The Ropemaker

8

The Walls of the City

Talagh. There was no grasping it, no way Tilja could imagine it as just a particular place in the world. It wouldn’t fit into her mind. It was like the Empire itself, too huge, too strange, too, somehow, vague.

By the time they reached it even its name had become uncertain. In the Valley it had been Talak; north of the Pirrim Hills Talagh; but in the twenty-seven days of travel since then she had heard it called Talarg and Dalarg and Dhawak and Tallak-Tallak, and Ndalag and several other names, by travelers who had joined the traffic on the Grand Northwest Road by one of the scores of roads that fed into it from north and south.

And the speakers had been just as different as the names they’d used for the city. Tahl, who could make friends with anyone, had hit it off with a boy his own age whom he’d met while he was haggling with a dealer over a price for Alnor’s horse at one of the way stations. These were huge by now, with booths for a thousand travelers, more or less grand according to their grade. Tahl’s friend, Cinoquo, had a clear, coppery skin, thick lips, a snub, spread nose, and high, prominent cheekbones, just like his parents, who were on their way to a provincial capital to be witnesses in a legal dispute between their Landholder and a rival which had already dragged on through five generations. They were nomadic cattle herders and drove a creaking oxcart—they had no other home—and spoke in an accent so strange that until she was used to it Tilja could understand only one word in three.

But some things didn’t vary at all. Cinoquo’s father was a chief in his tribe, so he was a fourteenth grader and wore a cap like Alnor’s, and Cinoquo’s little sister had just started to put her hair up, braided and coiled and fastened with two blue beads and a blue-headed pin showing, and she was having just the same trouble keeping them in place that Tilja used to have until the Ropemaker had done his trick with her hair tie. These were the people who called the city Tallak-Tallak.

Tilja saw it first as a dirty smudge spreading along the south-eastern horizon. The Grand Northwest Road truly lived up to its name by now. For the past nine days it had been fifty paces broad, well paved from ditch to ditch and marked off into separate lanes for travelers of different status and speeds, the ordinary traffic plodding along at the outer edges, while imperial messengers, high officials and their like sped through in the middle. (When the Emperor traveled, Tahl had heard someone say, the road was closed to all traffic for a day’s march before and behind him, and it took his retinue a morning to pass by.)

For most of the time they had journeyed across plains or among gentle hills; for the last day and a half they had wound up through precipitous valleys, beneath cliffs, over passes, and down by thundering streams until, abruptly, they came round a spur, and there lay Talagh.

Tilja didn’t at first notice it, because her eye was inevitably caught by the river. The one by which they had left the Valley would have been a trickle beside it. Nevertheless those waters were here, one of the hundreds of tributaries that mingled into this mile-wide gleaming flood, snaking down from the north, close below the hills, and swinging away east across the plain.

“Talagh,” said someone, and pointed. Tilja peered into the distance and saw the smudge spreading along the horizon, a smudge in the clear spring air from the dust and fume of several million lives, a smudge on the patient earth from centuries of such lives building their houses and workplaces and temples and palaces and towers of fortification, and then rebuilding and rebuilding on the rubble of them. A smudge on time itself. From where she stood she began to feel its power.

That was at noon. In midafternoon they crossed the river on one of a pair of wooden bridges built upon massive piles. (What forest of giants must have been felled to provide such timber!) They slept at the last, thronged way station with the city still a few miles distant. From here they could see the low hill at its center, where the twenty spindling towers of the Watchers rose above the haze of dust and smoke, marking the heart of the Empire, the Emperor’s palace. Here too, as Lananeth had warned them, they were pestered by touts offering to guide them through the bureaucratic maze of entry and the dangers of the streets to wondrous places of pleasure and profit within the walls of Talagh.

Next morning for a while they saw no sign of any such walls. They walked past fields of vegetables, clusters of shabby houses and barns, more fields, more buildings, and then they were trudging along a tree-lined avenue with pompous statues and fountains, but still with dingy and ramshackle warehouses and yards on either side. Some kind of building blocked the road in the distance.

Nearer, this turned out to be an immense triple archway built of dark red brick. Beyond it they came to an empty space, two hundred paces across and stretching out of sight on either side. Ahead, in the same dark brick, heavy as a thundercloud at sunset, rose the gates and towered walls of Talagh.

They passed under the arch around noon, and joined the lines for entry. Many of their fellow travelers would still be waiting by dusk, and have to camp in their places all night and wait for the clerks to start work again next morning, but Alnor was wearing the uniform of a fourteenth grader, so one of the officials controlling the lines (two drin before he would even look at them) told them to join the shorter line at the left-hand gate. Nobody questioned their identities. The fees and bribes seemed to be all that mattered. Even so Tilja found herself sighing with relief when at last, late in the day, they stepped under the massive arch of the great gate of Talagh.

At once the whole of her left arm went numb. It wasn’t ordinary numbness such as she might have got from sleeping on it too long. She flexed her hand and her fingers moved, but it didn’t seem to be her, Tilja, moving them. She had two left arms, this strange, new, different arm, full of a kind of glowing chill which blanked out all other feelings, and inside that her own everyday arm, helpless, a sort of ghost. The feeling spread through her whole body, filling it, taking it over, more and more intense. In a moment it was going to come shrieking out—

No! she thought. This is me! Tilja Urlasdaughter of Woodbourne Farm. No!

