"Certainly not during the lady's marriage to the governor of Farshore," Pig answered slowly, as if mulling over the evidence before he spoke. Theatrics. The Jinn had probably been snooping on the emperor's business since before he'd turned himself into a pearl and rolled out of heaven. "In the imperial city, I think, they found they had much in common."

They. The roofline of the governor's palace had many breaks for incomplete stories. As Llesho climbed from one lower level to a higher by means of a low dormer eaves, he considered the intelligence Pig had offered. The mortal goddess of war and an emperor who fought as a general in his own battles.

The Lady SienMa had been good to Llesho. She'd plucked him out of Lord Yueh's clutches in the arena at Farshore and taught him how to shoot a bow. When Markko had attacked the governor's compound, she had helped him to escape. In the midst of their flight, she had returned to him the precious artifacts of his family: the jade wedding bowl and one of the Great Goddess' lost pearls; and, less welcome, the spear that wanted to kill him. She even risked her own fleeing party to lead their attackers astray, giving him time to reach safety.

Her ladyship had saved his life on numerous occasions, but she was cool and remote and dangerous. And older than Shou's many times removed grandfathers, whose ashes had long since taken their place in the temple of state that adjoined the imperial palace. Bixei had spoken of her ladyship's feelings, but her presence in the emperor's bedroom indicated that Shou felt some attraction for her as well. Shou couldn't couldn't be that foolhardy-the very thought of it clenched the muscles of Llesho's guts. be that foolhardy-the very thought of it clenched the muscles of Llesho's guts.

"Has she cast a spell on him?" Llesho asked. It seemed the only logical explanation.

Pig barked a laughing snort. "Ho, boy! What makes you think the lady needs a spell? Better to ask what spell our Shou has cast on the mortal goddess."

Bixei had spoken of her ladyship's feelings, so he tried to reverse his thinking. Women were attracted to kings, he'd heard, though it hadn't ever worked for him. Maybe his love of the thing she served drew her to the emperor. Shou could have-probably should have-stayed at home in his palace tending to the peaceful ordering of the many provinces under his hand. Instead, he sneaked out the back way to fight battles hand-to-hand with Gan-sau Wastrels and meet with spies in low and dangerous places. As a general, he planned well to save as many of his soldiers' lives as he could. Llesho figured he should have noticed the man's attraction to the dangers of war before this. It scared him to the soles of his shoes to realize it now.

"Be careful!" Pig shouted as Llesho slipped on a loose tile.

"Whoa!" He slid, falling, and grabbed at a red clay tile that came off in his hand. He let it go, flinched when he heard it crash to the courtyard far below, but gave it little thought as he reached for a more secure handhold.

"Halt!" a voice below shouted, quickly followed by the whiz of an arrow passing near enough to rasp across the top of Llesho's ear.

"Don't shoot! I'm a friend!" he cried out, and realized that his grip was slipping- "Help!"

"Ouch." Thank the goddess, the face of the palace was cut everywhere with balconies. Llesho finished his fall onto one of them and rolled to his knees sucking on a cut that bled freely on his thumb. Tall doors decorated with trailing vines of colored glass stood open. Habiba, just inside of them, watched Llesho with his eyebrows raised nearly to his hair.

"What are you doing in Durnhag? And how did you get on the roof?"

"Would you believe I'm not really here?" Limp as a banner on a windless morning, he dragged himself to his feet.

"I'd believe a great deal about you, child." Habiba looked him over like he was a lame camel at a thieves' sale, but he moved out of the way to invite Llesho into the workroom. "You'd better get in here before one of the local guards finds you out there and hauls you off to a dungeon or something. That seems to have been a favorite vice of the former governor, and I don't think we've quite broken his minions of the habit."

When Llesho entered the room, however, the magician examined him with narrow- eyed concentration. "Who have you been listening to now?"

"His name is Bolghai. Lluka hates him."

