Old Mars

Out of Scarlight LIZ WILLIAMS

THE TRIBES OF THE COLD DESERTS DON’T LIKE ANYONE WHO doesn’t come from their blood. So I knew that they would not care for me, and that was quite apart from who I really was, or what. I rode up out of Scarlight, taking the road that led to the Cold Deserts, on a frost-rimed morning in early winter with the wind they call the Jharain kicking up the dust. I’d kept myself to myself in Scarlight, where the long trail had led me: It’s that kind of a town. I’d taken care to stable my own tope, who didn’t like other people, or even me, much, and he seemed glad to be out of the place as well. I’d spent the previous night awaking intermittently, as an occasional great thump from the stable below alerted me to the fact that the tope was trying to break down the door. So our progress up the mountain trail was brisk until we reached the summit of a ridge and I turned to look back.

Scarlight sits in a narrow valley, at a point where the Yss river is channeled between steps of stone, and cascades down to the canals of the plains in a series of dramatic chasms. At the top of Scarlight itself, an ancient arched bridge sits over one of these waterfalls, which then plummets several hundred feet to a dark pool, and on down through the town. Scarlight is one of those nexus places, where many roads meet, and they say that the pool is filled with the bones of those who have upset the lords of Scarlight.

They’re probably right.

We, however, were following the Yss, and as the tope paused to drink noisily from the tumbling white water, I dismounted via the saddle steps and stood for a moment on dry, golden grass, burned into straw over the summer. Red earth showed parched and cracked: the winter rains had not come into their own, and yet the river was full enough. I looked for tracks, but not much was visible: a mark that might have been half a footprint, some droppings that were clearly from the little verminous ulsas. There was a rank smell in the air, too, which I could not place, and it disturbed me. If I had not made a brief search of the area, I might have missed the tracks altogether, but they lay farther up over a patch of soil—a mount of some kind, traveling fast, and probably carrying more than one person. The footprints were reptilian, however, unlike the splayed feet of a tope. It had followed the river for a few paces, then bounded up over the rocks, and here the trail ended.

Thoughtfully, I rounded up my own mount, climbed back into the saddle, and jogged on. It might complicate matters if anyone else was up here—and by anyone else, I meant Nightwall Dair. Whether he realized it or not, we’d crossed paths all that year, first over the face of the plains, then most recently in Cadrada, and I was getting sick of it. If he knew me at all, it was as a man called Thane, and that cover had seemed to hold. If he found out who I really was, and what—a woman named Zuneida Peace—I was in deep trouble, and I didn’t want that. Zuneida was a former temple dancer, a seductress of princes (and princesses), a poet—a very different person to my taciturn alias Thane, who hid black hair beneath a hat, and drops of juice in his eyes to conceal the blue, who wore a half mask allegedly to hide the damage done by a scar, who spoke as little as possible, and in an accent that betrayed the north.

Half a day later, and we were high up into the slopes of the Khor; another full day, and I estimated that we would reach the edge of the Cold Deserts themselves. I camped that night in the shelter of a high tor of rock, one of the inexplicable piles of stones left by a people long gone, and decorated with the stylized wings of birds. A ban-lion called once, a throaty gasp against the silence of the mountain wall, then the night birds sang. I lay in a fleece wrap and watched the stars wheel over me until I slept and dreamed of warm Cadrada and a night filled with jasmine and golden wine, and of someone, now gone, beside me in the dark.

Next morning, the temperature had dropped another couple of degrees. I washed as best I could in the icy waters of the Yss and brewed tea on a makeshift fire. The tope yawned and snorted in the morning air. Later, high on the slope, I looked down across the plateau that was opening up ahead of me and saw the tiny figure of a rider on a black-furred mount, speeding over the tundra toward a stand of trees. There was something oddly familiar about the mount, and I wondered if I had seen it down in Scarlight. Then it disappeared into shadow and was gone. I skirted the cliff, keeping close to the anonymity of the rock wall, just in case. I knew that the Tribes did not come down this far, preferring the higher plateau of the Cold Deserts.

At midday, I saw the first outpost of the Tribes: a squat tower made of blackened stone. This was not something that they had originally built but a remnant of some long-gone people that they had taken over, perhaps once a military fortification, perhaps a temple of some kind. It could have been either, and it was impossible to tell—whatever sense of the practical or the numinous that it had once possessed was also long gone, leaving it a gloomy shell. But there were signs of a recent fire scorching the stone of its floor and witch-marks daubed in soot around the walls. I smiled when I saw them, because I was one of the ones whom the marks were intended to deter, but they held no trace of power, not this far west. It was only when you reached the inner desert that the sand-singers knew what they were doing; these marks would have been made by a warrior, superstitious, and thus afraid. Something clattered high in the roof, and, outside, the mount gave a rumbling bellow. A bird, nothing more, one of the leather-winged shrikes that haunted the mountains. I went outside again and looked down the valley. There was the bird, a low shadow shooting over the grass.

