"Is there trouble?"

"Of course there is trouble. The emperor has got himself captured by his enemies along with that trickster ChiChu, and I still don't have that peach."

Llesho considered for a moment. He couldn't do much but apologize for the one, but his dream self knew how to bring down a peach. He stood and bent low from the waist in respect. When he thought of it, his bow appeared in his hand, and he drew, aimed, sent his soul flying into the treetop, and opened a hand to receive it just as the peach fell. "My lady."

"Thank you." She took the peach from his outstretched palm and began to eat. Her lips barely seemed to move. Llesho saw not even a glimpse of her teeth or any juice of the peach on her chin, but still the fruit was disappearing. When the yellow flesh was gone, she flipped the stone into the grass and settled her eyes on him again. Llesho found her full attention daunting but felt he owed her more than one of her own peaches for all the trouble he'd caused.

"My lady," he repeated. With a graceful nod of her head she gave him permission to continue.

Llesho took a deep breath. "I don't deserve your forgiveness, but I beg your pity."

"For what, boy?"

"It was my quest, but the emperor has suffered for it, and with him his whole empire. Master Den is a prisoner as well, and Adar, and Carina, whose mother aspires to be a mortal god." He gave a bitter smile. "I have angered more gods than I ever imagined I would meet, and at least one dragon as well. As quests go, I couldn't have made a bigger mess if I'd intended to screw up from the start."

Everyone who ever tried to help him had suffered or died for it, including the goddess whose orchard had burned in Markko's pursuit of him.

Her ladyship tilted her head, as if she needed to study the problem of Prince Llesho from a different angle. "You are assuming that yours is the only quest on this journey," she finally pointed out. "Shou also has trials to suffer and lessons to learn."

"But Shou is old!"

"Not so so old." old."

The protest had escaped him before Llesho could stop it. At the goddess' wry reply he blushed and fidgeted, trying to keep his mind away from questions like, "How old is a mortal goddess anyway?" and "What are you testing Shou for?" On consideration, he figured Shou could probably use some lessons at that. The emperor showed great bravery and daring in matters of battle and espionage, for which Llesho took him as a model and teacher. But he didn't seem to spend a lot of time on statecraft and diplomacy, which Lleck had always told Llesho were the trusty tools of a great king. That was before the old minister had been reincarnated as a bear, of course, back when he had advised Llesho with greater subtlety and better pronunciation.

So, giving Shou a quest made sense. Maybe so did leaving him to figure it out for himself, though doing it as a prisoner of the Harn made it a whole lot harder. It left Llesho with a problem, however. Master Den had followed Shou to teach those lessons, he guessed or, knowing the trickster god, to keep the emperor alive while he learned them on his own. It didn't help Llesho.

After giving it enough thought to make his head ache even in his dream, he admitted, "Master Den was my my mentor. Without him, I don't know what to do." mentor. Without him, I don't know what to do."

"Look around you." The mortal goddess reached into a bowl that Llesho hadn't seen before and pulled out a plum, which she handed to him. "There are many teachers in the world if we pay attention, and none at all if we don't."

Llesho was pondering the meaning of that when he noticed a huge pig rooting at the base of a peach tree. He remembered another dream with a pig in it, and he reached for the three black pearls that hung at his breast. "Is that-?"

Before he could finish the question, Lady SienMa answered it with laughter in her voice. "Not a teacher, but possibly a guide." Then she called the creature to her, "Master Pig!"

"Not 'Master,' my lady, as you well know. Just Pig." The Jinn stood on his hind legs and bowed politely, then swiped another plum from the lady's bowl. "We've met." He grinned at Llesho around huge, sharp tusks, then gobbled down the fruit, pit and all, in two powerful snaps of his teeth. "You're going the wrong way, you know. You'd have done better to stick with Shou-at least the Harn are carrying him closer to the gates of heaven."

"Closer to Master Markko as well," the lady added.

"And I have brothers still to find, and pearls."

"Ah, well. You have a point there." Pig's nose twitched and he gave the ground a sharp glance. "Still, we'll find a use for you, I suppose." Sniffing attentively, he wandered away with the words, "Keep in touch," tossed over his shoulder.

"How am I supposed to do that?" But when he turned back, Llesho discovered that the mortal goddess of war had disappeared and her orchard lay in ashes. He awoke with a start to the realization that a barely sensed pressure between his shoulder blades had not returned. The Harn no longer followed them.

It took a moment for Llesho to realize that something had actually wakened him. They had left the desert sand for a road winding between hills stripped clean to the rocky bone. High on either side cliff faces rose above them, layers of soft stone folded in on themselves like the leaves of a hastily abandoned book or stacks of broken plates. Color slashed across the dun layers, rust-red and gray, with veins of lichenous green and sulfurous yellow running through the cave- pocked sandstone. He wondered what forces had cracked the hillside, and how a road had come to exist between.

