outside.' She smiled at Tazi. 'Given your facility with a lockpick, I suspect you know how to climb.'
The girl blinked. 'Ah… yes. But do you?'
'I'll race you to the top.'
The two women hastened out the door, then started up the wall beside it. Ridges in the stonework bit into Shamur's bare feet, but the discomfort was a small price to pay for the pleasure of conquering a vertical surface in the dead of night, and she almost wished the ascent could be more of a challenge. Thanks to the Hulorn's abominable taste and the excess of ornamentation it had produced, she found easy hand- and toeholds nearly every inch of the way.
'I've been thinking about what you said,' Tazi remarked, climbing along beside her, just the slightest hint of exertion in her voice.
'What?'
'That we shouldn't go for help, because the music might just put any newcomers to sleep, or turn them into snails. How do we know it isn't going to turn us into snails before we're through?'
'We don't,' Shamur said. 'That's part of the fun.' She grasped the black marble balustrade of a balcony. For a moment it felt like solid stone, but when she trusted her weight to it and started to pull herself up, it turned to mush in her fingers, and she fell.
Tazi cried out. Shamur glimpsed the ground four stories below, waiting to smash her plummeting body to pulp. She clutched desperately at the wall and grabbed a fragile bit of cinquefoil molding. It crumbled, and she dropped once more. Certain it was her last chance, she snatched for the narrow protuberance at the top of a cornice.
To her own surprise, she managed to catch and hold on to it. Her momentum dashed her against the wall, and there she clung, heart pounding, her fingers with their torn nails and her wrenched arms and shoulders throbbing.
Tazi peered down at her, then asked, 'Was that part of the fun, too?'
Shamur grinned, made a lewd gesture at her, and, once she'd caught her breath, climbed upward again.
The Uskevren women reached the roof without further mishaps. An expanse of fish-scale tile studded with chimney stacks and spires, it rose and fell with a confusion of domes, gables, hips, and pitches.
Shamur rotated her shoulders and swung her arms, trying to work the soreness out. Tiles groaned and rattled. She turned, her hand dropping to the hilt of her broadsword, and a warrior whose immobile face, hauberk, and greatsword were all made of pale stone lumbered stiffly from the darkness. She drew her blade*****
The lantern in his upraised hand, Thamalon peered about the benighted forest clearing. Standing behind him, Shamur silently lifted her skirt and removed the broadsword she'd concealed beneath it. It would have been simplicity itself to drive the blade between her husband's broad shoulders, but that had never been her way. Besides, she wanted to watch his face as he breathed his last.
'All right,' he said, puzzlement in his voice, 'where is this marvel you insisted I must see?'
'In my hand,' she replied.
He turned, and his brows-still black, unlike the snowy hair on his head-knit when he beheld the weapon. 'Is this a joke?' he asked.
'Far from it,' she replied. 'I recommend you draw and do your level best to kill me, because I certainly intend to kill you.'
'I know you haven't loved me for a long while,' he said, 'if indeed you ever did. But still, why would you wish me dead?'
'Because I know,' she said.
He shook his head. 'I don't understand, and I don't believe you truly do either, you're ill and confused. Consider what you're doing. You have no idea how to wield a sword. Even if we did fight-'
She deftly cut him on the cheek. 'Draw, old serpent. Draw, or die like a sheep at the butcher's.'
For an instant he stared in amazement at her manifest skill with her weapon. Then he stepped back and reached for the hilt of his long sword.
Something slammed into Shamur and knocked her staggering along the edge of the roof. One heel came down on empty air, and the weight of the rolled pieces of tapestry on her back tried its best to drag her over into space, but with a convulsive effort, she managed to throw herself forward onto the tiles.
She realized that, transfixed by her vision, she'd frozen, and Tazi had had to give her a push to keep her away from the stone warrior. She pivoted back toward the confrontation.
Smiling, Tazi advanced and retreated with such surefooted panache that one might almost have imagined she was fencing on the level floor of a training hall, not fighting on an incline where any loss of balance could result in a fatal fall. Her adversary crept after her clumsily. Guerren Bloodquill's music had granted it a sort of life, but here so high above the ground, not to the same degree as the gorgon. It hadn't transmuted the creature's substance into flesh.
Unfortunately, that very fact rendered Tazi's long sword all but useless. It rang and rebounded without leaving a scratch, or at least none large enough to see by moonlight. Meanwhile, other animate rainspouts and statues, some in the form of humans and others bestial, were converging on the scene. Once they surrounded the girl, her superior agility would no longer suffice to keep her safe from harm.
Shamur sprang up and rushed the stone warrior, who turned and swung his sword in a sweeping horizontal cut. She dived beneath the blow and rammed into him, wrestling him backward until he toppled over the edge of the drop.
She nearly went with him but caught herself in time. He shattered on the ground below with a satisfying crash.
'Don't bother to deny that you nodded off on me that last time,' said Tazi, a little out of breath.
'Well, perhaps for a moment,' said Shamur. 'Our friend there advanced on me so slowly, I got bored.'
The two women scrambled up the roof. Meanwhile, the stone noose around them tightened, the gaps between the living statues closing one by one until, Shamur observed, none remained.
'All right, then we'll break out,' she said. 'Help me pull down the fox.' The statue in question was an anthropomorphic character from a fable, walking on two legs and clad in a foppish doublet and plumed hat. He carried a yarting in his hand, brandishing the stringed musical instrument like a war club.
The Uskevren women sprang at the fox, and, narrowly dodging both a swing of the yarting and the attacks of the figures on either side, grabbed him, dumped him on his upturned nose, and ran over him. Glancing back, Shamur saw the statues awkwardly turning to pursue. A couple lost their balance, toppled, and rolled rumbling down the roof.
Now that she was no longer in immediate peril, she wondered at her last vision. It certainly hadn't been an episode from her past. Was it possible it had been a glimpse of the future?
No, of course not, because the Thamalon in the glade had spoken the truth. She'd never loved him. Sometimes she'd felt that she despised him. But certainly never enough to kill him, the head of her house and the father of her children. Surely the experience had only been a meaningless phantasm.
Better to forget it, then, and concentrate on the task at hand. The mob of statuary was still hunting her and Tazi, and similar menaces shambled through the darkness ahead. Silently darting and freezing, availing themselves of the cover provided by the complex topography of the roof, mother and daughter managed to make their way toward the Hunting Garden unseen, even when they passed so near their foes that they could have reached out and touched them. Shamur grinned. She'd always enjoyed a good, perilous game of hide-and-seek.
Her pleasure shriveled when the music swelled. Bizarre as the chords and rhythms were, she, who had sat through hundreds of operas, could nonetheless discern that the performance was building toward a climax and she and Tazi were running out of time.
'Come on!' she whispered. 'We have to hurry!' She strode forward. Something hissed, and the tiles gave way between her feet, creating a crater three yards across. She toppled helplessly forward until Tazi grabbed her, and, with a grunt, yanked her back to safety on the rim.
The hissing continued. Looking about, Shamur saw that holes were spontaneously opening all across the roof, with no discernible pattern and in such abundance that one could easily believe the whole surface might disintegrate in a matter of minutes.
'I never thought I'd say this,' Tazi remarked, 'but I may have had enough excitement for one evening. I'm
