XIX. Spring 782

"In the Light of the Divine Sun," began Enjele Ennis. A fine choice for a deity, Vivian thought: shedding a distant light on all and sundry, unjudging. Allowing whatever, condemning nothing. Allowing evil and betrayal and violence not only to exist, to flourish, but to exist and flourish by the very profit of its evil. And yet she looked around at the careworn, innocent faces of her ministers and was sure that none of them wore the expression of a Neil, hiding his treasonous schemes, his contempt for her and for Clane itself behind a mask of world-weariness. Looking back, it all seems so obvious. That was Vivian's general sentiment these days. After the stillbirth of her son, last summer, she had tried everything she could think of to sting and prick and nip from afar at the Emperor. As a result, she thought, he had, as several times before, placed his palm over her, so that she could see nothing beyond her own land. It happened quite suddenly: one night in August of 781, she sat down in her little library with the cup and the cards and the book and the candles, and Suzy and Annie, and went into trance, only to bump their spiritual heads against a low ceiling. It had been like that ever since: she could grope around within the closet of Clane, but she couldn't see what was bumping and rumbling outside the door. Now she knew what it was that he'd been hiding. "Seventy-eighth day, fifteenth regnal year of Vivian, daughter of Edmund, seventeenth Countess of Clane, this twenty-ninth day of March of the year 782," Enjele finished.

"The Countess Vivian presides," put in Sir Rogier.

"Thank you," said the Countess. "Lady Rain, would you care to present the news from down south?"

Ellean stood up at Vivian's right. Not quite twenty-eight, she looked superficially identical to the teenager that had shared the Countess's bed in the first months at Nikolad, but the mark of adulthood was hidden in her look, her walk and her subtler smile. She was not smiling now. "The Emperor's landed an army on the big island of Kel," she said. "That fleet he's been building in the Lavan River is now in control of the Gulf from the islands northward. Martin and I heard this news in Syrud. He has decimated the population of the capital of Kel, and for every citizen he's executed, five have fled to the forest or the other islands. The word is that the rest of the Kel archipelago still holds against him, and Samarra and Panthalla haven't been attacked--but that news is several months old."

"Any word on the size of the army?" asked Sigrith.

"Well, this is from one of our friends in Syrud, who heard it from a scout for the Rahavonian rebels, who spoke with a refugee from the islands, who said there were fifty thousand."

"Well," said Sir Rogier, "I doubt that, but we can probably guess at the true number from our own intelligence, if we really have to."

"Well, I'm interested," said Vivian. "Make a guess."

"All right," said Sir Rogier, "if you insist. Let me see. The Emperor has a standing army of twenty thousand, half of which is engaged in occupying Orzali, Amari, Vendrezu and Rahavon. He also has twenty thousand he can call up from the Duchies and ten or fifteen thousand Avars to use as he likes, and this doesn't count militia. He'd probably take no more than half of that away from the central Empire at any given moment. And he won't take any militia--they're not worth the shipping. So--I'm sorry, where does that leave us?"

"Twenty thousand standing," said Vivian, "and twenty thousand from the duchies, and say twelve thousand Avars, and take half."

"Twenty-six thousand," said Mirabel.

"Doesn't seem like so much," said Vivian.

"They're battle-hardened veterans," said Sir Rogier, "and Samarra and its allies can't gather much more than that even with militia. Still, this operation's a bit of a stretch. You don't usually invade an island with equal numbers."

"But he's the Emperor. He has the advantage any time he goes into battle."

"If that's so, my lady, then why has he not defeated Samarra before? Or Clane?"

"Give him time." She stared ahead for a few moments with narrowed eyes. She had been dreaming recently of storms at sea. "What's the weather doing, down there?"

"The weather? In Samarra?" He smiled suddenly. "Ah, I see. Yes, my lady, he does need good weather, and, yes, he's been having quite the run of nice days."

"Lucky guy--doesn't it usually storm on the Gulf in the winter and spring?"

"Usually, my lady. Not this year, I am told."

"Hmm." She stared narrowly for a few more moments. "You ask why he hasn't taken on Clane again. I think he's saving us for last." She closed her eyes and rubbed them lightly. She raised her eyebrows and sighed and sat up. The Council watched her every move. "Well," she said at last, "we have to do something."

"With respect," said Sir Rogier, "why? We didn't have to do something when Rahavon and Orzali were invaded. Now that battle is way out on the archipelago, we should send an army?"

"I said not, 'send an army'. I said we'll have to do something. As for why, I'll say that the fall of Samarra would mean the successful end of the Emperor's drive to restore the lost Empire. It would mean an Emperor and a realm such as has not been seen since the days of the First Twelve: true personal power, military power that owes nothing to the sovereign lords, and effective control over every inch of Imperial land, except for mountainous little Tithean--and of course Clane."

"But what shall we do, Countess?" asked Sigrith. "We are eager to do battle with the enemy, wherever and whenever you say, but it's far off over the ocean, and we have no ships and no wisdom of the sea. Perhaps we can make raids, bother him from afar as we have before."

"I'm all for raiding Intror," suggested Sir Francis Weaver. "I can't see any other way to help. We can't raid their supply lines. They're--aquatic."

The Countess surveyed her Council with a sour look. They all wanted to help her do something. None of it seemed relevant. "Look," she said, "eight years ago we were so close to victory. We performed our little task with distinction, and yet, on a far-off battlefield, the cause was lost. I tell you that we cannot afford to lose another battle." She raised her eyebrows again and sighed. "Maybe I said it wrong. Maybe I meant that I have to do something."

"What can you do?" asked Mirabel. She was rewarded with a glare that was both pointed and inscrutable.

"I know what you're going to suggest," said Ellean that night. She and Vivian and Willd were just sitting down in the dining room of Nikolad; the only other occupants were Jen, her year-old daughter Violet and the brewer Miranda. Countess and brewer were attempting to play the game that the Rukh had brought over the mountains, and the result was a brutal carnage of pawns and castles and priests and knights that always seemed to end in a draw. Ellean watched with a knowing air. She emptied a nearby pitcher of coppery ale into five glasses, and made a few faces at Violet. "Um, am I allowed to talk about it in front of--?"

"Jen and Miranda? Sure," said Vivian, studying the board. "But you better watch out about Vi. She looks so innocent."

"All right, then, let me call upon my powers and try to read your mind, my dear Countess. You want to go on a ride. You will of course take only your most trusted companions."

"You had it until then," said Vivian, "but Finesse is too old for a long trip. I'll take Flavia."

"Flavia's become your regular horse anyway" replied Ellean. "So that's no mistake. But wait, I'm not done predicting."

"All right, go on."

"You want to go to Samarra."

Vivian smiled broadly. "Now, my dear Ellean, you overreach. Samarra, indeed! Maybe we could ride our horsies there, over the Gulf? But seriously. I don't need to go all the way there to find out what's happening."

"How far do you have to go?" asked Miranda, taking a priest with her castle, which then fell to Vivian's Countess.

"Well, I don't know. I guess just over into Amari. Maybe all the way to the lowlands. All I know is, I can't see what's going on from here."

"See?" asked Miranda.

"See," said Vivian. Miranda just raised an eyebrow (and slew another knight).

"How's that?" asked Ellean. "I thought you could--"

"Well, normally, yes, I could, but he's thrown a blanket over Clane, as he likes to do whenever there's something afoot."

"And in fact there is something afoot," replied Ellean. "But how far are we going? I mean, Avigon? Really, I'd like to know."

"Avigon, with the Emperor on the throne?" said the brewer. "I don't think Suzy is quite ready to be Countess yet."

"I didn't say that, for goodness sake! But you know," added Vivian with narrow eyes, "he's not in Avigon right now, or else I have no fear of Samarra falling. His, um, Countess is out of position, eh? If there's an offensive on the islands, and apparently there is, then the Emperor is leading it. But let's be serious. I'm just going to the frontier, or maybe just across it into Amari, just to see. We're definitely not going to Samarra," she added, moving her Countess across the board to seize Miranda's other castle.

"But what can you do, without going all the way there?" Ellean asked. "I mean, it seems to me that's where the action is."

