“All of them.”

“Oh.” Aloê thought of the jail in Fungustown, staffed entirely with Noreê’s thains. She thought of the Hall of Tidings, staffed entirely with Noreê’s thains. How much of the city did she control—or was she trying to control? The thing could become a problem. It was, perhaps, already a problem.

Aloê met Naevros’ eye, and he nodded. She knew he was thinking the same thing. There was a comfort in knowing that someone else saw what she saw, was concerned by the same thing that concerned her.

Of course, Naevros was a traitor and a murderer. She did not forget that.

But how little it affected him! He sat there in the saddle, sunning himself like a cat in the thin daylight, and seemed concerned about nothing except the cut of his trousers (which kept riding up his leg as they rode). Beside him trotted perhaps the greatest seer in the world, but he was obviously not worried that some psychic effluvium would betray him as a murderer.

Of course, he was a killer. They were all three killers. The murder of Earno seemed worse to Aloê than killing in battle, but maybe Naevros justified it to himself somehow. He could truly be innocent in his own eyes. Those pretty green eyes.

She shook her head and snorted.

Naevros looked at her, glanced at her horse, and smiled to himself.

She laughed. It was funny. And he was a traitor and a murderer.

At Thaintower they dismounted and let a couple of ostler-thains tend to their horses. Then Noreê (how they knew her there! how they truckled to her!) briskly demanded to see seven particular thains in the tower atrium.

It was the third one to show himself: a fellow named Bavro. Aloê’s insight whispered it to her as soon as she laid eyes on him. But, to be sure, she ascended slightly into rapture and, with great difficulty, extended her hand in greeting.

He took it. His talic self was like a glowing mist with many dark gaps—perhaps like a skeleton made of fog, but it was not a human skeleton. It was the negative of the imprint left in the message sock.

She shook loose from her vision.

“Where is the letter, Thain Bavro?” she asked.

He must have suspected why he was being summoned. But perhaps he didn’t expect the question to be put so abruptly. In any case he gaped at her like a fish in a net.

“What—what—?” he said.

“The letter, Thain Bavro, the letter!” Noreê said angrily.

“The palimpsest you stole from the Arch of Tidings,” Aloê explained kindly. “Earno’s last letter.”

“Where is it, Thain Bavro?”

“Who did you steal it for? Who are you working with?”

Bavro glanced desperately (and most revealingly, Aloê thought) at Naevros, who stood silent through all this. Whatever Bavro saw in those pretty green eyes made him quail.

“I cannot tell,” he said sullenly at last. “I cannot tell.”

“You will tell, Guardian!” Noreê insisted. “If not now, then later. If not to us, then to the assembled Graith on the Witness Stone.”

“But the Witness Stone is broken, and—” Bavro stopped suddenly.

“Bleys tells me the Stone can be healed,” Noreê said. “But we may not have to wait so long. Take off your cape of office, Bavro; you don’t deserve it.”

Bavro looked at each of the vocates in turn. He reached up and undid the fastenings at his shoulder, letting the gray cape fell to the floor.

“You will come with me to the lockhouse, there to await the Graith’s pleasure. Guardians, will you come with us?”

“He may have hidden the palimpsest here, somewhere,” Aloê said. “I’ll stay and have a look around.”

“I’ll help,” Naevros said.

Noreê nodded curtly. She took Bavro by the elbow and steered him out the door. All the thains in the atrium followed her out, the sheep following their shepherd.

“I do not like this private army she is making of the thainate,” Aloê remarked.

“A thousand soldiers and one general,” Naevros agreed. “Yes, something will have to be done. . . .”

After some searching and asking questions of passing thains, they finally found their way to the narrow little room that Bavro called home. They took their time searching it. It needed time: the little room was layered in dirty clothes, books, pieces of uneaten food, badly drawn pornographic art, and string, which Bavro seemed to collect obsessively.

“This place is filthier than my house,” Naevros remarked at one point, “and that’s saying something.”

“What?” Aloê said. “Have you cast off the irreproachable Verch at last?”

Verch was Naevros’ housekeeper. They had been quarrelling on a daily basis since before Aloê was born . . . usually because Verch was trying to tell Naevros how to live his life.

“He’s an intolerable old queck-bug, and I should fire him, as a matter of fact. Only I’ve long suspected I couldn’t manage without him, and now I know it. I always thought of myself as a fairly neat person; I can take care of myself handily when I’m travelling. But one little house seems to generate more filth in a day than I can clear away in three. I’m counting the hours until he returns.”

“When will that be?”

“Nearly a month! He got it in his head he wanted to go south where it’s warm. I could hardly say no. I hope he hates it down there.”

“Couldn’t you hire a housekeeper to take care of you while he’s gone?”

“I—ah—I made rather a big deal about how I could take care of myself without any help. Somehow I’m going to have to figure out how to do it or I’ll never hear the end of his nagging.”

“If you could use help—”

“No, no. Thanks. My mess; I’ll tend to it. What is this, do you think?” He held up a dark strip of something he had excavated from the floor. “Is it a piece of dried meat gone bad, or an article of underclothing worn far longer than it should have been, or . . . ?”

In the end they had to admit that the palimpsest was not in the filthy little room.

“Dollon was also stationed at Thaintower, I think,” Aloê said. “Perhaps it’s in his room. Assuming they are part of a larger conspiracy.” Headed by you, Aloê wanted to say but did not.

“Possibly,” Naevros said agreeably. “Should we search it, too?”

A cold, clear light went on in Aloê’s mind.

“Or it could be in Fungustown,” she said, saying something quite different from her thought. “A lot of empty buildings there.”

“Er. Yes.”

“Maybe I should look in one place and you look in the other?”

“Maybe you should have someone watching your back, Guardian,” said Naevros drily, and pointed at the healing silk on her neck.

“Hm,” Aloê pretended to consider. “Yes, that’s a good point. Maybe I’ll pick up Jordel on my way to Fungustown. We can cover more ground that way, too.”

Naevros nodded. “You have your ducks in a row, I see. I’ll carry on here. Some of the other thains may know something we want to know. And I’ll plant a few seeds of doubt about Noreê’s leadership, maybe.”

Aloê nodded brightly and ran off. She clattered down the stairs, freed Raudhfax from the attentions of the ostlers, and galloped away toward Jordel’s.

But after she had crossed a few roads and she saw that Thaintower was lost in the thicket of towers behind her, she turned sharply west and rode straight to Naevros’ house, not far from the Old Center.

She believed that Verch had voluntarily left the house of Naevros for a month like she believed the sun was an orange ball of bubbling cheese—that is, not at all (although it did sort of resemble one these days). That old queck-bug loved Naevros more than his own life. So he was gone now because Naevros had wanted him out of the house. Aloê wanted to know why.

The house was locked, of course, but she had not lived with Morlock and his harven-kin without learning a great deal about locks—how they could be made, how they could be beaten. The locks at Naevros’ house were merely mechanical—they didn’t even have eyes or ears! Aloê was inside within moments of her arrival.