and twisted together to become some sort of plant. In the center of the intricate tangle dangled the helplessly writhing form of Quyance, with pairs of serrated, fleshy leaves clamped around his limbs like jaws. Judging from the little man's raw skin and blisters, the leaves secreted a juice that was slowly digesting him alive.
Tazi exclaimed in disgust and hacked at the plant.
Three gaping, traplike sets of leaves shot out at her like striking adders. Shamur swung her sword and severed one of them, and the younger woman accounted for the other two.
Killing the plant proved to be far from easy. It had countless mouths with which to strike at its attackers and no obvious vital areas at which the women could aim their blows. Still, Shamur felt confident that she and Tazi would defeat it in time, because she assumed it couldn't pursue them when they found it expedient to retreat. It was, after all, rooted to the back wall, and probably to the floor as well.
Then it made a fool of her by lunging, its roots either stretching or ripping free of their moorings. Shamur pivoted toward the doorway but couldn't reach it in time. A wave of creaking, rattling foliage slammed into her and Tazi, shoving them against the wall.
The mass of the plant pressed all around Shamur, blinding, smothering. Pairs of leaves closed on her, soft but powerful, relentlessly stinging her with their acids and striving to immobilize her. Snarling, she cut at the thing over and over again.
Finally, it stopped moving.
'Mother?' Tazi gasped. 'Are you all right?' From the sound of her voice, she was still only a yard of two away, but completely invisible inside the jumble of vines. These were already turning brown, and, from the stink of them, beginning to rot.
'I'm fine,' Shamur said. 'You?'
'The same, but that was close.'
'Close calls are good for you,' Shamur said. It was a remark she'd often made to other thieves and adventurers. 'They get your blood pumping.'
'Sometimes right out of your body,' Tazi replied, 'but I take your point.'
With considerable effort, the women struggled clear of the plant, then turned their attention to Quyance, stripping away the leaves and coils of liana that bound him. To Shamur's relief, the little man wasn't burned as badly as she'd initially feared.
'Thank you,' he whispered.
'You're welcome,' Shamur said. 'I wish we could take you directly to a healer as well, but we haven't time. We have to stop the opera, and we need your help. Exactly who are you, Master Quyance, and what do you know about what's going on?'
'I play the glaur,' said Quyance, 'and when the Hulorn was assembling his orchestra, he hired me. I was delighted to have the chance to participate in such a historic performance, even though I frankly couldn't understand why a master like Guerren Bloodquill had chosen to spend his talent on such a work. His genius was manifest in every phrase, but the effect was so unpleasant.'
'We noticed,' Tazi said.
Despite the pain of his injuries, the horn player gave her a wry little smile. 'Actually, we didn't have inanimate objects turning into man-eating plants during rehearsal. Still, odd things did happen. Stacks of boxes falling. A rack of costumes catching fire. A rat dancing on its hind legs. A layer of frost in a hallway. And Bors the drummer-strong, young, healthy-keeled over dead. His heart just stopped for no reason at all.
'Given Guerren's sinister reputation,' Quyance continued, 'I suspected that the music was responsible. I told the Hulorn of my concerns, but if anything, my report made him more eager than ever to have the work performed. I didn't entirely understand him, but he seemed to believe that the opera might contain an arcane message sent down the ages from Bloodquill specifically to himself. A communication that would lead him to some mysterious 'destiny.''
'Ah, yes, Andeth's destiny,' Shamur said. She and Tazi lifted Quyance clear of the dead plant and helped him to a bench in the corner. 'He's been seeking it for years, with never a clue as to what it will involve. Though I think we can rule out wise decisions and responsible governance.'
'Well, when I persisted in my objections, he discharged me,' Quyance said, 'and before I left the palace, I purloined a copy of the score. I'm not merely a performer, you see.' He drew himself up a little straighten 'I'm also an initiate of Milil and a scholar of music in both its exoteric and esoteric aspects. I hoped that if I studied the opera, consulting the texts I've collected over the years, I might find out exactly what was going on with it, and I felt I had a duty to attempt precisely that.'
'What did you come up with?' Tazi asked.
'Something more terrible than I could have dreamed. Guerren wove a sort of ritual into the score, which, when it reached its conclusion, would create a permanent region of primal chaos here on the earthly plane.'
As a rebellious scapegrace of a girl, Shamur had seldom cared to study, but, gifted with intelligence and a good memory, she'd often assimilated her lessons more or less despite herself. Now she recalled her philosophy tutor explaining that on those levels of reality where chaos, a fundamental force of the cosmos, reigned unchecked by the counterbalancing principle of law, all things were possible, and therefore, nothing was stable or permanent. Under such conditions, human life could not long endure.
'Why in the name of the Abyss would he want do that?' she asked.
Quyance dredged up another weary little smile. 'Well, the tales do say that he was mad. But perhaps it was intended as a weapon. You make your enemy a gift of the opera, he has it staged, and it destroys him. In any case, it was only tonight that I finally discerned its purpose. I raced back here, slipped in through a side entrance… but you know the rest.'
'How big a region of chaos are we talking about?' Tazi asked, restlessly toying with her knife.
'I can't be altogether certain,' Quyance said, 'but I think it might engulf the entire city.'
A chill oozed up Shamur's spine, and the music jangling in the air seemed to laugh at her. She pushed horror to the back of her mind and forced herself to concentrate on practicalities. 'There's one thing I still don't understand. During rehearsal, you people must have performed the opera from start to finish. Why didn't the ritual take effect then?'
'It draws power from starlight,' the little musician said. 'That's why Guerren specified that it be performed outdoors at night. We always rehearsed inside, to avoid the winter cold.'
'The important question,' Tazi said, 'is how do we stop it? The difficulty is that it senses we're trying, and every time we approach the performers, the magic grabs us and flings us back here.'
Quyance shook his head. 'I'm afraid I have no idea.'
'Perhaps I do,' Shamur said. 'Tazi, we saw the violet sparks filling the amphitheater, and spilling out across the grass, like a ground fog. And when we descended into the cellar, we didn't find as many oddities down here.'
'The plant was a fairly impressive oddity,' the black-haired girl replied, 'but still, you're right.'
'Doesn't all that suggest that the magic is most potent at ground level? Conceivably most aware at ground level? Perhaps it we came at it from above, we could sneak up on it.'
Tazi frowned. 'Maybe, but I can't imagine that buying us more than a second.'
'What if we used that second to sap a measure of its power? Then it might not have the ability to displace us.'
Shamur told the girl the specifics of her plan.
Tazi grinned. 'It sounds completely harebrained to me. Let's do it.'
They hastily made Quyance as comfortable as possible, then returned to the ground floor, where they discovered that in their absence the chambers and corridors had rearranged themselves into a veritable labyrinth. At last they found their way back to the foyer.
Here they yanked down one of the tapestries-a panorama of life in Selgaunt, with merchants trading, watermen ferrying passengers and cargo about the harbor, beggars begging, and the like-and cut it into manageable, blanket-sized pieces, which they then rolled and secured to their backs with strips of fabric. Shamur wondered fleetingly just how many hundreds or thousands of fivestars the hanging had been worth.
Considerably less than the entire city, one could be certain.
'I intended to find one of the staircases that would take us to the roof,' she said, 'but given the alterations to the interior of the building, that could take hours even if they still exist. It makes more sense to go up the