"I don't know yet, all right? Boy, you guys expect me to have all the answers. I'm just going to go see. Are you coming with me or not?"

"You're asking? Of course I am."

"And you, my dear?"

"I might stay behind, my lady, if ordered to," said Willd, "but then again, I might not."

"I've got beer to make," said Miranda, her Countess killing Vivian's, "but it sounds like good fun."

"No one asked you," Vivian replied. "After all, someone with brains has to stay behind. Besides Jen, that is." The Countess took the brewer's Countess with her priest, and then turned her attention to Jen's baby, who smiled back from beneath an increasingly beguiling set of blond curls. "And you take good care of your mama, understand? Goo goo, goo goo!"

"Heh heh," said Violet, grinning. "Nnng-gah! Yah!"

"You should be part of my council."

"Give her time," said Ellean. "Hey, Willd, we're riding off with the Countess!" He smiled nervously. "When do we leave?" she asked.

"Tomorrow, if possible," said Vivian. "No, next day--appeals are tomorrow. Too much to do to get ready. But it has to be quick. New moon's this week."

"My lady," said Jen, "what am I to tell Sir Rogier?"

"Oh, Jen, you do too much for me already. I'll take care of him."

"You're going where?" Sir Rogier was incredulous. Vivian couldn't see why.

"For a ride. Countess's business. So what's unusual about that?"

"But--Amari?" They were sitting in the dining room the next morning, in theory preparing to hear the appeals. The appeal Vivian was hearing was to her sanity. "It was bad enough," Sir Rogier went on, "when the Emperor was new, and the South was in chaos. But now, after he's had eight years to consolidate! Do you think they don't know what you look like?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I think," said Vivian. "But I have to go. There are sources only the Countess can contact."

"Like what?" he challenged her.

"Imagine, if you will, that it's Count Edmund sitting across the table."

"All right, I still remember that look. I get a headache just thinking about it. Don't think your look is any gentler. But I have to think of your safety, even if you won't."

"I appreciate that, really I do, but look at these grey hairs, will you? I'm thirty-six in three months. It's fourteen years since we rode back from the Imperial Diet, and you had to teach me to be Countess. I think sometimes you haven't noticed I've grown older."

"I worry," he replied, "and you keep so much of your thought from me. But that too is like your father. And in truth, I haven't noticed you growing any older, my lady, you still look twenty-one and three-fourths to me. But do as you wish." He sighed. "I just worry about being stuck trying to teach your eleven-year-old heiress."

"Oh, there's a pleasant thought. Now I'll really be careful."

"Excuse me, my lady," said Valerie de Nikolad, peeking in the door.

"Yes, Valerie? Come right in. We're just discussing the appeals."

"Well, my lady," said the gawky red-haired rider, stepping just inside, "it's that, well, I'd heard you were riding south, and, well, I wondered if you needed another rider. A guard."

Vivian smiled. "Thank you, Valerie, but I don't think we need you as much as you'll be needed in the cataphracts."

"I've been down to Amari, you remember, my lady--I know the way, and we did have a fight when we rescued Prince Frenerac."

"You did good service, Valerie, but I think Weaver needs you more than I do. But thanks for the offer--I may take you up on it next time."

"Thanks, my lady, for hearing me, and good luck," said Valerie, ducking back out the door.

"You're not actually planning on a next time, are you?" asked Sir Rogier.

"Who knows?" she replied mischievously. He smiled patiently. "No," she added, "of course I'm not planning on one."

"I hope not, my lady. And do not take too much encouragement from the fact that the young hotheads want to go along."

She smiled back at him. They turned to conferring over the appeal papers, and Angeline, Ellean and Mirabel came out of the kitchen with a tray of food and tea. Soon the five of them were having a working breakfast, with the Countess and the Minister of State muttering about testimonies and damages over tea and pastries. After some minutes, Angeline, who had been silent up to then, fixed her green eyes on the Countess.

"You know," she said, "you could probably use a rider who knows how to cook."

"Willd's cooking is just fine," said Vivian, scanning a purported contract.

"Like mine isn't?" said Ellean.

"Oh, please, take me this time," said Angeline. "I never get to go anywhere."

"You were right about the young hotheads, Rogier," said Vivian. "But Angeline, you can imagine how popular I'd be with Francis if I let you go along. You've got kids to take care of. And a husband."

"So? You have a husband. You have kids to take care of. This is so unfair."

"Look, Angeline," said Vivian, setting aside her papers. "We need you here. I go, you stay home. We can't have all the brainy women go on this ride."

"You can't flatter me out of this one," said Angeline.

"Then I'll order you out of it. The number is set. At three. It's a dangerous mission and one that relies on stealth and teamwork and familiarity with the terrain, and it was us three that went last time. That's that."

Angeline retreated into a sulky silence, and Vivian returned to the list of appeals. A minute later, the hall door opened and Sir Francis Weaver strode in. He knelt before his Countess and waited to be recognized.

"You're not going," said Vivian. "Nice try."

He looked up, then suddenly smiled. "It was worth a shot," he said. He frowned and asked, "Did Valerie--?"

"Yes, she did, and she got the same answer."

"Well, my lady, I'm sure I'll find something to do with myself."

"And Angeline, your assignment is to stay with Francis and make sure he doesn't do anything foolish. Now, Francis, are you staying for breakfast?"

"No, my lady. If my dearest Angeline would care to join me, I have an obligation this day to my youngest son and my daughter, in fact, a picnic on the side of Mount Nikolad."

"Oh, yes," said Angeline, rising and wiping her mouth. "Watch Henry get jam all over a clean shirt, and chase Elaine through the mud. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

"She's in a mood," Vivian called after them as the couple headed for the door.

"I am not," Angeline shot back from the doorway. Before the door shut, Prince Frenerac pushed it back open and came in, a polite smile on his face.

"Let me guess," said Vivian.

The Prince failed to persuade the Countess then, or the next morning at breakfast before dawn, despite his prowess, his familiarity with the country, his now notorious daring and his grudge against his brother.

"It's not daring and grudges that we need," said Vivian. "And you are under explicit orders not to risk your life beyond the call of duty until I get back." She looked around the table. She waved a piece of jellied bread at Weaver, Valerie, Angeline and everyone else present. "That goes for all of you. I'm the only one who gets to risk my life. Me and Ellean. Even you, Willd, even though you get to go along, you don't have life-risking privileges."

"I could go in his place," said Jack Rain, a tall twelve years old and quite serious.

Vivian smirked. "No. I know it's just a ploy to get away from Suzy."

"You could solve that problem," said Suzy, "by taking me with you instead."

"Ha. Eat your orange. Anyone else? Sir Rogier? Care to plead?"

"My lady, I don't even think you should go. I know I am far too old for such antics."

"You're what, sixty?"

"Sixty-eight. Thank you."

"Well, I'm thirty-six this year, so I'd better get this out of my system before my crazy youth is all wasted in meetings." She swigged her tea. "Are you two ready?" Willd and Ellean nodded enthusiastically. "All right, then, we're off. The rest of you may come with us as far as the bridge. Our packs are waiting?"

"Outside with the horses, my lady," said Jen.

"Kiss Violet for me, will you? Come here, Suz, Annie, let me give you both one more hug. Will you be good?"

"No," said Suzy truthfully.

"That's great," said Vivian. "Just don't do any permanent damage. No point expressing your anger till I get back, right? Come, Ellean, come, Willd."

"Coming, my lady," said Willd from behind as the Countess opened the hall door and looked back. He was busy tickling the frowning Suzy, while Annie climbed up his back.

And so, on the morning of 31 March, Angeline sulked and Sir Rogier fretted on the wall above the gate, and the sixteen-year-old Simone dozed on the Countess's bed--and the three-and-a-half-century-old Medallion hung around Susan's eleven-year-old neck. The three riders covered the first two miles up the Little Glass valley, until Nikolad was out of sight around a corner of rock. Vivian rode Flavia and Ellean rode her young stallion Alto, the inheritors of their retired parents Finesse and That Colt. Willd was borne by a swift mare, his steed for the past five years: the previous two had given their lives in the service of Clane.

