Now the frustration was starting to cloud his thoughts, making him prickly and despondent. Worse, everyone close to him knew it, which annoyed him even more, especially as he couldn’t tell them the reason.

He let out a frustrated sigh and rolled cleanly off the bed without waking Kristabel. His third hand snatched up the clothes he wanted, and they drifted silently through the air behind him as he tiptoed out into the corridor. Once he was dressed, he pulled his black cloak about him and marched off to the central stairs. When he reached them, he threw a concealment around himself and simply vaulted over the banister rails to plummet the ten floors down to the ground. It was stupid, and exhilarating, and he hadn’t done anything like it for years.

Makkathran buoyed him up as he asked, controlling his fall. When he reached the floor, his boots landed with a gentle thud. He strode through the deserted cloisters of the ground floor to the ziggurat’s private mooring platform. It was long past midnight, which left very little traffic on the Great Major Canal. He waited for a minute as a gondola slipped into the High Pool, its lantern disappearing around the curving wall. Then, with the waterway clear, he reached out with his third hand and steadied the water. Another thing he hadn’t done in years.

Edeard ran straight across the canal. When he was halfway across, the farsight caught him. It was so inevitable, he was almost ready for it.

“I’ll find you one day,” he longtalked down the strand of perception that stretched across the city to Cobara. “You know I will.”

The farsight ended so fast, it was as if it had been broken. Edeard grinned to himself and reached a public mooring platform, where the wooden steps took him up to Eyrie.

The crooked towers stretched away ahead of him. Around the lower quarter of each one, slender streaks of orange light shone out of their dark wrinkled fascias, illuminating the deserted streets that wove between them. But the upper sections were jet black, cutting sharply across the nebula-swathed sky.

It was instinct that drew him there. The Lady’s scriptures spoke of how the ill and infirm and old used to wait atop the towers; then, as the Skylord flew above the city, their souls would ascend to be guided away from Querencia. He reached the tower close to the Lady’s grand church, where so many years ago conspirators from the families had thrown him off the top. It was one of the tallest in Eyrie, which would put him as close to the Skylord as anything in Makkathran. Pushing aside any reservations about the location and its resonances, he walked up the central staircase, spiraling around and around until he finally reached the top and stood on the broad circular platform that crowned the tower. Eight spikes stuck up from the edge, their twisted tips stretching a further forty feet above the platform itself.

The nostalgia he was feeling now wasn’t good. This was where Medath had waited after luring him up. This was where the other Grand Family conspirators had overpowered him and-He grimaced as he stared over at the section of the lip where he’d been shoved over. After so long, over forty years, he really shouldn’t have been bothered by it, yet the memory was disturbingly clear. So much so that he even searched with farsight to make perfectly sure no one else was around.

Stupid, Edeard scolded himself. He abruptly sat down cross-legged on the platform and tipped his head back to gaze up at the sky. Gicon’s Bracelet was visible above the spikes in the western hemisphere, the planets gleaming bright just off the border of the Ku nebula’s marvelous aquamarine glow. Even though he knew exactly where to look, the Skylord wasn’t yet visible to the naked eye. Instead Edeard called to it. All of his mind’s strength was focused into a single thought of welcome, one he visualized streaming out through space.

And eventually the Skylord answered.

Finitan had retired to one of the houses the Eggshaper Guild maintained in Tosella for its distinguished elderly members who’d retired from active duties. It was a big boxy structure with a swath of delicate magenta and verdure Plateresque-style decoration running around the outside of the third floor. There were no guards posted outside, only a ge-hound curled up beside the gate, which took one look at Edeard and yawned. Back when Edeard had arrived in the city, every large building had had some kind of sentry detail. Families and guilds had maintained almost as many guards as the city regiments. Now their numbers were dwindling, with old duties like the door sentry handed over to genistars once again.

Edeard walked through the open wooden gates into the central courtyard, where white and scarlet flowering gurkvine grew up the walls to the upper balconies and a fountain played cheerfully in the central pond. Several ge-chimps were tending the heavily scented flower beds, with another sweeping the gray-white flooring. He went up the broad central stairs to the third floor.

A young Novice was waiting at the top of the stairs, her blue and white robe immaculate. She bowed her head slightly. “Waterwalker.”

“How is he?”

“A better day, I think. The pain is not so great this morning. He is lucid.”

“He’s taking the potions, then?”

She smiled in regret “When he wants to or when the pain becomes too much.”

“Can I see him?”

“Of course.”

Finitan’s room had long slim windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. The walls and ceiling were white, and the floor was a polished red-brown flecked with emerald in the shape of minute leaves, as if they’d been fossilized in the city substance. It was furnished equally simply, with a desk and several deep chairs. The bed was large, half-recessed in a semicircular alcove. Finitan was sitting up in the center of it, his back resting on a pile of firm pillows.

“I’ll be outside,” the Novice said quietly, and closed the heavy carved door.

Edeard walked over to the bed, and his third hand lifted one of the chairs over. He sat down and studied his old friend. Finitan was quite thin now; the disease seemed to be consuming him from within. Even so, up until a few months ago he had weathered it well; now he was visibly frail. Blue veins stood proudly from pale skin, and what was left of his fine hair was a faded gray.

Edeard’s farsight examined the body, exposing the malignant growths around his lungs and thorax.

“Don’t be so bloody nosy,” Finitan wheezed.

“Sorry. I just …”

“Want to see if it’s retreating, if I’m getting better?”

“Something like that, yes.”

Finitan managed a weak smile. “Not a chance. The Lady is calling. To be honest, I’m always quite surprised these days when I still find myself waking up of a morning.”

“Don’t say that.”

“For the Lady’s sake, Edeard, accept I am dying. I did quite some time ago. Or are you going to start making politician’s talk about how I’ll be up and about soon? Cheer my spirits up?”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Thank the Lady. Those bloody Novices do. They think it helps, while what it really does is get me depressed. Can you imagine that? I’ve got a gaggle of twenty-year-old girls fussing over me, and all I want is for them to shut up and get out. What kind of an ending is that for a man?”

“Dignified?”

“Sod dignity. I know how I’d rather go. Wouldn’t that be something, eh? Scandalizing everyone at the finish.”

Edeard grinned, though he felt like crying. “That would indeed be something. Perhaps the doctor knows of some concoction that would give you a final burst of strength.”

“That’s better. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. Especially now, when you should be out campaigning. How’s it going, by the way?”

“Well, Trahaval’s a certainty. I’m not sure about me; in private, my campaign people tell me there’s only a couple of percent in it. Yrance might be returned as Chief Constable.” He bit back on his irritation.