strong fingers. 'I was thinking we might share a bottle of wine together. Perhaps I could sing you a song to soothe your cares.'
She disengaged herself deftly from his grasp. 'Just now I need a balm more powerful even than your words, and that's sleep. Good night.' She undid the lock, guided Chen inside, and shut the heavy wooden door on his frustration.
She turned then, slumped against the wall, allowed herself to slide down until her rump touched the rush- strewn floor. 'Damn him.'
Chen stood to one side, looking as out of place as a dragon in the tidy if threadbare chamber, with its modest furnishings, its whitewashed walls and dark-stained wood trim. 'Why do you curse him?'
Zaranda shook her head. 'To keep from cursing myself.' She picked herself up. 'Now what we need to do is summon the help and have them bring round a straw pallet and some bedding for you. Also a tub and plenty of hot water.'
'Why?'
'Because you're long overdue for a bath, my fine young friend.'
Chen straightened and in defiance shook back her clotted strands of hair. When she did that, she looked as if she might conceivably be pretty beneath that coat of grime.
'Why should a mage be concerned with such matters?'
'A mage may do whatever she wishes,' Zaranda said. 'And so can you. But, if you wish to stay with me-much less become my apprentice-you'll have to be less a burden on my nose. Farlorn was right about the state of your hygiene.'
Chen scowled thunderously. Angry lights danced at the backs of her amber eyes, and sparks seemed to gather at the roots of her hair. Zaranda felt that ominous force gathering itself again. She crossed her arms. 'Go ahead, strike me to a cinder,' she said. 'I won't stop you. But you'll never master magic if you can't first master yourself.'
Chen glared at her with wild fury in her eyes, and for a moment Zaranda thought she had overplayed her hand. What alarmed her most was that she wasn't alarmed.
Then Chen exhaled explosively, and it seemed her anger passed forth as well as her breath, leaving her small, wilted, and vulnerable. 'I'm sorry,' she said, then began to cry.
'Poor dear,' Zaranda said. She opened the door to call for a servant.
Naked but for a skin of sweat, the top sheet discarded on the floor and the bottom rumpled into a damp relief map of the mountainous Starspire Peninsula, which guarded the harbor at Zazesspur from storms-Zaranda Star writhed in the grip of nightmare.
A score and more of hands reached out, it seemed, from the bed itself to seize her, pin her down despite her struggles, and caress her with obscene and unwelcome fervor. From somewhere immeasurably far below, that insidious Whisper came: Surrender, Zaranda. Give in. Your struggles are futile, your quest doomed. Give in, and you will reap greater rewards than that paltry scrap of nothing that you seek-greater than you can imagine.
Zaranda moaned low in her throat. What she found most hateful was that she was responding-not to the hissing insinuations of the Voice, but, in her loneliness and hunger, to the touch of phantom hands.
Hungry. Tired. Alone. Give in to Me, Zaranda Star, and you shall know satiation of every appetite, surcease sweet beyond imagining, and the comfort of Unity with something greater than yourself. Yield to Me, Zaranda; pure pleasure awaits…
A scratching came at the bars that covered the opened windows; no innkeeper in Zazesspur was ingenuous enough to believe the mere fact that a room lay on an upper story offered any insuperable barrier to the city's enterprising thieves. Zaranda snapped awake with the jarring suddenness of a catapult arm slamming into the stop. She had a woozy, disoriented moment, and a lingering hallucination of arms and hands, gray-fleshed and black- nailed, withdrawing into the wadded sheet.
She looked toward the window to see a hunched and winged black shadow crouching on the sill.
14
The great house looked as if it had been assembled out of bits and pieces of many architectural epochs, not all of them of this world. Zaranda paused in the midst of darkened Love Street to admire its many dubious splendors, though she had seen them before. Its facade was a riot of pilasters, friezes, a colonnaded portico with a single sapphire-blue lantern on top, windows wide, windows narrow, windows little more than slits, set without apparent regard for story, some lit, some not. The roof was a composite of planes and angles, chimneys and dormers of sundry styles and shapes; among forests of finials, gargoyles disported with caryatids, or perhaps menaced them.
Perhaps the oddest feature was that, taken whole, the effect was not of chaos-or rather, not pure chaos, but chaos with order imposed upon it, chaos channeled and restrained but not overmastered, leading to an effect both of harmony and tension. It seemed a natural thing, grown not built.
From all around her came rustlings and small murmurs from the shadows, skirting the edge of intelligibility without ever misstepping and falling into it. Zaranda felt no alarm. Wizard's houses were that way, this one more than most.
Let's get it done, she told herself. She squared her shoulders and marched up beneath the portico to double doors with stained-glass panels in their upper halves: on the left, the occupant's rune, on the right a stylized balance scale. The glass doors announced that this was the residence of a powerful mage no less than the rune; no one else would dare offer thieves so alluring a target.
A tug on the golden chain of the bellpull produced not chimes, but a thin eldritch cry, which seemed to echo in distant corridors of time and space rather than the hallways of a house. Then it produced a wait, stretching itself into what seemed to Zaranda's growing impatience like infinity before the doors were opened by a human footman, yawning and scratching himself through an indigo velvet waistcoat starred with a galaxy of diamond studs.
'Something?'' he drawled, all indolence and insolence.
Zaranda set her lips and handed him the object that the winged black faceless being hunkered on her win- dowsill had pressed into her palm not an hour before- a glazed tile, palm-sized, displaying the selfsame sigil as the left door: a dragon's eye in black, with what seemed a genuine star sapphire inset as the pupil.
'Huh,' he said, and ushered her in with a perfunctory bow. 'Down the hall to the end, then past the stairs to the chamber with the open door. Can't miss it.' He reseated himself on a stool with a red velour cushion, and subsided instantly to snores.
Entertaining but briefly the notion of kicking the stool from beneath him, Zaranda followed his directions. The hallway was brightly lit, with white walls and gilt trim. Doors opened left and right, giving glimpses of emphatically decorated parlors in which strange and richly clad hunched beings, of a generally humanoid cast, stood with heads together in apparent conversation. Only a few favored Zaranda with so much as a glance as she passed. Nonetheless, she had the sense of eyes following her-given the existence of such creatures as beholders, not a comfortable feeling.
The hallway debouched into an open space or shaft. A quick eye flick showed galleries mounting upward until they blurred into shadow at a seemingly higher level than the house's highest point visible from without. Stairs from the floor immediately above, balustraded with obsidian, descended to the left and right. Zaranda turned left, availing herself of the chance to peek back the way she had come. As expected, she saw nothing but the dozing doorman.
Proceeding, she came into a chamber. The walls were panels of quartz, milky white, and running through them sparkling veins that might have been gold. A soft, diffuse light shone from them. There was no furniture as such, only stands and cases and pedestals, likewise all of polished stone: jadeite, nephrite, agate, feldspar and onyx, glabrous gray chalcedony. Like the walls, some of them glowed gently. They held gems and semiprecious stones in fabulous array, some polished, some rough, turquoises, amethysts, topazes, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and everywhere sapphires. There were sapphires of yellow and gray and orange, sour-pallid green and faint pink; sapphires of every hue of blue, from the pale, heartless blue of the sky in the Savage North at high noon on Midwinter Day, to stones of indigo so rich as to appear black.