"He would." Habiba closed the doors. "I would have suggested him myself, but I doubted your ability to put aside your natural distaste for the Harnish people."

Inside, the room was warm and well lit, the walls turned a soft buttery yellow in the light from the many candles in holders at the corners. An oil lantern hanging from the ceiling lit a silver bowl filled with water on his workbench, and sweet herbs perfumed the air on which music drifted softly from somewhere nearby. Llesho found a cushioned sofa and dropped onto it, rubbing his eyes wearily. "They're not that bad. At least, not Chim-bai's people. They've got their own trouble with the raiders from the South, so it looks like we may have an ally there."

"And what do you think of Bolghai the shaman?"

"He's very strange, and so are his lessons. I'm dreaming all of this, you know. Awake, or so he tells me, and I must be, since I'm so tired I could drop where I stand- or, well, sit. You can't ache for sleep while you're sleeping, can you?"

"You're dream-walking," Habiba confirmed. "Is this your first trip?"

"Second, really, if you don't count the sleeping ones. Bolghai says the first one doesn't count, though, since I never left the khan's city and Shokar was still asleep when I visited his dream. Pig was with me, but he seems to have wandered off. That or he's still on the roof somewhere. Is the emperor about?"

"I'll take you to him." Habiba covered the silver bowl with white silk cloth. Llesho wasn't sure what it symbolized, since he'd never figured out where Habiba came from, but he knew what a bowl and water meant in a magician's workroom at- How had it come to be night here, when he'd taken this journey at dawn?

"Dream-walking doesn't always follow the sun in normal hours. Time and distance seem tangled somehow. The farther the travel, the more unrooted in time you can become."

Habiba led him into a hallway as broad as an avenue and once again answered his question without Llesho having to ask it. That was probably the most unnerving thing about consorting with magicians. He was about to ask when when he was, since he knew where, but Habiba had a sort-of answer to that as well: he was, since he knew where, but Habiba had a sort-of answer to that as well: "We could be having this conversation in your future, or in your past, but it is just the evening after the day before to me," he said, which was about what Llesho'd expected.

They had come to a double door of figured panels worked in gilt, and Habiba rapped sharply on a drum worked into the center of one panel. Llesho heard soft voices, and someone stirring in the room.

The Lady SienMa opened the door. She wore a rich robe of white satin tied with a gold belt. Her hair had come down, and it flowed over her shoulders like a velvet sea. Llesho tried not to wonder what, if anything, she wore beneath the robe, or what had left her hair in such disarray. Looking down didn't help, because then he noticed that on her feet she wore just a pair of embroidered slippers suitable for a lady's bedroom.

"He's here," the lady said, and stood aside.

Llesho hesitated, blushing to the roots of his hair, but the lady gestured with her open palm.

"Come in. He will want to see you." The way she said that, as if the emperor didn't know who was at his own bedroom door, drew him through it. He wondered if that was a good idea when she closed the door behind him with Habiba still on the outside.

The room was very large, rich with hangings and furnishings of gilt and lacquer work, though not as sumptuous as the royal palace in the Imperial City of Shan. The empty bed stood on a raised platform with its curtains drawn back to reveal disheveled covers. Clothed in the informal breeches and coat he wore indoors, Shou stood at the window with his back to the door. Llesho tugged the reins of his runaway imagination, but the blush stained his face with heat anyway.

"Is this your dream, or mine?" Shou asked, and only then turned away from his reflection in the glass.

"Mine, I think," Llesho answered. "Bolghai is teaching me to travel in waking dreams."

"A Harnish name. You have strange teachers, Prince Llesho."

He'd grown so accustomed to the magicians around him knowing his business before he did himself that it surprised him when Shou didn't recognize the name. It made him less like a sheep-or a slave-run through a counting shoot by omniscient masters.

"No stranger than your own," he answered, with a pointed look at Lady SienMa. "Was I wrong to be worried about you, or more right than I knew?"

