Zalzan Kavol boomed, "Twenty years of practice, lords and ladies of Pidruid! The keenest sense of hearing is necessary for this! He detects the rustle of the clubs against the atmosphere as they fly from hand to hand!"

Valentine wondered how even the keenest sense of hearing could detect anything against the hum of conversation and the clink of dishes and the loud ostentatious pronouncements of Zalzan Kavol, but Sleet made no errors. That the juggling was difficult even for him was obvious: normally he was smooth as a machine, tireless as a loom, but now his hands were moving in sudden sharp skips and lunges, grasping hastily at a club that was spinning up almost out of reach, snatching with desperate quickness at one that had fallen nearly too far. Still, it was miraculous juggling. It was as if Sleet had some chart in his mind of the location of each of the moving clubs, and put his hand where he expected a club to fall, and found it there, or close enough. He did ten, fifteen, twenty exchanges of the clubs, and then gathered all three to his chest, flipped the blindfold aside, took a deep bow. There was a pattering of applause. Sleet stood rigid. Carabella came to him and embraced him, Valentine clapped him lustily on the shoulder, and the troupe left the stage.

In the dressing room Sleet was quivering from strain and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He gulped fireshower wine without restraint, as though it were nothing. "Did they pay attention?" he asked Carabella. "Did they even notice?"

"Some did," she said gently.

Sleet spat. "Pigs! Blaves! They have not enough skill to walk from one side of a room to the other, and they sit there chattering when— when an artist— when—"

Valentine had never seen Sleet show temper before. This blind juggling, he decided, was not good for the nerves. He seized the livid Sleet by both shoulders and leaned close. "What matters," he said earnestly, "is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience. You were perfect."

"Not quite," Sleet said sullenly. "The timing—"

"Perfect," Valentine insisted. "You were in complete command. You were majestic. How could you care what drunken merchants might say or do? Is it for their souls or yours that you mastered the art?"

Sleet managed a weak grin. "The blind juggling cuts deep into the soul."

"I would not see you in such pain, my friend."

"It passes. I feel a little better now."

"Your pain was self-inflicted," Valentine said. "It was unwise to allow yourself such outrage. I say again: you were perfect, and nothing else is important." He turned to Shanamir. "Go to the kitchen and see if we might have some meat and bread. Sleet has worked too hard. He needs new fuel, and fireshower wine isn’t enough."

Sleet looked merely tired now, instead of tense and furious. He reached forth a hand. "Your soul is warm and kind, Valentine. Your spirit is a gentle and sunny one."

"Your pain pained me."

"I’ll guard my wrath better," Sleet said. "And you’re right, Valentine: we juggle for ourselves. They are incidental. I should not have forgotten that."

Twice more in Pidruid Valentine saw the blind juggling done; twice more he saw Sleet stalk from a stage, rigid and drained. The attention of the onlookers, Valentine realized, had nothing to do with Sleet’s fatigue. It was a demonic hard thing to do, was all, and the price the small man paid for his skill was a high one. When Sleet suffered, Valentine did what he could to beam comfort and strength to him. There was great pleasure for Valentine in serving the other man in that way.

Twice more, too, Valentine had dark dreams. One night the apparition of the Pontifex came to him and summoned him into the Labyrinth, and inward he went, down its many passageways and incomprehensible avenues, and the image of gaunt old Tyeveras floated like a will-o’-the-wisp before him, leading him onward to the core, until at last he attained some inner realm of the great maze and suddenly the Pontifex vanished, and Valentine stood alone in a void of cold green light, all footing gone, falling endlessly toward the center of Majipoor. And another night it was the Coronal, riding in his chariot across Pidruid, who beckoned him and invited him to a game of counters, and they threw the dice and moved the markers, and what they played with was a packet of bleached knucklebones, and when Valentine asked whose bones they were, Lord Valentine laughed and tugged at his stiff black fringe of a beard and fastened his dazzling harsh eyes on him and said, "Look at your hands," and Valentine looked, and his hands were without fingers, mere pink globes at his wrists.

These dreams Valentine shared once more with Carabella and with Sleet. But they offered him no dream-speaking, only repeated their advice that he go to some priestess of the slumber-world once they had left Pidruid.

Departure now was imminent. The festival was breaking up; the Coronal’s ships no longer stood in the harbor; the roads were crowded with the outflow, as the people of the province made their way homeward from the capital. Zalzan Kavol instructed his troupe to finish whatever business remained to be done in Pidruid that morning, for on Seaday afternoon they would take to the highway.

The announcement left Shanamir strangely quiet and dejected. Valentine noticed the boy’s moodiness. "I thought you’d be eager to move along. Finding the city too exciting to leave?"

Shanamir shook his head. "I could go anytime."

"Then what is it?"

"Last night a dream came to me of my father and brothers."

Valentine smiled. "Homesickness already, and you haven’t even left the province?"

"Not homesickness," Shanamir said bleakly. "They were tied and lying in the road, and I was driving a team of mounts, and they cried out to me for help and I drove right on, over their helpless bodies. One doesn’t have to go to a dream-speaker for understanding of a dream like that."

"So is it guilt at abandoning your duties at home?"

"Guilt? Yes. The money! "Shanamir said. There was an edge on his voice, as though he were a man trying to explain something to a dull child. He tapped his waist. "The money, Valentine. I carry in here some hundred sixty royals from the sale of my animals, have you forgotten? A fortune! Enough to pay my family’s way all this year and part of next! They depend on my coming back safely to Falkynkip with it."

"And you were planning not to give it to them?"

"I am hired by Zalzan Kavol. What if his route lies another way? If I bring the money home, I might never find you all again as you wander over Zimroel. If I go off with the jugglers I steal my father’s money, that he’s expecting, that he needs. You see?"

"Simply enough solved," Valentine said. "Falkynkip is how far from here?"

"Two days fast, three days ordinary."

"Quite close. Zalzan Kavol’s route, I’m sure, has not yet been fixed. I’ll speak to him right now. One town’s as good as the next to him. I’ll cajole him into taking the Falkynkip road out of here. When we’re close to your father’s ranch, you’ll slip away by night, give the money quietly to one of you brothers, slip back to us before dawn. And then no guilt will attach, and you’ll be free to proceed on your way."

Shanamir’s eyes widened. "You think you can win a favor from that Skandar? How?"

"I can try."

"He’ll strike you to the ground in anger if you ask for anything. He wants no interference with his plans, any more than you’d allow a flock of blaves to vote on how you should run your affairs."

"Let me talk to him," said Valentine, "and we’ll see. I have reason to think Zalzan Kavol’s not as rough within as he’d like us to believe. Where is he?"

"Seeing after his wagon, readying it for the journey. Do you know where that is?"

"Toward the waterfront," Valentine said. "Yes. I know."