"That wasn't so hard," said Ellean. "Once we got Willd unstuck from Annie and Suzy."

"He's a big hit with the girls, isn't he?"

"Yes," said Ellean, "and considering how much I've been dreading this trip the past two nights and a day, it's amazing how many people want to be in my place."

"You notice I didn't ask you if you wanted to go."

"My lady," said Willd, "here's a rider coming up behind us."

They stopped and looked back, and indeed, here came one of the Countess's messengers. "What do you suppose this is all about?" wondered Vivian sourly.

Martin of Auzel pulled up before them, smiling from his own skinny mare. "My lady," he said, half out of breath.

"What's the news, Martin?"

"Uh, no news, my lady, but I'm on my way to Amari, you know, scouting, the usual, and I heard you were going that way, and I thought--"

"You thought you could ride along."

"Well, yes, my lady, I mean, I am going there anyway--"

"Martin!" said Ellean, rolling her eyes.

Vivian gave him a narrow look. Then she laughed. "Oh, why not? Sure, but when we get back, don't tell anyone that I let you come with us, or we will both be very unpopular."

It was the season when the highlands were dressed in deep snow still while the lowlands wore a thick coat of mud. They passed from mud to snow during the day, and that night they camped under densely starry skies in the high plateau from which the streams that formed the Little Glass fell with loud exclamations north toward Nikolad. Soon two tents were staked into thin soil on a mostly bare rock sticking up out of a soggy snowfield. Vivian had business to take care of, and she wasted no time in getting to it. They were sitting around an uninhibited campfire on the rock, munching bread and fruit and cheese. She broke the silence with a question.

"Martin, tell me truthfully, are you Violet's father?"

All three of them stared at her, then the other two stared at him. He coughed loudly. "Ah, no, my lady, thanks for asking."

"You're not?"

"No, I'm not, my lady, I wouldn't lie to you. But if you don't believe me, then one, I'd be too scared you'd have me skinned alive to, ah, go anywhere near your maid, and two, I know for a fact that Jen has better taste than to, ah, go anywhere near me."

She looked into his eyes for a moment, then smiled and looked down. "Am I that scary?"

"Oh, yes, my lady."

"I'm not scared of you," said Ellean.

"Then it was you! I should've known! You've been sleeping with her all along! But seriously. If it wasn't you, Martin, then who was it?"

He coughed again. "My lady," he said, "you flatter me if I'm your prime suspect. It wasn't me, and I don't know who it was. Really."

"Jen'll never say," Ellean put in. "She wouldn't even tell me. It was just a fling, and whoever he is, he's not the marrying kind, and that's where she wants to leave it."

"Well," said Vivian, "that's where I'll have to leave it, but if I ever get my hands on that bum--oh, I don't know." She subsided slightly. "Throw him in the Nikolad dungeon till he's too old to do it again. But Jen has more dignity than most of the aristocrats I know."

They all nodded, and finished their meal with much smaller talk than the subject of Violet's paternity. Then while Ellean and Willd and Martin sat around the fire and talked about their horses, Vivian slipped away into the night. Sitting on a rock some distance from the camp fire, her cloak pulled around her against the cold, she slipped into trance. That much was easy--but she found herself trapped again under a low ceiling of mental clouds.

She stepped sideways from her wandering eye posture and entered the loose-lawed land of visionary trance. She felt she was standing on a height, at the top of stairs, overlooking a world below her, but it was no bustling mysterious city she saw. Instead, there was a great empty circular hall, and a dome above her, translucent with the full moon beyond it. Now her point of view slid sideways again, and she saw the whole chamber as if looking in from outside. Beneath the peak of the dome she saw a great stone seat atop seven stone steps. There was no one seated on the chair, but on its low back there perched two huge birds of prey or carrion.

She turned away from the stark scene, and tried to look out from the dome. Couldn't her eyes penetrate the sea air and perceive what passed in Samarra and Kel and Panthalla? She saw outside, but it was no maritime vista she beheld. She was in Avigon, in the center of the old city, and she could see armies massing on the low hills above the rivers. There was the white Imperial banner, and there too were the flags of Orzali and Amari and Shadewind and Farlain, but it was many years before, and the Imperial banner fell to earth, and the Dukes rode into the city from the east as a bare remnant of the Emperor's retinue fled in all other directions. Then she looked again, and there was a new army before the city: at its head was a woman of middle age, with light hair just going grey. Only one flag flew over this army: the grey cat couchant of Clane. She thought she smelled smoke, but just then she felt another eye looking somewhere, and brushed the fringes of a great power, and without another thought she dropped out of view into brief unconsciousness.

Vivian awoke, shivering, sitting on a rock under the stars. She came back to the campfire and found Willd sitting staring into the embers. She sat beside him. "Nothing," she said, as he put his arm around her and she cuddled against him. "Maybe over the border I'll be able to see. Oh, my Willd. What if--?" She put her hands over her face.

"My lady," was all he said, as he peeled one of her hands away and kissed her cheek. She turned her face to his and they kissed again as the stars turned.

The next day they crossed the highlands and came to the mountainous rim of Clane, and that night they camped in the dell where Vivian had been attacked on the way back from Avigon eight years before. Now it was empty of evil, but not of snow. They cleared off the top of a rock and spent some minutes getting moist pine branches to catch fire. Ellean and Martin went out at dusk and came back in under an hour with several big rabbits. Willd made stew, while Vivian crept out to the pier of rock where the Archer Girls had first made their mark.

She tried her trance again. The result was better than before, and worse. She found that her eye was no longer closed in by that dark ceiling, here on the other side of the mountains that fenced Clane. But as she flitted across Amari and Rahavon it seemed to her that the lands were less alive than ever before. Tyranny and power sat heavily on these conquered provinces--villages blasted, traitors hideously executed, that sort of thing--but she didn't linger to witness specifics. Instead she winged her way across the sea and came upon the islands of the great archipelagos that flew off from Samarra. Here was Kel, the main island of the County of Kel, and here was a vast fleet and an army that overflowed its narrow camp, and turned the rich farms and towns of the island into stockyards and slums for the supply of the Emperor's troops. A great stroke was made ready against the Isle of Samarra, with fleets and armies and powers and weapons of infamy. And here too was a nexus of power, centered on a certain tent, and inside--and then she dropped her eye again into the sea, and her spirit fled back to the rock on the edge of Amari, and she opened her eyes with a start and a fluttering heart.

When she returned to the camp, they all looked at her."Well," she said, "that was close."

The next morning all four riders stood at the summit of the long scree slope down which the trail led into Amari, even with the top of the uppermost pier of rock. The clouds were gathering below, and it already seemed to be raining at the foot of Mount Farag a few miles off to their right.

"What now?" asked Ellean.

"Well," said Vivian, "of course, I don't expect any of you to come with me--"

"Be serious," said Ellean. "Of course we're coming with you, even if you're going all the way to Samarra. I'd swim if I had to."

"Even if I'm going to Avigon?"

Ellean opened her mouth, shut it, swallowed. Then she shook her head. "Especially if you're going to Avigon."

"No one's going to ask me why?"

"Nope," said Ellean, and the two men just stared back at their Countess with grim smiles.

"Well, for the record," said Vivian, "it's because I'm sure something's going to happen in the islands by the full moon, and there's no way we could get to Samarra by then. And we can't do anything useful back home. So I figure, why not, at least take the opportunity to browse at the Imperial Library. We might just learn something. And where else can we cause any significant amount of mischief to the Emperor?" She looked at them, and they smiled grimly. "And you, Martin? Just where in Amari are we dropping you off?"

"Uh, my lady," he replied, swallowing a considerable lump of apprehension, "it just so happens I have business down in Avigon too."

"No, you don't."

"Well," he said, "I do now."