It was too early to camp in the tower, so I set off once more, heading through a stand of desert birch whose bare trunks arched out of the soil like golden bones. It was as the mount was traversing its thickest point that I heard a distant cry, borne on the wind. I steered the tope to the edge of the little wood and looked down. The wood stood high on a ridge of rock, looking out onto the plain, and, against the pale grass, I saw again the man on the black tope, but this time I could see that he wore the emblem of a tribe upon his hat and that he had a pursuer.

The pursuer rode a green beast, one of the burrow-dwelling things that live in the hills of Ithness, and it was therefore a long way from home. Part reptile, part cat, it leaped along sinuously, and I could see its rider casting the malefic incantations that the sorcerers of Ithness are wont to employ, hurling poisons like bolts. I grinned. I should not get involved, and yet—well, I knew Ithness all too well, had danced for a time in their slave palaces, and for Cadrada itself I had a score to settle. Besides, bestowing an unlikely favor is never a bad thing. I kicked the mount forward and rode down onto the plain.

As I neared the two figures, I could taste the incantations on the air. It is said that in Ithness, sorcerers imbibe magic with their poisons, so that they emit wrongness whenever they utter words, and the air was bitter in his wake. I recognized those incantations, and the man behind them. I notched a barb into the nozzle of the gun and took aim, firing through a lace of salt-alder on the banks of a brackish rivulet. I watched with satisfaction as the sorcerer threw up his arms and toppled sideways from his mount. The green beast shrieked and ran. The man on the black-furred tope reined it in and hailed me, but I was already turning my mount, fleeing back up the slope, and was gone.

Cadrada, sometime before, and a girl was dancing. There was a blue-green fire in the center of the hall, and far below the city, the plains jackals were barking out their territorial boundaries. The girl danced to the beat of their song and her eyes caught the light like a forest fire. I watched her from the back of the hall and thought of the night before, when she had danced for me alone. Her name was Hafyre, and I was not the only one watching.

The sorcerer sat on a dais, cross-legged beside our host, one of the lords of Cadrada, a man named Halse, who had a jackal as his totem. Appropriately. Occasionally, I saw the sorcerer lean over to whisper to him, and the lord’s cold, jaded face betrayed a flicker of interest. I noted that the sorcerer was typical of his kind: parchment skin and a yellowing rattail of hair, bound with a spiral of bone. The people of Ithness are always too pale, like mushrooms. His sleeves jingled with warding charms, and when he reached out a hand for his wineglass, I saw that it was tattooed with the sigil of his personal demon.

Later, looking for Hafyre, I saw the sorcerer again in the maze of corridors that led from the hall. He snapped his fingers and a spark of a spell arced through the air. Hafyre came meekly out of the shadows, took his sigil-decked hand, and followed him into the night. I did not think that the spell had much to do with it, however I might have liked to believe otherwise. That was Hafyre: She liked to circle herself with power and was not choosy about how she achieved it.

Then she had gone missing. No one knew where. Halse was predictably angry and had the slavemaster thrown off the battlements. He was not, it seemed, so jaded after all. He hired me to find her and bring her back. I did not know if he knew about Hafyre and myself, or if he would have cared. He knew me beneath the mask as Zuneida Peace, and men do not take women’s affairs seriously, or, if they do, are intrigued rather than angered. And I was little more than just another servant for hire, after all.

Hafyre’s trail, such as it was, led to Scarlight, and thus had brought me north. Now the pallid sorcerer was here, as well. And so, it seemed, was Nightwall Dair.

I left the plain far behind, and by dusk was deep into the mountains. The walls rose ahead of me, tower upon tower of shadow. When it grew too dark to see, I dismounted, lit a fire, and camped for the night. I slept, but with the strange dreams that I remembered from earlier times here, tormenting images of leatherblack wings and a girl’s face, seen through fire.

When I woke, I lay blinking at the stars. I knew who that girl in the dream was, of course: Hafyre, my quarry. Her eyes glowed forest-green, her skin was golden, and her hair a brown-red, like soil. She smiled, turned her head, and beckoned, and, in imagination, I saw her move sinuously in the firelight. She wore the costume of a slave-girl, her bare torso striped with a hundred shifting bands of emeralds and her tunic trousers the color of leaves in spring. Desire flickered deep within me. She was all the shades of the world, but she was gone, fleeing with the morning, and soon I rode on.