Deliberately she shaped the picture in her mind, herself in the kitchen at home, just having climbed out of bed and now leaning against the stove as she repeated the fire charm and listened to the crackle of twigs and the swelling roar of flames into the flue. Blindly she clung to that image as she forced her feeble Tilja legs to shuffle the alien body forward and out on the other side of the arch, where she halted, sweating and gasping as the numbness flowed back the way it had come, out of her body into her left arm and then down from the shoulder to the place where Axtrig lay against her skin. It swirled into the old wooden spoon and was gone.

Magic, she thought. Yes, Talagh, the warded city. Wards of immense power, built into its walls by the greatest magicians in the Empire. And she, Tilja, had just carried Axtrig through them. The Ropemaker had said he didn’t know if she could do it, but she had. The wards had tried to stop her, to break through her own mysterious defenses, and they had failed. Though she was still shuddering with the remembered strain and terror, beneath them she began to feel a strange sort of dazed exhilaration at the understanding of what she had done.

“Get a move on, girl! No time for daydreaming!”

Meena’s snarl from above her head yanked her back into the everyday world, and she led Calico on.

Again they had to force their way past a mass of touts, keeping close together, knowing what easy prey a blind old man, a lame old woman and two children might seem to these street jackals. Tilja had anything she valued beneath her skirt, and the others had taken similar precautions. Besides, the jackals had misjudged Meena, perched above them, watchful as a house dog. Twice Tilja heard the swish of her cane, followed by a yelp and guffaws from the other jackals, as a hand had reached for one of the saddlebags.

On Lananeth’s instructions they pushed through into a courtyard beside the main gate and lined up at yet another booth, where Alnor hired one of the official guides, a silent, unsmiling young man. He seemed quite unimpressed when Alnor asked him to take them to the house of Lord Kzuva, one of the great nobles of the Empire. He took the fee and bribe and extra without a word of thanks, told them to keep up, and strode off, using his staff of office to lever a path though the mob. They would never have found their way without him.

In one sense Talagh was roughly what Tilja had expected from the account of it in the story of Asarta. They had entered through one of the twelve great gates and were now on a broad avenue that led, gently rising, up to the Emperor’s palace at the center. On either side of her, just as in the story, she could see crooked lanes and alleys running off into the maze of streets that lay between this and the next avenues. She was even prepared, she’d thought, for the crowds and the noise and the smells.

But she wasn’t. In her mind, perhaps, but not in her imagination. Not for the overwhelming pressure of it all, all those hurrying people, the mass of different lives and purposes, the bellowing vendors, the infants—jackals in the making—wheedling pitifully for a quarter drin but with eyes sharp for anything they could snatch, so street skilled that when some bigwig was borne through, shoulder-high on a chair, with baton-wielding attendants thwacking a pathway, these urchins ducked under the blows without even turning to look. And the rattle of drums and the high bleat of bagpipes calling the scurriers’ attention to a troupe of five near-naked contortionists who’d tied themselves into a knot so intricate that no one could tell which arm or head belonged to which body. As Tilja passed, this knot began to dance, rolling itself from foot to foot that stuck out at random from the mass. And just beyond that another raucous ensemble advertised a woman whose gross body was so covered with different-colored scorpions that not a scrap of her flesh could be seen, and every one of them deadly poisonous, so the hawker beside her yelled. And another such sight, and another, and another, every few paces, and the lamplit stalls glittering with trinkets, or great mounds of unknown fruit, or wicked knives and daggers, or sickly-scented salves. . . . Oh, the reeks and odors of Talagh, familiar and strange, honest leather mingling with cloying spices, rots with roses, heady smokes, bitter, cleansing acids, furs and furnaces, people and creatures and stuffs and objects, the very bricks and plaster of the buildings seeming to pour out their own bricky and plastery essences into the dusty, pungent air.

Along its whole length the avenue was thronged from side to side, and at first the going seemed no easier when their guide turned off along one of the broader side lanes. They threaded their way on, crossed two of the main avenues, and came as night was falling to an area of much grander houses than they had so far seen. Here the side streets were almost empty, many of them guarded at either end by men with the tasseled caps and staffs that showed they were the servants of some great lord. At one of these places their guide halted.

“Speak to these fellows,” he said. “I go no further.”

Tahl offered him the three drin he had ready for the tip, but the guide shook his head.

“My father is also blind,” he said. Still unsmiling, he turned and strode away.

One of the guards laughed.

“My father has excellent eyesight,” he said. “Whose household do you seek, my rustic friends? The Lord Kzuva’s? This way, then . . .”

He led them past ornate entrances, beyond which fountains played in lamplit courtyards, and rapped with his staff on a small door in an otherwise blank high wall. Without waiting for an answer, he took his three drin and left. A bored servant opened the door, yawned as he took his bribe, barely seemed to listen to Alnor’s message but held out his hand for another three drin before he would open the main gate to let Meena and Calico through.

He told them to wait and slouched off, but almost before Tilja and Tahl had helped Meena down he came hurrying back, accompanied by another man, middle-aged, pale and plump, wearing the braided silk jacket that meant, Tilja knew by now, that he was a fairly important official. This man rushed eagerly up to Meena, threw his arms round her and kissed her on both cheeks.