They descended from the heights into a land where already the leaves were on the trees, and several times they were soaked by the great washing rains of the southern April. Once they hid from a downpour in a tall shallow cave among boulders, and after a minute realized that they were sharing the shelter with a full-grown black bear. She didn't bite--what bit them was bugs of sorts that most of Clane never knew existed. They were sunburned and calloused and stained with hundreds of miles of the dirt of the road. For more than a week the four riders crawled across the map of the Empire, creeping in the day through the hills and woods of Amari and the broad plantations of southern Farlain, camping at night in out of the way spots, staying away from major roads and towns and benefitting from the apathy of almost everyone they saw. In south central Farlain, on the ninth of April, they were stopped by a half dozen militiamen on ponies, and Vivian got to watch Martin of Auzel in action.

"Yeah," he said, "me and my woman and Willy there and his woman, we're headed down to Calway to register some land, see, we got these two pieces of land from my uncle, his dad, and we gotta register it 'cause my other uncle, who's his uncle too, he's disputing whether we got rights to the stream, there was a flood and the lines changed, but we gotta water our cattle, and anyway, my brother, his cousin, he's back there with his kids, I mean my brother's kids, and--"

"Stop, stop," said the officer in charge. "What part of Farlain are you from?"

"Oh, up north," said Martin. "Well, originally from Intror, but we moved down when the Duke was offering land up around Sakavis, and they never did mark the land right, so you see that's how this happened, and then that parcel by the crick, well, it's changed course three times the past five springs, the crick, that is, and we have to have the papers fixed every time it happens--"

"Just let him pass," said one of the conscripts. "Yeah," the others agreed. "Let's not hear any more of this."

"You can go," said the officer, "but if any of the Imperial Guard stop you, make sure to tell them the whole story."

The next morning they got the chance to do just that. The four had just begun to pack up camp under threat of rain when they heard horses busting through the undergrowth. Vivian and Ellean slipped behind trees. Willd and Martin tried to look innocent as they took down the tents and rolled up the bed pads.

A man on horseback emerged from the brush, wearing a white frock over chainmail. He sat on his horse looking around the camp. The two men tried to ignore him. "You," he said.

"Me?" Martin replied, standing. Six more riders joined the first one, some with bows, some with spears or swords, all clad in white. Martin started into his spiel: "Yeah, well, we're from up north, by Sakavis, see, me and my cousin Willy and--"

"If you're from Sakavis," said the officer, "then I'm from Panthalla. Hey, what's that there? Pick that up."

"What? This?" said Martin, looking at a bedroll.

"No, moron, that. It's a comb, isn't it? Give it to me."

"Well," said Martin, handing him the comb, "I think you look fine, but--"

The officer kicked him in the face. Martin went down without a second thought. As he sat on the ground rubbing his jaw, the officer held up the comb. "Look, gentlemen," he said, "it has little hearts carven into it. I believe it's made of antler. Fine work. From up north, indeed."

"Don't they carve things of antler up in Clane?" asked one of the other riders. "Maybe that's the part of Up North he means."

"You know," said the officer, "I think they do. And--wait a tick, there's a scent on this comb. Ah, smells very nice! Is that your perfume, my man?"

"Uh, yeah," said Martin, trying to scuttle out of the way of boots and hooves.

The officer swung his spear around until the point was in the vicinity of Martin's chest. "Where's the woman?" he asked. "You have till the count of three. One," and he pressed the spear point against the errand-rider's collarbone.

"Three," cried Ellean, rounding the tree and loosing an arrow. It struck the officer in the shoulder. He dropped his spear. While Ellean distracted him by shooting the man next to him in the neck, Martin returned the spear, burying its point a foot into the officer's stomach.

"That's for kicking me in the face, asshole," he said in a hurry as he dodged the next rider's sword. Not even Martin had known he could move that fast. Willd picked up his own bow and fired two quick arrows, both quite wild but distracting to the Imperial archers, one of whom fell with Ellean's next arrow in him. Another dart whizzed past her and she coolly shot its firer in the neck, her usual target and one of several places uncovered by Farlain armor. Another rider turned to flee but fell with two more arrows in his back. All was suddenly quiet. Then they heard an unidentifiable sound behind a tree to their left.

Vivian had been hiding there when two of the Guard crept upon her, knives drawn. "It's her," said one. "The Grey Lady."

"You're our prisoner," said the other. "Don't try any of that sorcery."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Vivian. "I'm no Grey Lady. Leave me alone."

"It is her! You are her! Drop your bow, lady, you're our prisoner!"

"I'm telling you," Vivian said through clenched teeth, "it's better if you just get on your little horses and ride back to Calway and forget you ever thought of hassling me."

"Come on, drop it!" they repeated, poking their knives at her.

Vivian rolled her eyes. Then she looked one of them straight on. He dropped his knife. She leaned in and gave a quick yank and he collapsed in a dead heap. The other backed away toward his horse, still staring at her. "Can't let you get away, either, now I think of it," she said, as she drew her bow and fired an arrow into his face. He fell with a gurgle and a thud, and just then Ellean and Martin and Willd came through the brush.

Vivian was standing there, her bow in her hand. "By the Sun," she said, "I like that not." She looked away and wiped her free hand nervously on her riding pants.

"Good shot," said Ellean, examining the body with the arrow in it. Vivian shouldered her bow and walked back to the horses, rubbing her hands together as if to wash them.

Willd went over to the other one, and Martin followed him. They knelt by the body. After a moment's examination Willd stood back up. "Brain hemorrhage," he told Martin. "Sometimes that'll happen in the heat of a fight."

The four riders now led a fifth horse, the most ordinary-looking of the Imperial Guard steeds. Over the course of the next few days, open woods disappeared, and instead of forest paths they rode along alleys in wide plantations. In the middle of the day they bathed in canals, and gangs of slaves out planting stopped to talk and offer them drinking water. Martin made up at least half a dozen stories about who they were and where they were going, but the farm workers didn't seem to care about that; they were happy enough just to hear different voices from the usual ones. The villages and highways were more and more crowded, but the four looked more and more like the rest of the crowd as their clothes gathered dirt and wear and tear. They used a few pieces of copper to buy food and wine, they camped where they could, and they managed to remain out of the way of the constabulary.

"We need to avoid Calway," said Vivian as they sat around a small fire in a patch of swampy woods. It was the night of 10 April. "We have to turn south into the Imperial Domain. We'll cross the Lavan by the Old West Bridge at Avigon."

"There's nothing but a big slum on this side of the river there," Martin told her. "No one will be watching that route."

"Not for us, certainly," Vivian replied. "They're hardly going to be on the lookout for the Grey Lady sneaking around the Imperial seat."

"The Grey Lady?" Ellean repeated.

"That's what one of those guards said. The one I shot. He kept saying, 'You're the Grey Lady, aren't you?'"

"Wait," said Ellean, "they knew who you were? I mean, they'd heard of you?"

"You're not grey at all though," said Willd.

"No, that's what I said to him, but he would go on about it, so I had to shoot him. Grey Lady indeed. I guess I'm supposed to be some sort of sorceress."

"Imagine that," said Ellean. "Am I crazy, or should this be causing us grave concern?"

"Yes, Ellean, I'm concerned, all right? I'm very concerned. About this whole journey. And I'm concerned about what's going on in Samarra. I'm concerned about Clane too. I'm concerned about whether Countess Susan will have a County to rule. I'm concerned about a number of things, but here we are."

"Well, good," said Ellean, "I was afraid it was just me. I guess I'd better get some sleep, unless I'm first watch."

"Get some sleep," said Vivian.

But when Ellean awoke to relieve her, the Countess stayed up to talk. "I tried to look," said Vivian, "but with the moon approaching full, it's hazy at best."

"Look? Oh. Look."

"Yes. I know he's out there, and I can feel him readying his strike, but I can't see his army or his ships. I'm almost sure he's going to land on Samarra on the night of the full moon. The fourteenth. Actually, the night of the thirteenth."

"I'm sorry, I have no idea what date it is. With this cloud cover, I couldn't tell you what phase the moon's in, either."

"That's all right. I happen to know. Full moon's three nights from now."

"Three nights? What could we accomplish by three nights from now?"

"I don't know," said Vivian. "We certainly can't sail out to Samarra in that time, so there's that plan torn to pieces. But we have to do something. He wouldn't have brought his army and his fleet all the way out to Kel if he were not sure of victory over the Duke of Samarra. And I'll wager that we can stir up some sort of trouble in Avigon. Maybe at the Library--or maybe," she added as if it were an afterthought, "at the Palace."

