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  Behind her, Shkai'ra Mek Kermak's-kin put hands to hips and pivoted a slow circle on one heel. "Best room?" she asked. All the furnishings were old but sound, like the inn itself. There were deep troughs in the oak doorsill, foot-worn. The Kchnotet Vurm wasn't the best in the city but it certainly wasn't the worst; what had Megan said—ah yes, the "noisiest." Around her feet a battered black tomcat wound, blinked, seemed to stretch out in an arc that landed on the bed; there he sat like a small idol, eyes slitted, forefeet kneading happily into the softness.

  "Dah." Megan came in and closed the shutter so the candleflame steadied.

  "We've had better," the Kommanza continued. Although they had known what she meant when she asked for an armor stand; no matter how carefully you packed a suit, it was better for the lacings if you stood it upright. She stood back to admire hers standing in the corner, the liquid shine of the black-lacquered surfaces and scarlet trim. Then she gave the fiberglass backings a quick inspection; they could come loose from the bullhide if the glue went moldy, and all the gods knew it had been trouble enough dragging it from the other side of the Lannic. The watertight chest had saved their lives once though, keeping them afloat through a shipwreck.

  "And worse," Megan said. "At least we're not head to heels with seventeen other travelers." Megan was unpacking her personal chest; books, scrolls, curios, a collection of knives ranging from tiny things that could be bent into a beltbuckle or held concealed in a palm to miniature shorts words. Last of all, a needlesword with a bell guard. She considered it almost distastefully, then leaned it against the wall by the bed. "Much worse, if—" She stopped and clapped a hand to her forehead as Shkai'ra set up a small six-armed joss on the windowledge. "Oh, no, no more sacrifices in our bedroom!"

  The tall woman shrugged. "Glitch can have his sheep outside."

  "Thank you Koru, Goddess. Much worse places, if you remember that fisher shack we were stuck in all last winter on that damned island—"

  "Not so bad, once the smell faded," Shkai'ra said, bouncing experimentally on the bed. "If there'd been any place to go, we wouldn't have ended up so near murdering each other." A grin. "Not that we didn't find some things to occupy our time, eh? Mind you, you're near as bad on shipboard, when you can't have a cabin to yourself; and you a riverboat captain! Half the time up the mast, especially those last few days."

  Megan laid down the bag of clothing and locked eyes with her companion. "This…" She moistened her lips. "I've been two years away, kh'eeredo." She paused, remembering. "I've never told you that story, have I?"

  Shkai'ra unlatched the walrus-ivory buckles on her boots and braced heel against instep to pull them off. "No," she said, turning on one side and lying propped up on an elbow. "Not the details, just that Habiku was your second and betrayed you." She reached out a hand, a brief light touch. "Got the impression he was… hmmm, likeable but suspicious. Hard to distrust someone likeable; which is why we Kommanza try so hard to dislike everybody." The blonde woman smiled, a quiet, almost shy expression, unlike her usual raffish grin."Make an exception for you, kh'eeredo."

  Megan smiled back, sat down on the bed. "Thanks; after more than a year of sleeping together, it's nice to know." She poked Shkai'ra in the ribs with her bare toe. "Up on the mast I'd think about him, too," she said, going very quiet, very still. "The night he betrayed me he came in after his swim, carrying an expensive bottle of wine— A Yeoli wine. A Terahan 1541 by their reckoning, year of the Ash Gryphon.

  "I had been watching him like a cat at a mousehole because I suspected everyone then. I thought he'd been the start of a couple of abortive attempts against me but I had no proof. Oh, he was so careful. He never pushed me. Never mocked me. Never threatened my—my stability, you might say. He was a good sailor, knew the river like he knew the inside of his eyelids. So good. So patient with my quirks." She smiled bitterly. "And it was all lies, of course."

  "I can tell you word for word what happened. 'Captain,' he says in that soft voice of his. 'I… we thought it appropriate to bring you this.' I should have known. I should have realized, but I never thought he'd do something so obvious as to offer me a gift. He told me it was a combination name day and birthday gift from the crew." He grinned at me, eyes twinkling. "He had some story about how little I paid them so they could only afford one gift."

