Black Jade

Chapter 29

Maram would have enjoyed our feast that night, made from a roasted antelope that I had killed with a quick arrow. Most of all, he would have delighted in the honey that Kane took from a beehive in a fallen tree.

None of us, not even Kane, knew anything about the mountainous terrain ahead of us. Surely, we all thought, we would find cities or at least villages in such a rich land.

Liljana, still chafing at having to abandon her beloved cook-ware, announced, 'Perhaps we will find a village and a smith who might- sell us a few pots?'

'And find as well Kallimun spies?' Kane growled at her. 'We're too close to Hesperu now, and it won't do to expose ourselves for no good need. It will be chance enough to pass through Senta, but I see no other way.' He walked over to the low fence of brush and logs that we had built up encircling our fire. It was the first fortified camp we had made since the mountains beyond Acadu. 'Manoj called this the land of the Dead People. Let's not join them,'

The next morning, as we wound our way southwest, we saw no sign of the road's makers nor indeed of anyone. The valley, and others through the mountains that lay beyond it, proved densely inhabited but not by man. Elk and wild horses kept company with the antelope, as did badgers, bears, boars, rabbits and other furry creatures we saw chewing the browse from bushes or darting through the trees of the mountains' forests. Flowers grew everywhere, but especially brightened the acres of thick grass in the valleys' lower reaches. We moved slowly, pausing often to let our horses fatten on this grass. The land seemed as wild as any we had ever crossed. And then the next day the road led straight into a small town, dead and deserted like Souzam. Ten miles farther up the road we came to a city thrice Souzam's size, though it was hard to tell for here field and forest overgrew what must have once been wooden houses and lanes passing between them, just as the desert had swallowed parts of Souzam. Death indeed haunted this place. I found myself wishing for the familiar sound of Maram's voice, moaning out his dread of ghosts. Here, among the ruins of ancient temples and what looked to be a large palace. Maram himself seemed almost a ghost and I could not shake the sense that he rode at my side or just behind us.

'What happened,' I called out into the cool air, giving voice to a sentiment that Maram would have shared, 'to the poor people of this city? And of Souzam — all those who once dwelled in these mountains?'

I looked to Kane for an answer, but he sat on top of his horse using his strong, white teeth to tweezer out a bee's stinger still embedded in his skin. He shrugged his shoulders. And Master Juwain said, 'It might have been the Great Death. In 1047 of the Age of the Dragon, the plague spread out of Argattha into all lands, in some places killing nine people out of ten. It might be that there were lands where all died — or at least, no one remained to make accounts.'

He wanted to search through the ruins for a library but Kane gainsaid such a quest, growling out, '1047 — has it really been almost two thousand years since Morjin bred that filthy plague? So, any books here that told of it would long since have rotted apart.'

He went on to curse Morjin for using a green gelstei to create the hideous, hemorrhagic disease meant to afflict the blood of all the Valari — and the Valari only.

'So, he failed — the green gelstei are hard to use, eh?' he said looking at Master Juwain. 'The Lord of Pestilence killed more of his own people than he did Valari.'

He didn't add what we all feared: that with the Lightstone in his grasp, he would be soon breed even worse plagues than the Great Death.

After that, we continued our journey up the road. This band of bricks and stones wound still higher and gradually turned past snowy peaks toward the south. Our dread of the Great Death, if not ghosts, impelled us to hurry from this rich country but over the next days we continued moving slowly, pausing often to let the horses graze upon all the grass they wished to eat. In truth, we all still suffered from the ravages of the desert. We needed time to heal. And our suspicion that a droghul awaited us farther up the road checked our enthusiasm for swift travel. We hunted and filled our bellies with meat even as Liljana found wild potatoes growing along our way, and much fruit: raspberries and blackberries, cherries, peaches and plums. We made feast of all these foods, and of the trout and rockfish that we pulled out of moun- tain streams. Kane called this land a hunter's paradise, and that it was. Liljana simply called it paradise. Rain fell upon us in perfect intervals and amounts, and so it was with the sunshine. It seemed strange that after fighting so hard for so long, against both man and nature, we should find a place where the world welcomed us and fed both our bodies and souls.

