There is no antidote.'

He sat down, and for a while he rocked back and forth, eyes closed, moaning. Then he said, 'Masha, there is no sense in my going on with you. But, since I have made it possible for you to be as wealthy as a queen, I beg you to do one favour for me. If it is not too much to ask.'

'What is that?' she said.

'Take the jar containing the tattooed skin to Sharranpip. And there tell our story to the highest priest of Weda Krizhtawn. He will pray for me to her, and a great tombstone will be erected for me in the courtyard of the peacocks, and pilgrims will come from all over Sharranpip and the islands around and will pray for me. But if you don't want...'

Masha knelt and kissed him on the mouth. He felt cold.

She stood up and said, 'I promise you that I will do that. That, as you said, is the least I can do.'

He smiled, though it cost him to do it.

'Good. Then I can die in peace. Go. May Weda Krizhtawn bless you.'

'But the Raggah ... they will torture you!'

'No. This bag contains a small vial of poison. They will find only a corpse. If they find me at all.'

Masha burst into tears, but she took the jar, and after kissing Smhee again, she rode off, his horse trotting behind hers. At the top of the hill she stopped to look behind at the hut. Far off, coming swiftly, was a dark mass. The Raggah. She turned away and urged her horse into a gallop.

'By Savankala and the Son!' Regli swore, 'why can't she bear and be done with it? And why does she demand to see her brother but won't see me?' The young lord's sweat-stained tunic looked as if it had been slept in. Indeed, Regli would have slept in it if he had slept any during the two days he had paced outside the bedroom, now couching room, of his wife. Regli's hands repeatedly flexed the shank of his riding crop. There were those - and not all of them women - who would have said that agitation heightened - Regli's already notably good looks, but he had no mind for such nonsense now. Not with his heir at risk!

'Now, now,' said Doctor Mernorad, patting the silver-worked lapels of his robe. The older man prided himself as much on his ability to see both sides of a question as he did on his skill at physic - though neither ability seemed much valued today in Regli's townhouse. 'One can't hurry the gods, you know. The child will be born when Sabellia says it should be. Any attempt to hasten matters would be sacrilege as well as foolishness. Why, you know there are some... I don't know what word to use, practitioners, who use forceps in a delivery? Forceps of metal! It's disgusting. I tell you. Prince Kadakithis makes a great noise about smugglers and thieves; but if he wanted to clean up a real evil in Sanctuary, he'd start with the so-called doctors who don't have proper connections with established temples.'

'Well, damn it,' Regli snapped, 'you've got a "proper connection" to the Temple of Sabellia in Ranke itself, and you can't tell me why my wife's been two days in labour. And if any of those bitch-midwives who've stood shift in there know' - he gestured towards the closed door - 'they sure aren't telling anybody.' Regli knuckled the fringe of blond whiskers sprouting on his jawbone. His wealth and breeding had made him a person of some importance even in Ranke. Here in Sanctuary, where he served as Master of the Scrolls for the royal governor, he was even less accustomed to being balked. The fact that Fate, in the form of his wife's abnormally-prolonged labour, was balking him infuriated Regli to the point that he needed to lash out at something. 'I can't imagine why Samlane insists on seeing no one but midwives from the Temple of Heqt,' he continued, snapping his riding crop at specks on the mosaic walls. 'That place has no very good reputation, I'm told. Not at all.'

'Well, you have to remember that your wife is from Cirdon,' said Mernorad reasonably, keeping a wary eye on his patron's lash. 'Though they've been forty years under the Empire, worship of the Trinity hasn't really caught on there. I've investigated the matter, and these women do have proper midwives' licences. There's altogether too much loose talk among laymen about "this priesthood" or "that particular healer" not being competent. I assure you that the medical profession keeps very close watch on itself. The worst to be said on the record - the only place it counts - about the Temple of Heqt here in Sanctuary is that thirty years ago the chief priest disappeared. Unfortunate, of course, but nothing to discredit the temple.'

The doctor paused, absently puffing out one cheek, then the other, so that his curly white sideburns flared. 'Though I do think,' he added, 'that since you have engaged me anyway, that their midwives might consult with one of my, well, stature.'

The door between the morning room and the hall was ajar. A page in Regli's livery of red and gold tapped the jamb deferentially. The two Rankans looked up, past the servant to the heavier man beyond in the hall. 'My lord,' said the page bowing, 'Samlor hil Samt.'

Samlor reached past the servant to swing the door fully open before Regli nodded entry. He had unpinned his dull travelling cloak and draped it over his left arm, close to his body where it almost hid the sheathed fighting knife. Northern fashion, Samlor wore boots and breeches with a long-sleeved over-tunic gathered at the wrists. The garments were plain and would have been a nondescript brown had they not been covered with white road dust. His sole jewellery was a neck thonged silver medallion stamped with the toad face of the goddess Heqt. Samlor's broad face was deep red, the complexion of a man who will never tan but who is rarely out of the sun. He cleared his throat, rubbed his mouth with the back of his big fist, and said, 'My sister sent for me. She's in there, the servant says?' He gestured.

'Why yes,' said Regli, looking a little puzzled to find the quirt in his hands. The doctor was getting up from his chair. 'Why, you're much older, aren't you?' the lord continued inanely.

'Fourteen years,' Samlor agreed sourly, stepping past the two Rankans to the bedroom door. He tossed his cloak over one of the ivory-inlaid tables along the wall. 'You'd have thought the folks would have guessed something when the five between us were stillborn, but no. Hell, no ... And much luck the bitch ever brought them.'

'I say!' Regli gasped at the stocky man's back. 'You're speaking of my wife!'

Samlor turned, his knuckles already poised to rap on the door panel. 'You had a choice,' he said. 'I'm the one who was running caravans through the mountains, trying to keep the Noble House of Kodrix afloat long enough to marry its daughter well - and her slutting about so that the folks had to go to Ranke to get offers from anybody but a brothel keeper. No wonder they drink.' He hammered on the door.

Mernorad tugged the white-faced Regli back. 'Master Samlor,' the physician said sharply.

'It's Samlor, dammit!' the Cirdonian was shouting in response to a question from within the bedroom. 'I didn't ride 500 miles to stand at a damned doorway, either.' He turned to Mernorad. 'Yes?' he asked.

The physician pointed. 'Your weapon,' he said. 'The lady Sam-lane has been distraught. Not an uncommon thing for women in her condition, of course. She, ah, attempted to have her condition, ah, terminated some months ago ... Fortunately, we got word before ... And even though she has since been watched at all times, she, ah, with a spoon ... Well. I'd simply rather that -things like your knife - not be where the Lady could snatch them, lest something untoward occur...'