"The Palace? You're not suggesting--?"

Vivian smiled at her. "You don't have to go if you don't want to."

On the evening of 12 April they found themselves on a busy thoroughfare in the western slums of Avigon the Dirty. They did not so much camp as squat on the porch of a dilapidated house tenanted by a loose family of old people and imbeciles. Martin of Auzel worked out a trade with them: one standard issue Imperial Guard horse (for food) in return for shelter and no questions answered. After nightfall the four were sitting around eating fruit and cheese and bread and sipping brandy, when Vivian formally announced her plans.

"I'm going to the Library tomorrow, and then I might just sneak over to the Palace and see what's going on there."

"You might what?" Martin repeated.

"You heard right. The Palace."

He grinned and said, "Well, go big or go home, I guess."

"I couldn't have said it better," Vivian replied. "But you're not going, Martin. Someone has to stay here and make sure that the rest of the horses don't get cooked up and served."

"Actually, my lady," he replied, "I think I can manage."

"And you, my love? You haven't said anything."

"My lady," said Willd, "I am going with you, am I not?"

"Um, yes, of course you are."

"That's all I need to know."

"Don't any of you want to know the plan?" asked Vivian warily.

"I thought," said Ellean, "that 'see what's going on' was a pretty good plan."

"Yeah," said Martin. "I mean, we all know you know what you're doing."

"Well, thank you, I guess," said Vivian.

So around dawn the next morning the Countess of Clane, Lady Ellean Rain and Sir William Willd accepted good luck wishes, and even hugs, from Martin. They pulled on their best peasant clothes and set off for the Library. Stiff, sniffly and covered with dirt, the three walked out of the slums at the foot of the high ground west of Avigon. They came to the single stone bridge over the Lavan River, swollen with the influx just a mile upstream of the Allor that flowed down from Inzil. Amid the general ruin around them of old marble buildings, among whose fallen roofs and empty porticos shanties and tenements had been erected, the massive bridge was a reminder of the durability of the old Imperial engineering. The way had been narrowed somewhat by houses built on it all across the span, and the crowd moving back and forth and just milling about made them glad already that they had left their horses behind. They had to look back from the other side to assure themselves that they had indeed crossed a mighty river.

Along the riverfront on the east side, there seemed to be a continuous market of food and supplies and odds and ends either stolen or dredged up for sale out of abandoned belongings: weapons, tools, utensils, statuary, pots and pans, cloth, boots, pieces of metal, rice, flour, farm animals and even a variety of books. Vivian looked over these, some of them obviously pilfered from the great Library, with a melancholy eye. Still she saw fit to trade four copper coins for a thin tome, from an old woman bookseller who seemed to be illiterate if not blind. Aside from that, the three gave the goods at market only the merest glance as they pushed through the knots of shoppers and out into the slums of the old city. They found their way into neighborhoods that echoed emptily.

"What happened here, do you suppose?" asked Ellean. "Has the Big Guy been slaughtering the poor?"

"I see people," said Vivian. "A few of them, anyway. They're looking out the cracks in their doors, watching us." Ellean looked around nervously. "No, it's all right," said Vivian, "they're afraid of us, they don't want any trouble. They're mostly old people, and a few children."

"So what happened?"

"Well, of course He's drafted his militia, and others have probably fled to avoid duty. Besides, Avigon's dying. Even He can't change that. That's why he's doomed."

"That, and the fact that he's got us mad," said Ellean. Willd laughed mirthlessly. Vivian thought of her son that never was, and made no reply.

The Library stood like a proud tree recently dead but still sturdy amid what had been a pretty park and was now a marsh with pillars sticking up at various angles. Its main entrance, with its grand stone stairs, was guarded by a squad of men in chainmail and white frocks. The three watched the guards for a minute from an abandoned wooden hovel in the lee of a stone arch a few hundred feet away, and then without a word filed out and through a brushy yard, around back to the loading dock. They slipped in, crept along the edge of a wide storage room and climbed eight rotting wooden steps to a narrow office full of boxes and shelves. "So," whispered Ellean, "what do we do if we meet a squad of soldiers while we're browsing?"

"I bet they haven't kept the catalog up to date," said Vivian, ignoring the question. "It's okay, I know what I'm looking for."

She led them up four flights of marble stairs and out into a floor of nothing but stacks. All around the staircase was a wall of bars like a jail cell, but the prisoners were the books, and the door of bars was off its hinges. Vivian led them through, down an aisle, and then between two long lines of shelves. Scanning the shelving marks on the bindings, she stopped several times to scratch her head and look around. Twice they waited while she pulled books down and leafed through them; one book interested her so much that she handed it to Willd after a close examination. "Hang onto that, my love," she said, "I just might borrow it for a few years."

They pressed on: now it seemed she was looking for a particular spot among the stacks. Presently they came to a whole shelf with not one book on it, like a bare patch in the woods. "This is where it was," said Vivian, pulling out her purchase from the market. "I'm almost sure of it. Every other book's gone, though."

"Is this what we came here to find?" asked Ellean. "Books that aren't there?"

"Well, it's strange, isn't it? In the midst of all these full shelves?"

"But there were plenty of books pilfered for the market," Ellean pointed out. "Maybe they liked this particular section. Maybe that one of yours is the only one they didn't sell."

Vivian set the thin book down on the empty shelf and opened it to the third page. Ellean looked over her shoulder and saw that it was hand-written in symbols of a sort she had never seen before. Vivian seemed to find them comprehensible. "What is it?" asked Ellean after five minutes.

"Several things," said Vivian. "First, these books were recently removed. Like in the past month. Look: there's no dust on the shelves."

"Sure there is, it's just in lumps."

"Those were on top of the books, brushed off when they were taken. And whether or not it was Him, it's interesting, isn't it? I think He wanted all the books in this section, but this one escaped by having been pilfered. Now, do you know what caught my eye about this book?"

"No, what caught your eye about it?"

"It's by Count Mattas the Old."

"Really?" exclaimed Ellean. "Second Count of Clane? Son of the famous Penelope? So why was it in the Imperial Library?"

"Ellean," said Willd, "I remember carting around whole armloads of books by Counts of Clane when we were here eight years ago."

"You remember right, my love," said Vivian. "The Counts up through Tereza contributed much to the wisdom of the late Empire, especially on subjects related to alchemy. That book I handed you, Willd: it's Tereza's first catalog of medicinal plants. Just a souvenir. I don't think a copy of it remains in all of Clane--we have the home-printed updated version, but this one has all her own pictures. It's right that we should have it, don't you think? But Mattas's book: the Library, as you know, is arranged by topic. All the books on purifying gold are in one place, and those on herbal medicines are in another, the history of Orzali in another, and so on. Now this book--"

"It was from this spot," said Ellean, "so whatever it's about would be what the missing books are about, and that would be what the Big Guy's been up to lately."

"Yes. Exactly. And this one seems to be about weather."

"Weather?" Ellean repeated. "You mean, figuring out if it's going to rain tomorrow?"

"Well, if I'm reading this right--and I have to warn you, I'm not terribly familiar with old Mattas's glyphs, they're not the same system that the more recent Counts sometimes used, and I'm not completely sure of those glyphs either--but if I'm reading this right, it seems as if old Mattas is talking about making it rain tomorrow."

"Ohhh. You can do that?"

"No, I can't. I guess I can murder people in cold blood, but bring rain? No. Not my grandfather, not Tereza, not Count Robert. But Mattas--well, like you said, he was the son of Penelope herself, and the grandson of Ranere and the Tenth Emperor. It was said that the Emperors could make lightning fall from a blue sky, or open the clouds to let in a single ray of sun, or summon the hurricane."

"And this guy? Can he do that?"

"Not quite," said Vivian. "But I already suspected he can make it rain or not. I suppose it's enough if he can just keep the seas calm. Come, follow me." She set down Count Mattas's meteorological tome on a nearby table and went on a brisk walk among the stacks, her companions trailing behind her. Here and there she pulled down a book and handed it to one or the other, and by the time they returned to the table each of them had a dozen or so stacked up in their arms.