Daj and Estrella especially seemed to thrive here. Their small frames filled out, and their faces lost the haggard, haunted look that hundreds of miles of desert travel — to say nothing of the Skadarak — had worn into them. The sharp edge of guilt I felt at taking them on this quest dulled, slightly. It made me happy to see them happy, taking all the sustenance and sleep they needed, and more, playing games once again. They made fast friends with Alphanderry. His materializations and vanishings remained a mystery. The children, though, accepted the presence of this strange being in a way that we, his old friends, could not. They sat often with Alphanderry, continuing their elaboration of Eleikar's story and bringing this figmental character more and more to life. One night, with the fire crackling and the owls hooing deep in the forest, I heard Alphanderry say to Daj: 'Hoy, our Eleikar is still in an impossible fix, loving the wicked king's daughter, all the while knowing he must kill the king, whom the princess still loves, wickedness or no. Eleikar's dilemma reminds me of a riddle I once heard: "How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?"'

Daj considered this a moment, and then turned to Estrella, who suddenly smiled and looked up at the sparkling heavens. And Daj blurted out: 'By becoming the sky!'

'Hoy, good, good — indeed, by becoming the sky!' Alphanderry said to Daj. 'What is it, then, that Eleikar must become to keep his head on his shoulders and keep the princess from hating him?'

Neither Daj nor Estrella, however, had an answer for him, and neither did I. I watched Alphanderry's face sparkling even in the thick of night as he said, 'We might think that we need to solve Eleikar's conundrum for him. But give it time, and he will solve it, himself — you'll see!'

We slept well that night, and journeyed on the next day, and the following days, in high spirits. The peaks of the Crescent Mountains cut the sky above us like rows of ice-sharp white teeth. In places, along rivers where the road held good, we clopped along over ancient stones. In other places thick forests obliterated the road, and there we had to pick our way more carefully, sometimes guessing from the lay of the land where we might find the road again. In ten days of such travel, we put many miles behind us. It couldn't be many more, I thought, until we came upon the tiny kingdom of Senta, and the much greater realm of Hesperu beyond that. I sensed with a rising heat of my blood that our story — at least our quest to find the Maitreya or not — was quickly coming to an end.

On the fourth of Soal, late in the afternoon, we came to a place where a wall of mountains blocked our way. We had lost the thread of the road a good five miles back and could not tell if a pass might cut this escarpment to our left, up and around the rocky slopes of a pyramid mountain, or to our right, to the west, through a dense forest of oak. cedar and silver fir.

'Here we have need of one of your Way Rhymes,' I said to Master Juwain. 'Or failing that, a guess.'

Master Juwain peered at the stark terrain ahead of us and said, 'Left, I think. I can almost see where a road once wound up around that mountain.'

So, I thought, shielding my eyes against the glare of the mountains' snowy slopes, could I.

Kane swept his hand at the escarpment and said, 'Senta lies within a great bowl. These might be the mountains forming the bowl's northern part — their backside. I have a memory of that peak, I think, though I beheld it long ago and from a different vantage. If it is that mountain, then I would say our way lies to the left.'

'Then let us make camp here for the night,' I said, 'and in the morning we'll see if you are right.'

'If I am right,' Kane said, 'if the way is not blocked, we'll reach Senta tomorrow. So, we must decide if we will go into the caverns.'

All my life I had heard of the Singing Caves of Senta, and for much of that time I had wondered if they could possibly be real.

'If we are to put ourselves forward as pilgrims,' Master Juwain said, 'as it seems we must, then the Sentans would think it strange if we didn't go into the caverns.'

His gray eyes gleamed with the light off the glacier high above us. I knew that he wasn't about to cross half the earth only to surrender up the chance to behold one of Ea's greatest wonders. 'I would like to hear the caverns' songs,' Liljana said.

'I would, too,' Atara added. 'There might be a chance that one of the voices in the caverns will tell of the Maitreya.'

'Ha — do you think you'll understand anything?' Kane asked. 'There are thousands of voices, millions, and if you go into the caverns, you'll hear gobbledygook. You will see — it will drive you mad.'

I thought about this for a moment, then looked at Kane. 'Mad, as it was for us with the Skadarak?'

Kane's eyes darkened and he said softly, 'No, not like that. The voices all do speak truly, I think. But in the presence of the truth, people are like stones in water. They can sit there forever, thirsting, and remain as dry as chalk.'

I glanced at Estrella, then clapped him on the arm and said, 'Let us hope that some people are rather like sponges. Let us go into the caverns and hope for the best.'

