clock marked the hours of the night in soft metallic counterpoint to the

singer, and as she pulled off her robes and prepared for sleep, Eiah was

amazed to see how early it was. The night had hardly exhausted its first

third. It had seemed longer. She put out the candles, pulled herself

into her bed, and drew the netting closed.

The night passed, and the day that followed it, and the day that

followed that. Eiah's life in Saraykeht had long since taken on a

rhythm. The mornings she spent at the palaces working with the court

physicians, the afternoons down in the city or in the low towns that

spread out from Saraykeht. To those who didn't know her, she gave

herself out to be a visitor from Cetani in the north, driven to the

summer cities by hardship. It wasn't an implausible tale. There were

many for whom it was true. And while it couldn't be totally hidden, she

didn't want to be widely known as her father's daughter. Not here. Not yet.

On a morning near the end of her second month in the city-two weeks

after Candles Night-the object of her hunt finally appeared. She was in

her rooms, working on a guide to the treatment of fevers in older

patients. The fire was snapping and murmuring in the grate and a thin,

cold rain tapped at the shutters like a hundred polite mice asking

permission to enter. The scratch at the door startled her. She arranged

her robe and opened the door just as the slave outside it was raising

her hand to scratch again.

"Eiah-cha," the girl said, falling into a pose that was equal parts

apology and greeting. "Forgive me, but there's a man ... he says he has

to speak with you. He has a message."

"From whom?" Eiah demanded.

"He wouldn't say, Most High," the slave said. "He said he could speak

only with you."

Eiah considered the girl. She was little more than sixteen summers. One

of the youngest in the cities of the Khaiem. One of the last.

"Bring him," Eiah said. The girl made a brief pose that acknowledged the

command and fled back out into the damp night. Eiah shuddered and went

to add more coal to the fire. She didn't close the door.

The runner was a young man, broad across the shoulder. Twenty summers,

perhaps. His hair was soaked and sticking to his forehead. His robe hung

heavily from his shoulders, sodden with the rain.

"Eiah-cha," he said. "Parit-cha sent me. He's at his workroom. He said

he has something and that you should come. Quickly."

She caught her breath, the first movements of excitement lighting her

nerves. The other times one or another of the physicians and healers and

herb women of the city had sent word, it had been with no sense of

urgency. A man ill one day was very likely to be ill the next as well.

This, then, was something different.

"What is it?" she asked.

The runner took an apologetic pose. Eiah waved it away and called for a

servant. She needed a thick robe. And a litter; she wasn't waiting for

the firekeeper. And now, she needed them now. The Emperor's daughter got

what she wanted, and she got it quickly. She and the boy were on the

streets in less than half a hand, the litter jouncing uncomfortably as

they were carried through the drizzle. The runner tried not to seem awed

at the palace servants' fear of Eiah. Eiah tried not to bite her

fingernails from anxiety. The streets slid by outside their shelter as

Eiah willed the litter bearers to go faster. When they reached Parit's

house, she strode through the courtyard gardens like a general going to war.

Without speaking, Parit ushered her to the back. It was the same room in

which she'd seen the last woman. Parit sent the runner away. There were

no servants. There was no one besides the two physicians and a body on

the wide slate table, covered by a thick canvas cloth soaked through

with blood.

"They brought her to me this morning," Parit said. "I called for you

immediately."

"Let me see," Eiah said.

Parit pulled back the cloth.

The woman was perhaps five summers older than Eiah herself, darkhaired

and thickly built. She was naked, and Eiah saw the wounds that covered

her body: belly, breasts, arms, legs. A hundred stab wounds. The woman's

skin was unnaturally pale. She'd bled to death. Eiah felt no revulsion,

no outrage. Her mind fell into the patterns she had cultivated all her

life. This was only death, only violence. This was where she was most at

home.

"Someone wasn't happy with her," Eiah said. "Was she a soft-quarter whore?"

Parit startled, his hands almost taking a pose of query. Eiah shrugged.

"That many knife wounds," she said, "aren't meant only to kill. Three or

four would suffice. And the spacing of them isn't what I've seen when

the killer had simply lost control. Someone was sending a message."

"She wasn't stabbed," Parit said. He took a cloth from his sleeve and

tossed it to her. Eiah turned back to the corpse, wiping the blood away

from a wound in the dead woman's side. The smear of gore thinned. The

nature of the wound became clear.

It was a mouth. Tiny rosebud lips, slack as sleep. Eiah told her hand to

move, but for a long moment her flesh refused her. Then, her breath

shallow, she cleaned another. And then another.

The woman was covered with babies' mouths. Eiah's fingertips traced the

tiny lips that had spilled the woman's lifeblood. It was a death as

grotesque as any Eiah had heard in the tales of poets who had tried to

bind the andat and fallen short.

Tears filled her eyes. Something like love or pity or gratitude filled

her heart to bursting. She looked at the woman's face for the first

time. The woman hadn't been pretty. A thick jaw, a heavy brow, acne

pocks. Eiah held back from kissing her cheek. Parit was confused enough

as it stood. Instead, Eiah wiped her eyes on her sleeve and took the

dead woman's hand.

"What happened?" she asked.

"The watch saw a cart going west out of the soft quarter," Parit said.

"The captain said there were three people, and they were acting nervous.

When he hailed them, they tried to run."

"Did he catch them?"

Parit was staring at Eiah's hand clasping the dead woman's fingers.

"Parit," she said. "Did he catch them?"

"What? No. No, all three slipped away. But they had to abandon the cart.

She was in it," Parit said, nodding at the corpse. "I'd asked anything

unusual to be brought to me. I offered a length of silver."

"They earned it," Eiah said. "Thank you, Parit-kya. I can't tell you how