"Right there," she told them, and they placed the teetering stacks on the table. Then for hours Willd and Ellean waited, watched, ran shelf errands, talked in whispers and otherwise amused themselves while the Countess pored over a collection of books that grew to fifty. But it was Count Mattas's book she concentrated on for the last hour of their day in the library. Her absorption seemed total. Day slowly rotated into evening, and still Vivian squinted at the text.

"So how much do you bet," said Ellean to Willd, "that we get to see the big guy before this night is over?"

"He's supposed to be concentrating on the conquest of Samarra," Willd replied. "It is, after all, the last of the Duchies to resist him."

"Still." She shivered. "If Vivie can kill soldiers with a look, imagine--"

"Yes, young lady," said Vivian, not looking up, "he could kill you with a glance. It wouldn't even faze him. It makes me so sick I can hardly stand to be in my own body afterward."

"I'm not surprised," said Ellean.

"Especially that soldier," Vivian went on. "That officer that stopped us on our way home from Avigon last time--or Torak--they weren't so hard, because they--deserved--no, I can't say that. Excuse me." She looked away, and they expected her to bend over and vomit, but instead she turned back to her books.

Minutes later, they heard voices, and feet on stairs. Willd went down the aisle of shelves and watched, then hastened back as quietly as he could. "Guards," he whispered to the two women where they stood fidgeting by the table. "They're on this floor. Half a dozen of them."

"There's another stair just down this way," Ellean whispered back, waving in the opposite direction from the noise. "It's not barred." Vivian pocketed her two ancestors' books and took off in a hurry in the direction indicated. Willd and Ellean trailed behind her, glancing over their shoulders. They found the back staircase without trouble, but trouble was following. As soon as they started down the steps, Ellean grabbed Vivian by the sleeve and hissed, "They've seen us."

Without another word they dashed down the stairs, constantly in danger of slipping or spraining an ankle. They had descended three flights when they heard voices above them and other feet descending. Without pausing to form a strategy, Vivian plunged on past the ground floor of the library and down three more flights of ever-rougher stairway into the urban earth of Avigon. The others chased her in near-panic. At last they pulled up panting at the sunless end of the stairs. They were in a wide, low passage, which they could see only from the faint light filtering down from the Library. Corridors disappeared into blank shadow in several directions, lined by great stone shelves and objects piled on the floor in nondescript heaps. There were still footsteps descending several flights above them.

"They may think we're book thieves," said Vivian. "Well, we are book thieves. No doubt a serious offense to Him. Let's get out of sight."

She grabbed Ellean's hand and pulled her into the soupy darkness, and Willd followed as best he could, until they had gone around the corner of a cobwebby wooden structure and lost what scant light sank as far as the bottom of the stairs. There they waited, holding their breath, as the guards came down the last flight.

"Vagrants," said one. "They live down here. Crazy lot. Ever heard them talk?"

"No, Karuf," said another. "They were too well-fed. They must be from one of the gangs that roam down here. For all we know, they made off with books. You know what that means."

"But no one survives down here," said a third.

"No, correction, no one lives down here," said the second voice. "Them gangs just come and go. Come on, we all know there'll be trouble, He'll hold us responsible. He's very concerned about the books. Form up, three groups, get those torches down here, let's get a move on."

A commotion told of men returning up the stairs to fetch torches, and the rest splitting up and choosing their ways. Vivian drew her friends back into the darkness. As the noise grew behind them, they fell back further, stumbling over unidentified obstacles. The torches followed them for a while, sometimes faintly lighting their path, but presently they were alone but for the scurrying creatures. They pushed on into a darkness that was a tangible thing pressing against them on all sides. Ellean gripped Vivian's hand ahead of her and Willd's behind her, but still she bumped into unknown objects along the walls--corpses, Ellean figured, or possibly torture equipment. After many minutes they stopped. They were no longer sure if their eyes were open or closed.

"We're lost," said Ellean.

"Not at all," said Vivian. "We're under the Palace."

"Great. I think I liked being lost."

Vivian raised her hand and kissed it in the dark. "You'll be fine," she said. Then without another word, she went on, dragging her companions along. They came to a dividing place, and Vivian stood for a moment thinking, while Ellean and Willd fidgeted. The choice was to the right. They followed a long hall, filled with stench even compared to the rest of the catacombs. There was a tiny scrap of light from somewhere, and they could tell they were passing doorways.

Suddenly they all jumped as someone quite nearby started laughing. Before they could gather their wits, the laugher was joined by others until a chorus of hilarity had broken out all around them from the shadows. The three wanderers stood abashed in the middle of the hall, made the objects of derision by invisible voices on every side. Vivian, dragging Ellean behind her, started to hurry on up the hall, and then on a whim turned aside and stood before one of the doors. Feeling out, she touched old wood. Beyond it, there was a single living mind, all but gone from long wasting in the darkness. She felt further and found other things as well, things at various stages between living mind and dead flesh. "Come on," she whispered, pulling Ellean on to the end of the hall. The laughter slowly died down.

Here was where the light came from: the bottom of a narrow stone stair. It was deep in shadow, but to them it was almost too bright. Vivian looked back from the first step and saw that Willd was still behind them, holding Ellean's other hand. Vivian turned back to grab him and kiss him. "I was so worried," she said. "I feared I'd lost you."

"Not while the light of your eyes is before me," he replied.

"Oh, please," said Ellean. "May I remind you--?"

Vivian gave her a little smile and pulled them up the stairs. They came to a door, struggled with it in silence, then stood back and pondered. Suddenly Vivian started pounding on it.

"What are you doing?" Ellean protested, but Willd joined in the pounding. They stopped: there was no sound from beyond, although a few chortles wafted up from below. They pounded again, and were rewarded with the sound of the bar being removed and the door creaking open.

The light of torches flooded their eyes. Willd and Ellean, who had their knives out, were not ready for it, and neither could focus on the figure before them. They heard a thump. When their eyes adjusted, they saw a large man with a cudgel in his hand--lying on the floor with his mouth open. Vivian was beyond him, looking around.

"Brain hemorrhage?" asked Ellean.

"Let's get moving," said Vivian, rubbing her hands on her dress.

They came out into a basement carved out of bedrock. It was voluminous, and everything from small odds to very large ends was piled along the walls, obscuring the shape of the chamber. The far end vanished into shadow. Torches burned along the nearer walls high up out of reach without aid of ladder. There was no one else in the room. The guard had been seated right next to the door to the catacombs, and on the other side of his chair was a doorway through which they could see the bottom of another set of stairs. Vivian ran in and started upwards, then stopped on the third step as the other two caught up.

"I don't know if I can do that again," she said to them.

"But what if--?" Ellean started.

"I don't know. I don't know."

She turned and ran softly up two flights of stairs and came out into a tiny room. Another soldier stood there: a very young man startled by the three intruders. Vivian held him in her gaze, and his mouth dropped open. They stood thus paired for ten seconds, twenty, thirty. Still both breathed. Willd ended the tableau, picking up a piece of rock whose regular use seemed to be as a doorstop. He knocked the young soldier on the head with it. The victim fell unconscious, and Vivian came out of her concentration with a sigh of relief.

"Thank you, my love," she said. "I wasn't joking. I just couldn't do it."

"Why?" asked Ellean. "Think what could've--!"

"He's innocent," Vivian explained in a whisper. "Let him sleep. And besides--it's work, all right? It's like lifting heavy weights. Now shush!"

She stepped out the other door of the tiny room, Willd behind her. They crossed a larger room, which seemed to be a giant's antechamber. They rushed through the far doorway--and they were in a curving corridor, wide and empty and echoing. Ellean tarried in the anteroom, but when Vivian looked back with impatience, Ellean came out holding a short bow and six arrows. "In case of more guards," she whispered, the sound caroming around the gallery. They stood watching and listening, barely daring to breathe, aghast at the place in which they found themselves.