"Welcome to the Stone River of Ahkenbad, boy." Dognut waved a flute at the cliffs on either side.

"River?"

Dognut waggled his eyebrows in a display of mock amazement. "Did I say river? Yes, I did! The Gansau Wastes weren't always a desert. That was before the time of the Tashek and their nomad cities, of course. Now the riverbeds make fine roads in a place nobody wants to go."

"What happened to it?" Llesho stared about him with amazement. Some giant hand might have taken hold of the earth and ripped it from its moorings here.

"Many things. Ages laid the stone, and ages more the great river wore the stone away."

"But where did the water go?"

"Ah, well, there was a dragon. Isn't there always? There used to be a song-"

Llesho didn't know about real life. In all his seventeen summers he'd only met two dragons, and those had been under extraordinary circumstances. He had to agree that dragons showed up in an awful lot of songs, however.

The dwarf drew out a flute no bigger than his thumb. He played the first few measures of a tune, and when he was satisfied that he'd set the melody in his ear, he began to sing: Now when the summer reeds grew tall and sun shone on the water Lord Dragon sallied from his hall Lord Dragon sallied from his hall The fisherfolk to slaughter. The fisherfolk to slaughter.

"My hall!" he cried, "is not for men, Their nets, their lines, or sinkers And if I must warn you again I'll stave in all your clinkers."

Llesho's confusion must have shown on his face, because Dognut paused to explain, "Clinker-built is a way of making the bottom of a boat so that the water can't get in."

"Like Master Den's traveling washtub," Llesho remembered out loud.

"Exactly." The dwarf swept his explanation past the point before Llesho could ask how he knew about battlefield laundry tubs. "The dragon was threatening to sink the fishing boats."

The farmers of Golden Dragon River lived in peace with their monster. They revered the worm beneath the water and respected his right to the fish that swam in the silty currents. He had a bad feeling about the Stone River, though.

When he nodded that he understood, the dwarf picked up the song again, and Llesho found himself drawn into the tale of a Gansau that was no waste at all, but a fertile land where rivers used to flow and lush jungles grew on the hillsides. In spite of the wealth the river brought to the land, however, the fishermen wanted the fish as well. Unfortunately, so did the dragon. When they couldn't come to an agreement, the fishermen hired hunters and mercenaries to rid them of their dragon. At the height of the story, with murder hinted just ahead, Dognut ceased to sing.

"You can't stop now!" Llesho protested, and he noticed that Balar and their Tashek guides had likewise turned to the dwarf for an ending to his tale. "What happened next?"

"That depends on who tells the story. Some say the fishermen succeeded in murdering the dragon, and the mourning river refused to flow. Some say the dragon grew tired of the harassment and left, taking his river with him. In that version of the tale, Lord Dragon found a new ground to water and a new bed to sleep in where the people knew how to honor a river. As for the fishermen, well, some say they died, and wanderers took their place in the waste they left behind. Others say they remained, clinging to the wells and oases until their children had forgotten that any river ever flowed here, or any fish swam in it."

The dwarf made a sweeping-broom gesture, a past to be brushed aside. "The only truth that matters is that no river flows here now."

Llesho figured the story might be true, but Dognut's conclusion likely wasn't. His own experience of dragons had proved them difficult to kill, hot-tempered but of a legalistic temper. And they didn't like to stir from their homes much. Thoughtfully he slipped from his saddle, wanting to feel the land through his own feet. Did it shift under him like an old dragon stirring in its sleep? Or was that just the beat of the horses' hooves on the drum of the road?

The heat, he decided, had driven out logic and left only fancy and a dry drift of yellow dust blurring his senses. Somewhere in the hills, he felt the presence of people he could not see and water, like a siren call, stirred deep beneath his feet. Light blazed in the distance, but he stood in a place of darkness. Lifting the gritty veil from his eyes didn't help.

"Am I blind?" he asked himself, and only realized that he'd spoken aloud when Balar answered him.

"It's just the dust," his brother assured him, but that wasn't it. He could see well enough, but what he saw seemed at odds with what he felt around him. A veil lay across his mind, not his eyes, and he shook his head, determined to clear his clouded thoughts. And he saw it, the gritty corner of a sandstone ledge jutting from the cliff face. Focusing down on the individual grains of sand fused into stone, he forced the haze from his mind.

Ahkenbad. Somehow, they had entered the city itself and stood in the shade of a rocky overhang. Llesho blinked, a cry of surprise escaping- "How?"

His mouth was hanging open, and he closed it with a snap of his teeth. Ahkenbad was like no city he had ever seen. For one thing, it seemed to be no city at all-he saw no buildings, no walls like those that made the cities of Shan or Farshore, no gardens. Rather, artisans had carved the whole city into the towering cliffs that rose high above the riverbed that wound between them. Set along narrow paths that zigzagged to the top, the mouth of cave after cave gaped down on them between glinting streaks of jade and lapis fused in tortured waves that rippled across the cliff face.

