"You need help to recover your mother." Ruha spoke loudly to make herself heard over the quarrel. "Admit that, and you have taken your first step to becoming a man."

Tang jabbed his index finger against his wife's fore- head and shouted something angry at her, then whirled away and strode over to Ruha.

"I need no help to rescue Mother!" The prince glared at

Ruha for a moment, then stepped past her and started toward the door. "And I am no child-I prove that soon enough!"

Ten

The dungeon beneath the Ginger

Palace was unlike any of those dank, deep, dark places from which the

Harpers had taught Ruha to escape.

Instead of mildew and offal, it smelled of cedar and lamp oil, and the sound that filled its corridors was not the wail of tortured prisoners, but the silken swishing of Shou robes. The doors hung on brass hinges rather than leather straps, and they were made of red-lacquered mahogany instead of rusty iron-a con- struction that would make them no less sturdy once they were barred shut. The stone walls were smooth- plastered, washed with white lime, and a foot thick; the ceiling, nearly fifteen feet above, was formed by the exposed underside of the floor planks above, and therein lay the only weakness Ruha could find.

The long procession of guards reached an intersection and, when Wei Dao attempted to turn right, came to a sudden halt. The leader of the soldiers spoke to the princess in Shou. She replied sharply and pointed at

Ruha. The witch had again been gagged with her own veil, her arms were pinned behind her by two separate men, and she was surrounded by a ring of warriors hold- ing naked sword blades within inches other throat.

Though the lasal haze had already faded from her mind, Ruha's escort had been too attentive to allow her to

cast any spells, so she could not understand the conver- sation. Nevertheless, she had explored the dungeon dur- ing her initial search for Yanseldara's staff and could imagine what they were discussing. Down the left corri- dor lay the palace's tidy prison cells; down the right lay the gruesome chambers of torture and death, where there were certainly enough shackles, fetters, and jaw clamps to keep even a wu-jen from escaping.

Wei Dao prevailed over the commander and led the column to the right. Ruha brought a two-syllable sun spell to mind and, as the clumsy ensemble around her struggled to turn the corner, pretended to stumble. The ring of swordsmen jerked their blades back-Prince Tang had been most emphatic in saying he expected the pris- oner alive when he returned-and that was all the room the witch needed.

Slipping her gag as she had once before, Ruha picked her feet off the brick floor and kicked them both back- ward. Only one of her heels landed on target, smashing the knee of one of the guards holding her arms. The other missed its mark and slipped between the fellow's legs. As she pitched forward, the witch brought her foot up, catch- ing the soldier squarely in the groin. Both men screamed and released her arms, then landed beside her on the floor.

At once, Ruha rolled onto her side, looked toward one of the oil lamps hanging on the wall, then closed her eyes, covered her ears, and uttered her spell. There was an ear-splitting boom and a flash of light so brilliant it pained the witch's eyes even through their closed lids.

The next thing Ruha knew, she was lying beneath a heap of writhing Shou guards. If they were screaming, the witch could not hear them; the ringing in her own ears was so loud she could not have heard a thunderclap breaking over her head. Half expecting to feel a long steel blade driving between her ribs, she opened her eyes and crawled from beneath the heap of soldiers.

The entire line of guards lay on the white bricks, their

open mouths voicing screams the witch could not hear.

Some of the men held their ears and some covered their eyes, but they all remained too stunned to do more than writhe in pain. The oil lamp she had used for her spell was gone, leaving a huge sooty smudge above the sconce where it had hung, but neither the wall nor the ceiling had suffered any material damage from the detonation.

Ruha searched for Wei Dao's form at the head of the column, weighing the wisdom of wading through the tangle of bodies to retrieve her late husband's jambiya from the princess. Unfortunately, the witch could not be sure how soon her captors would begin recovering from their shock. The effects would normally last long enough for her to run an eighth league, but she had no way to tell how long she herself had been incapacitated. Besides, there were a dozen more guards at the entrance to the dungeon, and it would not be long before they arrived to investigate the detonation.

Ruha pulled a dagger from a soldier's belt, then stepped over him and three other quivering men and started down the left-hand corridor. As she moved, the witch kept a careful watch on the floor, stopping to pry out any pebbles lodged between bricks. It took only a few moments to fill her hand, for even the tidy Shou could not keep from tracking tiny stones inside, and it hardly seemed worth the effort to scrape them from the seams of a dungeon floor.

The witch glanced back down the corridor. Although

Wei Dao had not entirely recovered from her shock, she had risen and was picking her way down the corridor.

The princess's eyes had the blank, inert stare of sight- lessness, and she was moving her open hands in front of her body in an ever changing pattern of circular motions.

Ruha found her pursuer's determination more than a little alarming; only a very good fighter would feel confi- dent enough to carry the battle to a foe while both blind and deaf.

Ruha shook her pebbles and uttered the incantation of

a sand spell. The stones began to oscillate in her palm, scrubbing off two layers of skin before she could hurl them at the ceiling. They struck in a circle as broad as her shoulders and continued to vibrate, much too fast for the eye to follow. She heard a faint drone above the ring- ing in her ears, and a steady shower of powdered wood rained down on her shoulders. The witch hiked up the hem of her aba, then pressed her hands and feet against opposite walls and began to chimney up the walls of the corridor.

Ruha had climbed about ten feet when Wei Dao passed beneath her, still circling her hands before her body and staring vacantly ahead. The drone of the sand spell must have been loud enough for the princess to hear, for she stopped directly beneath the scouring pebbles and cocked her head. She turned her palm up to catch some of the powdered wood raining down her, then seemed to guess what was happening and started after the witch.

Ruha climbed to the ceiling and waited beside her circle of buzzing pebbles. The stones had dug a deep labyrinth of wormy grooves into the wood, and it would not be much longer before they scoured clear through.

Already, islands of plank were trembling as though they would fall at any moment, but the witch did not dare reach up to pull them loose. The whirling pebbles would take her fingers off.

A short distance below, Wei Dao had nearly climbed within arm's reach. She carried Ruh amp;'s jambiya clenched between her teeth, and her blinking, squinting eyes were fixed vaguely on the hem of the witch's aba. Down the corridor, the guards were beginning to rise and rub their heads. Deciding to attack before they gathered their wits,