"It isn't easy, but it can be done." The tip of Amitra's forefinger moved from light into shadow and back again. "The Dragons thrive in brilliant sunlight, in star-spangled velvet night. Otherwise, they keep to the heavy mists that becloud rain-forests and giant waterfalls, for their nemeses are dawn and dusk, those moments before the sun rises and just after it sets. Surprise a Dragon at such a time, and it can be captured, for then it can neither think clearly nor move quickly." Her forefinger hovering in the penumbra between light and shadow. "Can the Cage be built with only eight banestones?" Riane asked. "Yes. And it can imprison a Dragon." Asir nodded. "But only for a short time. That is why the sauromicians have been so desperately searching for the ninth and final banestone. With that, the Dragon's fate is sealed."

"But do we know for certain that they have imprisoned a Dragon?" "It is a fact that one of them is missing." Riane's heart in her mouth. "Which one?" "Seelin."

"The Sacred Dragon of Transformation." A terrible foreboding engulfed her, for Prophecy spoke of Seelin being the Dar Sala-at's personal Dragon. "How can we save her?"

"You must obtain the ninth banestone before the Dark League uses it to complete the Cage."

"I know who is in possession of it-the Sarakkon named Lujon-but not where he is."

"You do not have to know," Amitra said, "for it is inevitable he will go to where the sauromicians havebuilt the Cage."

"Do we know where that is?" Riane asked.

Amitra opened her hand. In it was a square of raw silk, which she unfurled. Wrapped within it was what looked like the nail from a gargantuan beast-fully twenty centimeters long, slightly curved, the most beautiful coral color.

"This is the talon of the Dragon, Seelin." She placed it in Riane's hand, curled her fingers around it.

"We found it at the spot where the sauromicians trapped her and took her."

Riane found her mouth dry. "Where was that?"

"At the bottom of Oppamonifex. The same place we found the infinity-wands. These volcanos used to be the Dragons' playground."

Riane discovered that her fingers had begun to tingle where they were in contact with Seelin's talon.

When she told them that, Amitra exclaimed, "You see, Asir, it is well we waited. It is as the Prophecy foretold. Our daughter will find her."

Asir said, "You will take the talon with you into null-s.p.a.ce. It will guide you to where Seelin is. You and this particular Dragon have an innate affinity for one another."

"Now listen well to me." Amitra's elation was tempered by concern. "You must not touch the banestone with your bare hands. If you do, it will change you in ways no one can predict, and not for the better I'll warrant."

"I understand. When I get the ninth banestone, what then?"

Asir and Amitra exchanged a charged look. Again, Riane wondered whether they were somehow communicating with one another the way she and Giyan could.

Amitra leaned forward, took Riane's hands in her own. "Seelin has already been in the Cage for some time."

Riane's sense of foreboding increased. Into her mind sprang something the Hagoshrin had said, unremarked upon, but now full of dire meaning. In fact, it might already be too late. She said, "What does this mean?"

Amitra squeezed her hands all the tighter. "Remember what I told you about not touching the banestones? One banestone does not affect a Dragon as it would you or me, but if one is caught within the bane-stone energy field ..."

"You mean Seelin has been altered?"

Amitra nodded. "I am afraid so."

It might already be too late.

Riane felt a bleakness in her soul. "Is there nothing I can do?"

"One thing and one thing alone," Asir said, his voice echoing ominously. "You must take possession of the ninth banestone and with it kill Seelin."

31

Pools

Beautiful, isn't it?" Leyytey set the hovercraft down at the edge of a field of wrygra.s.s. Sornnn held up a cut-crystal bottle of fire-grade numaaadis. "A perfect place to celebrate."

She powered down the engine, and they clambered out. By tacit agreement they left the hovercraft behind, the last vestige of the city's tyranny. The rich scents of growing things, of dew and sweet pollen, loamy soil surrounded them. He followed her lead across a patch of hardscrabble that led down to a meandering brook, sun sparks darting like fish. Crossing that, cresting a small root-knotted knoll, they found themselves in a stand of heartwood trees. They sat for a time in the dappled shade, side by side.

