whisper of winter wind through the beeches.
'If your thief is here.'
Lissa nodded. 'They are-I've had dreams.'
'Dreams?'
'The voice of our lord. He speaks to us in our dreams. It's our way.'
She could be naive, misled, inspired, or right; Pinch withheld judgment. He couldn't think of any good reason why a god shouldn't talk to his priests in their dreams, but why not just burn your words in a rock or, for that matter, limn the offender in holy fire? Had she seen him in her dreams? If not, then what was her god revealing? At least so far, that seemed to be nothing.
Gods always took roundabout ways to the straightest of things, and he for one felt they did so for his personal benefit, although perhaps not in the case of Fortune's master. Pinch did feel that the Mistress of Luck was a little too indirect in his own case-so much that he, only acting from a sense of just deserving, did what he could to speed the turn of her wheel along. So if the gods wanted to be indirect with him to the point where he helped move them along, it was apt that her god was equally oblique.
In this simplified theology, it was clear to Pinch's mind that Lissa was being tested. Succeed at the test and she would find the thief. Fail-and well, who knows?
He pulled at his ear to show doubt. 'I could never place so much stock in dreams. What if you have a nightmare?'
The seminary student got the better of the priestess. 'It's my duty to interpret the meaning in what I have received. If I can't, then I need to dedicate myself even more.'
'Well spoken,' he applauded, while settling onto a punky log, fallen several years back and now riddled with insects and mold.
She reddened at the compliment.
'So you don't really see the thief in your dreams, only some sort of symbol?'
'The words of our god transcend simple images. He speaks a different language from us. In our dreams, we filter though the things we know and find parallels for his voice.' Lissa's hands flew as she talked, sometimes cupping the words only to spill them in a burst of excitement.
Pinch let her go on to explain how to tell true dreams from false visions, the five precepts of action, and more than Pinch needed to know. Still it was a good diversion from the hectic preparations for home, and before the rogue had completely succumbed to boredom, dusk wafted in from the east and it was time to retire.
The night passed quickly, dreamless for Pinch. As for the others, none would say. What kinds of dreams were left to an outcast Gur, a drink-sodden sorceress, and an unrepentant halfling?
Dawn scratched at the canvas, scarring the tan haze with morning shadows. Pinch stepped out of the sweat of tent air. It was a clammy dawn of stale wood smoke and horse manure, but over it all was the incongruous thick scent of geraniums and jasmine. The jarring sweetness clung in the throat and choked more than the stench of ordure. In the cold of coming winter, it could only be that the wizards were here, borne in on a wind of flowers of their own making.
Stumbling out of his tent, the rogue wandered through a queue of clay-colored troopers, pilgrims awaiting their turn at the shrine. Each man led his horse, fully packed and carefully groomed. They jostled and talked, smoked pipeweed or whittled, and every few minutes plodded ahead a few more steps.
At the head of the column was a small cluster of strangers, as uncomfortable as choirboys milling outside the church. As each man of the column came abreast, one of the strangers stepped from their shivering mass, thin robes clutched about him, and gestured over the line. A greenish flash bubbled out from his fingertips and swallowed trooper, spellcaster, and more. When the bright air cleared, wizard and soldier were gone.
'The time is best for you and your companions to take their place in the line,' Cleedis noted as he ambled over to where Pinch stood. There was no haste or desperate urgency in the man's way; those who weren't ready could be left behind.
A swift yank on the tent pole roused the rest. As they stumbled out, Lord Cleedis, playing host and master and accompanied by Lissa, led Pinch to the front of his troop. The rogue's mates fell into line, grumbling and slouching, unruly children mocking their parents. At the front a pudgy, boy-faced wizard who couldn't be much older than twenty and hadn't gotten himself killed yet-more than a little feat for an ambitious mage-bowed to the Lord Chamberlain. With apologies, the wizard arranged them just so, positioning the five of them to some invisible diagram. Cleedis's impatience and Sprite's impish refusal to cooperate made the young mage all the more nervous until, by the time he was to say the words and make the passes, Pinch worried whether they would have their essences scattered across a thousand miles. Pinch always worried though; suspicion is what kept rogues like him alive.
Then, before the last words had gotten through the boy-mage's lips, the air around them went green, lightly at first like a fading hangover on a too-long day. It got brighter, swallowing the blue out of the sky, the cold from Pinch's boots, even the creaking of saddlery from the line of men behind him. In flickering moments, the evenness of the green overwhelmed everything, eventually even the green of the color itself. The world became a perfect color and Pinch could not see it.
The world returned with a nauseating rush. The green vanished, flooded out by other colors: blue sky, curling gray clouds, the brown-mottled turf of freshly turned fields, the fleshy green of still-leaved trees, and the glittering silver of a nearby sea. The ground lurched beneath him, practically toppling him from the unexpected jolt. Lissa clutched at his sleeve and he seized the belt of someone else. A heave of nausea washed over him and then passed.
Blinking in the sudden new light, Cleedis tapped Pinch and pointed toward the sea. Sited on the shore, between the water and the close nest of hills, were the tarnished gypsum-white walls of Ankhapur. A fog had rolled back from the thrusting wharves. Atop the hills, the morning bells of the temples had started to sound. And filling the top of the very highest hill were the colonnaded buildings of the royal palace, millipedes clinging to the rich garden slopes.
Cleedis turned and beamed a drillmaster's smile as he waved his hand up-slope. 'Welcome back to Ankhapur, Janol.'
5
Their arrival was well outside the walls of Ankhapur, in the shadow of the Villa of the Palantic Road that crowned the top of Palas Hill, one of six hills surrounding Ankhapur. They appeared at the edge of a grove, as if they had ridden through the woods and emerged to survey the vineyard-filled valley that lay between them and the city. Thus it was that their descent through the fields, while hailed by the peasants with the appropriate concern and homage, raised no questions of wonder or gossip.
Furthermore, they all looked gray, muddy, and spent, even Lord Cleedis himself. Pinch's foreign elegance was all but indistinguishable from the old-fashioned tabard Cleedis favored. Brown Maeve, Sprite-Heels, and Therin the Gur-no one could identify them as any more than merchants or servants among the entourage.
Only the wizards in their white clean shifts stood out from the ordinary, and that too was quite ordinary. No wizard was like the rest of the world, so it was only natural for them to be easily marked. At least that was the reasoning of those who watched the column pass.
In the two hours it took for the column to wend down the hairpin lanes and cross the bridge over the bog- banked Thornwash, a score of petty details returned to Pinch from the life he had fled fifteen years ago. The chill of snow and ice, that in fifteen years in Elturel he had never grown accustomed to, was gone, replaced by the faded green of Ankhapur's winter. The rhythmic lines of grapes were bare vines stretched over frames, the roads were rocky sloughs of clammy mud. To Pinch, the warm sun breathed the promise of spring, fresh grasses, and new growth. After fifteen years' absence, the sun of life was returned to him.
The warmth filled Pinch with a confidence bordering almost on joy, unwarranted by everything he knew, but that was unimportant. He was home, as much as he hated it, with all its memories and pitfalls. He was no longer
