This one-Spirit Bell-will track Varda wherever he goes."

Giyan, eyes closed, conjured Spirit Bell, found its particular note among a blizzard of others, spent a moment or two attuning herself to it, aligning herself, so that she and it vibrated at the same frequency, tracing it back, softly now.

"I see him, but for some reason I cannot tell where he is." Her voice husky, slightly out of time.

Krystren was forced closer. Head bent, ear c.o.c.ked. Intent on every word, every nuance in every word. "Is he blocking you?" Her voice also hushed, like a Sarakkon fishing, so as to ensure the evening's dinner.

"Something is."

A little shiver ran down Krystren's spine. "What are we to do?"

"Not to worry, my dear." Giyan ma.s.saged her temples with delicate fingertips. "The Skreeling Engine will find him."

She rose and climbed the innocuous-looking library ladder. Gaining the top, she sat and was immediately engulfed in a column of amber light. Krystren stepped back, her eyes squeezed to mere slits.

The glare from the column seemed greater in one section. Dimly, she could see Giyan moving her hands, and then the glare began to move, swinging around like the lantern in a lighthouse, a brilliant beam of amber light revolving.

A great juddering almost threw her off her feet, and she ran to the walls of shelves beneath one of the three small windows, thrust books away, clouds of dust rising like bloodflies, as she mounted the shelves to get a view. More books flew off the shelves, not of her doing. They slid across the floor, pages waving like fans.

Out the window, the forest was moving-or, more accurately, the tower was. She could see two of the other towers, also moving, leaning in concert as if they were trees bending in a high wind.

Inside the column of amber light Giyan worked feverishly. She had no experience working the greatSkreeling Engine of Five Pivots, though she had read the cla.s.sic text on it written by Konara Leau in a lucid style uncommon for ancient konara. She drew on that knowledge now, allowed it to mingle with her intuition, for she rang in her mind the particular note that Minnum-Miina keep and bless him!-had with Spirit Bell attached to Varda. She aligned the Skreeling Engine with the tone.

Long ago, when Osoru was still in its infancy, konara had devised the Skreeling Engine as a way of listening to the Cosmos, feeling their way along the buried bourns whose purpose was at that time mostly unknown. What the Skreeling Engine did was listen and report back, and from this data the Ramahan of ancient times began to ama.s.s information about s.p.a.ce, time, and the interstices in between.

What Giyan was attempting to do now was align the Skreeling Engine with the sorcerous link to Varda the Sticky Spell had left. It was essential to divine where he was and what he was doing. For in truth she feared him, feared what he had become, what he would become if his unholy liaison with the ascendant sauromicians was allowed to continue.

Like a wyr-hound on the hunt, the Skreeling Engine sniffed out the Sticky Spell, opened its eye on the subject. What the engine showed her were tracks like footprints in the snow, the eely wake of a fish's progress through ultramarine water, the path of a storm etched in twilight by plumed spindrift. Darkness made visible by Skreeling.

And in the center of the darkness, Varda, splayed out on a rock barely a kilometer south of the abbey. His torso was stretched like the arc of a bow, arms flung to either side, fingers curled into knots of muscle. His head was thrown back, eyes open and staring. Mouth wide-open. And from its cavity emerged a conversation of sorts, one that did not involve Varda at all. Now and again his muscles jumped as if in galvanic response. While his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, eyes wide and rolling as if in seizure.

Giyan counted eight distinct voices, though they were not voices at all, at least not in the usual sense.

They belonged neither to sauromician nor to Sarakkon, belonged in fact to no breathing being.

A sense of dread wormed its way into her soul, for the Skreeling identified the source of the conversation-not where but what. Eight banestones, linked. Banestones found, somehow, how? In the Korrush, the back of beyond where even the Five Tribes rarely ventured. So there had been a reason for the sauromician flight. It had not been, as had been a.s.sumed even by Minnum, a headlong flight to the farthest reaches of Kundala. No. The archons had had a plan in mind all along. And they had spent the years of their bitter exile more fruitfully than anyone could have guessed. They had learned necromancy, waiting patient as kris-spiders for the knowledge to build sufficiently to turn to their search for the scattered banestones. They had used their necromantic arts to find them, for the newly dead could feel the banestones' dark emanations and, forced to speak to their new sauromician masters, revealed the burial grounds. The very first one was pa.s.sed around from archon to archon, and as their bare skin came in contact with it, the banestones altered them forever. And so the sauromicians ama.s.sed the stones one by one, h.o.a.rding them, caressing them as a male will a female, sinking deeper and deeper into their spell, until eight had come into their possession. And what had the sauromicians done with the eight banestones? She had recalibrated the Skreeling Engine to home in on the cache of banestones. And again the Engine provided the answer-what but not where.