  Megan's hand tightened on the wooden rail of the footboard. "I was stupid enough to believe him. It flustered me. I even thanked him. " I stammered and blushed like an idiot. He even got a smile out of me. Even Shyll didn't make me sputter like that. "He even pretended to drink a glass with me." Megan let the coils of her braids down and scrubbed at her temples; the silverwhite streak in her hair caught at the light of the flame.

  "I still remember locking the door behind him; thinking that his smile was a bit strange. Then I remember the dizziness. I had enough time to stagger over to my chair, wondering why the ship was rocking like that, and I heard the leather hinges as he opened my door. 'I'm sorry that you trusted me,' is what he said. 'I'm sorry you trusted me!' The fishgutted bastard had dosed me with God'sTears. The last I recall before I woke up aboard the slave ship is him wrapping me in a cloak and lifting me. I still haven't figured out why he didn't just drop me overboard. I suppose he had a grudge and thought I'd hurt more if he sold me safely for away. Stupid of him."

  "Ia," Shkai'ra said, in her own tongue. For a moment teeth showed between thinned lips, and the skull beneath her fair skin glanced out through her face. "Very foolish…"

  Megan stretched, shook the memory out of her head as she combed out her hair with her fingers, scratched Ten-Knife-Foot under his chin; he was getting grey there like a jowly old man. A purr rewarded her as she watched Shkai'ra get up to make a minor adjustment to the incense sticks in front of the idol. "Don't you think that the little godlet of fuck-ups might ignore us more if you didn't keep dinning your presence into his ears?"

  "Hai!" Shkai'ra snorted. "He'd be mortally offended if I ignored him. After all, if it hadn't been for him, Fehinna would have been much worse." She sighed: her memories of that kingdom of peculiar savageries were happy, mostly. It was where Megan and she had met, after all; Megan come west-over-sea across the Lannic, she herself wandering down from the interior of Almerkun, from the prairies.

  "Imagine the things that could have gone wrong on top of what did happen." she continued.

  Ten-Knife-Foot stretched and stalked regally across the bed and out the open window. Shkai'ra's mood darkened; the cat walked a little more stiffly than he had. The Zinghut Muth'a, the Black Crone, had her hand on him, as on all that lived.

  What hasn't gone wrong for me, one time or another? she thought. Exile—well, that had been her own choice. Bitter memory arose: Stonefort, in the Komman of Granfor. The draughty halls of the keep and smoking fires and the roaring clamor of the Salute rising to the morning sun from a tower. Riding the spring steppe, through a foam of flowers, a sweetness so strong it made you drunk like lifewater or cloudberry mead; the bow in her hands and the coughing grunt of the tiger about to charge. Feasting, dancers wild with dream-smoke leaping the firetrench; the pride of bearing the god-born Mek Kermak blood, offering to the Mighty Ones; victory, glory ...

  And winter bivouacs, her mind prompted. Riding picket against nomad raiders, sacked villages and children roasted and eaten over the embers of their homes. Fleas and filth and cruelty, the endless intrigues of power, knives in the dark, poison in the cup, arrows out of the sloughgrass thickets. Each season a repetition of the last, fighting to hold the wild folk at bay long enough to bring in the harvest. The bottomless black pits of a shamans eyes, windows into a soul rotted empty with drugs and sacrifice and magic…

  Long years after that. Drifting southward from the valley of the Red River, selling the skills with horse and lance and bow that were all a Kommanz aristocrat knew. A mercenary's life, a war without purpose or end; squalid siege camps and the dread of fever, loot that always somehow dribbled through your fingers and left you with less than you had before. One campaign after another, fly-blown bodies under southern suns, peasants staring at you with sick brutalized eyes as you rode by the swollen-bellied village children, a comrade's scream as the pikepoint went into her belly, climbing a storming-ladder as the flamethrower nozzles turned their blackened snouts toward her…

  Until I reached the shores of the Lannic and met you, she thought, looking up from her musings to Megan. Since then it's all seemed… fresher, somehow. Or is it only that you had a purpose, and a goal?

  "Fehinna was…" She paused. "Fun."