Kane slowly nodded his head at this, and my smile made him smile. 'All right, Valashu. But I tell you that you will hear things in those damn caverns that will be harder you to hear.'

I thought about this for half the night, and all the next morning as we set out again and worked our way up to the left, over the humps and folds of the pyramid mountain. Its eastern slopes, at this great height, with the air cool and thin, were covered mostly with silver fir and little undergrowth, and so we had little difficulty passing through the open spaces between the tall trees. Our luck held good, for we espied the white ridgeline of a low pass ahead of us and encountered no very steep grades or rockfalls to block our way. And then we came upon the road again. Here it was nothing more than a rubble of old, shattered stones, but it held true for a few more miles, taking us up almost all the way to the lip of the pass. We breathed hard at the cutting air, hurrying up this last leg of the ascent to see if Kane was right. Then we stood on a snowy shelf of ground as we looked down into a bowl of land twelve miles wide that was the ancient and entire kingdom of Senta.

The city of Senta stood near the bowl's midpoint. From this distance I could make out the cuts of the winding streets and the larger buildings, some of them domed and gleaming with veneers of gold. Kane pointed out King Yulmar's palace, on the wooded heights to the west of the city. More gold flashed from the towers and domes there, and I caught a brilliant sparkle, as of encrusted diamonds. Senta, which had extracted tolls and bribes from pilgrims for thousands of years, was famous for its wealth. According to Kane, it enjoyed a natural bounty, as well. Through the forest rising between the king's palace and the sheltering wall of mountains ran deer, foxes and boar, and other game that the king and Senta's nobles hunted. To the north of the city, and sweeping in a wide swath around it to the east and south, the Sentans cultivated some of the richest-looking farmland I had ever seen. The greenness of these acres colored the entire kingdom. And it was all crowned by huge, sharp, white peaks in a vast and gleaming circle, and higher still, by the brilliant blue sky.

Kane pointed past the city perhaps a mile to the south where a rocky prominence rose up, too large to be called a hill and yet not quite high enough to challenge the mountains that framed it.

'There are the Singing Caves,' Kane said. 'They go down through the side of that rock.'

We could see the road to it as a narrow streak of bluish-gray against the greenness of fields. Three other roads led into (or out of) Senta: to the west, the road to Surrapam, which cut through a high pass before curving back north on its winding way through the Crescent Mountains. To our left, built on a line toward the southeast, ran the Sunguru road. And nearly straight ahead, passing around the rocky prominence and then into the city, gleamed the ancient road that we would take into Hesperu.

No road, unfortunately, led from the pass upon which we stood down into the city. We had a hard time picking our way slowly down through the rattling scree, and were grateful to enter the line of trees where the grade eased and the ground smoothed out. Soon we came out of the forest into a wheatfield, to the surprise of the farmer at work there: a stout, red-haired man with pale blue eyes who directed us toward the city. We planned to stay at one of the inns built on the hill at the very foot of the Singing Caves. Though it would no doubt be costly, Kane insisted we should remain close to the Hesperu Road and the pass to the south out of Senta in case we encountered troubles and needed to make a hasty escape.

Soon we found ourselves riding through the streets of Senta's northern district, past shops and steeply gabled houses that were like those of my home. They were built flush with one another of good granite that might have endured here for thousands of years. We found the Hesperu Road near the center of the city, where, in a great square, intersected the Sunguru Road coming in from the east. Along the storefronts, we saw many more people plying their trades and going about their business — though not nearly as many, we were given to understand, as in years past. Most of them, I thought, were Sentans. Red hair and blue eyes predominated among them, and I wondered if some wandering tribe from Surrapam had made its way south through the mountains to settle this kingdom during the Age of the Mother long, long ago. Some showed darker, almost mahogany-colored skins and black rings of hair, and these I took to be Hesperuks, in origin if not allegiance to King Arsu. Some were a blending of kinds and colors, and it amazed me to come across a young man as brown as coffee, with sparking green eyes and a curly red mane falling to his shoulders. The few pilgrims we saw seemed to be Hesperuk or Sung, with their almond eyes and straight black hair. But I bowed my head to a band of Galdans, to three blond Thalunes and to a lone Saryak warrior from Uskudar, whose face seemed carved of jet and who stood as high as the ceilings of most houses. In such company, my friends and I did not attract undue attention.

