on the side of the head. The man fell backward and went cartwheeling down the tiers of benches. One of the benches at the bottom gave way under the added weight with a loud snapping noise. The man's back was obviously broken.
They made the top of the bleachers and turned, momentarily ahead of the pursuit. Here the angry crowd could only come at them with difficulty, and some of the most vocal members of the mob sheered off short of the steps, wary of the bleachers' penchant for falling. The would-be killers came in ones and twos. Moriana was able to send them reeling down again, gashed and bloody, while Fost propped his sword tip against the bench and tried to kick it straight again.
He slipped, slashing his right calf, cursed, looked accidentally over the edge. The hard marble of the Plaza was a good forty feet below. There was no escape that way.
'Where the hell are the soldiers?' he shouted, swinging his almost-straight sword against a long-haired man hacking at him with a billhook. The blade struck edge-on and didn't bend. Fost put a sandaled foot in the man's belly and sent him staggering into the sweat-streaming faces of a dozen fellows.
'Don't expect help from them,' Moriana panted through a lull in the attacks. She pointed her chin up the street.
'It appears your elevation is resented more than anyone anticipated,' Erimenes said dryly. 'Or perhaps the Twenty-third is paying off some long-standing grudges against the City Watch.'
The lightly armed but more numerous infantrymen had thrown themselves against the massively armored Watch, preventing them from coming to the aid of the Imperial party. In the other direction, Imperial troops fought each other, too. Fost shook his head and spat blood. A blow had caught him in the mouth, and he hadn't noticed it until now.
'Their commanders won't even stand trial for this,' he said bitterly. 'Look. Teom's out of it.'
Moriana glanced across the sea of bobbing heads that flooded the Plaza. Teom and the innumerable clerics had disappeared. The great gilt valves of the Temple were shut and guarded by a line of Life Guards with raised shields and lowered spears. A fresh wave of attackers flowed against Fost and Moriana leaving no time for talk.
An apprentice stonemason dressed in a leather jerkin thrust at Fost with a shortsword taken from a dead Watchman. Fost disengaged and ran the man through. Screaming, the apprentice toppled off the verge of the bleachers, but not before the courier had wrenched the sword from his grasp.
Fost turned back and found a big man almost on top of him, swinging a makeshift club at his head. He caught the thick wrist in his free hand and aimed a disembowelling stroke at the giant belly squashed against his hips.
'Ellu!' he gasped into a face he knew well from the streets of his childhood. He faltered.
He recalled in a flash the foundling kitten they'd found and nursed together with scraps of food purloined to ease the complaining of their own bellies. No such memories stayed Ellu's now-fat hand.
'Traitor!' he snarled through spit and a cloud of reeking breath. He twisted his burly arm free of Fost's grip and cracked him across the face with his cudgel. Fost saw blackness and dancing sparks, fought to keep his balance with heels dangling over emptiness.
Ellu raised the club to finish him off. His arm stopped in midstroke, as if caught and held by an invisible hand. A look of consternation gripped the man's florid features. Then Moriana seized his shoulder, spun him from her lover and struck him down, crying her thanks to Ziore for staying the man's hand with her emotion-confusing powers. Dizzy and nauseated, Fost dropped to his knees.
'It's lost,' he croaked. 'We can't stand them all off. The War of Powers is lost here and now.' A blackness beyond physical oblivion clutched at him.
He felt Moriana's hand on his shoulder, looked up through red mists of agony. He heard barks, snarls, screams, saw the crowd streaming away to the right, eastward toward The Teeming in which he'd been born. No one had reckoned with Captain Mayft and the outland cavalry. Now they came with lances couched and war dogs snapping left and right and made reckoning of their own with the mob.
Slow and lazy the stained wooden deck rocked beneath Fost's bare feet. He smoothed wet hair from his face, drank in the salt air rich with the tar and cordage smells of the big ship and felt more relaxed than he had in days.