Shou passed off the question with a raised shoulder, but Llesho didn't let it slide. "What happened with Tsutan? I'm not just prying. We are going after Adar and Hmishi and Lling, and I have to know what has been done to them."

"Put Hmishi out of your mind. He is dead already and waits only for his body to realize that fact and cease pumping blood to his heart."

"I won't accept that."

"Then don't. What you do or do not choose to believe will make not one bit of difference in the outcome." Shou crossed the room so quickly, and with such purpose that Llesho took a step back, expecting an attack. But the emperor merely brushed his elbow on his way to a low table where he picked up a bottle and poured a foggy liquid into a bowl.

"He's given Hmishi over to the torments of his followers, but fears his master if he harms a more valuable prisoner," Shou said after drinking the contents of the bowl. "Adar should still be safe from physical hurt, at least, until Tsu-tan reaches Markko's camp in the South. What Markko will do to him then I cannot say, but the witch-finder spoke much of burnings at the stake."

Llesho shuddered. He had time yet to rescue Adar. In his dreams he heard Hmishi's cries of pain, but he refused to believe that his friend couldn't be healed with time and the skills of the healer-prince. He wasn't as certain about Shou, who refused to acknowledge his own hurts.

"And you? What did the witch-finder do to you?"

"A simple beating, to put me in my place." Shou waved a hand to dismiss his tale as if to say the blows had meant nothing. But he reached again for the drink.

With a hand on the stone bottle, Llesho stopped him from pouring himself another bowl of the liquor. "Master Markko, then. From afar?"

Lady SienMa watched with distant interest as the emperor shook his head, no. She neither encouraged him nor gave any sign of disapproval, so Llesho continued his struggle for the emperor's story.

"He murdered the dream readers of Ahkenbad in their dreams," he reminded Shou, "and has visited my own dreams with threats of death as well. I know some of what he can do, but I don't have enough information yet to see the shape of his spirit."

Understanding clicked in Shou's head. Each story added to the picture, not only of Markko's powers, but also of his limitations.

"He raised my dead," he said. "In my dreams, he brought their torn and bleeding bodies rotting from their graves and pecked by birds to curse me for their suffering. Vast wastelands filled with the moldering corpses of soldiers killed in battle. Villages emptied by diseases that grow in the fields of unburied dead. Grandfathers starved to death after the armies had eaten all the villagers had grown for the winter, so that even the worms could find no food on their bones. Children and infants and old women and their strong young sons, all dead so that generals and emperors might trade a few li of ground. Each came to me and showed me deadly wounds and scurvied bones and flyblown sores, and cursed my part in their tortured dying."

"It's a trick," Llesho started to say, but Lady SienMa stopped him with a little shake of her head. Her wide, unfeeling gaze never left the emperor, however, and Llesho shuddered, praying that she never looked on him with such predatory interest. If this was love, he wanted no part of the emotion.

"If it hurts so much, why haven't you gone home? Why don't you just stop?"

"Because I love her." Shou whispered the confession that meant not just the Lady SienMa but the act of war itself, the struggle and the test of arms and the plotting of strategy against a worthy foe.

The lady went to him, a smile on her blood-red lips. He took her hands in his and she raised them to her face, put kisses on each fingertip and rested a cheek white as pear blossoms on their clasped hands.

"One good thing has come of this." Shou dropped a kiss on the bowed head of his lover, the mortal goddess of war. "My anguish serves as a warning to the khans along our borders, who now must fear the magician will attack them as well. It seems that, like yourself, we make allies where we once looked for enemies."

"And what of the governor of Guynm Province?"

Shou gave him a terrible smile, full of sadness and endurance and satisfaction. "He has joined my importunate dead."

"Oh."

Shou rested his cheek over the kiss he had placed on the Lady SienMa's head. When the lady freed her hands to raise his face to her again and run her fingers through his hair, Llesho slowly backed away, not wanting to see any more.