By now, I had expected to see signs of the Tribes, and that I had not done so concerned me. It was cold, but I would not yet have expected them to retreat into their mountain fastnesses, the secret places that made the more credulous folk claim that they were nothing more than ghosts. Toward the middle of the afternoon, however, I came across more tracks, then, in the distance, a cluster of the round grey tents that the Tribes use in summer, sprouting like toadstools on a plateau of dead grass. Their mounts grazed nearby, and I saw the red-and-azure banner of the Ynar flying on a pole. I released a breath of relief: These were the most civilized, if you like, of the Tribes—they do not, at least, shoot on first sight. And they were also the ones I was looking for. I approached warily all the same.

When I was a short distance away, the priestess came out of a tent with a flail in her hand. She was not young, her skin scarred and splattered with indigo patterning. I saw the spike through her lower lip that told me she was a deathspeaker, and her headdress jingled with the beads of her wealth. She did not look pleased to see me.

“Shan-hai,” I greeted her with her title, “I come with a message. From Cadrada.”

“I know no one and nothing in the cities,” the priestess snapped. “Do not lie.”

“I’m telling you the truth.” I dismounted and threw the scrap of fabric with the emblem of the Ynar upon it, above the personal totem. Her breath hissed in her throat as she saw it, and she snatched it from the ground as though I were going to steal it back.

“Where did you get this?”

“Give me water and I’ll tell you. I cut it from no corpse, if that is what you’re asking.”

She stared at me for a long moment, then shook the flail and spoke a word of Protection from the carrion gods of the Ynar … “You won’t need that for me,” I said. Her eyes widened: the dark green of winter forests. I remembered Hafyre and held my breath. The priestess was not as old as I’d first assumed. She did better than water, making me tea from the bittersweet verthane of the high slopes and keeping a polite silence until I’d drunk the first three mouthfuls. Then she said, “I ask you again. Where did you get this?”

“From a slave palace.” She had not yet realized that I was not a man. If I had my way, she never would. “What I was doing there—that’s my business. But I met a girl, who told me that she was a princess of the Ynar. Her name was Hafyre. She gave me this.” I pointed to the emblem.

“And you brought it back to us. Why?”

“I’m traveling across the Cold Deserts to Coyine. I want safe passage.”

“And so you buy it with an emblem of the lost,” she said, but consideringly, without condemnation. I could see that she was thinking fast.

“If you like.”

She gave a swift gesture of assent. “Very well. What else did you understand of the girl? ‘Princess’ is not a term we know.”

I affected disinterest. “I’m not familiar with your hierarchies.”

“Very well, I shall explain them to you, though no man can apprehend how the Tribes are governed.” She turned her head and spat. “You with your male-ruled cities—you cannot understand our matriarchies. Hafyre is ghost-touched, grass-haunted. There was a comet at her birth, and we believe that is a herald from the carrion lords who live between the winds, the land where death is. She is an oracle, a harbinger, and she is marked for power.”

“Then you’ll be wanting her back.”

“As you say. She went missing a year and a half ago; we had thought her dead, but the wind brought no messages from her, and I confess that I did not understand why.”

I looked away. “How do you plan to retrieve her?”

“Ah,” the Shan-hai said, “I don’t think it wise to tell you that.”

“It’s none of my concern, really. But you’ll guarantee safe passage?”

“Yes. You have done me a service. Even though you are a man, I won’t forget it. There’ll be a ceremony tonight because of this—you will stay. I say this not because I wish to honor you: It is the best way to inform as many people as possible of your presence, at once.”

“What does this ceremony involve?”

“A call to the winds and the gods who ride them. No more than that. You won’t be expected to do more than watch. The priestesses run things here.”

“Then it will be an honor indeed,” I said, and saw her cold, forest-eyed smile.

To the citizens of Cadrada, these people are barbarians. Remembering Halse’s palace, and the things that happened there, I rather think it is more even-handed than that. The ceremony to which I had been invited was held up in the rocks, on a low plateau looking out across the darkening plain and the red sun falling. The air grew colder swiftly and smelled of snow. Huge harps of sinew were threaded between tall poles, and, as the dusk breeze grew, they began to whine and sing. The priestess moved among them, whispering, in a dance that grew steadily wilder as the evening wore on. By the time the actual ceremony was due to begin, some three hundred people had gathered. I saw the banner of the Ynar again, but others, too. The women gathered about the fires; the men stood sullenly on the fringes, standing guard.

The Shan-hai called on the carrion spirits of the wind. They use an older tongue for these ceremonies, a language that has been dead for thousands of years and has nothing to do with the builders of the canals or the cities of the plain. It is wilder, stranger, not at all human. It made my skin crawl to hear it, and yet it filled me with a strange ascetic sense of longing: the reverse of the sex-songs that they sing in the palaces to inflame all those who hear them. This spoke of purity and deliberate isolation. Perhaps it was what I needed. I became lost in the thin harmonies, as the priestess berated or cajoled or implored the carrion gods; I did not know which. But then I became aware that someone was close to my shoulder. Casually, I turned.