She had been the first person Sornnn had wanted to tell. Marethyn alive. He was elated to share more good news with her. She was like some mysterious blossom, beautiful and th.o.r.n.y, roots sunk deep into the ground. Armored and tenacious. Only in moonslight, in secret, only he could see. She might have been his sister, save for other feelings he held for her, deeper, unsure, pleasurable in the enigma they presented. Out across the wrygra.s.s insects droned in the building heat of the day. Small clouds like puffs of snow. A fitful crosswind cooled their cheeks.

"We're only, what, ten kilometers from Axis Tyr?"

"Less," she said. She was still trying to sort out her feelings. When he had told her she had felt so many things: happiness for him, of course, an odd kind of deflation, a sense of the ground collapsing beneath her feet, buildings tilting. Everyone looked strange. Had she grown to love the SaTrryn? Was that her problem? What would be the point? He loved Marethyn, that was clear enough. He had been sinking without her. Perhaps, if Marethyn had been really and truly dead, saving Pnin would have been enough to save him. And then she might have had a chance. Now she would never know. "But it seems like more, doesn't it?"

"What a relief to be clear of the city!" He wrestled open the sealed stopper, poured them both a generous amount. "Thank you for suggesting this." They clinked crystal and downed the heady liquor.

Without asking, he refilled both goblets.

"Whose villa is that?" Sornnn used the bottle to indicate the Kun-dalan facade visible on the far side of the field. There was a wall, incised with a decorative pattern, beyond which the cerulean tiles of the pitched roof gleamed like the brook. "I imagine it must have a beautiful view of the sh.o.r.eline."

"You can see kilometers out to sea." She threw the numaaadis into the back of her throat, swallowed convulsively. "It used to belong to a prominent Kundalan family. Intellectuals. The father was a scholar, the mother a renowned herbalist. Ramahan came from near and far to share her wisdom and buy her wares. They had three girls, and she was training them all."

"What happened to them?"

"All dead. But that was a long time ago."

Sornnn gathered a handful of dirt, tiny pebbles, seedpods, dried twigs, let it all sift through his fingers like sand in an hourgla.s.s. The wrygra.s.s lifting like combers as the wind bustled through. A gimnopede trilled once and was still. To one side of the villa there was a fenced-off area in which three roan cthauros grazed and snorted.

"And now?" Sornnn holding the bottle by its long neck. "Who lives there?"

"Full-time, no one. Most days it's very quiet there. Utterly still. The sea looks perfectly flat from this high up, like you could walk on it all the way to the horizon." She rose, and together they continued their stroll closer to the hissing wrygra.s.s, the somnolent cthauros. "Occasionally, though, Raan Tallus comes out from the city, usually with an entourage, but sometimes alone. He's an expert rider.""I did not know that." Sornnn studied her sun-glossed profile. "How do you know?"

She took a deep breath, felt as if she were at the southern edge of the villa's property, sun beating down on the back of her neck hard by the cliff, steep and rockbound. A wildness in deep contrast to the softly waving wrygra.s.s, the tranquillity of the cthauros pen. She felt as if she were stepping off the edge.

Falling. She drew courage from her father.

"Dacce would tell me about it."

"I don't understand. Teww Dacce and Raan Tallus could not have been friends."

"No, certainly not." The most curious thing had happened when he had told her that Marethyn was still alive. She had felt closer to him than she ever had before. Possibly it was because he had come to her first, had wanted to confide in her. His altered reality had not changed the way he felt about her. Not in the least bit. What did that say about them? Were they friends? If so, what did that entail? She had no experience in the matter of friendship, especially one that seemed so mysterious, so precious. Yes, that was the word. Precious. "Dacce and Raan Tallus had a certain business arrangement."

They had come close enough so that the cthauros, scenting them, lifted their heads. Watching with their huge brown eyes, velvet ears turned, alert. One of them stamped a tufted foreleg in warning.

She turned her head, could see him working out the parameters, he had a very keen mind, she knew that already. It was one of the things she found so attractive about him. The other, of course, was that he saw her in a way other males had failed to do.

