shaking the water off his thick fur with a series of huffing sneezes. He blinked his eyes and his outline grew hazy and expanded until he stood in front of Llesho in his man-shape again. His clothes, with their totems of his animal spirit hanging from his neck, were damp from his swim across the river in stoat-form, but he showed no other signs of his transformation.

The clothes were a good sign. If he could figure out how to change back to himself the way Bolghai had, Llesho figured he wouldn't do it naked, which would have just about capped the most humiliating week of his life. Only, he couldn't do it.

"Don't panic," Bolghai soothed.

Too late. Llesho shied away when the shaman reached to touch his shoulder. He waited, trembling, just out of the shaman's reach and ready to flee. Animal sense, he fought to control it.

"Think of something you keep on you all the time, that you can use to anchor yourself when you spirit travel."

His Thebin knife-but he had no waist to hang it from. The pearls, three in a pouch that hung by a cord around his neck, and a fourth, Pig, who hung from a silver chain. Weight settled around his long and slender neck, and he skittered, the animal part of him trying to escape it while the human part tried to wrap a hand he didn't have around the heavy pearls.

And then he did have a hand. His neck shortened and his head felt lighter as the antlers faded. Suddenly his balance was all wrong and Llesho tumbled forward into the leaves that had massed among the trees where he had sheltered as the roebuck.

"Very good." Bolghai grinned down at him. "Now we can begin."

"With a nap?" he asked hopefully. False dawn tinted the sky with gray shadows. Llesho was so tired that he shook with wave after wave of fine tremors-he hadn't even made it to his feet yet.

"There will be plenty of time for sleep when you've learned to control your dream travel."

Bolghai offered him a hand up. He took it, and brushed the leaves off his clothes with distaste. From head to toe he wore the dirt of the night of mad dancing and the day's game of jidu.

"Do I have time to wash my face in the river?"

"And defile the Onga?" The shaman sniffed with distaste. "If you learn your lessons well, I'll let you draw a cup from the river to use as you please," he said.

Llesho had the feeling that he'd have a choice of washing in it or drinking it, but he wouldn't get water for both. He sighed, thinking back with fondness to the one thing that Pearl Bay had offered in abundance: water.

But Bolghai's words reminded him that they were now on the wrong side of the Onga.

"How do we get back across the river?" he asked.

Bolghai gave a little shrug, as if to say it was a minor thing. "When you control your dream travels, you may go anywhere, and return anywhere. If you want to be on the other side of the river, you will just go."

Exhaustion was making him giddy and almost as light as the air. In that state, the shaman almost made sense.

"Then I suppose we should begin," he agreed with a careless wave of a hand that didn't feel a part of him. He followed the arm it was on back to his shoulder to be sure it was his own.

"Good boy." Bolghai had left the fiddle on the other side of the Onga, but he shifted the collar of stoat pelts at his throat to reveal a loose wooden ring, which he lifted over his head. Set in carved niches at regular intervals around the ring were little cymbals, and hanging from the front were little bells. When he shook it, a sound like temple bells rang out in the forest.

"If you want to travel in the material world, and you have no camel, what do you do?"

Riddles again. This one was simple enough though. "I walk."

Bolghai began to walk in a tight circle. "And if you want to arrive at your destination more swiftly?"

"I run."

Bolghai nodded and beat the rim of the wooden ring against his palm in a rhythmic tempo. "How soon do you want to reach your dream goal?"

"Now. But it's almost daylight-"

"Run, then, before Great Sun rises." Bolghai laughed. He kept to the path of his tight circle, but now he was running faster, pumping his arms in the air so that his wooden ring jingled with the beat of his step.

Llesho figured that was a riddle, too, and meant that he could travel not only across distance, but in time as well. He followed the shaman's lead. Though he had no instrument to keep his time, he found that the pearls at his throat beat the rhythm against his breast until it absorbed his mind and his feet and his arms, which he raised and lowered in the way of the shaman. As he ran, he considered where he wanted to go, and what he wanted to see, and how he was going to find it. Adar, of course, and Hmishi and Lling, but he shied away from there. Better to practice with a safer journey first, make sure he could find his way back before jumping into the fire.

When he thought of safety, Shokar's face rose up in his mind to meet him. Llesho followed his brother back to his dreams in the tent city of the khan.

Shokar was leaning over a teakettle hung from an iron rod over a fire in a cleanly dressed stone fireplace that Llesho had never seen before. He was in a room with a low ceiling crossed by round logs for beams overhead and a long plank table with benches on either side at the center. Llesho was dimly conscious of shelves on the wall, though he couldn't see them clearly in the dream. Mostly what filled his mind was the rocking chair sitting by the hearth, and the woman who watched his brother with wide liquid eyes as she nursed the baby on her lap. Neither man nor woman seemed aware of Llesho's presence, though the child tracked his every move as if she saw what her parents did not.

"I know you have to go," the woman said when Shokar faced her with his arguments. Llesho could see in her eyes the desire to reach out and hold her husband, to bind him tight to hearth and farm. She dropped her gaze to the nursing child, however, to hide her feelings away. "They are your brothers, and if you stayed here safe with us and they died, you would never forgive me. What would we have together then?"

"I wouldn't," Shokar protested. Llesho saw him reach a hand to her, but the woman kept her attention focused on the child until he closed an empty fist around the comfort he had meant by offering it.