Simple carvings of pillars and trailing vines that drew the mineral colors into the designs outlined the openings into the caves at the heights. Rows of heavy curtains hid the chambers behind heavy embroidery worked on red cloth: elaborate twining vines, and nests with brightly feathered birds standing guard over huge eggs stitched in blue and yellow. Flanking the road at its own level, the caves of Ahkenbad were larger and more elaborate. Figures carved in bas-relief seemed to writhe in sinuous dances around each entrance-strange, stern desert spirits glaring over an abandoned marketplace that lined the road with just a few tattered awnings draped on poles. Beneath the faded canopies, among the empty bins and broken bits of oil jars, aged Tashek nomads stared into a distance that had nothing to do with the handful of paces between themselves and Llesho's party.

"The chamber of the dream readers." Balar directed his attention to a cave with an entrance more elaborately decorated than the others. With an effort, he let go of his tense contemplation of the Tashek elders who lined the streets more terrifyingly than the great stone dancers, and looked where Balar pointed.

Set at the very center of the mountainside, a jagged cave entrance stretched like the gaping mouth of a monstrous dragon out of Dognut's songs. Around the yawning arch of its mouth, open wide as if to swallow the road, artisans had carved the stone into sharp, curved, dragon teeth. A broad flat nose flared over the mouth, the smoke of fires perfumed with sandalwood and cedar drifting from its deep nostrils. The plates and horns of a dragon's ruff made a halo around the entrance. On the top of the carved head, great horns rose like columns flanking the entrance to a cave that opened atop the dragon's head. Great eyes had been carved in the half-closed position of a sleeping dragon, with deep blue flashes of lapis just hinted at between the lashes. They reminded Llesho too much of the Golden River Dragon's impersonation of a bridge, stirring a creeping terror in his heart.

While he stood transfixed, wondering if he would survive a meeting with yet another legend, someone pushed aside a cloth of heavy silk and came toward them out of the dragon's mouth.

"Balar, did you find-"

Except for his shaved head, this man could have been Llesho himself in another ten years. They were of equal height and had the same dark coloring, though he paled when he saw Llesho.

"Sweet heavenly Goddess, you have found him."

To Llesho's consternation, his newfound brother fell to one knee and bowed his head at Llesho's feet. Then, all along the road they had travelled, the aged Tashek mystics followed his example, bending aching joints to kneel in the grit, their heads bowed to the young prince.

"Lluka?" he asked in disbelief, "What are you doing down there?"

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Lluka stood slowly, his glittering eyes dry in his weather-pinched face. A strange mix of calculation and emotion seemed to pass behind that searching gaze.

In the slaver's office, where they'd met to rescue each other, neither Adar nor Shokar had succeeded in hiding their anguish and the love they felt for their youngest brother. In the fleeting moment before the Harn attacked the inn at Durnhag, Balar's joy at finding his brother had shone in his face. When he stared into Lluka's eyes, however, Llesho felt only the slow glide of secrets rising out of darkness. Lluka wanted something from him, and he wasn't sure Llesho would give it.

"I don't understand-" He turned to Balar for his answers, trusting at least his own powers to read the man who'd kidnapped him and dragged him across the desert.

"The Dinha said to bring , so I did." Balar shrugged, clearly hiding something.

"And Lluka is the Dinha?"

Balar shook his head. "No. We are both simple students in the service of the Dinha."

That answer didn't satisfy him at all. He scanned the crowd, looking for a less guarded source of information. Harlol had stopped to embrace an aged crone with a wrinkled, leathery face. She handed him a pair of curved swords suspended from a tooled leather belt and he buckled them under his coats, low about his waist. He stood taller, balanced over his knees like a soldier, and met Llesho's gaze steadily.

"The merchant Shou called you a Wastrel," Llesho answered the challenge. They both remembered when Shou had taunted the Tashek drover over poised swords.

Harlol dropped his head once in acknowledgment. "The Dinha sent Wastrels to bring you here before the Uulgar Harn could take you to the magician. I had the advantage of our Harnish friends, however. Lluka and Balar have studied with the Dinha for many years; the family likeness stamps you like a coin. Adar, I was not so sure of. I meant to test him, but I would not have killed your brother."

"His blood stains the blades you drew on him." The memory squeezed like a fist around Llesho's heart. So much he might have lost on that morning-a brother, a friend. The emperor of Shan. The world had almost come undone. "Did you know that our host would answer your challenge? If not Adar, did you plan to murder Shou?"

"Your merchant should have stayed out of it."

Stubborn. Llesho was unimpressed. "And for defending his guest, you would have killed him?"

"I might have tried." Harlol laughed softly. "I hoped only to scare him a little, but there is more to our pompous merchant than he seems."