  Megan snorted. "If you define fun as nearly being eaten alive in the sewers by the crawlers, tortured, chased by the Sniffers…"

  Shkai'ra lay back on the bed and linked her hands behind her head. "Fun rescuing you, kheeredo," she amplified. "And just think, Baiwun hammer me flat and Jaiwun strike me barren, if I hadn't decided to rescue you one more time on the docks, I wouldn't have been chased on board ship and you wouldn't have had someone to look after you all these weary years—"

  "Rescue?" Megan whirled and pounced, landing with knees astride Shkai'ra's chest, grabbed a red-blonde braid in each hand. "If I had to list all the times a certain loud, clumsy, often drunken, large, over-sexed—" She interrupted herself to pull Shkai'ra's head up to kiss her. "—barbarian had to be rescued! How about the beams of a certain sweet factory? Or a plank floating on the open ocean? Or a ledge in—" Shkai'ra reached up and shut her up by kissing her, grabbed her in a hug around her back and rolled on top of her. Megan went with it, relaxed, wrapped her legs around and squeezed.

  The Kommanza smiled, gasped and wheezed, "hhEnough! You'll squeeze the breath out of me!" With one hand she reached up and began tickling Megan under the short ribs and they rolled over on the bed, wrestling. Then the Kommanza had her pinned, used her weight—

  "Shkai'ra. Let. Go." Megan's voice was flat. She lay still under Shkai'ra, her good-natured struggles gone in the snap of a finger. Shkai'ra heard the panic in her voice and stopped, let go. This had happened before. Somehow the old fear would well up in the Zak woman, a fear that Sarngeld, who had owned her when she was a child, had carefully cultivated. The one asshole's making her vulnerable to the second, Shkai'ra thought. Megan lay still, clenched her fists so she wouldn't claw her lover, and shivered.

  "I'm sorry, akribhan. I try. I try so hard sometimes but when you just hold me down, I look up and it doesn't matter that I love you, that I know you, that you'd never hurt me…"

  "Shush, I know. It's all right, kh'eeredo." Shkai'ra grinned, a bit forcedly, and tickled Megan's chin with one of her braids. "I know it isn't me you're afraid of." She hugged, warm and careful. More careful than anyone outside this room would have believed. She raised herself on one elbow and traced Megan's mouth as the Zak lay in the crook of her arm, looking troubled. "It's getting better. I should know."

  Megan turned and pressed her face into Shkai'ra's shoulder. "I'm just tired of being afraid."

  "I know." Over the Zak's dark head, Shkai'ra's face darkened as she thought of Sarngeld, but he was dead and out of reach. Ten-Knife jumped up on the bed, looking proud of himself, and dropped a large dead rat on them; his first kill on a new territory. Megan laughed at Shkai'ra's shout of outrage.

  "Out! OUT, you rabid night-stalker! Oh, sheepshit, Megan, he's gone under the bed with it. Stop laughing! It isn't funny at all!"

  Chapter Two

  MANOR OF THE SLEEPING DRAGON

  F'TALEZON, UPPER BREZHAN RIVER NEW CHEAPSTREET, NEAR THE LADY SHRINETENTH IRON CYCLE, SIXTH DAY

  Habiku threw himself down by the lapdesk under the east window, smiling.

  He was a small man, though tall for one with Zak blood, with fine-chiseled features, somewhat gone to good living, as if a sculptor had taken a statue of a strongly muscled athlete and coated it with an inch of yellow tallow that had sagged with heat. His eyes were a clear amber color, and the curly brown hair still refused to be tamed by a comb, dropping one lock down over his right eye. His cream-colored tunic was immaculate, with white lace at the throat as well as the wrists.

  "Master." Lixa, his debt-slave, handed him his goblet. Her voice was soft nd pleasing. "There is word from the south." The rain was turning to light, slushy snow. He looked at her and was annoyed by her quietness. He had worked hard to get it, but had bought the woman for her wildness as well as her resemblance to the dead… He leaned back into the office cushions. Windows ringed them all around save where the door led to the stairwell; it had been her office, as she had furnished it. The cushions, the teakwood lapdesk and hangings were from all along the Brezhan, even an abstract piece from the teRyadn steppe to the east. Of course, he no longer had to defer to her love of barrenness; there were Raku spirit-poles between the windows now, carved scarlet satin-wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. On a bronze stand was a Hriis prayer-box, fantastically ornate with gold and scrollwork. Idly, he wondered how the Karibal river pirates had come by it. Luckily they had no eye for fine things; brightness and gaud caught their eye, like magpies, and they charged accordingly. Although they've acquired a shrewd sense of what gold means to us, he mused; it was odd, considering that they were scarcely even human, now. Schotter had picked it out for him, down in Brahvniki; the Thane merchant had a talent for finding jewels among trash. He raised an immaculate eyebrow at Lixa.