“My dearest Qualifa!” he purred. “What a pleasurable surprise! And Qualif! And both grandchildren—long way from home, my young friends, eh? And have you grown! See to the horse, Carran, and have the east-court guest rooms made ready. Send food to my room. This way, my friends. Ah, Qualifa, my dear, your hip is troubling you? Shall I send for a litter?”

“I’ll do, thank you kindly,” said Meena. “And it’s a pleasure to see you again, sir.”

“Take my arm then, and tell me what’s happening at home. You left my wife well?”

He took Meena’s arm and led them through a couple of lamplit courtyards, up a few steps and in through a door. The room beyond glowed with colors and had a strange but pleasing smell. On one side piles of cushions ringed a low table. On the other was a work table covered with ledgers and documents. A large caged bird squawked at their entry.

Their guide closed the door and let out a sigh of relief. He shook his head as he studied his visitors. He had, Tilja thought, a guarded look in his eyes. He had stopped smiling.

“And your true names?” he asked in a voice just above a whisper.

Alnor answered just as quietly.

“We are Alnor Ortahlson and Meena Urlasdaughter, and these are our grandchildren, Tahl and Tilja. We came to your house, where your wife questioned us and gave us food. We needed to come to Talagh, for our own purposes. She needed four people, two old, two young, to come to Talagh and buy death-leaves for the two whose names we assumed. She could not get word to you sooner than we could come, but she said you would understand, since you and she had talked of this possibility. Now we are here. If you have no use for us after all, we will go and do the thing we came for, and trouble you no further.”

The man stood for a long while, drumming his fingertips on the table.

“She has taken you under my roof and fed you,” he said. “She and I are one. You can safely tell me more. Where, for instance, do you come from?”

“Beyond the forest.”

“Ah . . . you gave my name at the gate?”

“Yes. Your wife told us . . .”

“Of course.”

He stood there for a while, aimlessly tidying stacks of papers, then nodded.

“Sit,” he said. “When they bring food they will consider it strange to find you still standing. I must think.”

While he paced the room Tilja settled Meena down and made her comfortable, then sat beside her. They waited in silence until he joined them.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “you offer me a way out of one great danger, but into a far worse one. Now not only I and mine, but my Lord Kzuva and all his household stand in peril. Still, I can see no other way than to continue to help you. You have come through the gate, so the names of Qualif and Qualifa are in the registers, recorded as visiting me. Therefore you must be recorded as leaving Talagh, or dying before you could do so. If you had not eaten under my roof, it would have been best for me to poison you two and sell the children for slaves, as the law demands, but that path is now closed. Well, then, I am Ellion, Steward to the Lord Kzuva, and despite all this I welcome you for your own sakes.”

“Thank you kindly,” said Meena, sharply. “Even if we’d have been more use to you dead than alive.”

“Would you really have poisoned them and sold us two?” said Tahl, sounding more interested than horrified. Ellion smiled thinly.

“I am glad to be spared the decision,” he said. “And the fact remains that you may indeed be useful to me alive. I find I can no longer do as I intended, and arrange for false death-leaves to be issued, with false entries in the registers, as would have been possible in the previous reign. The man now in charge of the census and registry of subjects is able and vigorous, and many laxities are being swept away.

“Now the main danger lies in your being who you are, and where you come from. My wife has explained to you about this? Good. And of course you are in just as great danger as I am, so it is in all our interests that you should leave as soon as possible. Your gate permit in any case lasts only five days. Can you do what you have come for in that time?”

“We are looking for a man,” said Alnor. “Our account of him says that we will find him if he wants us to, and fail if he does not.”

Ellion sat very still, staring at the back of his hand.

“That kind of a man?” he whispered. “No, tell me nothing.”

“If you say so,” said Meena. “Then all I want is somewhere for Tilja and me to go on our own, out in the open would be best, sometime when there’s no one else around. I know it’s not going to be easy in Talagh, but—”

There was a movement at the door, and a discreet tap. All five froze, but it was only servants with a tray of food. Ellion at once became smiling and easy, fussing over Meena and Alnor and seeing that they were comfortable, just as he might have done over two old friends, but as soon as the servants had left he let out a deep sigh. Tilja could feel his fear. He looked at Meena.

“So you are another of that kind?” he said slowly.

“No, I’m not, sir, I promise you. We don’t have anything like that in the Valley, just—what did your wife call it—little bits of country magic. I’ll need Tilja here along with me. It’ll only take us a moment, and then we’ll clear out.”

Perhaps if Ellion had known her better he would have refused. As it was, after another long pause and sigh, followed by that anxious smile, he said, “I know an obstinate woman when I meet one. You will do what you plan whether I help you or not. Well, I will need to talk to . . . a friend. Eat now, and then I will send for somebody to show you where you can sleep. When all is quiet let the girl come back here and find me.”

A big moon cast dense shadows. Keeping to the darkest places beneath the walls, Ellion led Tilja back the way she had come, round a small courtyard, through an archway and round a larger courtyard, to where Meena was waiting at the foot of the stairway that led up to their rooms.

“I shall not stay for you once we are there,” he whispered. “You will need to remember your own way back. Now, come.”

He led them on through many windings to what seemed to be the back of the house, and out into yet another courtyard surrounded by large, shapeless buildings which looked more like storehouses than places where anyone lived. Here he unlocked a door and gave Tilja the key. Inside was a musty-smelling space into which the moonlight shone through three small windows high in one wall. Between the bars of silver light everything else was impenetrably dark.

