Once they were safely out of Silavia's earshot, Ruha said, "I am expecting a-" she yawned, "-a visit from

Vaerana."

Jarvis missed a step and nearly fell, filling the stair- well with a ringing clamor as he thrust a hand out to catch himself.

"Is something wrong?" Ruha found the guard's conster- nation puzzling. "Has she been here already?"

Jarvis shook his head and smoothed his tabard. "I

haven't seen the Lady Constable, but that doesn't mean

she hasn't been here. She might come through the pas- sage from Moon Tower, and I would never know it."

Ruha considered this worrisome possibility, then rejected it as quickly as it entered her mind. Had Vaer- ana already come and gone, she would certainly have left a message with the guards.

Jarvis stopped at a landing and opened a doorway into the main part of the tower, where a short corridor led to a vaulted alcove that served as one of the fortress's exterior arrow loops. He escorted Ruha past three doors, two with loud rumbling snores reverberating through the wood, then opened a fourth. The chamber inside was as lavishly furnished as it was small, with wool tapestries on the walls, a true wooden bed, a small table with a pitcher and basin, and a stone bench built into the alcove of another arrow loop.

Jarvis lit a tallow pot hanging inside the door, then stepped aside to let Ruha enter. "I'll tell Vaerana which room you're in."

"That is very kind. And do you know Captain Fowler?"

Jarvis's eyes widened slightly. "The half-ore?"

"Yes. If he asks for me, please fetch me at ence."

The guard nodded, then backed into the hall and pulled the door shut. Ruha sat on the stone bench and peered out the arrow loop at the side of a wooded hill.

She leaned her head back against the wall and felt her heavy eyelids beginning to descend. She did not have the strength to raise them.

Tang lay facedown on the dark mountainside, his toes kicked deep into the slippery mud to keep from sliding through the ferns down into the swamp. Though he had his palms pressed tightly over his ears, he could not shut out the voices of the dead. The spirits of his soldiers kept wailing at him. Their words were incoherent, but he knew what they wanted. He could feel their craving, deep

down in his abdomen where his own shrunken spirit cow- ered like that of a frightened peasant. They needed him to look at them, to acknowledge the futility of their sacri- fice, to intercede with Yen-Wang-Yeh and tell the Great

Judge that they had died bravely and well and that their mission had failed through no fault of their own.

Tang could not bring himself to utter the prayer. To concede their valor was to admit he had suffered defeat at the hands of a barbarian; worse, it was to admit defeat at his own hands. When his soldiers laughed at him, he had let his embarrassment dictate General Fui's death.

The price for that arrogance had been the failure of his assault, and the prince did not care to admit-to himself or his ancestors-that he been had such a fool. If that made him a coward, so be it; Shou princes were taught to be cowards, and forgetting that lesson had been the cause of his ignoble defeat.

Tang's resolve only made the voices echo louder inside his head. He rolled onto his back and sat up. Midnight gloom filled the swamp below like a funeral pyre's black smoke, spreading an oily, clinging ink over everything it touched. The darkness was broken only by a faint fox fire glow that illuminated the floating corpses of the scream- ing dead soldiers.

"Silence, I command!" Tang hissed. "Present your- selves at Ten Courts and leave me in peace!"

A gentle sloshing sounded below. Something broke the surface of the black water, sending a crazy pattern of rip- pling, ghost-faint lights bouncing off invisible cypress trunks. Tang froze, praying the disturbance had been caused by a restless alligator.

It was impossible to say how long the prince stared into the darkness. He was not conscious of breathing until long after the air had grown heavy with silence and the pond had returned to its glassy stillness. It occurred to him that the voices of his dead soldiers had fallen quiet; then he sensed a pair of long reptilian necks rising from the black water. He did not see the creatures so

much as feel a pair of lighter, warmer presences among the cypress trees below, but he knew without doubt that his craven outburst of whispering had drawn the atten- tion of Cypress's wyverns.

Tang had not expected the two reptiles to emerge froni the cave that night. They had both suffered a substantial battering during the destruction of the Shou assault party, so the prince had assumed they would lie up for the night and lick their wounds. Still, with a ready sup- ply of fresh meat floating outside their door, it was not surprising they had come out to feed. Tang was glad he had decided not to hazard moving at night. If the crea- tures had been outside when he started rustling through the brush, they would surely have killed him.

No sooner had Tang finished congratulating himself on his wisdom than the ground trembled beneath his legs

He stifled a cry and, thinking one of the reptiles had landed nearby, reached for his only weapon, a pitifully inadequate dagger. Instead of feeling the sharp sting of a wyvern's tail barb, however, he heard a series of faint, muffled knells-such as a distant bell or gong might make.

The tolling had hardly begun to fade before a loud purl rolled from the mouth of the grotto below. Cypress's form-a huge, shadowy darkness far blacker than the surrounding swamp-emerged from the lair and seemed to pause outside the cavern.

The wyverns hissed in frustration and swam, rather noisily, back into the cavern. A loud, basal throb rever- berated through the swamp as Cypress's mighty wings beat the air. Visions of the dragon swooping down out of the darkness filled the prince's mind, at least until he realized the pulsing was growing softer and more dis- tant. The dragon was flying away.

Tang sighed in relief, then kicked his heels deep into the mud and felt something slithering across his leg. The prince remained motionless until he located the crea- ture's head, then calmly grabbed it behind the jaws and

flung the writhing thing down the hill. He had nothing to fear from snakes-perhaps from the spirits of his dead soldiers, whose voices were again filling his ears-but not from snakes.

Ruha slept without dreaming and awoke sometime later, lying on the soft bed with the heavy woolen quilt pulled high beneath her chin. Her first thought was not that she usually took off her aba before sleeping, or that she never pulled the blanket up to her chin, but that she had slept the night away. She threw the cover off and rushed to the alcove, where, to her relief, she saw the treetops still dancing in silver moonlight. Only then did she notice that someone had removed her veil and real- ized that the tallow lamp had been extinguished-she could not have been asleep long enough for it to burn itself out!-and it occurred to her Vaerana had already come and gone.