"Dacce was taking a foolish risk," he said. There were grave consequences for Khagggun caught murdering Bashkir for hire.

"You already know his ambition. It drove him to take foolish risks."

Sornnn nodded. All this was true. "Who did Raan Tallus want killed?"

"I am afraid it was your father."

Reliving the horror of Hadinnn SaTrryn's sudden and premature death all over again, Sornnn experienced it now from some G.o.dlike perspective, watching all the partic.i.p.ants, including the ones he had not been aware of before. They moved as if in a staged drama, and he a director stripped of his power, reduced to watching the fell event unfold with a fateful inevitability. And yet, deep down, he was astonished to discover not an iota of surprise. It was as if part of him had known it all along-or suspected it-but refused to admit it. Raan Tallus had wanted a piece of the SaTrryn spice trade. When Hadinnn SaTrryn refused, this was the egregious response. In light of that, he had to ask himself how long Raan Tallus had been plotting to take over the SaTrryn business.

The day seemed completely different now, everything heightened, the smells of the fields, the bars of sunlight, the brachiated shadows, the wind rippling the wrygra.s.s, the piercing cry of a blackcrow. They all spoke to him in the voice of dreams, omens, predetermination. His father rising up beside him, walking with his old familiar lilt. The dense, spicy smell of him, the brush of his shoulder and hip.

"Sornnn?"

Had to clear his throat first. "Yes."

She took his hand, and he squeezed back.

They had kept on walking and were now in sight of the western side of the villa. Someone was there, a solitary figure. Raan Tallus. Sornnn did not break stride but now it all seemed clear to him, laid out like an architect's holoprint, dimensions measured, angles calculated, length, width, height. Nothing left to chance. She had thought of everything.

Only one thread left to unravel. "You told me you know about this place because of Dacce. That's part of the truth but not all of it."

"No." That one word squeezed out of her, more difficult to say than any other in her life. This was why the knowledge had lain like a stone in her chest, why she had tried several times and been unable to tell him. Because she knew he was smart enough to work this out. She knew he knew already, only wanted her verbal confirmation. Still, it was difficult. Her throat was hot and full. She felt suffocated by the past, the mistake she had made.

"You were here yourself," he said, "without Dacce."

Of course he knew. She felt oddly proud of him. They kept walking, she made certain of that. Thefigure of Raan Tallus was tense and coiled, a spring about to be released. Staring into a portable data-screen, totally absorbed. What plots were being hatched on that readout? What evil concocted in the vast silence of this bucolic setting? I need to be here, I need s.p.a.ce to think, he had once told her, laughing. Solitude casts a spell over me, and I in turn cast a spell over others.

"I offered myself to him as a kind of revenge, to get back at Dacce. To make him jealous. At least that's what I told myself." The floodgates, once opened, thrown wide. The fierce joy of confession thundering through her. "But there was something else at work, something more powerful than simple revenge. My affair with Raan Tallus was a way of punishing myself. I could not break with Dacce, so I found another relationship that debased me further."

"Before or after?"

Her hearts contracted. "I was here with him before I found out what Dacce had done, what Raan Tallus had ordered him to do."

He nodded, seemed satisfied by her answer. They stood under the protection of another stand of heartwood. He still held her hand. He found that he did not want to let go, that it served as a kind of conduit. He felt her pain, and he fancied this connection would allow him to take it away. "It is difficult to live with such self-loathing." How he knew, having spent weeks blaming himself for Marethyn's death, hating himself for it. To think she had had years of it. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her, but he did not think it proper, did not in fact know whether it was what she wanted or needed. He felt her thorns, even then. It was a good feeling because they were a vital part of her. "It's good that you told me.

Everything."

"How many times I wanted to, SaTrryn! But I was afraid."

"Of what?"

He saw her look down, followed her gaze to their clasped hands. "I want to thank you."

Her eyes flicked up to gaze into his.

"For this gift. You have prepared it perfectly."

"Thank you, SaTrryn."