“I will leave you here,” said Ellion. “When I am gone, lock the door and hide the key. In the further corner to your right you will find a stair. Climb it until you reach a locked door. Here is that key. Go through, lock the door and again hide the key. Hide it well. You will find yourselves on the inner-city wall. It is not guarded along its length, only at the main gates. But you will see flashes of light here and there, where fragments of loose magic strike against the wards that ring it round. My friend says that the bit of country magic you propose to do should have much the same effect, and so pass unnoticed by any Watcher. Go to your left, until you are well away from this house, before you attempt anything, be as quick as you can, and when you have done leave instantly.”

“Well, thank you kindly,” said Meena as if she were talking to a neighbor who’d brought her a basket of pears. “I can see you’re doing the best you can by us, and we’ll do the same for you. Come along then, girl. No point in hanging around.”

Tilja closed the door behind Ellion and tucked the key under some sacking that she found by touch down against the wall. She took Meena’s hand and with her free hand groping before her and feeling her way with each footstep she worked across into one of the shafts of moonlight and down it to the right-hand wall. There were piles of barrels stacked against it. She felt her way from barrel to barrel to the corner, where she found another door, not locked. She opened it and found the first step with her foot.

“He didn’t say how far up it was,” she whispered. “Are you going to be able to manage? Wait—there’s a hand rope.”

“You take my cane, then. Where’s your shoulder? Right. One at a time.”

Very slowly they climbed eight winding flights. The ones against the two outer walls had slit windows through which Tilja could see the stars, and moonlit roofs, but it was still pitch black inside the stairwell and she had to make sure of every tread by feel. Meena muttered under her breath from time to time, but never groaned nor asked to rest. The ninth flight ended in a door.

Tilja found the keyhole with her fingers, turned the grinding lock and pushed the door open. Beyond it was a battlemented parapet and a wide moonlit sky. She stepped outside and found herself in a kind of alley stretching left and right between the parapet and the much higher wall of the building they had just left. She couldn’t quite see over the parapet.

She locked the door as soon as Meena was through and followed her along to the left, looking for somewhere to hide the key. She fully understood the need. If they were caught doing whatever it was Meena was planning, they mustn’t be carrying any clues about where they’d come from. There was a small tree growing out of the parapet. Its roots had broken some of the brickwork away, so that Tilja could look over. Below her the wall dropped dizzyingly down to the cleared space that circled the old city, and beyond that the moonlit roofs of the outer city reached away.

Tilja managed to wedge the key in among the roots, then hurried after Meena. Buildings lined the inner side of the walkway, screening the central city, but anyone outside the walls must surely have seen Meena’s head and shoulders as she hobbled along through the moonlight. Some distance ahead of them a wisp of pale light flickered above the wall and vanished. Then another, further on. Loose magic striking the wards, Ellion had said. Every hundred paces or so they came to a small watchtower, with a doorless opening onto the walkway. A little beyond the third of these there was a gap in the screen of buildings on their left, with only a waist-high wall to prevent them falling. The gap was wide enough to show them most of the inner city.

“This’ll have to do,” Meena whispered. “I’ll stay back here. Keep yourself down. First thing, we’ve got to get our bearings. Moon must’ve come up over there, so that’ll be eastish. North’s somewhere behind there, then. Drat this moon—can’t see a thing this side. You go on ahead, girl, and see if you can spot the Fisherman—he’ll be low down this time of night, so he should show up spite of the moon—and that should give you the Axle-pin. Once you’ve got that you take old Axtrig out and put her down on her cloth—here—and stand a bit beyond, facing this way so you can see me as well as her. Put your hand up when you’re ready.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“I’ll tell you. You remember what happened in Ellion’s house when I said the man’s name out loud—how Axtrig twisted round and pointed herself toward Talagh, showing us that was the way we’d got to go. Only thing it could mean, far as I can see. What I’m hoping is she’ll do it again now, but this time I’ll keep myself well clear and just whisper his name. That way maybe it won’t hit me as hard as it did back then, but it’ll still be enough for Axtrig to move. Soon as you see her twist, you run in and check the line, and then you pick her up and put her away and we’ll be out of here as fast as we can go. And if nothing happens, I’ll come a bit closer and try again.”

“It’s still a lot more than country magic, isn’t it, Meena, whatever you said to Ellion?”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but if you was in my shoes you’d give it a try, wouldn’t you, girl?”

“I expect so. But one line’s not going to be enough, is it? We’re going to have to do it somewhere else, and see where the lines cross.”

“Well, maybe. But what I’m thinking is this. There’s got to be a reason why he gave Dirna the peach in the first place, and why we’ve kept Axtrig in the family all this time, and why I brought her along without rhyme or reason, just feeling it was important. It’s so we could find him when the time came. So maybe when I say his name he’ll feel it himself, and he’ll know we’re here and looking for him, and then either he’ll help us, or he won’t. Now, don’t hang around arguing. Off you go, and let’s get it done with.”

From the sharpness of her whispered voice Tilja could tell that Meena was as scared as she was herself. Crouching low and keeping in the strip of shadow beneath the parapet, she scuttled along the walkway to the center of the gap. There she turned and gazed out across the dark and jagged roofscape of the inner city, rising in a gentle swell from east and west to the palace at the summit. Each of the twenty fantastic towers that ringed it had one or two lit windows near the top, and everything below was dark and still. Were the Watchers still awake, even at this hour? Awake enough, in spite of what Ellion had said, to notice something different about a flicker of country magic striking the city’s wards? A sense of steadily increasing danger filled the night air.