  "Well?"

  "There is word from Teik Schotter Valders'sen. Things are going well in Brahvniki, but there was a fight at the counting house. He sent a letter with details. It's on the desk."

  "Hmm. Well, I'll read it later. I'm sure they handled it." His eyes focused on her and he smiled, a baring of teeth that had nothing to do with affection. She was one of the reasons he was glad his mother's rooms were far away. Lixa was a tiny woman, just over four feet tall, with clear white skin and ebony black hair, classically Zak. She was staring at her bare feet so that her eyes were hidden but he knew the color matched her hair. "You're a lovely piece, Lixa." He was disappointed that she didn't react. She used to. She stood, silent and tense, until he beckoned with his ringless hand. "Come, come, my dear. We wouldn't want your parents to hear of your dumb-beast insolence, now, would we?"

  She stepped into his reach, passive. He ran a proprietary hand down her hip, feeling her quiver, feeling her want to move away. He left his hand on her, waiting to see if she'd fight him.

  "No, master," she said, eyes downcast, hiding the hate he knew was there. He smiled silkenly.

  "Remember, darling. I own you and all of your kin. Your parents are too old to take your beatings. You want to please me, don't you?"

  "Vilist, Teik."

  "Well, that's good. I will be dining with my mother. You will come to my room this evening."

  "Yes, Teik."

  He watched her as she walked to the inlaid wooden door of his sanctum, bare feet soundless on the plush green rug, then scraping faintly on the grey stone, irritated by the subdued tilt of her shoulders under her wool shift. The light oak of the slave-links hanging from neck to one wrist clicked as she moved. It had taken so much to get quiet answers from her. It had been so enjoyable. It was no coincidence that she was small, and dark, and had been wild. He owned Lixa and Lixa looked like her … but Whitlock was gone, dead. Vhsant had killed her. The slave would look better if he had her bleach the color from the lock of hair at the temple.

  Life is good, he thought.

  EARLY EVENING

  BALCONY AROUND THE ATRIUM

  OF THE SLAF HIKARME

  Habiku strolled down the third floor corridor toward his mothers quarters.

  Arches to his right opened onto the central courtyard. The milky white glow through the steel-bound alabaster roof was faint and the lanterns hanging from the metal girders were giving off their glow and a feint scent of heated canola oil.

  He drew a deep breath of it, along with the eternal F'talezonian scents of wool rugs and slightly damp stone, the wealth-smells of polished wood and wax and incense. Windows to his left were sizable panes of rare imported Arkan plate glass trimmed to fit the pointed arches. Snow tapped faintly against the glass and melted, streaking the view of the narrow strip of brown lawn about the house; that was an arrogant boast of power, within the walls of the City, where space was always precious.

  The streaked glass blurred his view west, down to the river, but memory painted the details. F'talezon was a mountain city, built up a sloping, V-shaped valley with its broad end facing the water and a long stream dividing it; there was a lake between the city and the Brezhan, and water tumbled into the greater stream over a natural cliff and moving floodgates of metal that were one of the wonders of the northern world. Down there was the Lake Quarter, where the untouchable corpse-handlers and poor foreigners and vagrants dwelt in hovels built among three thousand years of ruins.

  A long climb. He had lived there once, a tall blond half-foreign child in this witch city whose folk were small and dark and despised all outsiders. The more so if their poverty left them nothing but their Zak blood to take pride in.

  F'talezon was like that: a grey, aged pile that had seen the days of its glory come, and go, and come again, until the layers and the legends ran together as the crumbling buildings did… A long climb up the valley, there were ancient, obscene jokes of how each class drank the piss of the one above. Tumbled, steep-pitched roofs of dark slate over buildings of plain dark stone, the fringing cliffs on either side tunneled like maggot-ridden cheese with old mines and quarries, still worked or abandoned or made over into teeming warrens for the poor, back into darkness where only rumor went.