"Not on purpose, no," she agreed, "but it would eat at your mind and your soul until there was nothing left of them for me." She did look at her husband then, fiercely, as if she were fighting a battle for his soul right there in her peaceful farmhouse. "I want better than that, for me and for my children. Your children. So deliver your soldiers and rescue your brothers. Just don't you forget us. Come back when it's safe again. And bring this prince, your brother, home for a visit when he's done with his wars and visions."

Shokar set his hands on either arm of her chair to still her rocking. "I will." He leaned down to drop a kiss on the child's forehead, then took the lips of his wife with more passion than Llesho wanted to know about in his brother. He turned away, guilty to have invaded the privacy of the dream; he'd known Shokar had a family. Why hadn't he considered what his brother would be leaving behind when he dragged him halfway accross the known world? Before he had more than a second for regret the door opened behind him. Three boys and a girl tumbled into the room.

"Who's the guy in the corner?" the oldest asked with a casual flick of a glance in Llesho's direction. The boy looked enough like Llesho's lost mother to blur his eyes with a mist of tears.

Shokar looked through him. "Han and Chen, fallen from the sky?" he asked, taking the boy's question for a joke.

"No!" the little girl giggled and hid her face in her skirts. "The man!"

"Llesho? How did you get here? I thought you were with Shou?" Shokar bunked, shaking his head to clear it of the vision of his brother. "No. Shou's on his way back to Durnhag. What am I doing here?"

"It's a dream," Llesho muttered, torn by the devastation that crossed his brother's face.

"No-"

And Llesho was gone, pulled back across the river and dumped on his backside at the feet of the Harnish shaman.

"I can't believe what I've done," he said, and buried his head in his hands.

"And what is that?" Bolghai quized him.

"I've torn my brother out of his home, left his farm with no one to tend it, his children with no father to teach them, and his wife with no husband to protect her against the coming war. And then I invaded his dreams and exposed the comfort he took from his sleep." As an answer, he thought it was one of his better ones. Concise and complete. So he didn't understand why Bolghai was snorting at him like a horse with a fly up its nose.

"Okay, sneeze it out before you give yourself a fit," Llesho insisted. "What did I say wrong this time?"

"Just the usual. Taking the blame for all the ills of the world, and all the decisions made around you. In all the ages men have gone to war for their own reasons-honor or glory or wealth or the right of crossing another's pasturage. To defend loved ones or to punish enemies. They didn't need Llesho the boy king to make their decisions for them, and neither did your brother."

"He wouldn't be here if it weren't for me."

"If it weren't for you, Shou would still be more a general than an emperor, and the goddess of war would still have taken him as her favorite. What do you think that would have meant to a brother who tilled the land in the empire of such a match? Ultimately, soldiers will fight because it's all they know. And emperors will bring their subjects into battle whether they wish it or not, because that is the way of warrior kings. Are you such a king, Llesho, Prince of Dreams?"

"I never wanted to be," Llesho shrugged, denying both the charge and his answer. "It seems that's what I'm becoming, regardless of my own wishes."

"Well, you learned something." Bolghai combed a twig out of his hair and brushed off the bits of leaves he'd got on his clothes while he waited for Llesho to return from Shokar's dream. Great Sun hadn't moved very far across the sky, however. Llesho figured it wasn't much past breakfast. Which reminded him of his empty stomach. As if it heard his thoughts, his gut roared a loud and angry growl.

"Enough of that," Bolghai chided him. "Four times sets the lesson. You have more dreams to visit before you feed the beast in the belly. And this time, perhaps, we can get farther than our own longed-for sleeping tent? We still need to cross the river."

While among the dream readers of Ahkenbad, he'd dream traveled in his sleep and woken far from where he'd gone to bed. Llesho figured that, if he could move his body through the dream world while he slept, it ought to be easier when he was awake. But the shaman wanted more than a simple crossing of the river, and Llesho knew who he had to see. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he fixed the Emperor Shou in his mind and started running, faster and faster in his demented circle. Llesho's throat lengthened and roughened with a shaggy red pelt. Antlers sprouted from his head and his arms stretched into the legs of the roebuck. Delicate hooves touched ground and leaped, carried him out of his circle in an explosion of animal speed. The forest disappeared.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

SUDDENLY, Llesho was high above Dumhag, coming down hard on the roof of the governor's palace. Roebuck hooves hit rounded terra cotta tiles and turned into hands and feet, tumbling him before he could catch his balance in either form. At his breast, the pearl that hung from the silver chain had grown limbs and distracted him with pinprick stabs of its elbows. They landed in a heap of boy king and Jinn covered in bits of broken roof tiles. Pig regained his footing first, brushing bits of tile from his tunic.

"Are you getting up from there, or do you plan to ask the emperor to attend you on the roof?"

"He's here, then?"

"In his bedchamber, but I'd have myself announced before barging in if I were you."

"Is he any improved?" The dream magic that brought them to Durnhag had deserted him now. Llesho wandered over the rooftops of the governor's palace looking for a way in before the soldiers who were supposed to keep watch started lobbing arrows at him.

"You will have to ask the Lady SienMa," Pig answered primly.

"The mortal goddess is in Durnhag?'

"In Shou's bedroom, to be exact." The Jinn gave Llesho a meaningful look. "Surprising them would not not be a good idea." be a good idea."

"Oh." Slowly wrapping his mind around this new information, Llesho worked his way to the only conclusion that also explained Pig's nudge and wink. Llesho shuddered at the thought. His dream of the cobra and the turtle had already told him something of that, however, and Bixei had known before he did. Still, dreams were one thing and bedrooms something else entirely. Or so he'd thought. "They're-when did that happen?"