She turned her eyes upward and searched among the familiar stars. Yes, there, faint, because of the moon pallor, and lying on his side, was the good old Fisherman, his rod bowed from the weight of the Fish. She followed the line of the last section of rod, and found the Axle-pin, fainter still, directly over the third tower from the left. So that was due north.

She rolled up her sleeve and with trembling fingers untied the ribbon that for the last sixteen days had kept Axtrig safely against her forearm. She had grown so used to the spoon being there that she seldom noticed her, but now as she took her in her hand, that curious slight numbness seeped across her palm and the pads of her fingers.

Something moved in the darkness beside her.

She froze.

Again, in the utter stillness, the same faint pad. A cat meowed softly. She stared and saw the green of its eyes. As her heart resumed its proper beat, the cat moved into the moonlight and meowed again. It was a large, bony creature, neither starved nor cared for. The moonlight sparkled faintly off its shaggy fur. Automatically her hand moved to stroke it, but it backed away and sat down.

“Off you go,” she whispered. “Shoo!”

The cat answered with another meow, but didn’t stir. There’d always been cats at Woodbourne, and Tilja felt comforted by its homely presence. She knelt and spread out the cloth Meena had given her, then laid Axtrig down with her shaft pointing east along the wall, so that she would need to make an obvious movement to point to anywhere in the city. Still keeping low, she stepped back, squatted down facing toward Meena and signaled that she was ready. Meena raised her hand in answer. Tilja stared at the spoon.

The world changed.

Light blazed all along the wall, glaring, shadowless. A whirl of movement—the cat streaking away along the wall, leaping past Meena’s body where it lay on the walkway . . .

Tilja jumped to her feet and ran, snatched Axtrig and the cloth as she passed, crammed them into her blouse and raced on. Meena was lying on her back, her head facing the way they had come, and her cane beside her. Tilja poked it into her waistband, knelt, worked her arms under Meena’s shoulders, heaved her up and started to drag her along the walkway. All this without thought. She only knew that they had to get clear of the place, now, at once. But Meena was far too heavy for her. She was gasping already, her heart pounding. She knew she couldn’t go much further. Where . . . ?

Something she’d seen. The fleeing cat vanishing into the darkness of the little tower. It was only a few paces away now. With a last, wrenching effort she dragged Meena in through the opening and collapsed on top of her.

As soon as she could, she mastered her gasping lungs and breathed more quietly, but the thud of her heart seemed still to fill the night. The glaring light was gone. She knelt up and looked toward the tower entrance. Through it she could see only the blank, moonlit wall of the building on the opposite side of the walkway, so bright that the reflected light shone straight into the center of the little tower, leaving a patch of deep shadow either side. Anyone standing there was sure to see her, and Meena too. Carefully she lifted Meena’s shoulders again and dragged her into the shadow, close to the curving wall, then rose and stood, knowing it was still useless, hopeless. The tower itself was a trap. Her breathing had eased but her heart wouldn’t stop thumping, as it did in nightmares until the terror itself woke her with every muscle locked rigid.

This was just such a nightmare, with the unknown enemy hunting outside, herself hiding, knowing it was going to find her. Except that she was already awake.

Forcing herself out of the paralysis of terror, she edged toward the door until she could see along the walkway almost as far as the next tower. She stared at it. There. It was there that the world had changed, and the nightmare had begun.

An image formed itself in her mind—the spoon, Axtrig, lying on her cloth under that astounding light, with her bowl toward the heart of the city and her shaft pointing the other way. There had been a world in which the spoon had been pointing east along the old city wall. Then there was one in which she was pointing . . . no, not in toward the heart of Talagh, but out, away from it, waking the wards that ringed it, south.

She had no time to think about this, to be amazed or puzzled, because now the nightmare became real. Two figures appeared, moving toward her. One was human, a woman she thought, but couldn’t be sure because it was wrapped in a wide cloak that reached to the ground. The other . . . she didn’t know what it was. It was the height of a large dog, and the human held it by a leash, but it was twice as broad as any dog Tilja had ever seen, with massive shoulders on long forelegs, and a body that then sloped away to squat hind legs. It moved with an awkward waddle and was jet black, blacker than jet. Its blackness drank the moonlight.

As she stared, rigid, holding her breath, trying to silence the betraying thud of her heart, the cat came out of the patch of shadow on the opposite side of the tower and walked to the entrance. It saw the approaching pair, stiffened and arched its back. All its fur stood on end, flecked by the moonlight with pale golden sparks that flickered and changed as it paced rapidly to and fro across the opening, weaving a figure-eight pattern. That done, it came back almost to where Tilja was standing and sat down to watch with her.

Its presence, its ordinariness, didn’t belong in the nightmare. For some kind of reassurance Tilja stooped to stroke its back, but again it moved out of reach and sat watching the pair on the walkway.

