series of rat holes in a mountain gnawed with thousands of such dark places.
'The palace is that way,' he said, pointing almost due south at a wan of stone.
To the west of the palace, he said, was the great Gardens: a huge hall where flowering plants were bathed in the light of the thousands of glowstones on the walls.
To the east of the palace was a passage that only Morjin was permitted to use. This led past a series of private stairs to the lower levels, a mile and a half straight toward an opening cut onto Skartaru's east face. Daj called it Morjin's Porch, and there the Red Dragon liked to sit each morning to watch the rising of the sun. There, too, long ago, on the naked rock face, he had nailed the immortal Kalkamesh and tortured him for ten long years.
'I'd like to see this porch of his,' Maram said, looking about the dim street. 'I'd give anything to feel real light on my face again.'
'Don't be a fool!' Kane snapped at him. 'You won't be seeing it anytime soon unless Morjin puts you there.'
'He may put all of us there,' Maram said bravely. 'And it may be that someday the poets will sing of us and what we tried to do here. Do you think so, Val?'
'Perhaps,' I said to him. 'But it would please me more if Alphanderry were here to sing of the stars.'
The boulevard led us a quarter mile toward the east, where it intersected another running from north to south – directly toward the throne room of Morjin's Palace. In the great square where these two streets came together had been built a fountain.
Men and women sat around it in the spray of a great plume of water, red as rust, as if it had been forced through ancient iron pipes.
We sat there by this crimson pool, too, waiting for our friends. We watched carts full of silks and wine barrels roll past; one cart, stacked with glowstones that reminded me of the skulls in the dragon's hall, was clearly being taken outside of Argattha so that these gelstei could be refilled with the light of the sun. Hundreds of people from the boulevards poured in streams of living flesh around the fountain.
Many of these wore red robes embroidered with golden dragons: the vestments of the Red Priests of the Kallimun. These men – and they were almost all men – strode along with an air of rectitude and dominion, as if all things and peoples about them were their province. More than one of them cast us suspicious looks. And we were, I thought, a suspicious company: three men dressed like mercenaries, a noble-looking woman and a ragtag child. It was very good, I thought, that only we could see Flick.
After a while, it became clear that there were few mercenaries on this level of the city
– but many captains and lords of Morjin's armies. One of these, dressed in an ice-blue tunic with a broadsword buckled at the waist, swaggered up to us and demanded that we identify ourselves. Only the medallions that we had lifted off the dead knights kept us from being taken and bound in chains.
'That was close,' Maram said, after the captain had stalked off. We had hinted that we were spies, and that Morjin would be very displeased if the captain interfered with our mission. 'Too, too close.'
Liljana sat with her arms thrown protectively around Daj as might his mother. But there was something fierce and unyielding in her watchful gaze, as if she would reluctantly sacrifice him or any of us – or herself – in order to gain the Lightstone.
'We can't wait here much longer,' she whispered against the fountain's splatter.
I looked up and down the boulevards, praying that I might catch sight of Atara and the others.
'With our delay at the waterseller's, likely they're already come,' Kane said. 'And likely they've already gone on to the throne room.'
He pointed down the boulevard toward the south. According to Daj, it gave out onto Morjin's Palace little more than a quarter mile from the fountain.
'Perhaps we should wait just a few minutes longer,' I said. I looked for Atara's flowing blond mane among the mostly darker-haired women who seemed to populate Argattha.
'We agreed not to wait,' Kane reminded me. 'Likely they're trying to find their way into the throne room even as we waste our time here. And likely they'll need our help with the guards.'
Here Liljana fingered her blue figurine while Kane rested his hand on the haft of his dagger.
It seemed a desperate business to try to fool or force our way into the throne room past Morjin's guards. Although fortune often favored such boldness, I was reluctant to attempt this frontal assault even so. And then Daj surprised me, and all of us, saying, 'There's another way into the throne room.'
He told us that three great gates, on the throne room's east, west and north sides, opened upon the streets of the city and were always guarded. But a door inside the throne room, on its west wall, opened upon an unguarded passage that led directly through the palace to Morjin's private quarters.
'Oh, excellent,' Maram said to Daj. 'And I suppose you know a way to get inside the Red Dragon's rooms without just knocking at his door?'
'I do,' Daj said, and our surprise turned to amazement. 'There's a secret passage from Lord Morjin's rooms into the city.'
He went on to tell us that Morjin often used this passage to leave his palace unnoticed; he would go about the city in disguise, Daj said, acting as his own most trusted spy to ferret out any plots or slanders made against him.
'But why didn't you tell us this?' I asked him.
'Because I was afraid,' he said, looking at Kane grip his dagger.
'Afraid of what?'
'Afraid that you've come to kill Lord Morjin.'
He went on to say that an ancient curse had been laid upon anyone who would dare to try to slay the Red Dragon. And so he had been afraid, he said, to lead us through his private chambers.
'But why are you telling us this now, then?' I asked him.
'Because I don't care anymore,' he said. His dark, youthful eyes suddenly filled with hate, like Kane's. 'About the curse, I mean. I hope you do kill him. I'll never sleep well again until he's dead.'
The hurt inside him cut me like a heated knife. And I said to him, 'But we haven't come here to kill anyone. We're not assassins, Daj.'
As Kane's eyes flared like coals, I went on to tell him that we meant to enter Morjin's throne room in order to recover something that had once been stolen from the king's palace in Tria.
'What is it then, treasure?' he asked. 'There's plenty of that in the throne room.'
'Yes, treasure,' I said. And then, to myself, I whispered: The greatest treasure in the world.
We decided that Daj should take us through the district outside Morjin's Palace to the secret passage that led into it. But first we must reconnoiter the streets around the gates to the throne room, in the hope that we might find Atara and the others seeking a way inside. Then we might rejoin them and tell of our new plan for gaining entrance.
When we reached the street facing the throne room's north gate, however, we found many people milling about the food stalls and fortune tellers there, but none of them were our friends. The gate itself – great iron doors twenty feet high and as wide – was guarded by four of Morjin's men. We might simply have rushed upon them and murdered them; it would then be easy to push open the doors and storm our way into the throne room and begin our search for the Lightstone. But even if we completed our quest within a few minutes, the alarm would have been given, and we would have to try to fight our way back out against perhaps a hundred hastily summoned guards.
'Does this street ever grow quiet?' I asked Daj. I looked at the silksellers hawking their wares from their carts and other merchants displaying golden bangles, silver brooches and jeweled rings.
'At night it does,' he said.
Maram pulled at his beard and muttered, 'But how can you tell when it's night in this accursed place?'
'Well, the criers come to call out the curfew.'
'So,' Kane said, 'if our friends have discovered that then perhaps they're waiting for night to clear the streets.
'Perhaps,' I said, as I watched a nearby vendor roasting a baby pig over a little fire.
The spit and hiss of its dripping fat sent a greasy, black smoke out onto the noisy street.
'Perhaps we should wait here, after all,' Maram said. 'If we're to steal through the Red Dragon's rooms, it