His tea-colored eyes caught the firelight. His coat was frayed, but originally of good quality, and he wore a hat with an emblem upon it—the same form of emblem that I had brought to the priestess. Close to, his face was sallow and long, like a chiseled candle, under a fall of fawn-brown hair. I had last seen him on a black-furred mount, pursued by the sorcerer from Ithness.

“You rescued me,” he said. He sounded amused. His voice was low, like silk and razors, with the sibilants of the plains. “Why?”

“I don’t like Ithness.”

“The hotels? The shopping?”

I inclined my head, though my smile was hidden by the mask. “Neither are good. The hotels are verminous and the shops overpriced. Their sorcerers are worse.”

“This one isn’t dead, by the way. Regrettably. You’d need a bolt or poison for that, or one of their own spells, not a barb gun. But it was a kind thing to do. And altruism always worries me.”

“It worries me, too. That’s why I never practice it. What did you do, to be pursued so far and so hard? Are you a traveler? You’re no tribesman, yet you wear their sign.”

“Well,” he said, “I am indeed a traveler, and as for why I am permitted to wear the sign of the Ynar, that’s a longer story. If this was Scarlight, I’d offer to discuss it over a drink. But here—”

“The tribes don’t indulge in wine or spirits. Unless you like fermented tope milk.”

“That’s why I brought a hipflask.”

We both deemed it prudent to wait until the ceremony was over before returning to a tent and pouring out measures. I was feeling insecure. He was flirting, I could have sworn it, and that was a problem. Either he knew me for a woman, or he thought I was a man. Neither possibility was reassuring. I kept to the shadows and made sure that the mask was securely tied, nor did I drink much, although the man I had rescued watched me all the while.

He had not told me his name, but he did not need to. He was called Nightwall Dair. He was the only man who had ever gone beyond the Nightwall of the far north, the great glacier that separates Heth from the plains, or at least the only man who had done so and lived. He had brought back a captive, a strange black thing with golden eyes, who had lived for a time before spilling its secrets to the sorcerers of Cadrada. I’d seen it, and him, at Lord Halse’s palace, and, as I’ve said, we’d crossed paths on several occasions before that. Dair was a manhunter, just as I was, and a hunter of other things, too. Not an easy man to trick, and I did not know if I had succeeded.

We spoke of Scarlight, and Cadrada itself, lightly enough, as men do when they meet in a strange place. At length, he said, “I know you, I am sure of it.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps we have met on our travels. There is something a little familiar about you.”

“Many people know me,” he said. He spoke as if it did not matter.

“Perhaps, then, we have met. But I have still not heard your name.”

He gave a grin filled with teeth. “Just as well. If you had, you would have reason to be afraid.”

“Many say the same of me.” I rose to my feet. “It’s getting late, and I have a long way to go.”

There was a faint curiosity in his face. “Where are you headed?”

“Coyine.”

“The Tribes don’t like travelers.”

“That’s why I’ve paid for safe passage.”

“They don’t use money.”

“I wasn’t talking about money.”

He laughed. “I think you’ve been here before.”

“And you? But of course you have, with that emblem.”

“Me? I’ve been everywhere.” He put his head on one side, looking up at me from beneath the lock of hair that fell across his face. His long countenance was wry, amused, like one who anticipates a negative reply. “Do you want a companion for the night?”

“Not fussy, are you? You haven’t even seen my face.”

“As you say, I’m not fussy.”

“Unfortunately, I’ve recently taken a vow of celibacy,” I said.

He laughed again. “And you have seen my countenance. Well, I shall choose to believe you—it’s more flattering than the alternatives.”

I bowed, then headed to the tent that the priestess had told me I could use. I don’t like tents. They’re hard to secure, and I spent most of the night in a light doze with my blade over my knees, just in case. But Dair had obviously taken my refusal in good spirits: I knew that he would not have found entertainment among the tribes, who are prudish in the extreme, but he did not bother me.

In the morning, I woke to find the priestess sitting outside the tent.

“The woman you saw,” she began, without preamble. “I want to use you for a divination.”

“Very well,” I said. The sun was only just coming up. “What did you have in mind?”

“I need to take you to the scrying pool.”

“And if I prefer not to?”

“You still want safe passage to Coyine, I believe?” She glowered. “And my magic can fry any man at seven paces.”

“Good point. I’d like some tea first, though.” I wasn’t at my best first thing.

“It’s better on an empty stomach,” she said, unsmiling.

The scrying pool lay up in the woods. A narrow track that looked as though it had been made by an animal led up to it, and when we sat down by its glassy black depths, the air rose cool and dank through the ferns. Red earth, green leaves … they reminded me of Hafyre.

“What do you want me to do?”

She was lighting something in a tiny censer, held by a dangling bronze chain. A pungent smell twined out in its smoke, making me cough. It reminded me of something: one of the strong perfumes of the south that are brought forth by heat.