Halfway between the two towers they halted and the creature crouched and sniffed noisily at the paving. It licked the place vigorously, looked up and gave a purring snarl, its tongue lolling from an enormous, jagged-fanged mouth. It had one eye, in the middle of its forehead. The woman—she had turned her face into the moonlight, and Tilja could now be sure—scratched the back of its head and gazed along the wall, directly toward the tower where Tilja was hiding. She was almost as dark as the creature, a smooth, young, handsome face with no life in it at all. The face of a statue.

She stooped gracefully and held her hands over the place the creature had shown her. Ribbons of yellow light glowed between her fingers and the paving. Tilja’s chest started to tingle. Instinctively she put her hand to the place and found that the tingling came from Axtrig, lying between her shift and her blouse, but as soon as her fingers gripped the wood it stopped, and instead the same odd numbness as before flowed into her hand. This time it ran all the way up her arm to the elbow, strong enough for her to recognize it as the terrifying sensation that had almost overwhelmed her coming through the city gate. It came from Axtrig, but it was caused by whatever the woman was doing. Yes, she and her creature were looking for Axtrig—that was the tingling. And Tilja had stopped her when she had laid her hand on the wood— that was the numbness. The magic, instead of reaching out to answer the woman’s summons, had flowed into Tilja’s arm and away.

The woman stayed where she was. The glow of light beneath her hands increased to a glare, but Axtrig remained inert, while the numbness seeped away. The woman rose, frowning, and looked again along the walkway. Tilja was certain that now was the moment when they were going to come and find her, but then saw that the woman seemed to be looking beyond the tower. It was clear from the way she stood that she was now waiting for something, or somebody, coming toward her.

Soon Tilja heard the pad of shod feet and a man came into view, walking toward the woman. Tilja saw only his naked back, with a wild tangle of hair reaching almost to his waist, muscular arms with heavy bracelets above and below the elbows, a wide belt covered with jewels that glittered in the moonlight, baggy knee-length trousers, sandals jeweled like the belt. Over his shoulder he carried a sort of whip, a short handle with several knotted thongs.

The creature waddled forward and faced him, snarling. The man ignored it. It leaped at his throat. Something in the empty air seemed to cuff it aside. The man walked straight toward the woman as if he intended to do the same with her. Now his bulk hid her completely from where Tilja was standing, so she couldn’t see how the woman stopped him, but she must have, somehow.

They faced each other. Tilja could hear low voices, but not the words. It sounded like a language she didn’t know. They seemed to come to some kind of agreement. The man took his whip and held it aloft. The thongs fluttered, as if in a lightly gusting breeze, but there wasn’t one. The numbness came back into Tilja’s hand and arm, and flowed away as before. She could guess what was happening. The man was looking for Axtrig, just as the woman had with her magic ribbons. If Tilja hadn’t been clutching the spoon, the thongs would have been straining toward her. As it was, all they responded to was the little currents of ordinary magic wafting to and fro in the night.

The man turned slowly as he searched, until Tilja could see him from in front. The face didn’t belong to the healthy young body or the mass of wild hair. It was the face of a very old man, pale and wrinkled, with bloodshot rheumy eyes and cracked blue lips. Surely, with his powers, he could have chosen any face he wanted. Had he chosen to look like that? It was horrible.

His gaze reached the tower and stopped. He shook his whip slightly, as if trying to stir it into action. The thongs rose, straining like weed in a rapid river. But not toward the tower. South, over the outer city. He turned abruptly to look that way. The woman did the same. They stiffened and moved apart. The woman made a sweeping gesture with her arms and her creature threw back its head and bayed. The man brandished his whip. The thongs writhed, grew, and turned to cords of fire streaming out over the wall. From somewhere close below came an enormous, hissing, whooping howl, the howl of a tempest bellowing through a single throat. The glare of light came back, blazing above the wall like a sheet of summer lightning frozen into stillness. The woman, now half again as tall as before, made a whirling gesture to it, and it gathered itself together, spiraling inward, too bright to look at, and then hurled itself down, a bolt of silent lightning, at the bellowing thing beyond the wall. And again. And again.

A hand, massive as a tree trunk but the color of moonlight, reached up and grasped at the swirling curtain of magic, gathering it together. The glow blazed fiercer yet round that silvery fist, but the fist simply absorbed it. Tilja could see the incandescence pulsing away down the veins of the arm. The tower where Tilja was hiding shuddered as a whole section of parapet fell away.

The cat was at the entrance now, its fur again as rigid as a hedgehog’s spines. In the lull after the crash of falling masonry Tilja heard a gasping croak from inside the tower.

“You there, girl?”

“Meena . . . !”

“Got to get out of here . . . can’t stand much more . . .”

The glare lit all the interior of the tower. Meena was struggling to her knees. Tilja helped her to her feet and gave her her cane.

“I’ll just about do,” Meena muttered.

The cat moved out of their way as she hobbled, wheezing, to the door. Tilja saw her stagger and almost fall, but she managed to clutch the parapet and worked her way along it, gripping it all the time as if something was trying to wrench her away. Tilja followed. The magical battle raged behind them. A whole section of wall fell thundering into the space below. Nobody seemed to notice their going.

“You go ahead,” Meena croaked. “Get the door open.”

Tilja ran on. One-handed—the other was still tight round Axtrig—she found the key behind the tree where she had hidden it, opened the storehouse door and looked back. Against the lightning glare she saw Meena forcing her way through the invisible tempest. Behind her came the cat, pacing steadily along, occasionally turning its head to glance back.

