So she leaned on the gunnel of the boat as the oarsmen below decks swept the river, pushing the waves westward toward the sea. Glad Hell's high prison wall loomed in the gathering night; then the island was past them, and the lights of Heptam were visible far to the south, across the marshes. I am outside the prison walls now, she thought. I am outside King's Hill, and I'll never go back there, except as Heptarch. Inwardly she laughed at the thought. Whatever else she might be or do in her life, the Heptarchy was the thing furthest out of reach. She would set herself to other tasks, and let the Heptarchy come to her if it would.

King's Hill was not the only prison she was free of. Those walls had always been the least of her jails. The training regimen was over. The constant tests and problems were ended. Never again would others determine her present and future according to their own desires.

Instead she would go where she was born to go. To Cranning, the great Skyfoot city at the center of the world. How could she, for a moment, think of going anywhere else?

She felt a tingling of her skin at the thought of Cranning, ' a trembling in her loins, a hunger deeper than any she had felt before in her life. Cranning. All roads go there, all rivers flow there, all time bends there, all life ends there.

It became a pounding rhyme in her head.

All roads go there.

(But Father killed Mother-)

All rivers flow there.

(-to save me from someone-)

All time bends there.

(-who waits there, calling, calling-)

All life ends there.

Over and over the rhyme, the need, filling her with a passion she had never felt before. She knew what it was.

No one needed to explain it to her. The Cranning call.

THEY SPENT NO TIME AT ALL IN THE CUTS THOUGH PATIENCE was fascinated by the glittering clothing and everyone's passionate urgency to spend themselves all in one night, Sken led her at once to a small riverboat, the kind with a mast to help upstream when the wind was good, or to go out to sea on short runs, if there was a need. The heavy oars explained why the fat woman's arms were thick and muscular. Patience began to suspect, as Sken pulled them away from the island, that there was less fat on her than she had supposed at first.

"We wait out here in the dark," Sken whispered, "until his boat comes. Then we go back in and get him."

It was only a few minutes later; this early in the evening, there was a lot of traffic from Kingsport up the Glad River to the Cuts. Angel's disguise was good enough that Sken recognized him before Patience did. She was looking for an aging scholar, or the gracious old woman he sometimes had mimicked in the past. Instead, he was an obvious male whore, slightly drunk, painted till his face fairly glowed in the torchlight.

"I thought the essence of disguise was to be inconspicuous," Patience said. The oars dipped into the water without a splash-Sken knew the river and had the strength to glide upstream without seeming to strain.

"The essence of disguise is to be unnoticed," said, Angel. He dipped his hands into the river to wash his face. "You can do that by being so nondescript that no one notices you, or being so embarrassing that no one can stand to look at you. Either way, your disguise remains unexamined, and so you remain unrecognized."

"Why did you leave me in the tonguing booths all day?" Patience said. She didn't like it when Angel proved that he still knew more than she did.

"Where were you yesterday, little fool, when I stood there in the School with my face hanging out for any of the King's asses to see me?"

"Talk softer," Sken whispered. "The King's patrol are known to anchor their boats on the river and listen in the darkness for fools who think they're alone."

They fell silent then. They passed the eastern edge of Cuts Island and began to pass among the pilings on which houses perched precariously high above the water.

It was a district called Stilts-the town of the river people, who it was said were born and died without ever setting foot on land. It wasn't true, of course, but they did spend most of their lives on the water. The story was they got seasick on land. If they had liquor in them, they couldn't even walk unless there was a shifting deck under them. Patience had always suspected they made up the stories themselves.

"At high tide," said Sken, "the water comes up to there." She pointed to a level on the nearest piling about a meter above the water. "But in spring flood, there are weeks when we live in the attics, because the water on the first floor is three feet deep."

Patience marveled at that-the houses were all a good four meters above the water level. The land on the left bank, where the new town was rising, was high enough that it might not flood in the spring. But the marshland of the right bank must be under water for a good long time.

Patience began to understand how the river controlled the way human beings lived here. Korfu had risen and fallen many times in seven thousand years. Heptam had been a provincial town and the center of the world. Yet in all that time, the river still worked its will in this place.

As if he read her thoughts, Angel said, "There was a levee on the right bank for a thousand years, and the marshland was heavily populated. But about five thousand years ago it was breached and no one rebuilt it.

Within fifty years it was as if it had never been there.

Time is against us."

The boat bumped up against a large piling. A house was built on this single massive stilt, with stabilizing boards angling off to triangulate with the great beams.

"Here," said Sken. She tied the boat to the piling and climbed with surprising ease up a series of boards that made a sort of irregular ladder into the house. Then, before Patience could walk to that end of the boat to climb up, a net dropped down like a heavy spider.

"She's going to lift us up?" asked Patience.

"I brought some luggage with me," said Angel. Patience recognized his small trunk. Of course. Her things he could leave somewhere in hiding, but his little trunk was never long out of his sight. She knew he kept his disguises in it, but there were other things, too, which he showed to no one.

The trunk rose quickly upward into the house. Then Angel motioned for Patience to climb.

The house swayed slightly when they walked from one end to another. To someone who lived on the river, it probably felt fine, but to Patience it was unnerving. It was like living in a constant earthquake, she thought.

And when Sken moved from place to place, her great mass tilted it even more. She seemed not to notice it, and Patience said nothing.

"I'm sorry I didn't meet you on time," Patience said.

"I had some questions I had to ask Father. Questions I could only ask him when he was dead."

"I guessed as much," said Angel. "Did you leave him there when you were through?"

"Oruc had enough use of him when he was alive," said Patience. "He'll have no use of him now."

Sken was horrified. "You killed your father's head?"

"Shut up and tend to the food," Angel said softly.

Sken glowered but obeyed.

"He asked me to," said Patience.

"As any sane man would," said Angel. "Just because we can preserve them doesn't mean we should. Just one more abomination we'll have to answer for someday."

"To God? I don't think he cares what we do with our heads."

Sken couldn't keep her silence. "If I'd known you were blasphemers I would have put you at the bottom of the river."

It was Patience who answered this time. "And if I'd known you were unable to keep your mouth still I would have left your head in the privy hole."