The mosaic-encrusted walls rose many fathoms to tall narrow windows, and then to an arched ceiling set with stones in what were either intricate geometric patterns or sentences in an unknown cuneiform. The floor was tiled with triangular stones of black and white, again in a pattern that, after first seeming quite random, began to suggest the encoding of deep secrets. On the far wall, which curved away from them on both sides, the mosaics showed monsters and gods fighting on the mountainous shore of a primeval sea. There were serpents, winged things, carrion creatures of all descriptions, demon-eyed fish, blobs whose protuberances suggested various animals living or mythical, and things which were no animal that imagination could conjure. Heroes fought them, heroes in human form: something suggested that it was form only.

Far around the curve of the hall to the left, they could see an interruption in this inner wall. Ellean and Willd stood marveling at the strange world into which they had intruded, but Vivian took off her shoes, turned and padded on bare feet to the left. The other two followed a little way behind, slowed down by their efforts at walking silently. Still their footfalls echoed around the corridor as they pursued the Countess. Through the years it took them to cross that stretch of floor, they expected at every second to be discovered, but not, perhaps, by human agents. There was no sound, just the sensation of a sound, of billowing winds, of wings beating, the feeling of a ceaseless watch from between the molecules of air. All around them the hieroglyph designs spun across the walls, the black tiles and white tiles danced asymmetrically on the floor.

They reached a doorway. They stood in it and marveled to be where they were. The chamber before them was lit by a light that seemed to come from the space itself, although it seemed as if there was no air there, only empty volume. The room was circular and surmounted by a great windowless dome of pale stone interlaced throughout with tiny cracks. The full moon shone upon the outside of the dome, this night, but its luminescence added nothing to the light beneath it. The floor was of a shiny black stone that reflected only the vacant space above: but it was formed of tiny intricate tiles barely visible even directly at their feet. The effect, seen in the shine from across the room, was of tiny, barely-seen bugs crawling everywhere, frozen in motion by the act of viewing. Suddenly it seemed that the cracks in the dome likewise formed an insidious design, one of grave implication, that would not in a hundred years yield up its meaning. Then they raised their eyes to the middle of the room, where stood the only object beneath that white dome and above that black floor. It sat atop seven circular steps of unmarked white stone. It was a seat, wide with a low back, built of whitest marble almost translucent in the glowing air. There they stood, tiny brainless creatures in a corner of the study of some huge and wise beast. They did not move, but their hearts quailed back from the greatness of the chair.

Vivian closed her eyes against the vastness of it all and almost jumped: waiting behind her eyelids was a figure. It was the Lady of the Fountain. Beside the Lady, Vivian beheld a young man of great beauty, but he wore a darkened face, and she could not make out his features. Yet she knew him: she had carried him within for eight months, a year ago. Beside them she now looked upon a crowded scene: there was Trofim fitz-Trofim, and there was Edwy Sallier, and Sir Everard, and Lord Smeagle, and then she saw the old Duke George of Samarra, and the Dukes of Rahavon and Orzali, and then, clenching his hands in rage, she saw another, an august man, if headstrong and thoughtless. With a sudden breath she knew him: Maladar, late Duke of Farlain. They all stared back at her from the inside of her eyelids, an implacable grudge written on all their varied faces. She opened her eyes and strode forward.

Forever it seemed that she crossed those empty yards. The beating in her ears grew louder. She looked only ahead, but still it grew, and it was not her heart. She looked up and saw them: dark wings falling upon her from the air. Two evil carrion-birds stooped upon her before the throne. She fell to her knees, trying to fight them off with her hands and her spirit, but they tore at her and cursed her. She tried to hold them, one and then the other, with her eyes, but as one held back the other mauled her with beak and claws. Then with a savage cry one she held for a moment fell from the air and landed beside her in a heap of shabby scales and feathers. Two arrows stuck from its tiny lizard head.

Vivian turned on the other and seized its wing in her hand. Her eyes burned into its skull, and it could not resist her grip as she gained a hold on its neck. Then using both her eyes and her hands she twisted it, twisted the thing until its spirit fled and the hulk that had contained it fell to the black floor beside its companion.

Still the beating of wings sounded in the room. Vivian looked toward the door and saw her friends under attack by one more of the bird things. Willd held the bow and tried to get a shot off, while Ellean crouched covering her face, but the creature tore the bow away and dropped, its claws extended. "No!" cried Vivian. She ran to the throne, ran up its seven steps and stood at the top. Her hand extended toward the door, she said in a thundering voice: "Cease, servant of evil! Go back to the pits that bred you!" The tension of the chamber snapped. The bird thing rose with a screeching complaint, disappeared upward into thin air. Ellean and Willd looked up, startled, but remained crouching.

Vivian looked around. The room was empty but for her and for her friends in the doorway. She sat down upon the stone seat as if it were a park bench. There was something in the back pocket of her dress: Count Mattas's book. She drew it out. There seemed to be no hurry about anything: after all, had not blood and war swirled around this throne for seven hundred and eighty years? But far off she thought she heard trumpets, and the sound of the waves, and of battle on land and sea. She opened the tome to the page she had marked, set it in her lap and put her hands on the arms of the throne. Then she seemed to notice where she was.

No woman had ever sat upon that chair before Vivian. An alien power resided there, yet one strangely akin to hers.

She entered trance as easily as entering a room, letting her spirit flow out, down the Lavan River to the Gulf of Almery. She floated, far downwind, over the waves in their millions, while the full moon flew in the eastern sky. At the same time she saw the symbols of the book, the hieroglyphs of the spells of her ancestor. She saw land ahead, a long low island, and to its right more islands: Samarra and the Kel archipelago beside it. She saw many ships in the moonlight. And there was an eye there ever awake. One who was engaged in great deeds was of a sudden distracted, and turned his attention toward her.

Vivian remembered herself at the last moment and opened her eyes in the heart of the Palace. She began to read out the names of the symbols before her. Confusion fought with a rising wrath in that one who had become aware of her. She ignored him and read on. The fish beside the tree, the bent eye upon the full moon, blood seeping from cracks in the stone: her voice pressed on across the page into darkness. Already she felt the wind of storm stirring. In this place of power, the powers were close at hand. One more line, one more word, and it was done. She looked out upon the sea and the islands as the wind rose.

But now that eye perceived her design and left off its other business to quash her storm. Hands far off settled upon the ocean and calmed its excitement. And now for you, little countess, came the voice from afar. Hurriedly she read the words again, louder and faster and yet with care. The one far off became wrathful, and the hands laid on the sea were shaking with rage. Her spirit above the waters brushed against those hands, and fell back from their heat, but still the sea stirred impatiently. Once more she read out the words of Count Mattas, and once more the sea and the wind rose in their ire.

The hands from afar now seized her spirit and wrestled with it, and she fell back and yet could not get loose from that grip. She opened her eyes again on the domed chamber, and before her she saw a collage of carnage: fathers died and sons slew their brothers and climbed the throne. The blood of dozens of sons of Emperors was spilled, sometimes in combat, more often in execution, sometimes three brothers at once beheaded before the seat from which the fourth brother watched. All these murders took place in one unending moment before the throne on which sat Vivian, and there amongst them all was the Emperor himself, clad in white, his hood thrown back to reveal his ancient face with that bent nose and those piercing eyes. The throne is not yours, little Countess, he said. Or do you wish to claim it?

She shrank back in the chair, gripping the arms of stone. I claim nothing, but my own land, she replied. He snarled and advanced up the steps, a beast bent on tearing its helpless victim limb from limb. He was on the sixth step when she rose to her feet and added, And in the name of the son that you destroyed, I challenge your claim. Why don't you show me the signs?

His wrath boiled over as he stood before her. He would drag her from the throne and devour her, not a shred of her would remain upon the earth, he would obliterate her line and her land itself would be desert, he would--but she laughed in his face. Far off she felt a great storm rising over the summer sea. The spell had done its work. She spoke aloud. "Go ahead, kill me, Tyrant. I will happily give my life in return for your defeat. I have daughters to succeed me, while the Empire is sterile. But look out from whatever deck you stand upon, and see Count Mattas's storm rising. Where will your ships find haven?"

The simulacrum of the Emperor, twisted by the suppression of extreme rage, in one more moment vanished from the room. It was empty again but for Vivian, the throne, and her two companions rising from the floor.

