She whispered, "Boom."

The window exploded at Dreamsinger's touch, blasting shards of glass into the room. It was a big window; it had lots of glass.

The shards slashed like shrapnel into two brawny men who stood just inside. The men didn't have a chance: they went down under the barrage, blown off their feet, sliced by glass splinters. One man collided with a heavy chair, drove it forward half a meter, then toppled off sideways… striking the floor at an angle that shoved crystal daggers deeper into his flesh. Blood gushed from a severed artery-a fountain that lasted several seconds, then subsided to a pressureless drip.

The other man landed facedown on the carpet, slivers of glass protruding from his back like needles on a porcupine. He lifted his arm feebly, reaching blindly for nothing. Beneath his tattered clothes, bony spurs pushed weakly from the raised arm, then retracted again in defeat.

The spurs showed that Hump wasn't the only smuggler with pointy augmentation. Not that the spikes seemed to do much good. The man in front of us slumped unconscious and continued to bleed from a dozen lacerations.

Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind and thrown onto the muddy soil. "Idiot," Impervia whispered, pressing her body against my spine. I opened my mouth to protest but was drowned out by an eruption of gunfire from inside the house. Oops. I'd been so busy watching men die near the window, I'd never looked farther into the room. There must have been more guards inside, beyond the blast radius of the glass. Now they were shooting in our direction: shooting at Dreamsinger alone, since the Caryatid had hit the dirt beside Impervia and me.

The Sorcery-Lord made no effort to remove herself from the fire zone. As the shots continued, she stepped over the low windowsill and into the room itself. Bullets zinged through the air; a few passed through Dreamsinger's crimson cloak, tearing several holes in it before the cloak was ripped to rags… but the majority of shots were directly on target, plowing straight into Dreamsinger's body.

The bullets had no effect; they never quite made contact.

A violet glow had sprung up around the Spark Lord's outline, like a fringe of indigo fire. Each time a shot hit the glow, the bullet was met with violet flame-a blazing hot flame that dissolved the chunk of lead into spittles of molten metal. Stinking smoke filled the air as drops of liquefied lead fell to the floor… but none of it touched Dreamsinger. She just stood with a placid smile, waiting for the barrage to end.

Lying on top of me, Impervia whispered, "That glow around her… is it sorcery?"

"No," the Caryatid replied. "I've heard it called a force field. Projected by her armor."

"She's wearing armor?" I asked.

"What do you think she's wearing, idiot?" That was Impervia again.

"She's wearing Kaylan's Chameleon. Total coverage. I can't see a square millimeter of who she really is."

"Vanity, vanity," Impervia murmured. She shifted her body slightly against my back. "So, uhh, Phil… what do you see?"

I didn't answer.

The shooting dwindled to an anticlimax of prissy little clicks: firing pins hitting on empty chambers. A woman inside the house growled, "For God's sake, assholes, give it up. Xavier, will you please call off your dogs?"

A grunting sigh. "You heard her." An old man's gristly voice. "Stand down… but reload."

Both the man and the woman spoke with accents: something Central European. Teaching at the academy, I'd heard lots of accents from my students-but those accents were all upper class. The people in Nanticook House sounded rougher… more ragged and throaty.

"Warwick Xavier?" Dreamsinger asked.

"You know who I am," the man answered. A statement, not a question.

"She's a Spark," said the unknown woman inside. "She knows everyone." A pause. "Judging by the crimson armor, you're the female Sorcery-Lord. Serpent's Kiss."

"Serpent's Kiss was my predecessor. I'm Dreamsinger."

"Ach, such a fancy name," said Xavier. "Fine women, always so pretentious."

Impervia slid off me. On hands and knees she peered over the windowsill, into the room beyond. The Caryatid and I joined her-like the comic relief in a Shakespeare play, the three of us poking our noses up in the background while more important characters played the main action downstage.

Xavier stood beside the unknown woman at the far end of the room. He was white-haired, big-eared, stoop-shouldered, an imposing jowly man who might be as old as seventy, dressed in formal black-and-white; she was black-haired, fierce-eyed, sharp-boned, an imposing skeleton-thin woman in her early thirties, wearing gray silk pants and shirt, cut so loosely they seemed tailored for someone four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. If Warwick Xavier was the Smuggler King, this woman might be his Queen or Crown Princess… either a wife half his age or his daughter. Maybe even granddaughter. Or perhaps she was his heir-apparent, ruthless in her own right and ready to take over as soon as the king showed weakness.

Before Dreamsinger's entrance, Xavier and the woman had been examining papers spread on a table-records, I assumed, of ill-gotten gains. Two gunsels stood nearby: big men who'd now holstered their pistols and stood with razor spikes bristling along their arms, ready to slash anyone who got too close. The sort of men who didn't know when they were out of their depth.

Dreamsinger ignored the enforcers. She gazed only at Xavier and the woman… smiling in what I thought might be recognition.

"You're a long way from home," Dreamsinger said.

It was the woman who replied. "I have many homes."

"And home is where the heart is," Dreamsinger observed. "Or within a few kilometers. Which came first, dear sister? This operation or Feliss Academy?"

"This operation, of course. I chose Feliss Academy only because I had an outpost nearby."

"Did your daughter know?"

The woman beside Xavier shook her head. "Rosalind is happier thinking she's not completely under my wing. But I don't send her to a school unless it's close to my holdings… and wherever she goes, I follow."

Dreamsinger smiled. "Dear sister, she's gone somewhere you can't follow. Your daughter died several hours ago."

The thin woman-Elizabeth Tzekich, Knife-Hand Liz-caught her breath. That was all. Then she clamped her jaw tight.

I saw no tears.

Where Elizabeth Tzekich was gaunt, Rosalind had been plump-possibly in rebellion, the daughter fattening herself to look as little like her mother as possible. Yet the mother's tight face, the way she suppressed all grief, reminded me of Rosalind concealing her own emotions: the careful hiding-behind-walls of a girl who'd given up making friends.

Like mother, like daughter. And the fierce woman in front of us must have been Rosalind's age when she gave birth to her child. How had that happened? A passionate elopement the way Rosalind had planned to run off with Sebastian? It wouldn't surprise me. Then pregnancy, and who knows? I couldn't imagine how a woman that young could create the Ring of Knives, but Elizabeth Tzekich had managed it. Not only spreading through Europe, but all around the world.

Rosalind had moved from school to school and Knife-Hand Liz had moved from one Ring outpost to another. I wondered who led whom. Was the mother following the daughter just to be close to her? Or was Elizabeth Tzekich touring her assets, inspecting her lieutenants, streamlining operations, spending a few months in every branch office… and whenever she moved on, forcing her daughter to move too, shunting the girl into any school that was handy at the next port of call?

Maybe a little of both.

But she had kept her daughter near her. When Rosalind came to Feliss Academy, Mother Tzekich must have moved in with Warwick Xavier-Xavier, who was district manager for the Ring, in charge of smuggling and miscellaneous skullduggery. Had Knife-Hand Liz crept near the academy from time to time in hope of catching sight of her daughter? Or had she stayed away, never trying to see the girl but staying close in case something happened?