"I guess I'll be in touch," he stammered, at a loss for words.

Shou nodded, not really paying attention to him anymore. "I have moved my court here to Durnhag, to be closer to the fighting."

The emperor put his his arms around her ladyship and Llesho decided that was definitely more than he wanted to know. Remembering Bolghai's lessons, he began to run in a tight circle on the thick carpet. Thankfully, the emperor's temporary quarters vanished just as Shou lifted the goddess from her tiny feet.

Llesho closed his eyes tight, but that didn't stop the sensation that he was falling from a great height.

"Ohhhh," he groaned as the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He knew this feeling, like Lord Chin-shi's fishing boats on a stormy sea, and had even grown used to it during his years in Pearl Bay. He'd lost the knack of it, though, and prayed only for it to end quickly, before his stomach turned itself inside out ridding itself of a breakfast he didn't have.

Then the bright light of full day was beating against his eyelids. He was back in the waking world again, his surroundings unyielding, as he rediscovered when his ankle turned on an outcropping of rock.

"Ouch!" He fell on his backside, grabbing his booted ankle and squinting against the light. Well. He was on the right side of the river, at least. There was the shaman's burrow, and Bolghai himself in human form, which reassured him that he'd landed in the right time and reality.

"Did you have a good trip?" Bolghai stared down into his face with a sly grin.

Llesho wasn't sure if he meant the dream-walk to Durnhag or the twisted ankle. He grimaced his displeasure with the question and struggled to get his legs under him.

"How is Durnhag?"

"Dark."

Bolghai gave him a reassuring pat. "We'll work on the 'when' of dream-walking later. For now it's remarkable that you went where you chose, when you chose to do it, after only a day and a half of lessons."

So he'd been gone only a matter of hours by the reckoning of the waking world. Llesho accepted that with relief. He had only four days, after all, and he had places to go and time to harness in his dreams. In the meantime, and in case the next exercise didn't work out as well, he made a report.

"If something should happen and I don't get back, tell Kaydu that the emperor has negotiated a truce with Tinglut-Khan on his eastern border. Together, they make plans for war against Master Markko in the South."

"And the governor of Guynm Province?"

"Dead," Llesho answered "So I should think."

Llesho nodded his agreement. Bolghai didn't need telling; he'd already figured that the governor must have been involved in the plot that had made Shou a prisoner of Markko's lieutenant, Tsu-tan.

"Chimbai will need to know this," the shaman continued with his musing. "There is no love between our khan and the East."

"Nobody says he has to marry Tinglut's daughter, but Chimbai will doubtless need all the human allies he can muster when the magician moves against the grasslands, which Shou believes he must."

"That's the problem, though," Bolghai answered with a snort. "Chimbai has has married a daughter of the Eastern Khan. The lady has proved ... of questionable value as a wife." married a daughter of the Eastern Khan. The lady has proved ... of questionable value as a wife."

Llesho remembered Lady Chaiujin's agate stare and shivered his agreement. The shaman's explanation made sense of the diplomat's war between the husband and wife that he'd felt in the ger-tent of the khan, but there was more at stake than an unhappy marriage.

"Markko is getting stronger. He couldn't kill in dreams before. I know. He tried." That was a memory he didn't want to revisit; he'd thought he was dying, and more than once, but Markko hadn't carried through.

"He's Harnish, and from the South by blood if not upbringing," Bolghai reminded him as if this made a difference in his powers. When Llesho showed no sign of understanding his point, the shaman explained. "Magic comes from many places, but always it grows strongest where our roots grow deepest. Your abilities grow stronger through training and exercise, but also because, as you near the source of your power, it flows through you with greater force and vigor. The same holds true for the magician. I would be surprised if he meant to murder the dream readers of Ahkenbad. He knows the legends, and would not want to call on himself the wrath of the Dun Dragon. But he is trying to control too many distant fronts, and he cannot have learned to harness the force of home soil in his magic yet."