At last Meena reached the door and hobbled through. As Tilja was about to follow, something brushed, purring, against her skirt. She looked down and saw the cat. She could guess now why it hadn’t let her stroke it.

“Thanks, puss,” she whispered, “for whatever it was you were doing.”

The cat purred again and stalked off along the walkway. Tilja closed and locked the door. Beside her Meena was gasping in the darkness.

“Are you all right?”

“Don’t talk. I’m just about holding on. I’d best go down on my arse. You first. Tell me what’s coming.”

Slowly they worked their way down, Tilja going backward on her knees, placing Meena’s feet on each step and waiting for her to ease her body down, and then repeating the action, all one-handed because of her desperate fear of letting go of Axtrig. When they were halfway to the ground Meena spoke again, her voice less strained.

“That’s a bit more like it. They’re giving up. My goodness, though . . . Remember that gale we had, two years back when the home byre blew down? It was like being out in something like that, all the magic blasting around. . . . What about you, girl? You don’t seem to have turned a hair.”

“No, I didn’t feel any of that. Only when they were looking for Axtrig and she started to sort of tingle. . . . Do you think I can let go of her now? If I put her right in under my blouse so she’s against my skin?”

“Maybe I can tell you . . . yes, that feels safe enough. Better get on now—the others’ll be wondering what’s up. They must’ve heard the racket going on. Stirred up a hornets’ nest, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Meena was right. When at last they had reached the ground and made their way out of the storehouse they found the whole great household in an uproar, with shouts and cries, and the neighing of panicking horses and barking of dogs, and people hurrying about or standing in groups talking in low voices and glancing up now and again at the moonlit sky. No one paid any attention to Meena and Tilja as they made their way back to their room. Despite what he had said, Ellion was already there.

It was well past midnight before they reached the little windowless chamber to which he now insisted on taking them. When he had locked the door the five of them settled onto coarse cushions round a single dim lamp in the middle of the floor. Meena gray with exhaustion and pain and snarling in her determination not to give in to them; Alnor very solemn and calm; Tahl fizzing with interest and excitement, wide awake despite the hour; Tilja almost too tired to make one word follow another, but still too shaken to think of sleep; and Ellion himself, keeping his voice steady and soft as always, but with his eyes twitching from one face to the next, and starting at every sound that reached them from the still disturbed household.

“This room is warded,” he explained. “Every great lord maintains at least one personal magician. Ours is my wife’s cousin, Zara, and they have been good friends. This is her chamber, and no doubt she will have arranged to hear what we say, but it is the best I can do. It is not only for myself. It is for my own household, and my lord and all who depend on him. You have come among us, into the heart of Talagh, and worked your strong unwarded magic. . . .”

“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” snapped Meena. “You think I’d’ve risked it if I’d known?”

“I accept that you acted in ignorance,” said Ellion. “That would not save you from the Questioners, nor would it save me and mine, even if I were to hand you over to them. But as it is . . . I have always tried to know as little as possible about these matters, but now . . . First, tell me what happened on the wall, so that I may try to judge where any safety may lie.”

“Tilja’ll have to do that,” said Meena. “Soon as I’d said the name something hit me and I passed clean out.”

Somehow Tilja forced herself to concentrate and explain what had happened on the wall. When she had finished Meena spoke first.

“South? Axtrig was pointing south?”

“Yes. I felt the world change. I’m quite sure.”

“Then he is not in Talagh,” said Alnor.

“He could be in the outer city,” said Tahl. “That thing Tilja says came—the one that pulled the wall down—he could have sent—”

There was a soft scratching at the door. They all froze. Tilja saw Ellion’s face go white in the lamplight. The lock clicked as the key turned with no hand holding it. The door opened and a woman entered. She closed the door, turned the key in the normal way and came further into the room, then stood and looked at them one by one. Her smile meant nothing. It seemed to Tilja that she spent much longer on her than on the others. She was middle-aged, wearing a dark red robe that completely hid her figure. Despite her smile, her face had the same smooth stillness as that of the woman Tilja had seen on the wall. When she spoke her voice was slow and husky.

“My friend Ellion has guessed correctly,” she said. “I had of course arranged to hear your talk. You are in need of my advice, and you can tell me things it would be useful for me to know. I am called Zara. I am the Lord Kzuva’s magician. Sit down, and I will explain to you what the girl has seen. . . . Good. From your talk I gather that you are looking for a particular man and that you have brought with you some object that you think will enable you to find him. You name this thing Axtrig. Where is it now?”

They hesitated, waiting for each other. Though Tilja could see a family likeness to Lananeth, this woman seemed very different. Lananeth might have magical powers, but she was human. You could read her voice and feelings and make up your mind whether to trust her, even though Lananeth wasn’t her real name. With this woman—Zara, she said she was called, as if that wasn’t her real name either—with this woman there was no way of knowing.

“No, you must tell her,” said Ellion. “We are in her hands.”

“Axtrig is a carved wooden spoon,” said Alnor. “Tilja has her.”

“Here? In this room? I feel nothing.”

“No,” said Tilja. “I don’t understand, but she’s got to be touching my skin. I’ve had her strapped to my arm most of the journey. Even when I had her under my blouse, with just my shift in between, she started to tingle when that woman was looking for her. I think the woman could feel she was there until I grabbed her handle. Do you want me to show you?”

Zara shook her head.

