Massaging his throbbing temples, he closed his eyes and recalled the details of the palimpsest's various inscriptions. Could he and Nysander have missed something in the rambling prophecies? Or perhaps Nysander had been wrong in his assertion that only one side of the document concealed a palimpsest.

Now there was an uncomfortable thought.

He was startled from his reverie by a blast of cold air. Opening his eyes, he found himself lying in the snow outside the tunnel entrance with Turik and Shradin kneeling over him with obvious concern. Over Shradin's shoulder he saw that the sun was already low behind the designated peak.

"What happened?" Seregil gasped, sitting up.

"We waited as long as we could," Turik apologized. "The time came and went for you to return. When we went down, we found you in a spirit dream."

"There's a storm coming," added Shradin, frowning up at the clouds. "They come on fast this time of year. We need to get back to the village while there's still light enough to go down safely. There's no shelter here, and nothing for a fire."

Seregil looked around in sudden alarm. "My sword! And the box—Where are they?"

"Here, beside you. We brought them out, too," Turik assured him. "But tell us, did you speak to the spirit? Do you know the reason for its anger?"

Still chagrined at having fallen so easily under the spell of the place, Seregil nodded slowly, buying time as he collected his thoughts.

"It's not your spirit who is angry, but another, an evil one," he told them. "This evil one keeps the other prisoner. It's a very strong spirit. I must rest and prepare myself to banish it."

Shradin looked up at the sky again. "You'll have time, I think."

Taking up their packs and poles, the Dravnian guides led Seregil back to the village for another night of exhausting hospitality.

As Shradin had predicted, a savage blizzard roared in through the teeth of the mountains during the night.

People fought their way through the howling wind to drive their livestock up the ramps into their towers, then sealed their doors and settled down to wait out the storm.

It raged steadily for two days. One house lost its felt roof, forcing the inhabitants to flee to a neighboring tower.

At another, a woman gave birth to twins.

Otherwise, the time was given over to eating, storytelling, and general husbandry. The Dravnians were philosophical about such conditions; what was the use of complaining about something that happened every winter? The blizzards were even beneficial. They piled snow around the house and helped keep the drafts out.

One family in particular regarded this storm as a stroke of luck, for it kept the Aurenfaie guest in their house for two nights.

Seregil was less complaisant about the-situation.

Ekrid had nine children, six of them daughters. One girl was too young, another in the midst of her menses, but that still left four to contend with and he didn't much like the competitive gleam in their eyes as they welcomed him.

To further complicate matters, the lower level had been given over to Ekrid's herd of goats and sheep, and their bleating and odor lent little to the general atmosphere. For two days, Seregil had to choose between evading the amorous advances of the girls or trying to walk three feet without treading in shit. His success was limited on both counts and his concentration on the problem at hand suffered.

Stretched out with two of Ekrid's daughters still twined around him the second night, Seregil stared up at the rafters and decided he'd had enough of women to last him for some time. Shifting restlessly in their musky embrace, he caught a hint of answering movement across the way where Ekrid's sons slept.

One of them had made long eyes at him the evening before—He gave the possibility a moment's consideration, but resolved dourly that there was little to be gained in that direction. The young man smelled as strongly of goat tallow and old hides as his sisters, and lacked a front tooth besides.

Lying back, he allowed himself a moment's longing for his own clean bed and a freshly bathed companion to share it. To his surprise, the anonymous figure swiftly transformed into Alec.

Father, brother, friend, and lover, the Oracle of Illior had told him that night in Rhiminee.

He supposed that, after a fashion, he had been father and brother to Alec, having more or less adopted him after their escape from Asengai's dungeon.

Seregil smiled wryly to himself in the darkness; it'd been the least he could do, considering that Alec was one of dozens of innocents captured and tortured by Asengai's men during their hunt for Seregil himself.

In the months since then they'd certainly become friends, and perhaps something more than friends.

But lovers?

Seregil had kept this possibility resolutely at bay, telling himself the boy was too young, too Dalnan, and, above all, too valued a companion to risk losing over something as inconsequential as sex.

And yet, lying exhausted among Ekrid's daughters, he suffered a guilty pang of arousal as he thought of Alec's slender body, his dark blue eyes and ready smile, the rough silken texture of his hair.

Haven't you had enough hopeless infatuations in your life? he scowled to himself. Rolling onto his belly, he turned his thoughts to the palimpsest, running through its cryptic phrases once again.

Horns of crystal beneath horns of stone. Stone within ice within stone within ice.

Damn, but there seemed little enough to be wrung out of it at this point. Slowly he repeated the phrase in its original Dravnian, then translated it into Konic, Skalan, and Aurenfaie, just for good measure.

Nothing.

Start again, he thought.

You're overlooking something. Think!

After this came the directions to the chamber. Before it were the prophetic ramblings: first the dancing animals, then the bones, and the strange words of the unscrambled cipher that unlocked the secret—

"Illior's Eyes!"

One of the girls stirred in her sleep, running a hand down his back. He forced himself to lie still, heart pounding excitedly.

The phrase! The phrase itself.

Those alien, throat-scraping words. If they were the key to the palimpsest, then why not to the magic of the chamber itself?

Assuming he was correct, however, this raised other considerations. If the words were simply a password spell, then he could probably use them without danger to himself or anyone else. But if they worked a deeper magic, what then?

He could go back to Nysander now with what he already knew. Still, the Plenimarans might be beating a trail up the valley at this very moment and Nysander would be too drained from the first translocation spell to send him or anyone else back immediately. Unless, of course, he enlisted the aid of someone more magically reliable rather than risk mishap—Magyana perhaps, or Thero.

To hell with that! I haven't come this far for someone else to see the mystery's end. First light tomorrow I'm going up that pass again, avalanches be damned.

As he drifted happily off to sleep, he realized that the wind had dropped at last.

Someone pounded on Ekrid's door just before dawn, waking the household.

"Come to the council house!" a voice shouted from outside. "Something terrible has happened. Come now!"

Extricating himself from a soft tangle of arms and thighs, Seregil threw on his clothes and ran for the council house with the others.

Faint, predawn light painted the snow blue, the towers black against it. Snowshoeing through the icy powder, Seregil found the village almost unrecognizable. The storm had buried the towers up to their doorsills, leaving the exposed upper story looking like an ordinary cottage drifted up with snow.

Shouldering his way through the crowd at the council house, he hurried downstairs to the meeting chamber.