"They're still dead."

Llesho didn't need the reminder. It ended the conversation about his dream journey to the emperor, however.

Discretion demanded that he remain silent about Shou's relationship with the Lady SienMa. The mortal goddess of war required more than romantic attention from her suitors. He needed to think about that more, sort out what was private and what was military intelligence vital to their struggle.

Being a god himself, Master Den would know what this new aspect of Shou's devotion to her ladyship would mean in the coming battle. He would understand the debts and allegiances between gods and the humans who received their attentions. Llesho might even learn something about Shou's relationship with the trickster god, and by the emperor's example, what he might one day be required to pay for the help he accepted from the gods in his quest. But how much did he have the right to tell the trickster god? He wasn't going to talk about any of it with the shaman.

As if he heard Llesho think his name, Bolghai gave his arm a shake. "Ready to go again?"

"Again?" But he already knew where he wanted to go.

"Four times to set the lesson," Bolghai asserted, "two more to go." He began to run. With a groan, Llesho followed, loping painfully on his sore ankle and blistered feet. Gradually, his forequarters lengthened, his scalp itched, erupted in horny antlers covered in a soft furze. With one bounding leap, and another, he landed in a camp of round black tents. At his shoulder rose the largest of the tents, and on either side half a hundred formed a ragged circle several tents deep. At their heart, a central commons had been eaten down to dust by the animals that wandered the encampment. Harnish raiders on their mounts laughed and joked as aimlessly as their beasts.

"Come in, witch." Tsu-tan, the witch-finder of Pearl Island and Master Markko's lieutenant, stood beside the largest tent. Hidden in the shadow of late afternoon, pressed dark against the black felt, he cocked an arrow in the bow he pulled.

Llesho, in the shape of the roebuck, quivered in all his muscles, but otherwise remained completely still. Behind the witch-finder, moving stealthily and with murder in her eyes, Lling crept nearer. She wore the rough pants and tunic of a slave and a smudge of grime crossed the bridge of her nose. In her hand she held a knife poised to strike.

"Come, boy. You remember what it is to be human. I won't hurt you."

"You can't hurt me," Llesho realized, "because I'm not really here."

"You're here, all right." Tsu-tan let the arrow fly and it brushed past on a breeze but didn't touch him. "The questions is, when when are you?" are you?"

As if in answer to that mysterious statement, Llesho stepped painfully into his human form. Startled, Lling paused, her brows disappearing beneath the tumbled hair that fell over her forehead. The beginning of recognition fought its way through layers of fog that clouded her focus. She tilted her head, as if she could see more clearly out of the corners of her eyes, but came no closer.

"It's all right, girl, go on about your work. He's not going to hurt you." Tsu-tan didn't turn to look at her, but he seemed aware of every movement at his back. Lling said nothing, but slowly lowered her knife and backed away.

"Since my master took her mind she's become a fine laundress. He bids me leave her the knife to defend her virtue-for himself, I venture-not that she needs it. The knife, I mean, though virtue, too, seems a waste in a laundress. But no one would touch her even if she walked the camp naked with a price in cash around her neck. She's mad, you see. And no one wants to catch madness. It's the ultimate social disease."

Tsu-tan turned and entered the black tent then, so he did not see the look of hatred and low cunning that crossed Lling's face. With a last sly glance, she sheathed her knife and aimlessly drifted away. Llesho watched her go, wondering how much of her apparent mindlessness she owed to Master Markko and how much to her own talented spycraft. When she passed out of sight around a neighboring tent, he braced himself for what he would see, and followed Tsu-tan.

The witch-finder had gone to a small table on the far side of the firebox at the center of the tent and watched the reunion with mocking attentiveness. "I've brought you a visitor," he announced to the figure bent over a sickbed near the door of the tent, where guests of low station must wait.