She gasped. Against all odds, the unthinkable had happened: the Cage had been forged. But for what purpose? Without that knowledge it was impossible to know how to prepare to dismantle it, for different purposes changed the shape of the Cage, which in turn changed the nature of the sorcery invoked. The Cage could be used for many things, provided one had the knowledge: it could imprison Dragons, open the Portals to the Abyss, or, Mima forbid, become the great weapon created at Za Hara-at. How much forbidden knowledge had the sauromicians derived from this Library? There was no way to know unless you could coerce an archon into telling you.

A warning sounded from the Engine, and her attention snapped back. She saw that Varda was now sitting up. She saw his head turning in her direction. Could he have become aware of the Skreeling?

With a bang, she shut it all down, the towers' juddering subsided, the slanting floor returned to level.

The amber light winked out.

"What did you see?" Krystren's face was tight with worry. "What did it tell you?""Varda." Climbing down from the ladder. "In some way I cannot yet understand he had become aware of me."

"Does he know where you are?"

"I am not certain, but I do not think so. I think I shut down the Engine in time."

Krystren thought a moment. "What would happen if you used the Engine to find him again? Would he be able to locate you?"

"There is no way to say for sure, but it seems likely."

"That is what we thought." A small smile crept across Krystren's face, and she fingered the crystal knife she had stolen from him. "We say let him come."

Before they had a chance to react, Nith Na.s.sam sent a serpent of coruscating light from the fingertips of his ion-matrix glove. Gul Aluf's countermove only split the serpent in two, and they pa.s.sed through her furled wings, pinioning her in place. A kind of photonic coc.o.o.n wove itself about her legs, torso, and arms, binding her faster the more she tried to shake herself free.

"Are you insane?" Gul Aluf said. "It is forbidden to attack a Breeder."

"But not unprecedented." Nith Na.s.sam turned his hand over, and the coc.o.o.n quickly wound itself around her mouth. "Now." He turned to Sahor. "What have we here?" Another serpent of light circled his hand, both its head and tail questing, ready at a moment's notice to be sped on its way. "Certainly, you look like a Kundalan." He c.o.c.ked his head inquisitively. "But you neither speak like one nor act like one."

Sahor held himself still. He knew that Nith Na.s.sam had been both lucky and clever. Lucky that he had been able to attack in surprise, clever to have used photonic lances. Had he chosen, instead, any of a thousand ion-based weapons, Gul Aluf would have been able to fight him off. But Breeders so highly attuned to photons in their work were vulnerable to photon-based weapons.

"How could you be Kundalan?" Nith Na.s.sam began to circle him. "You are in the Temple of Mnemonics, you know your way around a lab-orb, you are familiar with both a Gul and a Nith." He stopped so that he was just out of Sahor's field of vision. "Not so difficult a puzzle to solve." He smiled cruelly. "Even if I had not heard the Breeder call you by name."

He looped the photon lance around Sahor's neck, forming a loose collar. "If I didn't see you, I would not have believed it. Nith Sahor alive." The photon lance did not touch him, but floated ominously, not a centimeter from his skin.

"So the question is not who are, but what are you? A photon sh.e.l.l, a construct? Or something other, something we have never seen before?"

Sahor was watching Gul Aluf-more specifically, her eyes. She always did have expressive eyes, no matter which guise she was in.

"Why are you looking at Gul Aluf?" Nith Na.s.sam said. "Do you think the Breeder will be able to help you?" He turned his hand over and with an eerie scratching sound the coc.o.o.n drew tighter so that Gul Aluf groaned through her gag.

He turned back to Sahor. "I see that you will need further persuasion." He tightened the photon lance around Sahor's neck. "Do you imagine that you are strong enough to resist me? Ah, Sahor, you have an exaggerated sense of your resiliency and strength. I will break you, one way or another." As it contracted, the photon lance crawled against Sahor's skin like an army of carnivorous insects. "In a moment, I shall instruct the photon lance to create a field of tiny blades. Ever so slowly, they will emerge from the inside of the collar, piercing your skin and cartilage. I will drain the blood, of course. I don't want you prematurely drowning."

Sahor, breath already beginning to strangle in his constricted throat, tried to ignore him. He knew that without Gul Aluf's help he would not get out of this predicament.