She put her hand on the back of his head, kissed his cheek tenderly, and he hugged her to him. They remained like that for a moment, dappled sunlight and shade moving over them with the swaying of the heartwood leaves. Sornnn thought how much she had come to mean to him.

"I want to continue our business arrangement," she said, when at length they drew apart. "I want you to take me to the Korrush."

He grew silent for a moment. Of course, he welcomed Leyytey's offer, but before he could return to the Korrush he needed to find Marethyn, he needed to see her, taste her, feel her. To a.s.sure himself that she was, indeed, alive and well. If Leyytey was with him, that might present a problem. She was, after all, a Fleet-Admiral's daughter. "Are you certain?" he said. "It was part of our scheme. I would not hold you to the contract you signed."

"I know, SaTrryn. But this is what I want. To forge my weapons for your tribal folk. To help them survive their war. There is a purpose in this that I think I have been searching for all my life."

A certain tension seemed to drain out of him, as if he had been vibrating all the time she had known him, and now, finally, he had come to rest.

"He likes to ride." He was staring through the glare of sunlight at Raan Tallus. "What else does he like to do?"

Wing-Adjutant Wiiin and the Khagggun Wing had decamped the highland slopes south of Stone Border, glumly wending their way back whence they had come. Wiiin himself was silent as the grave, seeing his career over, his head on a pike in front of the Wing-General's offices. Deep in mountain forests, green-black, dripping with dew, he took his own life, botching that, even, no clean line of death for him, but a slow, agonizing bleed, pecked at by carrion birds, by foraging mammals with sharp teeth and glittering eyes, out of sight of those who had laughed at him, whom he had sought to command. Withhim died any suspicion as to the cause of death- of the officer who had attacked the Nawatir in his guise as Khagggun.

All this Konara Inggres saw with her Third Eye. She should have felt compa.s.sion for Wiiin, so clearly a fish out of water, but she could summon none. Because of him the Nawatir had been gravely wounded.

Instead of moving with a spell to end Wiiin's suffering, she did nothing, withdrawing her consciousness back to the abbey.

Moonslight slanting in through the barred windows of the infirmary illuminated the Nawatir's face in a pool of celestial light. What emotions now stirred her-emotions she thought long ago atrophied. She had betrayed First Mother, not only in her heart but in every cell of her body. Her lips still burned at the contact with the Nawatir's mouth. She prayed now, as she had been praying since that one fateful kiss, beseeching Miina for guidance, for resolution. For peace. But it was a fool's endeavor, she knew that well enough. Miina was not concerned with the private lives of Her children, nor should She be. It was for Inggres and Inggres alone to solve a puzzle that could not be solved.

She ceased her prayers, but remained in a position of reflection. There was only one course open to her-the one that had always been there. Continue. What was in her heart must remain there, packed away, sealed. Forever untouched. He must never know what she felt for him. She could tell no one, least of all First Mother.

She put her head down. Felt, despite her resolve, the tidal pull of him. Burning from throat to cheeks, she put her hand on the Nawatir's chest. Her heart thrummed in her throat. Her body felt thick and swollen. The Ja-Gaar watched her incuriously with the cabochon jewels of their eyes, their tails swishing back and forth like the metronomes used at choir practice.

Besieged by anguish, she whispered his name, using a voice, a tone she would never use again. How acutely she felt her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her belly, her thighs-so aware of them that the silk seemed to abrade her flesh. How pleasurable the pain! How deeply inside her she must bury it.

"Inggres."

The sound of his voice, though low, gave her a start. There was a ringing in her ears, over which she could barely make out her stuttering reply. "I am here."

"I am not dead."

"No, Nawatir."

"Take my hand."

She hesitated only a fraction of an instant, and he was too groggy to notice. She slid her hand into his, felt a connection all the way through her bones. His touch felt so right.

"You are here in the abbey," she whispered thickly. "Safe now."

"Thank you." He pulled her down toward him, the smell of him like attar. "Inggres."

His lips brushed hers and she shivered. Their breaths commingled.

"No, Nawatir. No." Resisting him, herself. "This is wrong."