“Close your eyes,” she instructed. I did so, though not too trustingly. I felt a warm breath on the skin around my eyes, the only part of my face that was visible. The smoke penetrated the mask, seeping into my throat, and, against my better judgment, I felt myself grow slack and relaxed. I had a sudden vision of the long pale face of Nightwall Dair.

“No,” I heard the priestess hiss. Another image floated before me: the girl with green eyes and hair the shade of earth. The priestess gave a breath of satisfaction. “There she is. Hafyre.”

The girl’s face was downcast. She stared down at something she was holding in her lap, a crystal globe with a spark at the heart of it, like a little flame. A shaft of lamplight came over her shoulder; she wore a filmy ochre shift. Her face was as beautiful as I remembered it, all ovals and symmetry and that sudden, flaming smile. The slave brand was stamped white on her shoulder and the priestess cursed when she saw it.

“Defiled!”

I’d met her in a slave palace, after all. They’re not convents.

“This is the past,” the priestess said, with authority. “She is not there now.”

This was dangerous ground. I didn’t want the woman looking into my head and discovering that the girl was the reason I was here, that I’d been sent to bring her back. That—well, I did not want to let her in and that was an end of it.

“Is it so?” I said, deceptively dulcet.

“Try to see where she is now.” The smoke grew stronger. Against my will, I looked into the black and saw the girl. This time, she wore black leather riding gear and she was sitting beside a hearth of ashes. But she was still the same person I had known back in Cadrada, the girl who could, in an instant, throw another person into desire like the flick of a whip.

“Ahhhh,” the priestess said. “I know where she is.”

“Where?”

“Enough.” The smoke abruptly ceased and my eyes fluttered open.

“Why did you choose me for this?” I asked. I didn’t know whether she’d seen that I was a woman.

“An outsider is better, even a man.” That answered that question. “Those of the Tribes—they bring too many assumptions to it.” She stood and nodded thanks. “You can go now. You’ll have safe passage to Coyine. When you reach the next ridge, you will find a settlement on the far side. Give them this.” She handed me a token: a brass coin bearing a sigil. “They will exchange it for another. Thus, with luck, and if you do not meet too many wild beasts, you will reach Coyine alive.” There was a flicker of contempt beneath her words.

And so I mounted up and rode swiftly into the morning light. I did not see Nightwall Dair again, but before I reached the ridge, I turned the mount and headed up into the woods. I doubled back until I could see the tents. The priestess was speaking to two warriors: They saddled up topes and she swung up behind the leader. Then they were riding northwest, fast. I followed.

By the middle of the afternoon, we were high into the mountains and the air had grown an icy bite. I was quite a long way behind, but when I came up over a ridge, they had halted and were standing below. The ruin was so decrepit that at first I failed to realize what it was: another stump of a tower. I reined in my mount and watched the little pantomime enacted below. The priestess came out of the tower and waved her arms. I got the impression that she was blaming the warriors for something. There was an argument, then they all mounted up again and rode off. Greatly entertained, I waited until they had disappeared from sight and rode down to the ruin.

Inside it was as I had seen it in the vision. There was no sign of Hafyre. The ashy hearth lay undisturbed, or so I thought at first. Then I looked closer. In the ash, someone had inscribed a few symbols. To anyone unfamiliar with the secret slave signs of Cadrada, which was most people, it would have looked like the footprints of a bird, or the scratchings of vermin. To me, it was a message.

Northwest, then west again. A rock below a star.

I digested this for a moment, then made a thorough examination of the ruin. She had not been the only person here. There had been someone with her, a man, I thought from the footprints. Someone had pissed up against the wall; it was still faintly damp. I knelt and sniffed. Not a native of the south, but someone else … It wasn’t wet enough to have been one of the priestesses’ warriors—not as recent—and it was too high on the wall to have been a woman. So someone else had been here with Hafyre, someone who did not know the slave-signs.

Someone from Ithness? Or had Dair beaten me to it?

Well, that was what I intended to find out. I went back out, cautiously, climbed back on the tope, and kicked it into a gallop in a westerly direction.

For some time, I’d been getting the impression that I might be being followed. A fleeting scent on the wind, a prickle at the back of the neck, nothing more. If so, there were two obvious likely candidates: the sorcerer and Nightwall Dair. But there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. If I doubled back, my pursuer would know, and I stood little chance of losing him in this terrain; on the pale tope, I stood out like a moon in a clear sky. And the message hadn’t exactly been clear, although once I’d been riding for a bit, I saw what she’d meant. The only possible westerly passage was a funnel of rock as the mountain wall closed in, channeling me in the direction of the setting sun. And at the end of it, as we rode into dusk, a pinnacle of stone reared up over the narrow valley, wearing the Lovestar like a hat. When I saw that, I smiled under the mask and spurred the mount on and under a lip of rock. Then I dove off it, falling the ten feet from its high humped back and sprawling with a gasp in the dust. The tope, astonished, bounded away. I knew it wouldn’t go very far: it would come back eventually if it thought there was a chance of food. I lay in a twist of limbs.