They looked toward the throne and saw the Countess standing, her arms raised toward the dome. Again she spoke words strange to them, words of great potency, and laughed, and the words and the laughter echoed through the chamber and the halls outside, not the giggling of the insane and dying, but the sure joy of triumph. There she stood, Vivian, heiress of the Old Line, and for a moment they saw her clad in white, with fire in her hands. The light of her filled the dome with a burning radiance that cast no shadows, and her laughter mocked all things beneath her as she stood before the ancient seat of Emperors. Even her friends were cowed by her puissance. She was no one that they had known before, but she was that which they had all their lives feared without recognition. Before the world she stood, on the verge of the greatest throne their history had ever seen. It was hers to claim.

And then the echoes died out, the light dimmed, the white figure descended the steps, and there before them, in the middle of a room that was so many yards across and so many fathoms high, was a woman in a dirty brown dress. She had been frightening and beautiful, but now she was only Vivian, five foot three with a few lines on her face and a little grey in her hair. She walked up to them, a worried smile on her face. "We'd better go," she said.

"That way?" Ellean suggested, indicating a far door in the dim far end of the chamber.

"No, not that way," said Vivian, pushing past her toward the door they had entered by.

Two weeks later, the four Clanish riders were in the hills of north Farlain. Vivian, Ellean and Willd had fled through the catacombs and into the ancient sewers of the city, and by the time they came back out into the light, on the afternoon of 15 April, no one would have taken any of them for an Imperial claimant. Of the things they had seen, or passed and not seen, during their escape in the darkness under Avigon, none of the three would ever speak even to one another.

They had found Martin of Auzel sitting on his stoop sharing a pipe with an old man of the house, who had been quartering their steeds in the yard outside his room. The next morning they bade farewell to the tenement, and left a couple of gold florins bearing the face of Duke Salvar.

They were forced to take an entire week to cross through the most populated parts of the Grand Duchy and the Calway suburbs, and to evade pursuit they bore northward, instead of eastward into Amari. Days they pressed on with a continually changing crowd of vagrants, and nights they camped with vagrants, the only mark of difference being their horses. They did not encounter the Imperial Guard at close range, although they saw soldiers often. More than once they had to defend their steeds from hungry neighbors in camp. Beyond Calway they turned to the northwest, and passed through wide woodlands in Farlain's central hills, and from then on they camped alone and saw few people. The only sign of pursuit was a vague headache that grew on Vivian as the days passed.

Now they were sitting around the campfire, chewing on the bones of a pheasant that Ellean and Martin had bagged and Willd had roasted, and passing around a skin filled at the last village with a local wine.

"You want to hear something scary?" asked Vivian. "If I'm not mistaken, we're within about ten miles of the site of Arrenuim. It might even be right here. That rock over there might have come from the foundation of the house built by the brother of the Sixteenth Emperor."

"That's not scary," said Ellean. "You want to hear something really scary? I thought you might just sit back down on that throne and claim the Empire for yourself."

"That's nothing. You want to hear something really really scary? I thought about it."

"You did not."

"Well, it occurred to me that the seat was about the right size, and that I really could, and-- well, there I was, right? But I knew better."

"Wait, wait," said Martin. "What's all this about? The Throne?"

"Don't think about it too much, is my advice," said Ellean.

"And of course," said Vivian, "you're sworn to secrecy regarding every detail of this trip."

"Of course, my lady," said Martin. "I have no idea what you're talking about, and I don't want to know, and if I figure it out I won't tell anyone."

"But you were saying," said Ellean.

"Oh. Well," Vivian went on, "the throne may be the right size for my butt, but the rest of me doesn't fit it at all. Having to--to do what I had to do to that guard in the basement, for instance. It was almost too much as it was. But to be Emperor--would mean that would be standard procedure, a possible outcome of every encounter with a human being. I could feel the intoxication of it. It was so easy to use power there. I felt as if I could do anything. Yet it was also easy, in the end, to say no. It's not that I couldn't--do that, over and over again. It's just that I don't want to be that person. I'm happy as I am."

"We're very happy as you are," said Ellean. She raised the wineskin as if it were a glass. "To Vivian, who will never be anything more than the Countess of Clane." She drank, and the two men followed her example. Willd passed the wineskin to Vivian.

"I'll drink to Clane," she said, "and to the best scouts in the Empire."

Then while the stars wheeled on that night of the new moon, and Martin and Ellean shared a pipe, they sang and talked and told stories, and then they slept the sleep of long laborers and far travelers, while far away, on the shores of Rahavon, the Emperor dragged his remaining forces out of the unkind sea.

The Countess and her companions crossed the low mountains between Farlain and Intror and Westdubbik and on a sunny morning of early May found themselves following a joyous brook northward. It grew as they rode on that day, and the next day it led them to Dubkarin. Three days later they were in Nikolad, and the day after that, the ninth day of May of the year 782, Clane's Countess convened her council.

"The news is," said Siglind, twenty-five, tall and still spindly, "the Emperor's fleet foundered in a storm as he was beginning his invasion of Samarra. Most of the ships were lost, but he got half of his army out. He has pulled back from Kel, and the islands are again free."

"What number do we have of his losses?" asked Sir Rogier of the half-nude Rukh scout.

"Messengers of the Samarrans say ten thousand, maybe fifteen. They say the storm came up out of nowhere, on the night of the full moon. The story is that the wind was dead, the sea flat as glass and not a cloud in the moonlit sky, and then just when his ships were crossing the waters between Kel and Samarra a storm arose and smashed the fleet upon the rocks. Those who came out of the sea on the Samarra side were set upon piecemeal by the defenders and soon slain. They say that the Emperor himself was aboard ship, and barely reached land again on Kel. I know that in the mountains a storm may blow up in minutes out of a clear blue sky; I am told that such things happen on the ocean as well."

"They seem to," said the Countess, whose headache persisted. "Thank you, Siglind. I understand that you and Martin will be off again in the next day or two to Amari to check up on your sources. Good luck, and as always, be careful."

"Thank you, my lady."

"Well," said Vivian, "as for me, I haven't much to report. We rode down to Amari and on into eastern Farlain, and consulted our own sources, and generally tried to maneuver to get some help to the islanders, you know, from others who resist the Emperor. I'd like to say we made some difference, but I doubt anyone made it in time for the fight. But the storm, it seems, was worth more than a fleet and tens of thousands of men."

"Yes, strange," said Sir Rogier. "The Emperor is said to have power over the sea and the sky. The weather had been nothing but favorable to him all last year when he was preparing this strike, invading Kel, bringing his army across. Yet at the critical moment, his control failed."

"It's simple," said Vivian. "He is no rightful Emperor."

"But I thought you said he was the rightful--"

"There is no rightful Emperor now. We have sworn it ourselves, and we were not wrong to do so. Even the wind and the waves know he is not their master. They should have no master. It is no longer fitting that the Emperor rule both man and nature." She looked around at them all: Weaver, Willd, the heiress Susan, Prince Frenerac, the Rain sisters, Mirabel, Miranda, Enjele Ennis, Purcell Colmack, Anne Atgate, Thane Sigrith, her daughter Siglind, Thane Agnes of Westdubbik, and back to Sir Rogier. They hung on her words, some nodding to themselves, as she went on. "Once we needed an Emperor to rule both those worlds, but no more. We now have the burden of ruling ourselves, as Nature does, and when I look at you, my Council, I know we are strong enough to bear that burden. I can't speak for other states, but it's true of Clane already.

"He does not rule us: his imperium ends at our frontiers. And the storm is rising over the Gulf of Almery: he will never take Samarra now either. He may not know it, but his rule is not forever. Indeed, the end of Imperial history is near."

"I never thought I'd hear a Count of Clane say that," said Sir Rogier, "but then I never thought I'd believe it, or be happy about it, and both those things are true. Of course there's still a long road to travel toward that destination."

"Oh, yes," said Vivian. "I didn't mean to imply that it would be easy."

"Nothing's ever easy with you, is it?" said Ellean.

"No," replied the Countess. "I hope you're all used to that by now."

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