As we moved into Senta's southern districts, closer to the caverns, we came upon inns and the shops of craftsmen who had long serviced pilgrims: armorers, barbers, seamstresses, saddlers, cobblers and wheelwrights — and many others. We stopped at a tinker's so that Liljana could finally buy her pots and pans, and we visited a miller and a butcher in order lay in stores. It was from the butcher, all sweaty and bloody from cutting up a lamb, that we heard news out of Hesperu and other lands.

'They say there was a rising in Surrapam,' he told us as he weighed out some slabs of salt pork. 'And a new rebellion in Hesperu, in the Haraland — that lies in Hesperu's north, brave pilgrims, just over the mountains. You didn't come here by way of Hesperu, did you? Few now do. Anyway, it's said that King Arsu has marched north with his army out of Khevaju to put down the rebellion. There are those who fear that he will march right into Senta, but he can't even hold onto his conquests and keep his evil empire together. And if he did try to force his way through the Khal Arrak, we would stop him in the narrows of the pass.'

To emphasize his point — and his own bravery — he picked up a bloody cleaver and waved it about. And he added, 'Senta will never fall; you can take that as a prophecy — and take it back to your homelands, wherever they are.'

Others, however, were not so confident of Senta's ability to withstand King Arsu, and his master, the Red Dragon. After we had finished with the butcher, we came across an old, blind woman begging alms beneath the eves of the adjacent fletcher's shop. She had the straight hair and wheat-colored skin of the Sung, and her eyes might once have been like large almonds before being gouged out. Atara took pity on her, and pressed a gold coin into the woman's trembling hand. And the woman, whose name was Zhenna, murmured to her: 'Bless you, my lady. But you should be careful with whom you speak. Alfar, the butcher, is a good man, but he talks too freely. The Red Dragon's ears are very keen, if you understand me, and they are everywhere.'

'If we were to take your advice,' Liljana said, stepping up close to her, 'we should not speak to you. How is it that you are willing to speak to us?'

'Because I like your smell,' Zhenna said, turning from Atara to smile towards Daj and Estrella. She reached out and fumbled to grasp Liljana's hand. 'And because I, too, was once a pilgrim like you.'

She told us that years ago, when King Angand had come to Sunguru's throne and had made the first moves toward an alliance with Morjin, she had been the wife of the Duke of Nazca. The Duke, in secret, had rallied nobles to oppose the alliance — and, if need be, to oppose King Angand himself. But sometimes there are secrets within secrets. By ill fate, one of the nobles had proved to be of the Order of the Dragon and had betrayed the Duke to King Angand and the Kallimun priests who sat at his court. As an example. King Angand had ordered the Duke crucified and had Zhenna cruelly blinded. She had then fled Sunguru, making the pilgrimage to Senta, and had remained here ever since.

'I've lived off the kindness of the Sentans and strangers such as yourselves,' she told us. 'But everyone looks to the south now, and they hoard their coins. Who has the strength to resist King Arsu? Once, Senta made alliance with Sunguru and Surrapam to keep the Hesperuks at bay, but I'm afraid that time is past.'

'I should think that even King Yulmar's few warriors,' I said to her, 'could wreak harm on King Arsu's army, if they tried to force the pass.'

'Alfar, too,' she said to me, 'speaks always of the Hesperuk army. But why should King Arsu waste his soldiers in an invasion when those who look to the Red Dragon will do his work for him? It's said that Galda fell from within, and so, I fear, it will be here.'

'Why don't you leave here, then?' I asked her.

'Where would I go?' Zhenna said to me. 'At least here, for ten days at the New Year, King Yulmar opens the caverns to such as I. The songs! Not even the larks make such music! As you will hear — you will hear!'

Atara gave her another coin and said to her, 'We should go on. Perhaps it would be best if you weren't seen talking with us.'

Zhenna straightened her shoulders and held her head up high. She said, 'What more can they take from me? I've only one wish, and that is to go into the caverns one more time. Somewhere, in the lower caverns, I think, where the opals grow, they sing of a land without tyrants, without evil or war. A land that the Red Dragon cannot touch.'

I shook my head against the throbbing there, and told her: 'I think there is no place on earth like that.'

'No, young man,' she said, grasping my hand, 'there must be. Someday I will go there. It will be my last pilgrimage.'