He wasn't laughing now, but settled those uncanny sharp eyes on Llesho, as if he could find his answers in an unguarded emotion. "He fights like no fool but rather like a man whose life has dangled on the point of a sword many times. And I had worried him. Among the Tashek I'm considered one of the best, but I count myself lucky to have survived the encounter."

"And your Dinha wished this because . . . ?" Llesho sidestepped the question of Shou's identity, referring instead to the testing of Adar, and his own kidnapping.

Lluka interrupted before Harlol could answer. "If you will come with me, she'll tell you herself." With a clap of his hands, he called out, "Shelter for our guests, and water-"

Several of the Tashek scurried to do his bidding, with the dwarf's grumbling from atop Shou's stolen camel only adding to the general commotion. "About time," he muttered, and grumbled at Kagar to: "Let me down, before my legs fall off up here."

As if released from the spell of Ahkenbad, Kagar raced to Dognut's side and unhooked the ladder from the saddle pack. When the dwarf had made his painful way to the ground, complaining with each step about the sting of returning life in his legs, Lluka gathered them up in the sweep of his arm.

"Come in out of the heat. You are safe now-from discovery, at least."

"The Dinha wants to ask you some questions." Balar fell in beside him with wry gloom written on his face.

Llesho nodded. The exhaustion he had fought for so long would have felled him if his brother hadn't taken him by the arm. "Some great power muddies the flow of dreams. She thinks it may be you."

With more effort than he had to spare, Llesho mustered a retort. "I didn't do anything. The Dinha would do better to concentrate on Master Markko. If he finds us unprepared, we are doomed."

"The magician failed, at least in this-the magic of Ahkenbad turned his forces aside. You, however, found the hidden city in spite of all its protections. If nothing else, it proves the city wants you here."

"I just followed you," Llesho objected. "I didn't even control the reins of my own horse for most of the journey."

"Ah, but we didn't know the way." His voice kept very low, Balar murmured for only Llesho to hear. "We followed you."

"You live here, and so do Harlol and Kagar. Of course you knew your way back."

"We couldn't find the way." Balar gave a little shrug, accepting the strangeness of it. "We'd still be lost in the desert if we hadn't followed you."

He didn't believe it for a minute, and suspected that Lluka didn't either. Balar did, though, so there wasn't any point in arguing it with him. "And what was that bending and kneeling about anyway? The last time I saw Lluka, he refused to speak to me because I broke one of the screws on his lute."

"He has his moods, but he loved you. More than that I will leave for the Dinha to explain."

Llesho felt the past tense of that like a sharp cut. He said nothing, however, but followed his brother into the mouth of the dragon.

Whatever he had set himself to expect, it wasn't the dim but opulent chamber that he discovered there. A single lantern rested on a table fashioned from a rocky outcropping at the center of the massive cave. Skilled artisans had plastered the soft rock of the walls and ceiling until they were as smooth as fine paper. They'd decorated every surface with elaborate paintings of date trees with birds nesting in them and curious spirits with tongues of fire dancing above their heads. In the flickering lamplight, the spirits seemed to nod their heads at one another, their eyes reflecting the lantern's flame with otherworldly purpose.

Amid the spirits dancing on the walls at the back of the cave, a staircase carved from the living stone of the mountain ascended into the darkness. The floor was covered in a thick layering of carpets, and cushions lay scattered about for people to sit upon. Most were taken up by silent figures who sat perfectly still with their eyes open but unseeing, like the dead. For a brief, irrational moment, Llesho imagined that life had fled those human shells to take up residence in the more lively gazes of the spirits painted on the walls above them. He shivered even as he rejected the notion. No mystical transference of life essence, but the skill of the artists and his own imagination brought those images to life. Or so he hoped.

Several old Tashek trailed them into the cavern and found their own places on the floor. Lluka directed him to an empty cushion and Balar took a place at Llesho's right. Dognut settled himself in a corner that seemed to be fitted out for his special use. Harlol, the last to enter, took up a position as sentry at the entrance to the cave.

Llesho found that he was sitting across from a crone who slept, barely breathing, sitting upright with legs bent in the lotus. Her eyes were open, like the others of her kind, but covered by cataracts that turned the orbs in her head to milky pearls and he shuddered with some supernatural dread. Even blind and asleep, the old Tashek woman seemed to be studying him. It felt like she'd stripped him naked in front of all the gathered company.

With a touch on the shoulder, Balar distracted him from his momentary discomfort. "Dinha," he said, dropping his gaze in a respectful bow, "I have brought my brother-prince, as you spoke the dream."

"You have done well, my child."

Llesho trembled at the shock of her raspy whisper. "I thought you were sleeping."

"We are," she answered, "sleeping. You are our dream."

She smiled at his consternation, though how she saw his frown remained a mystery to him.