I knew when he was close. I could smell the tope, and a shadow fell across my face. There was a light step, then a foot in my ribs. He reached down and snatched off the mask. I felt my hair spill down into the dirt. I didn’t stir but lay still with my eyes shut. He didn’t say anything, but I heard him laugh with surprise. He shoved me again with his boot. Then, when he still got no reaction, he picked me up and hoisted me up over the back of his tope. And that was when I kicked him in the head.

That’s one of the good things about being a professional dancer. I felt his jaw snap back, then he was down in the dirt. I dropped onto him from the back of the tope and flattened him for good measure. Then I took a good look at him: at the long face and the fawn hair sprawling in the dust.

“Nightwall Dair. My apologies.” I almost felt sincere.

I tied his arms behind him: I thought he was out cold, but I didn’t want to take the chance that he’d try the same trick with me that I had with him, and I wanted his wrists secured, at least. He was too heavy to lift onto the puzzled tope, so I left him lying there and ducked back under the lip of rock, making my way down the canyon. I dusted off the mask as I went and replaced it. On the way down, I met my mount wandering back up. It was now almost dark.

“You stay there,” I told it, and tied its harness to an outcrop. Then I looked for what I’d been expecting to find, and found it.

The ancestors of the Tribes, or those who came before them, had done something stupid once. I don’t know what. Some kind of poisoning of the atmosphere, a souring of the soil, thousands of years ago. It had made them take to the mountains for a time, burrowing into the rocks against the killing cold. Their tunnels could still be found, used now as winterings, and a round stone door showed where the closest one lay. It stood half-concealed behind a boulder. I gave it a push, judging the pivot point, and when it opened, I climbed through. It led into a passage, traveling downward. I could smell a perfume that I knew well, plus sweat and smoke. I followed.

Hafyre was huddled in a makeshift bed of furs, still in her riding leathers. She gasped when she saw me, and I saw her become more sinuous, sliding into the furs as she assessed this new threat.

Slowly, I took off the mask and watched her face change.

“Zuneida Peace,” she breathed. “All the way from Cadrada. I didn’t think you cared.” Her forest eyes were wide with surprise. “Of all the people I thought might come after me …”

“Your lord paid well.”

“Good enough,” she said, briskly. She got to her feet.

“Where is he? The sorcerer?” I demanded.

“He’s gone to find my aunt,” she said. “I don’t know when he’ll be back. I tried to get out, but I couldn’t move the door from the inside.”

“We need to go.”

On the way back up the passage, I said, “Did he rape you? The sorcerer?”

“No.” Our eyes met.

“What were you doing with him?”

“He took me from the palace. We’d been sleeping together.” She told me this without a hint of shame, as though what she and I had experienced did not matter, and perhaps, I thought with bitterness, she was right.

“He bound me with a spell and took me out of Halse’s palace through the cellars. I thought at first that he was taking me to Ithness, to the markets there. But he brought me here, instead. He wants leverage over the Tribes. He planned to use me as a bargaining chip with my aunt.” She paused. Her face grew downcast and demure, a little sly. She ran a hand over my arm and murmured, “What are you planning to do?”

“Take you back to Cadrada.”

I braced myself for resistance and fingered the little phial of amorphite in my pocket. It would knock her out immediately and keep her out for a while. But she perked up.

“Good! We both gain, then. You’ll get your fee and I’ll get a traveling companion back to the palace.” She laughed at the expression on my face. “You don’t think I want to stay here, do you? Shut up in a stuffy tent until it’s time for me to be a broodmare, manipulated by my priestess aunt because of some moldy old prophecy? Or shut down in a wintering like this, not able to go out for a piss for six months because the cold freezes the snot in your nose, and living off dried ulsa meat? No thanks.” She paused. “I suppose this has occurred to you already, but the roles of women in this society really aren’t worth much, are they? When I was snatched from the Cold Deserts in the first place, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve got opportunities in the palace. Clearly, Lord Halse wants me back, but in three or four years, I’ll be over the hill and too old for him. They’ll give me a pension—it’s happened to other women. Then I’ll set up my own place. I know several girls who’d be happy to work for me, and I’d have my own regular clients.” A meditative look entered her green eyes. “I fancy a place overlooking the Grand Canal—all those lovely gardens and a restaurant on every corner. I’ve got it all worked out.”

“I see,” I said, faintly.

“So.” Hafyre bounced up. “Shall we get going?”

“We might as well,” I replied.