She smiled at me and squeezed my hand. I thought to take her with us and pay her admittance to the caverns, but she said that King Yulmar's stewards, who guarded them, would not allow that. She shooed me toward my horse, and said, 'Go, and listen well, brave knight. The land that I told of — it is called Ansunna.'

Past a district where the air reeked of tannin, roasting meats and perfume wafting from the open windows of the brothels, we came out into farmland, and smelled instead freshly turned earth and the dung used to fertilize the fields. It did not take us very long to wind our way up the wooded hill at the base of Mount Miru, as the Sentans called the huge rock that contained the caverns. Two inns stood upon the top of the hill: The Inn of the Caves and the larger, rambling Inn of the Clouds, painted white. Kane liked the size and look of this inn, and so we rented rooms there. We gave our horses into the keeping of the stableboys. The innkeeper insisted that we should have a hot bath and a change of clothes before going into the caverns. And so it was late in the afternoon when we walked along a flagstoned path at the top of the hill with the shadowed, granite face of Mount Miru above us. We were the last pilgrims that day to seek admittance at the entrance to the caverns, a house-sized scoop in the rock of the face of Mount Miru. The Sentans called it the First Cavern, but it did not seem natural: most of its surface gleamed with an obsidian-like glaze. I wondered if men had once melted out in this hollow from solid rock with, the aid of a firestone.

At a long, gilded table set on a carpet in the recesses of the cavern sat a lean, dark-haired man decked out in gilded armor. Two other men similarly dressed but with spears in their hands and short swords on their ruby-studded belts stood leaning against It. These I took to be stewards of the Caves. As we drew up in front of the table, the seated man said, 'My name is Sylar, good pilgrims, and I am Lord of the Caves. We ask only three things of you: a small donation to help pay for the upkeep of the Caves and that you take from them all the wonder that you are about to see and hear.'

I studied Sylar's sharp eyes and nose, and the tiny round scars pocking his dark, sallow skin. Long ringlets of black hair, scented with sandalwood oil, hung down over the plate armor encasing his chest. He had a kindly, helpful manner about him, but his smile, somewhat forced, hinted at deep resentments and suspicions.

'And what is the third thing?' I asked him.

He directed my attention to a rock the size of a wagon rising up from the cavern's floor behind us. I saw that this rock, too, did not seem a natural part of the mountain, for it was of basalt, as black as night and all greasy looking. A face, hideous as a demon's, had been carved into the rock's smooth surface. Two blue stones resembling lapis had been set below the demon's bulging brows as eyes. The demon's mouth turned up in a tormented smile, and a large black hole at its center opened like a throat drilled deep into the rock.

'The third thing we ask,' Sylar said to us, 'is that you not take any stone or crystal from the caverns. There is a demon of desire inside all of us. but if you give in to its lusts, you will not gain new treasure but only lose that which is even more precious.'

He explained that each pilgrim, upon exiting the cavern, would be required to put his hand inside the demon's mouth. He would then be asked if he had removed anything from the caverns. If the pilgrim told the truth, all would be well. If the pilgrim lied however, he would forfeit his hand. It seemed that the ancients had connected a mechanism to the demon's eyes, which were truth stones. Upon being activated, the mechanism would bring down a massive, razor-sharp blade upon the wrist of any palterer or prevaricator.

'But that is horrible!' Atara cried out. 'To lose a hand so! How long has it been, then, since a pilgrim perjured himself?'

'Never in my lifetime,' Sylar told her. He seemed almost disappointed that he had never had the opportunity to see the demon do its work. 'But two hundred years ago, it is said that a prince of Karabuk boasted that no gelstei could look through his mind into his heart. What is left of his hand adorns that wall.'

He pointed toward the back of the hollow where two more stewards stood guarding iron doors that led into the caverns. On the wail to the left and right of the doors, seemingly cemented into the rock, gleamed the yellow-white bones of many human hands. Kane, I thought, should have warned us against such a bizarre and gruesome display, but he had retreated inside one of his depth less silences.

The 'Lord of the Caves' turned to look at me in a way that I did not like. And I told him, 'We are no thieves.'

'No, of course not — anyone could see that.' Sylar's dark, inquisitive eyes studied my face, and then fell upon my sword, strapped to my back. I had wrapped a strip of plain leather around its hilt to conceal the diamond pommel and the seven diamonds set into the black jade. 'You are no doubt a hired sword engaged to protect these good pilgrims, and perhaps even a pilgrim yourself?'

