"Talks, is it?" Makewell shook his head and made a razzing noise with his lips. "Does that mean there are many scenes in this new work of a fat old playwright futtering a disguised child? I thought your winds only blew one direction, Finn."

"Don't be jealous, Pedder," said Teodoros serenely. "I promise you my re¬lationship with young Tim has been as chaste as it would have been with Zoria herself. But Tim, the crudeness of Master Makewell left to one side, what do you say? You could be a great help to us and earn yourself a player's share, which can be rich indeed in Tessis, since the Syannese love plays the way the Hierosolines love religious processions."

"I am flattered, I suppose," Briony said carefully-she would be travel¬ing with these people for days more, perhaps months, and didn't want to offend them. "But the answer is no. Under no circumstances. It will not happen in this world or any other. You must think of something else."

She only had a tennight to learn the lines. There were dozens upon dozens of them, in teetering rhyme-that-was-not-rhyme. Rehearsals came at night after whatever performance they made for their supper, so most of the work was done by candlelight in tavern courtyards and barns, while chill winds blew outside and snow and rain fell, but they could also speak lines and discuss blocking-a word she had learned meant where the ac¬tors went in and out or stood-as they made their way down the Great Kertish Road toward Syan.

I have fallen so far, she thought. From a princess in a castle to a false goddess with no home, with straws in my hair and fleas in my woolen hose.

Still, there was an unfamiliar freedom in such a collapse from grace. Briony was not happy, but she was not sad, either, and she had to admit that however lonely and uncomfortable it might be, and however much she missed her home and family, she was having something that could only be described as an adventure.

33

The Crocodile's Roar

Argal and his brothers launched their attack upon the fortress Moontusk, and many gods were slain, o my children, a thousand times a thousand.

In the end, betrayed by one of his own family, Nushash was prevented from

destroying his half brothers, so he withdrew to the sun with his sister-wife,

Surigali, Mistress of Justice. His true brother remained in the moon, taking

as a spoil of war Nenizu, the wife of Xergal, to be his own wife.

— from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One

ALREADY SMOKE LAY OVER the Kulloan Straits like thick fog, great curtains of gray and black torn ragged by the wind. The Xixian ships churned up and down before the walls of Hierosol, their long banks of oars stabbing at the water like the legs of insects, fire spouting from their cannons. The defenders fired back: white spouts leaped up to show where the Hierosoline cannons were finding their range, and many of the Xixian sails were tattered, the flaming eye insignia in flames, but none of the besiegers had been sunk yet. Still, it was a little sol¬ace to Pelaya to see that the cannonfire that reached Hierosol's walls did almost no damage.

"Look, Babba," she said, tugging on her father's arm. "They bounce off like pebbles!"

He smiled, barely. "Our walls are strong and thick. But that does not mean I want you here watching. You have given me your mother's message,and my midday meal." He mined to the armed servant,a tall man with the long-suffering look, of someone in minor but almost constant pain."See her back, now, Eril. And loll my wife that she and the children are no longer to come to the palace, not unless I say they may."

The servant bowed. "Yes, Kurs Perivos. And I will inform the kura, as you say."

Pelaya rose onto the tips of her toes to throw her arms around her fa¬ther's neck, not caring one little bit about either Eril's frown of disapproval or her father's distracted, half-attentive squeeze in return.

"You should not act so, Kuraion," the servant reproached her as they made their way out of the antechamber and onto the landing. He had called her "Little Mistress" since she was small enough to enjoy it-a time long past. "Not before strangers."

"What strangers, Eril?" She was particularly nettled because she always did her best to uphold the honor of her house-and it was high honor, too: the Akuanai were of the blood of the Devonai, the dynasty that had ruled all Hierosol only a few shbrt centuries before, and whose funeral masks lined the entrance hall of the family estate in Siris like an assembly of pa¬tient, placid ghosts. She might not be as timid as Teloni of speaking out in public, but neither did she run or giggle like a child: those who saw her, she had always felt sure, saw a young woman as grave and serious-minded as befitted her upbringing and her noble house.

"There were soldiers there," he said. "Your father's men."

"Theo and Damian? And Spiridon? They have all been in our house," she told him. "They are not strangers, they are like uncles." She thought of Damian, who was really quite handsome. "Young uncles, perhaps. But they are not strange to me, and it is no shame to embrace my father in front…"

She did not finish her statement because something outside the an¬techamber boomed like thunder, making the statue of Perin sway in the wall shrine above the landing. Pelaya squeaked with fear despite herself, then ran to the window.

"What are you doing, child?" The servant almost grabbed her arm to pull her away, but then thought better of taking such a liberty. "Come away. A cannonball will kill you!"

"Don't be foolish, Eril." Whatever else she might be, Pelaya was her fa¬ther's daughter. "They cannot shoot their cannon this far, all the way to the citadel, not unless they are inside our walls already. But, oh, sweet mother Siveda, look!"

A thick plume of gray black smoke was rising beside the ancient walls-one of the buildings along the quay of the Harbor of Nektarios.

"It must be the powder magazine, hit by some stray shot. Oh, look at it burn!" Had her forward-thinking father not moved much of the powder stored for convenience in the immense harbor magazine, parceling it out to at least a dozen different storage places all over the city, half of the city's black powder would be gone now, not to mention the harbor itself, which would have almost certainly been destroyed. Instead, it looked as though only one building, the magazine itself, had been ruined, and if the fire could be put out quickly the loss would be bearable.

"I must tell my father," she said, leaving Eril to catch up as best he could as she scuttled back up the stairs.

"What are you doing?" her father shouted as she came in. He looked angry, truly angry, and for the first time she realized that the city might fall-that they all might die. She was so overwhelmed by this sudden, ter¬rifying understanding that for a moment she could not speak.

"The magazine…" she said at last. "The one in the Harbor of Nektar¬ios. It was hit by… it's exploded."

His expression softened a little. "I know. There is a window in the next room, do not forget. Go, and hurry to your mother as I told you. She will be frightened-I'm sure she could hear that crash in Landsman's Market."

He is defending the whole city, she thought, staring at him. Her father had already turned back to the table and was examining his charts again, his big hands splayed across the curling parchments like the roots of tall trees. For a moment she found it hard to breathe.

Pinimmon Vash, Paramount Minister to the Golden One Sulepis, Autarch of Xis, did not like traveling on ships. The sea air that had so de¬lighted his ancestors when they came out of the deserts of Xand and set¬tled on the northern shore of the continent smelled to him of putrefaction. The rolling motion of the waves made him feel again as he had in his child¬hood, when he had caught the bilious fever and lain for days near death, unable to keep anything in his stomach, shivering and sweating. In fact, his survival of that fever had been so unexpected that his father had dedicated the sacrifice of an entire ram to the goddess Sawamat (something that Vash