"But Quience has no children yet, does he?"

"None that are regarded as mattering, and he has yet to decide who to marry, but even if he was concerned only for his own reign, he might still want to see the Protectorate fail."

"Dear me. I had no idea we were quite so surrounded by enemies."

"I'm afraid we are, my lady."

"Ah. Here we are."

The old stone-built building across the crowded street from them was the paupers" hospital. It was here Perrund had wanted to come with her basket of foods and medicines. "My old home," she said, staring over the heads of the people. A small troop of colourfully dressed soldiers appeared round a corner and came marching down the street, attended by a boy drummer at their head, tearful women to each side and capering children behind. Everybody turned to look except Perrund. Her gaze remained fixed on the worn, stained stones of the old hospital across the street.

DeWar looked this way and that. "Have you been back since?" he asked.

"No. But I have kept in touch. I have sent them some little things in the past. I thought it would be amusing to deliver them myself this time. Oh. What are those?" The troop of soldiers was passing in front of them. The soldiers wore bright red and yellow uniforms and polished metal hats. Each carried a long wood-mounted metal tube slung slanted across their shoulders and waving in the air above their gleaming helmets.

"Musketeers, my lady," DeWar told her. "And that is Duke Simalg's banner at their head."

"Ah. These are the musket guns. I have heard about them."

DeWar watched the troop pass with a troubled, distracted look. "UrLeyn won't have them in the palace," he said eventually. "They can be useful on the battlefield."

The sound of the beating drum faded. The street filled again with its ordinary commerce. A gap opened in the traffic of carts and carriages between them and the hospital, and DeWar thought they would take advantage of it, but Perrund lingered on the pavement, her hand clutching at his forearm while she stared at the ornate and time-stained stonework of the ancient building.

DeWar cleared his throat. "Will there be anybody there from when you were?"

"The present matron was a nurse when I was here. It's her I've corresponded with. - Still she did not move.

"Were you here long?"

"Only ten days or so. It was only five years ago, but it seems much longer." She kept staring at the building.

DeWar was not sure what to say. "It must have been a difficult time."

From what he had succeeded in teasing from her over the past few years, DeWar knew that Perrund had been brought here suffering from a terrible fever. She and eight of her sisters, brothers and cousins had been refugees from the war of succession during which UrLeyn had taken control of Tassasen following the fall of the Empire. Travelling from the southlands where the fighting had been worst, they had made for Crough, along with a large part of the rest of the population of Tassasen's south. The family had been traders in a market town, but most of them had been killed by the King's forces when they had taken the town from UrLeyn's troops. The General's men had retaken it, with UrLeyn at their head, but by then Perrund and her few remaining relatives were on the road for the capital.

They had all contracted some form of plague on the journey and only a hefty bribe had got them through the city gates at all. The least sick of them had driven their wagon to one of the old royal parks where refugees could camp and the last of their money had paid for a doctor and medicines. Most of them had died then. Perrund had been found a place in the paupers" hospital. She had come close to death but then recovered. When she had gone in search of the rest of her family her quest had ended at the lime pits beyond the city walls where people had been buried hundreds at a time.

She had thought of killing herself then, but was afraid to, and besides considered that as Providence had seen fit to have her recover from the plague, perhaps she was not meant to die quite yet. There was, anyway, a general feeling that the worst of times might be over. The war had ended, the plague had all but disappeared and order had returned to Crough and was returning to the rest of Tassasen.

Perrund had helped out at the hospital, sleeping on the floor of one of the great open wards where people wept and shouted and moaned throughout the day and night. She had begged for food in the street and she had turned down many an offer that would have let her buy food and comfort with her sex, but then a eunuch of the palace harem — UrLeyn's, now that the old King was dead — had visited the hospital. The doctor who had found Perrund a place in the hospital had told a friend at court that she was a great beauty, and — once she had been persuaded to clean her face and put on a dress — the eunuch had thought her suitable.

So she was recruited to the languid opulence of the harem, and became a frequent choice of the Protector. What would have seemed like a restrictive kind of luxury, even a sort of well-furnished prison to the young woman she had been a year earlier, when she and her family were living together and peaceably in their prosperous little market town, she saw instead, after the war and everything that had come with it, as a blessed sanctuary.

Then had come the day when UrLeyn and various of his court favourites, including some of his concubines, were to be painted by a famous artist. The artist brought with him a new assistant who turned out to have a mission of rather more serious intent than simply helping to fix UrLeyn's and the others" likenesses in paint, and only Perrund throwing herself between his knife and UrLeyn had saved the Protector's life.

"Shall we?" DeWar asked, when Perrund still had not moved from the pavement.

She looked at him as though she had forgotten he was there, then she smiled from the depths of the hood. "Yes," she said. "Yes, let's."

She held his arm tightly as they crossed the street.

"Tell me more about Lavishia."

"Where? Oh, Lavishia. Let me think. Well now, in Lavishia everybody is able to fly."

"Like birds? Lattens asked.

"Just like birds," DeWar confirmed. "They can leap from cliffs and tall buildings — of which there are a great many in Lavishia — or they can just run along the street and jump into the air and soar away up into the sky."

"Do they have wings??

"They do have wings but they are invisible wings."

"Can they fly to the suns?"

"Not on their own. To fly to the suns they have to use ships. Ships with invisible sails."

"Don't they burn in the heat of the suns??

"Not the sails, they're invisible and the heat goes straight through them. But the wooden hulls scorch and blacken and burst into flame if they go too close, of course."

"How far is it to the suns?"

"I don't know, but people say that they are different distances away, and some clever people claim that they are both very far away indeed."

"These would be the same clever people called mathematicians who tell us the world is a ball, and not flat," Perrund said.

"They would," DeWar confirmed.

A travelling troupe of shadow players had come to court. They had set up in the palace's theatre, whose plaster windows had shutters which could be closed against the light. They had stretched a white sheet very tightly across a wooden frame whose lower edge was just above head height. Below the frame hung a black cloth. The white screen was lit from behind by a single strong lamp set some distance back. Two men and two women manipulated the two-dimensional puppets and their accompanying shadow-scenery, using thin sticks to make the characters" limbs and bodies swivel. Effects like waterfalls and flames were achieved using thin strips of dark paper and bellows to make them flutter. Using a variety of voices, the players told ancient stories of kings and queens, heroes and villains, fidelity and betrayal and love and hate.