The scorn in his voice made my ears burn, and I wanted to shout out that I was no mercenary but a knight and a prince of Mesh. Instead, I kept my silence.

'A hired sword … from where?' he asked me. 'You have the look of the Valari, I think. A couple of Valari visited the caverns not two years ago, during the great Quest. I think they said they were Waashians.'

'I call no land my home,' I told him.

'I see.' Then Sylar's eyes turned to Atara's unstrung bow, which she tapped against the ground, seeming to feel her way. I was glad that Liljana had sewn the three arrows that Atara had brought with her within the lining of her cloak.

'A woman, bearing a bow without arrows,' Sylar said, 'and a blind one at that. I am not sure if I've ever seen a stranger sight.'

'I was a warrior before being blinded in battle,' Atara told him. 'My bow is sacred to me, and makes a good enough staff.'

'A warrior woman,' Sylar mused. 'I think I have heard of such, in Thalu — you must be Thalune, then? Well, many of the blind come here hoping to ease their suffering. It's said that the blind gain keener hearing to make up for what was lost. If that is true, then very soon, when you hear the songs of the angels, you will not regret your misfortune.'

He went on to explain to us that the deepest caverns held the most beautiful songs as well as the loveliest crystals, adding, 'Now, it is the way of things here for honored pilgrims such as yourselves to show their devotion, as the sun does its gold. The more gold, the greater the honor, do you understand? And the deeper the devotion, the deeper the songs that the good pilgrim will hear.'. Kane growled out, 'Are you telling us that the lower caverns are open only to those who'll pay to see them?'

The look in Kane's black eyes just then alarmed the two guards leaning against the table, for they stood up straight and ground the iron-shod butts of their spears against the cavern's rocky floor. And Sylar, in a voice as smooth as silk, said, 'No, good pilgrim — of course not! That would go against the King's decree. All the caverns are open to all who come here. But so many come, and so many wish to linger in the lower caverns that unfortunately we must limit the time of their visits. Of course, we like to reserve the greatest spans of time for those who are most deeply devoted.'

Liljana, who could haggle the scales off a dragon, bowed her head to him and asked, 'And how much devotion do you think a pilgrim should show in order to spend as long inside the caverns as she pleases?' So sweetly and yet compellingly did her voice sound out that Sylar forget the first rule of negotiating, and he was the first to name a price, saying, 'Surely six ounces would not be too much.'

'All right — six silver ounces,' Liljana said, reaching for the coins bulging out her purse.

'No, madam — six gold ounces,' Sylar smiled at her and added, 'Alonian archers would be good — that is one currency, at least, that hasn't been debased. You are Alonian, aren't you? A poor knight's widow, I heard you say, though I think you have the look of a queen.'

His smile, as fluid as heated oil, produced no like response in her. Her gaze fixed on him as she said. 'Three gold archers seems to me a very great devotion.'

Sylar's smile widened as he snapped at her offer and said, 'Very well, then — three archers for each of the seven of you. Twenty-one altogether.'

'Three archers apiece!' Liljana cried out. 'Why didn't you say so from the first? We're only poor pilgrims — and even poorer for having come so far.'

'Two archers apiece, then. Let it not be said that Sylar of the Caves takes advantage of blind women and grandmothers.'

Liljana appeared to consider this. She gathered Estrella and Daj close to her, then asked, 'Have you children. Lord Steward? You wouldn't wish to impoverish ours, would you?'

And so the haggling continued untill the end Sylar raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness and agreed to accept five gold ounces, total, for our admission to the caverns: one for each adult, and none at all for the children. I watched Liljana count the coins out of her purse. They were full-weight, Alonian ounces, with the face of the deceased King Kiritan stamped into one side and the image of an archer drawing a longbow on the other.

'Very well, grandmother,' Sylar said to Liljana after he had put away the coins. He glared at her as if he had lost the ability to smile then waved us toward the opened iron doors.

'You played him like a hooked fish,' I whispered to her as I walked beside her.

I heard my words less as a compliment than an accusation. Not often did Liljana allow anyone to see the skills in manipulating men that had made her Materix of the Maitriche Telu.

'The signs were written on his face for anyone to read,' she whispered back to me. 'Still, that is one fish who is more slippery than I would like. Let us not be any longer about our business than we must.'

I nodded my head, and looked over at the blue-eyed demon behind us. Then I turned to lead the way into the Singing Caves.