He stood near an opening in the rail. A rope ladder had been let down from the gap to hang just above the dancing green surface of the sea. As he watched, a slim hand reached out of the waves, catching the bottom rung. In a few seconds, Moriana was lithely scaling the side of the ship, shimmering with wetness.
Like him, she wore a minimum of clothing. To a simple loincloth like the one knotted around his waist she had added a brief halter bound about her chest.
'I must say the princess makes an impressive sea sprite,' remarked Erimenes. His jug had been lashed to the railing so that he could watch Fost and Moriana swim without fear of being tossed into the sea by the sway of the ship.
'A good thing this is a Tolvirot craft with a mixed crew,' said Fost. 'If Moriana appeared dressed like that on deck of an Imperial vessel with an all male crew…' He shook his head.
For all that, he found himself appreciating the suppleness of her body and her great beauty. He approved, heartily. 'Have fun with the sharks?' he asked as Moriana stepped on deck.
She nodded, doing a brief dance as her feet accustomed themselves to the heated deck. Fost glanced over the side to where lean, silver shapes knifed through the water. A wedge of fin broke water hard beside the ship. A blunt snout thrust above the surface and a dead-gray eye regarded the deck with inhuman detachment. Fost shivered, but Moriana called out to the creature and waved. It slipped soundlessly into green water and vanished, all thirty feet of it.
'You shouldn't have left the water when they arrived, Fost,' chided Moriana, wringing out her long hair. 'They're very friendly. It's fantastic to ride on one. They're so fast, they move so cleanly, with such strength – it's like being on the back of an eagle, almost.' Her voice dropped and her eyes were troubled. He slipped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her reassuringly, savoring the feel and smell of her tanned flesh.
'Friendly?' He shook his head, grinning. 'I could swim down the throat of that monster without getting scraped on his teeth along the way. And I'm not even sure he would consider me as more than an appetizer served before the main course. I prefer not to take my chances with a beast like that.'
'Perhaps we need such powerful friends.' Her tone was not wholly joking.
'I wonder if it's true what Oracle said,' asked Ziore, hovering at Erimenes's side with her fingers vaporously mingled in his. 'That in the old days the world belonged to the Zr'gsz and the giant lizards and the great furred beasts, the hornbulls and mammoths, that humanity came here from somewhere else and brought certain animals with them, dogs and pigs and sharks and those darling little animals Teom showed us just before we left, the new ones imported from the Far Archipelago. What did he call them? Horses?' Erimenes sneered.
'That's right,' answered Fost, ignoring him. Teom had taken them into the menagerie he kept outside the north wall of the Palace, on the very bluff overlooking the harbor. The Emperor had chattered volubly as if a second attempt on his life and throne had not been crushed in a bloody street battle only two days before. The new acquisitions to his enormous zoo filled him with delight, for they were rare beasts with intriguing legends surrounding them. Indeed, Fost thought they were rather cute. Tiny elfin things, the largest male no more than eighteen inches high at the shoulder. They were built like hornless deer, but their small hooves were continuous, not cloven. They had long silky brush tails and similar manes of hair growing down their necks. Their dished faces held eyes liquid brown and large.
In their last interview with Oracle a little later, Fost had mentioned the beasts. Oracle's eyes lit up.
'I have heard of such,' he said eagerly. 'Do you know the most intriguing legend of all concerning them?' The four had shaken their heads, Erimenes with a crabbed look. He hated being lectured to by someone more knowledgeable.
'It is written in old, old documents that once these creatures called horses grew larger than the biggest war dog, as large as Nevrym unicorn stags, and that they were tamed as dogs are now, to be ridden in travel, the hunt, war.' 'But they're so tiny,' objected Ziore.
'The ones surviving today are. They were a special breed, nurtured by the scholar-priests of the Far Archipelago as objects of amusement and wonder. What happened to the others?' He shrugged imaginary white shoulders. 'What happened to the cattle of olden days, short-coated like riding dogs, with horns set on either side of their heads? The only beast in the world today who wears his horns like that is Istu himself – oh! Your pardon,