"Here they come." Nith Na.s.sam studied Sahor with eyes turned obsidian-black. "Do you feel them, Sahor, the ten thousand tiny blades."

Sahor steeled himself as the pain came crashing in on him.

26

Old Friends

Riane stood in tattered FIREFLY wondering what on Kundala Kurgan would be doing there. Dust and the smell of s.e.x, old now, sour as a Mesagggun's armpits. She felt battered and bruised. Ever since she had discovered that The Pearl was a fake, that Miina had lied to even Her most devoted disciples, she had been fighting a dreadful despair. How could a G.o.ddess be so vengeful, so righteous, that She would sacrifice thousands of innocents to root out and punish the few Ramahan infecting the collective corpus of the abbeys? How could you continue to believe in such a deity? Why would you want to, anyway?

"Love." Eleana's hand on her arm. "I am uncomfortable staying in one place."

Thigpen nodded. There was about the building, a creepy air of sentience, as if they were being watched by the portraits on the walls, the sculpted figures, sinuous, naked, wrapped around lamp bases or stone bowls, lit by their own reflections in stained mirrors. The trio went silently through the pleasure chambers on the ground floor, for the moment pa.s.sed up the stair to explore the back rooms-small servants' quarters, explosive with dust, mold along the bottom of the window sash, mildew, an animal stench, sharp and acrid in the tiny bath. They came next, on the other side, to an expansive, low-ceilinged kitchen. Light spilled through windows that flanked a service door. Beneath the windows were square soapstone sinks large enough to bathe twins, a central island on which had taken place the bloodletting of many a fowl and cor haunch, with a narrow door to the larder beyond.

They heard a sound from the ceiling, a creaking from upstairs, and stood transfixed for a moment, listening. It came again, weight on dried-out floorboards. Stealthy footsteps. Riane invoked Dragonfly by speaking the Venca syllables, saw Kurgan, saw where he was precisely, saw the shadows cast by the banestone he held.

She leaned to whisper in Thigpen's ear. "Stay here with Eleana." In so doing, breaking off the spell precipitously, she remained ignorant of other shadows spreading.

"You are my primary concern, little dumpling." The Rappa bared her teeth to show her resolve. "Even if Giyan had not charged me with your protection."

"I am telling you." She took a handful of her fur, shook her lightly. "Don't let her out of your sight."

With that she was gone, Thigpen giving a low growl, Eleana looking from the Rappa to the doorway to the servants' corridor.

"Don't even think about it," Thigpen said, as Eleana tried to get around her. "There is already more than enough danger in this pit without you adding to it."

"You don't like me much, do you?"

"Don't take it personally."

Eleana looked at the Rappa for a time. "It's my relationship with the Dar Sala-at, isn't it? You don't approve."

Thigpen sniffed. "It's not for me to approve or disapprove."

"I am not trying to take your place, I a.s.sure you."

"Don't try so hard." Thigpen trotted around, pushing her snout into this corner and that, nose wrinkling, investigating. "We might as well make ourselves useful. Why don't you take a look in the pantry."

"I'm not hungry."

Thigpen bared her teeth again. "Indulge me."

Eleana went around the island and opened the narrow door. Stepped inside to the scents of spices and dried foodstuffs. The moment she was inside, Thigpen slammed the door shut, wedged a shim ofwood she had ferreted out from beneath one of the sinks into the gap between the door bottom and the sill.

"Sorry," she muttered as she scampered out. "My responsibility is to the Dar Sala-at. I promised I would protect her, and that's what I'm going to do."

Eleana hammered on the door, shut tight and unmoving.

Nondescript almost to the point of invisibility, First-Captain Kwenn caused barely a ripple in the gallery gathered in the Forum of Adjudication despite the fact that Khagggun rarely looked in on Bashkir adjudications. He took a seat and stared down at the arena-like gallery floor.

The aggrieved parties in the current dispute sat at either side while in the middle stood the Prime Factor, the adjudicator. It took Kwenn only a few moments to recognize Sornnn SaTrryn as the figure at the bar the afternoon he and Pack-Commander Dacce were playing warr-nixx. He was tall, handsome, and impressive in his official uniform. Kwenn studied him for a while, allowing the barrage of arguments to flow around him without paying attention to the details. There was something about the SaTrryn's eyes, the way they seemed to take in intent, what was beneath the surface gloss of legalese, that made Kwenn suspect that he was good at his role. He liked particularly Sornnn's economy of movement. He possessed a certain grace Kwenn did not automatically a.s.sociate with Bashkir. He was a far cry from the sad-looking Bashkir bent over his drink at Alloy Fist.

