"I'll take him for you, lad, entourage or not!" Ramiro whispered at my shoulder.

I shook my head disconsolately as the captor's words continued to sink and settle.

"Hardly the talk of a philosopher-king, Master Namer!" another familiar voice called out heartily behind me. I turned to see Shardos, his hands tied, escorted by two Plainsmen into the swimming light of the library.

"What would you know of philosophy, sirrah?" Firebrand growled, gripping the staff tightly.

"Oh… not that much," Shardos replied, stepping away from his guards and walking cautiously across the chamber. He came to the very lectern against which Brithelm had stumbled and stepped around it deftly. "Not that much. Only that it keeps a man from twitching after visions."

"Is that so?" Firebrand asked, the anger rising in his voice. Then suddenly the anger rushed from him. His shoulders slumped and his eye softened, and he stared at the old juggler with a look of surprise and fascination.

"Attend to the gentleman!" he snapped at the guards. "Can't you see that he is blind?"

Gruffly brushing aside the pale helping hands, Shardos seated himself atop a library table, his large hands gripping the yellowed wood. His blank eyes scanned the room.

I coughed loudly, intentionally. His gaze uncannily fastened on me.

"Sir Galen," he said quietly, a strange half-smile on his face. "It appears that we are all together again."

"Except…" Ramiro began absently and caught himself. His meaty faced flushed with embarrassment at the prospect of almost having betrayed Dannelle's escape to the Que-Tana.

But Shardos caught the words and juggled them gracefully. "Of course," he said quickly. "Except for my dog, whom I shall miss sorely."

"Who is this man, Galen?" Firebrand asked, walking slowly toward the old man.

"Shardos is my name," the juggler replied. "Traveler, jongleur, purveyor of history and lore, and juggler to the courts of seven kings."

"I see," Firebrand said, a note of suspicion creeping into his voice. "A juggler, you say?"

The Que-Tana Namer stood his ground now, a good knife's throw from the table and from Shardos. It was as though a wall of light lay between them, transparent but impenetrable. Firebrand circled Shardos, staring at him from every side, and it occured to me that our captor was afraid.

Afraid, no doubt, because he had not seen this man in his vaunted visions.

"A juggler? But-"

"It is every man's question," Shardos interrupted. "And there is no answer but in the juggling itself."

The Plainsmen guards moved toward the blind man, but Firebrand raised his hand, waved them away.

"Juggler and… purveyor of lore?"

"Balance and sleight of hand are more common than they used to be, sir," Shardos replied merrily. "Nowadays a man has to branch out-to sing and tell stories while the bottles tumble butt over neck in the air. Mere jugglery is a poor man's trade, but you can eat when you throw in song and tale amidst the fruit and crockery."

"Shall we escort him somewhere, Namer?" one of the guards asked.

"Song and tale?" Firebrand asked, ignoring his underling. Absently he walked to the obstructing lectern, his back to the juggler.

Almost as absently, Shardos began to sing:

"In the country of the blind, Where the one-eyed man is king And the stones are eyes of gods And pathways to remembering…"

"Enough!" Firebrand shouted, clutching the sides of the lectern. The silver circlet he wore on his head flickered with a dark light, and smoke blossomed from beneath his grasping fingers, singeing the wood.

Ramiro and I glanced sidelong at each other, and my big companion emitted a low whistle.

"Not fully mounted, this one," he whispered to me as Firebrand spun toward Shardos with a rattle of bead and bone and a creaking of leather.

"So a snatch of old song comes back to you, juggler?" Firebrand asked, and what little civility was left in his voice he had banished entirely. "But your primary talent… is legerdemain, is it not?"

Shardos said nothing, his gaze fixed somewhere far beyond his adversary. With a quick, powerful lunge, Firebrand stepped directly in front of the old man, gathering objects from the lectern as he moved-an ink bottle, a book, a piece of parchment, and finally a small, sharp, glittering penknife. Extending his hands to the juggler, the Que-Tana Namer smiled wickedly.

"Juggle these," he hissed. "Juggle these, or you shall find things most… excruciating for your comrades."

Though I knew nothing of the juggler's art, I knew that the task before Shardos was a formidable one. Four items, each of different shape and weight, made for a clumsy performance, and the introduction of the piece of parchment, which would flutter and catch on the slightest breath in the chamber, was surpassing cruel to any man in Shardos's line of work, much less a blind man.

But Shardos took the objects with a smile and, standing atop the library table, held them aloft while he surveyed the room with that penetrating, vacant stare. Almost instinctually, the Que-Tana began to crowd around him, Firebrand included, until only four of our captors remained beside us.

Almost instinctually in turn, Ramiro and I glanced at one another, reckoning the odds.

Three of our Plainsmen escorts were formidable enough, in their paint and leather, their sharp spears at the ready. But the fourth one, a man at least a head taller than Ramiro, looked as sturdy as a vallenwood, though I doubted he was much brighter. Nonetheless, his line of work did not partake of higher mathematics. Even the usually dauntless Ramiro looked once at the menacing hulk beside him and shook his head.

We would have to wait for other options to arise. But what was it Longwalker had said, miles above me and days away from me, by a fire at the foot of the mountains?

"Sometimes the waiting is the doing."

"It will be a feat justly celebrated!" Shardos began, holding the strange, disparate objects in plain sight above the nodding heads of the Plainsmen. "These objects, as unlike as poet and soldier, no more kin to each other than godseye miner and forest-dwelling elf, will find their way and their proper place in the great turning of things, where the wheeling path of the book in the air crosses that of the ink bottle."

Quietly, as Shardos held the attention of his audience, Firebrand slipped from the edge of the crowd and moved to a far point in the dimly lit chamber, where he was lost among shadows and leaning shelves.

Frantically I tried to see where he had gone. With the opals in tow, he was no doubt looking for a private spot, away from the eyes of his people and his prisoners, where he could be about the ensorcellments that Longwalker dreaded so. And surely with the opals in tow, he would no longer find any of us useful.

My thoughts were darkening quickly, and I might well have sunk into the stupors and sorrows, had Shardos's act not become suddenly interesting.

"In my travels," the juggler said, "I have found it often a delight to sing for my hosts while I juggle." He cleared his throat dramatically.

"A delight indeed," Ramiro whispered ironically.

"Oh, yes, Ramiro!" chorused my brother, on whom all irony was lost. "I love a singer as much as a sword fight!"

"Hush! Both of you!" I muttered, and Shardos continued.

"Unfortunately, I have fallen on hard times in my travels, and fallen in with a rather… rough-hewn company in my later years. I am afraid that the only juggling songs I remember are a bit on the racy side for the women and children among you…"

"That's absurd!" Ramiro commented. "The old bastard remembers everything!"

"Hush!" I repeated.

'Therefore," Shardos announced, "I shall sing the salty chorus in its original language, so as not to offend the more delicate ears in our midst."