I hoped Dair hadn’t come round by the time we left; it would save embarrassment, but the body sprawled in the dust had gone. That made me doubly eager to get going. He’d freed my tope, but the mount hadn’t gone far; after a moment of panic, I saw it trot nimbly down through the rocks with an air of affront. Hafyre had walked, apparently, since the edge of the mountains, and was more than happy to ride. All we had to do now was get out of the lands of the Tribes and head south.

But, however conscious I was of the missing Dair, I still wasn’t paying quite enough attention.

Once we’d come through the canyon, the stars were fully out, spreading a pallid light over the rocks. I saw the sorcerer from Ithness out of the corner of my eye, suddenly rearing up on the edge of a ledge, and Hafyre cried out as I toppled, paralyzed, from the tope and hit the ground for the second time that day. There I lay, while the sorcerer leaped from the rock as lightly as a bird and onto the back of my mount. Hafyre shrieked curses and went abruptly silent. They disappeared down the slope at a run.

Some considerable time later, I became aware that a pair of boots had appeared in front of me.

“Tut, tut,” said the voice of Nightwall Dair. “I see that the hand of immediate karma appears to have touched you. How ironic.” He bent down and touched something cold and damp to the side of my neck, and suddenly I could move again. “I really should try to get over these disastrous impulses toward compassion. Never does me any good … Especially after what happened earlier.” He helped me to my feet. His wrists were raw.

“Thanks,” I mumbled. I wouldn’t say that I felt abashed, precisely, but there was a slight element of the embarrassment I’d hoped to avoid earlier. Why I should have felt this way, I don’t know: It must have been a professional thing.

“So, where is she? The girl?”

“The sorcerer from Ithness took her.”

Dair swore. “I thought so. Bastard. Are you on a finders’ fee?”

“Yes. You?”

“Yes, from a lord in Cadrada who took a fancy to her. One of Halse’s rivals. I know who you are now, by the way. A man named Thane. Or a woman named Peace. I recognize you from Halse’s palace. You were a dancer. Among, it seems, other things.”

“I’m not sure it matters.”

“We stand more chance of tracking her down together. I don’t need the hassle of your interference, and I know this sorcerer; we’ve got a history.”

“Very generous of you. I know him, too. We have a history. You could, of course, just kill me.”

Dair looked pained. “I don’t work that way. We can sort out the money later.”

I knew that he had no intention of splitting it: He just wanted to keep an eye on me and perhaps get my help. But that was fine for the moment.

With me up behind Dair on his black tope, we tracked them as far as the edge of the plain, then lost the trail. The tope stood, swinging its head in indecision. Since the sorcerer had stolen my mount, I wondered what he’d done with his own. Maybe the lizard-thing was still roaming around the place.

“Might as well camp up for the night,” Dair said, philosophically.

“I’m still not up for ‘companionship.’ ”

“Now that I’ve found out you’re a woman, actually, neither am I.”

We took turns keeping watch. It was a quiet enough night, although for a time I heard sounds out on the plain suggesting the Tribes were having another jamboree. Dair woke me at dawn, handed me a leather cup of tea, and told me that we were getting going. I was quick enough to agree. I wanted to get out of tribal lands, before the priestess—Hafyre’s aunt—discovered that we were still on her patch and sent her warriors out against us.

We’d gone far enough west already that by the time evening fell, we were back in Scarlight, and I was surprised to find how much I’d missed the place. At least, compared to the Cold Deserts.

We found a bar to sit out the early evening in a corner booth. I thought that the sorcerer, having presumably dealt with Hafyre’s aunt, might come back through Scarlight. If he still lived. Whatever the case, I was resigned to Hafyre’s loss. But by that time, I was also looking forward to a sweat lodge, and wine.

“You’re quite attractive now you’re not covered in filth,” Dair said when I reappeared. I gritted my teeth. I was likely to get more attention as Zuneida than I had as the anonymous Thane, so I’d kept the mask on, rendering his remark even more irritating.

“I thought you didn’t like women.”

“I like some women. Just not for sex.” He glanced around at the men in the bar.

“Trust me, that’s refreshing.”

“So,” Dair said, primly. He poured me a glass of Ylltian white and watched as I took a sip. If he’d been going to poison me, I thought, he’d have done so earlier. “You’ve had a varied career.”

“You noticed.”

“Whereas I’m more single-track. I’ve always been a bounty hunter, ever since I was a young man. Followed in my uncle’s footsteps.”

“You’re from Cadrada?”

“I’m from a lot of places. I was born in a desert village. Didn’t have a name, it was too little. I got out on a barge down the Grand Canal and never went back. You?”

“Cadrada, but I don’t know who my parents were. Brought up on the edge of the court, by a variety of people, then into the temple as a dancer. They used me to seduce visiting aristocracy. Reliable enough work.” And it paid for my poetry, but I didn’t really want to tell Dair that; I thought it might make me seem less threatening.