Seeing the Prime Factor in the flesh brought home to Kwenn with a terrifying finality what he was about to do. He knew that the moment he accosted the SaTrryn, the moment he uttered the first word, he would be committed. There would be no going back, no saying, sorry, my mistake.

But very soon the tightness in his chest that had been his companion all the way down to the Forum vanished. In its place, he found a sense of freedom he had never felt before. This was his decision. He felt as if it was the first one he had made independent of the intricate web of his caste obligations. There was no Khagggun training that covered such a circ.u.mstance. For the first time in his life he was entirely on his own.

It seemed forever before there was a break in the proceedings. During that time Kwenn had ample time to discover that he had no interest in becoming Bashkir. He couldn't imagine any Khagggun who would. Save Dacce. Dacce was an entirely different matter altogether. Somewhere along the line he had acquired a thirst for coin. That made him a mercenary, a dangerous tendency, especially for a Khagggun for whom loyalty was supposed to be a bred-in-the-bone trait.

At the break, Kwenn made his way down to where the SaTrryn was standing. He had to wait as the Prime Factor was in a tense and heated discussion with Raan Tallus. The SaTrryn cut it off abruptly, and Kwenn heard the word "inappropriate."

As Sornnn turned away from Raan Tallus, he came face-to-face with Kwenn.

"Well," he said without missing a beat, "what is a Haaar-kyut doing here?"

"Actually, I came to talk to you, Prime Factor."

"An official visit? I should be offended the regent did not come himself."

Kwenn smiled. "Not at all." Now that the moment had arrived, it was odd how light he felt. There was a certain freedom in following the dictates of your hearts, in having nothing more to lose. "This conversation is strictly between you and me." He looked around the milling Forum. "Is there somewhere more private we could go to?"

"Alloy Fist is nearby."

"A game of warrnixx perhaps?" He saw the closed look on the SaTrryn's face and was immediately sorry he had been flip. "At this point, you're right to be wary. Just give me a chance to prove you wrong."

They wound up walking instead, through a fine spring drizzle that brought the pungent odors from the outdoor food stalls. They stopped at a brazier, bought skewers of grilled meat, which they ate as they strolled. Kwenn, without seeming to, steered them clear of Khagggun patrols.

"I have a problem," Kwenn began, "and I don't know what to do about it." He had been up all nightthinking of what to say and how to say it. Tong had told him that the SaTrryn was someone he could trust, but there remained the question of how to gain the SaTrryn's trust.

"I am not of your caste," Sornnn said. "How can I help you?"

"It is precisely because you are not Khagggun that I have sought you out, Prime Factor. It is your role to find answers to vexing problems."

Sornnn, who was thinking about his failure with Fleet-Admiral Pnin, finished his skewer and said nothing.

Kwenn decided to put more than his toe into the water, "Also, our mutual friend Tong suggested I talk to you."

Outwardly, Sornnn did not change, but he had suddenly gone on alert. "I have known Tong all my life.

He is of good hearts."

"Great hearts," Kwenn said. "By all accounts that is true also of you."

Sornnn stopped. "What question do you wish to ask me, First-Captain?"

Kwenn looked around at all the pa.s.sing faces. He was searching particularly for the regent's vast network of spies he himself had set in place. He recognized no one. No one was paying them the slightest attention.

"You must understand, Prime Factor, that what I say next will put me in great jeopardy."

"Are you sure you want to continue?"

"Absolutely." Kwenn licked his lips. "All my life I have been in training. I have killed with more weapons than you could name. I am small, as you can see. Because of that, I trained myself strongly in hand-to-hand combat. In the Kalllistotos, before I became known, I made a lot of money wagering on the long odds the others put on me. I have killed many enemies and have thought little of their pa.s.sing. I never considered the blood on my hands. Now it seems to me as if I am living two lives. One is the life I have always known, the life of killing and of obeying orders. The other life is unknown to me. In this second life I am like an observer of my other self, and I tell you, Prime Factor, that I do not care for what I see."

Sornnn was intrigued but still wary. "This is all very interesting, First-Captain, but-"

"I want to discredit the regent," Kwenn said. "To do so the Star-Admiral must be discredited."

Sornnn frowned. "You are either confused or mistaken, First-Captain. I have no interest in-"

"Prime Factor, please. This is not a trap."

"I will report this traitorous talk." Sornnn craned his neck. "Where is a Khagggun patrol when you need one?"

"You will not find one," Kwenn said. "I have taken us on a route the patrols do not use. Tong said-"