“Give me your hand, child,” she said.

Tilja reached out and let Zara take her hand. She felt the numbness starting. Zara stiffened for a moment and let go.

“Remarkable,” she said. “Several others, each far more powerful than I, are searching for this thing. I dare not let you show it to me. The wards of this room are not strong enough to hold them off. And you do it, in pure ignorance. You have no need of wards. I think Silena’s beast, the creature you saw on the wall, could not have touched you. To hurt you she would have needed to cause the tower to fall on you, or some such thing.”

She laughed, pleasantly human for a moment.

“And this thing is a wooden spoon! I had imagined a sword, at least, or a jeweled rod. Well, then, I was asleep in my room, which is warded like this one, as it needs to be, or I would not dare sleep, ever. Through those wards came a burst, an explosion, of magical power, here in Talagh, in the warded heart of the Empire. The blast threw me from my bed, and I was stunned.”

“Me too,” said Meena. “It wasn’t like fainting, when you can feel yourself going. It was that sudden . . . I don’t know . . .”

“But you, child, standing close beside the center of it, you felt nothing at all?”

“No,” said Tilja. “Well, there was a sort of blink, and the world had changed, so that Axtrig was lying differently. It was the same that time with Lananeth.”

“The world had changed?” asked Zara, more softly than ever.

Stumbling for words, Tilja tried to explain her feelings about what happened to Axtrig when Meena spoke the name of Faheel—how it seemed as if it wasn’t the old spoon that moved, but instead the whole world became slightly different. Or perhaps it was time itself that became different, so that Axtrig had always been lying the way she now was, though nothing else had changed.

“That is power indeed,” said Zara, and for the first time Tilja could hear something like an emotion in the calm voice, a sense of awe. “Well, let me continue. When I recovered, that power was gone, but several other powers were active in the place. I counted, at first, four. Two I felt to be those of Watchers. Those were the two magicians the girl saw up on the wall. We know them as Silena and Dorn. There was another I did not know close by. Then a fourth, whom I also did not know, coming from the outer city below. But it would have been that one who sent the hand that broke the walls.”

“The other one up on the wall must’ve been Meena,” said Tahl.

“Me? I was passed out most of the time,” said Meena, “and besides, I’m not that sort.”

“No, it was the cat,” said Tilja. “I don’t know what it was doing, but it was doing something. I think it stopped the woman realizing we were in the tower.”

“If so, it was a creature with some power,” said Zara. “Each of the twenty Watchers oversees a section of the city, and all the Empire that lies beyond it. Dorn is South, the second most powerful of the Watchers, after Varti, who is North. The section Silena watches is next to his. The place at which you chose to do what you did was in Silena’s section, but close to Dorn’s, so she came first, and he soon after. None of the Watchers are friends to any of the others. They are all in fierce rivalry for power, but will combine to prevent one of themselves becoming more powerful than the rest. By this means the Emperor is able to see that none becomes overwhelmingly powerful. But, sensing a source of power such as you unleashed on the wall, of course both Silena and Dorn wanted it for themselves. . . .”

“And you do not want it also?” asked Alnor.

She shook her head.

“Not yet, and not for many years,” she said. “A more powerful magician would take it from me almost instantly, destroying such powers as I have to do so. My guess is that it would also have been more powerful than either Silena could handle, or even Dorn. The magician who came from the outer city is another matter. What you saw him doing was truly powerful, more than a match for Dorn and Silena together. Two more Watchers had joined them in the contest before they could drive him away. I have no idea who he can be, but he is still not the one you want. I think that one is far from here.”

“And south, apparently,” said Alnor.

“Yes. So it is in your interest to leave Talagh as soon as possible, and it is also in our interest, mine and Ellion’s, to have you gone. We have all been extremely fortunate in how this has worked out. The attention of the Watchers will now be concentrated on finding and if possible destroying the magician in the outer city, and it will be assumed that what brought Silena and Dorn to the place was the start of his attack on the walls, and not your doings with your spoon. So, for the moment we are safe. But your presence here with your unwarded magic is intensely dangerous to us, and to everyone under our Lord’s roof. Ellion is an honest man, but even so I think he would be tempted to hand you over to the Questioners, if he thought that would save us.”

“Yes, I have thought of it,” said Ellion. “But I know it would not help, so we must do the best we can to get you away from here. You must remain Qualif and Qualifa until you have left the city, and are recorded as having done so. At first light tomorrow I will send a trusted man with you to obtain your death-leaves and he will bring them back to me while you at once start the journey home.”

“But we can’t go home yet,” Meena burst in. “First we’ve got to—”

“Wait,” said Ellion. “You must be recorded as having started on that journey, but only your death-leaves are going home, for me to present to the census takers when they come. Since these will be in order, it is extremely unlikely that they will trouble to check with the records of way-leaves and see whether you in fact made the whole journey home.

“But in fact, once you have crossed the river you will take the Grand Trunk Road south. . . .”

“Meena and I will need way-leaves, surely,” said Alnor.

“I dare not give you way-leaves. My name will be on them if you are discovered. Instead I will give you money, so that you can pay the necessary bribes to turn aside from the Grand Trunk Road. Southern officials are notoriously corrupt, so once you are well away from Talagh, you should be able to do that without trouble. But until that time comes, you are traveling to the City of Death. No records are kept of those who take that journey.”