“Easier than bounty hunting.”

“Only sometimes. Anyway, I wanted to travel.” I was trying to be philosophical about Hafyre’s loss, and failing. This is why one should never mix business and personal matters.

Dair was scanning the room behind me; he’d seen something, but I didn’t want to draw attention by looking round. “I can understand that.”

“This is decent wine,” I said, loudly. “Want some more?”

His eyes remained on the back of the room. “Whatever you say, my friend.” His free hand traced a couple of sigils on the tabletop: northwest, leaving. Then he stood. “There’s a back way out behind the kitchen.”

So that was the way I took, while Dair went out the front. I passed a greasy scullery and someone washing pans; she did not look up. The staff were probably used to it. I sped through an alley, seeing no one, and met Dair again outside the bar, standing in the shadows.

“They’re here. The sorcerer is, anyway.”

“Did you see her? Why would he have brought her back here and not to the Tribes?”

“I don’t know. Negotiating on neutral ground? Or maybe he thinks it’s safer now that he’s found out we’re on the scene. I only saw him. I don’t think he saw us, though. But I can’t be sure.”

“Did you see where he went?”

“No.”

“I want my tope back,” I told him. A quick trip round the town’s stables seemed in order, and, in the second, belonging to one of the cheaper guesthouses, we found my mount. He bellowed a welcome when he saw me, looking up from his steaming bucket of entrails and enveloping me in a blast of fetid breath. Dair said that he thought it was sweet. I did not bother to reply. We took the back stairs, weapons at the ready. Dair took a phial from his pocket, broke off the top, and threw it into the corner; after a moment, smoke billowed out, seeping under the doors.

“Fire!” Dair shouted, with a convincing note of panic.

We waited until there were a series of gratifying cries and people in various stages of undress bolted forth. At the far end of the hall, however, a door remained firmly closed. I ran through the clouds of smoke and kicked it in.

The sorcerer was standing by the window, in the act of throwing open the shutters.

Hafyre cried out, muffled by a gag. Her hands were tied behind her back. I sliced through the bonds while Dair fired a bolt at the sorcerer, who flung himself to one side. I stood up to get a clear shot with the barb gun, aiming at the sorcerer’s face, but at that moment the room crackled with the cast of a spell.

I felt it hit me, and it felt as though it should have brought me down, but it broke over me like a fiery wave and was gone. There was a cry of fury and I turned to see the priestess, Hafyre’s aunt, standing in the doorway. Her hand was outstretched; her face, bewildered. The sorcerer gave a sudden caw of laughter.

“That’s the trouble with women’s spells!”

My magic can fry any man at seven paces. Being a poet, I really should pay more attention to figures of speech, especially in other people’s languages.

The sorcerer flung out a hand of his own. Dair tackled me low, clutching me around the waist and bringing me to the floor.

The bolts shot over my head like twin comets: one green and one blue. There was a sharp cry, a curse from Hafyre, then the ringing silence that follows concussive-weapons fire. The pressure of Dair’s body on mine was abruptly released. He pulled me to my feet. A scorched outline against the opposite wall was all that remained of the sorcerer: Evidently rage had lent force to that particular spell. In the doorway, the body of the Ynar priestess, Hafyre’s aunt, had slumped lifelessly to the floor. And a window banging against its own shutters was the only trace of Hafyre herself.

She’d stolen my tope, we discovered shortly. But there were no prizes for guessing where she was headed: Cadrada, decent restaurants, and a lifetime of business opportunities. We could have gone after her, but I couldn’t help feeling that she deserved to have a free run.

Later, though—later I would return to Cadrada. Maybe with money in my pocket. The hope in my heart was already there, however misplaced.

Aloud, I said I thought that she was more trouble than she was worth. So Dair and I split the proceeds along gender lines: He took the sorcerer’s cash bag and poison store, while I stripped the priestess’s body of her coin belt and the wealth-beads in her hair. Then we dumped her body in the Yss and gave the guesthouse proprietor a bit over the cost of the room to keep her quiet. Even with this unexpected expense, over another bottle of Ylltian white, we calculated that we’d made slightly more than the finders’ fees.

“Of course,” Dair said sourly, a couple of hours later, “failure’s not good for the reputation.”

“True. But at least we don’t have to go all the way back to Cadrada empty-handed. Although I don’t think that the north is a very healthy place to be anymore.” I was remembering the priestess’s warriors. Dair turned the glass in his fingers.

“I was thinking of Yllt. Lovely at this time of year. And they do make a nice wine.”

I smiled.

“Do you want a companion for the ride?”

“Not fussy, are you? Although I’m reminded that you no longer have a mount.”

And so the next morning I once more rode out of Scarlight, on Dair’s black tope, with the Jharain wind at my back, money in my pocket, and the vision of a girl’s face before me, her eyes the color of forests.