Perhaps he was even right. Degenerate lifestyle aside, he wasn’t a stupid man.

She thought abruptly of Ishgrim’s pale curves, thought about owning them the way Jhiral had, the way he owned the three sleeping girls in his bed now. Owning the belief, no not even that, owning the knowledge that this was flesh you had a right to use like any other purchased thing you might have in the house. Like the flesh of the fruit you kept in the larder, the leather of a jerkin you liked to wear.

Perhaps you’re the stupid one, Archidi. Ever think of that?

She dismounted into the sunlit quiet of the courtyard, beset by her own murmuring, circling thoughts. No sign of the stable boy. Well, he wasn’t the sharpest pin in the box, but still, he should have heard Idrashan’s hooves on the cobbles when she rode in. She glanced sourly toward the stables, felt a spike of krin-driven anger, and tamped it back down with great care. You don’t take it out on the servants, Flaradnam had told her when she was about six, and it stuck. She led Idrashan over to the hitching rail by the stables, looped the reins there, and went to look for Kefanin.

Found him.

Bloodied and crawling on hands and knees, just inside the main door. He’d heard her come in, was trying to get up. The blood made a darkened, matted mass of his hair on one whole side of his head. It dripped off his face onto the flagstones, spotted them in a line where he’d crawled.

She stopped dead, rigid with shock.

“Kef? Kef?”

Kefanin looked up at her, mouth working, making the repeated silent gape of a gaffed fish. She dropped to her knees at his side, gathered him up, and got his mouth close to her ear. She felt the blood smear on her cheek.

“I’m sorry, milady,” he uttered, voice clicking and breathless, barely audible. “We tried to stop them. But they took her.”

CHAPTER 25

For Ringil, the days that followed were like fever dreams from some battlefield injury that wouldn’t heal.

He couldn’t be sure how much of it Seethlaw was inducing for his own purposes and how much was just a levy-standard human reaction to time spent in the Aldrain marches. Either way, it was pretty horrible. Landscapes and interiors he thought were real would suddenly melt without warning, collapse around him like walls of candlewax bowing to the flame; worse still, behind them was a radiance that glimmered coldly like bandlight on distant water, and a sense of exposure to the void that made him want to curl up and cry. Figures came and went who could not possibly be there, stooped close to him and bestowed cryptic fragments of wisdom on him, each with the chilly intimacy of serpents hissing in his ear. Some of them he knew; others brought with them a nightmarish half familiarity that said he ought to know them, maybe would have known them if his life had only turned out fractionally different. They at any rate affected to know him, and the dream logic of their assumption was the thing he came to dread most, because he was tolerably sure he could feel aspects of himself ebbing away or shifting in response.

If it’s true, Shalak pontificated, one warm spring evening in the garden behind the shop, if it’s really a fact that the Aldrain realms stand outside time, or at least in the shallow surf on time’s shores, then the constraints of time aren’t going to apply to anything that goes on there. You think about that for a moment. Never mind all that old marsh-shit about young men seduced by Aldrain maids into spending a single night with them and going home the next day to find forty years have passed. That’s the least of it. A lack of time presupposes a lack of limits on what can happen at any given point as well. You’d be living inside a million different possibilities all at once. Imagine the will it would take to survive that. Your average peasant human is just going to go screaming insane.

You think about that, he repeated, and leaned in close to whisper. Give us a kiss, Gil.

Ringil flinched. Shalak wavered and went away. So did a large chunk of the garden behind him. Flaradnam stepped through the blurry space it left, seated himself opposite as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Thing is, Gil, if I’d taken that attitude at Gallows Gap, where would we be now? I’d never have made it back in one piece.

What attitude? Ringil shook his head numbly, stared back at the seamed anthracite features. You didn’t make it back, ’Nam. You never got to Gallows Gap in the first place. You died on the surgeon’s table.

Flaradnam pulled a face, as if he’d just been told a joke in very poor taste. Oh come on. So who led the charge at the Gap, if it wasn’t me?

I did.

You?

Yes! Me! Shouting now. You were fucking dead, ’Nam. We left your body for the lizards.

Gil, what’s the matter with you? You’re not well.

And so on.

“DO YOU EVER GET USED TO IT?” HE ASKED SEETHLAW ACROSS A SOFTLY snapping campfire in a forest he didn’t remember walking into. Thick green scent of pine needles mingled with the smoke. He was shivering, but not with cold. “How long does it take?”

The dwenda cocked his head. “Get used to what?”

“Oh, what do you think? The ghosts, the visitors I’m getting. And don’t tell me you don’t fucking see them.”

Seethlaw nodded, more to himself than to the human he faced. “No, you’re correct. I do see them. But not as you do. They are not my alternatives, they mean nothing to me. I see a faint gathering of motion around you, that’s all. Like a fog. It’s always that way with humans.”

“Yeah, well there’s no fucking fog around you,” Ringil snapped. “How long before I can learn to do that?”

“Longer than you have, I suspect.” The dwenda stared into the fire, and its light turned his eyes incandescent. “No human has managed it to my knowledge, except maybe . . . well, but he was not truly human anyway.”

“Who wasn’t?”

“It no longer matters.” Seethlaw looked up and smiled sadly. “You ask how long. In all honesty, I wouldn’t know. I was born to it, we all were. Our young flicker in and out of the gray places from birth.”

Later, they walked in single file along a worn footpath through the trees and up across the shoulder of the hill. Ringil followed the broad-shouldered figure of the dwenda without question, something that seemed wrong to him, but in some oddly shaped way he could not define. A pale but strengthening glow seeped in between the jagged barked trunks, brought the ground underfoot into clearer view, but it never really got light.

“Where are we going?” he asked Seethlaw’s back.

“Where you wanted to go.” The voice drifted to him over the dwenda’s shoulder. Seethlaw did not turn around or slacken his pace. “I’m going to fulfill your obligations for you.”

“And why would you do that?”

A lewd chuckle that put twinges through Ringil’s sweetly aching groin. “You have a short memory, Ringil Angeleyes.”

“Lucky I’ve got a fucking memory at all,” Ringil muttered. “Place like this.”

And he shivered again.

BACK IN THE GARDEN, THERE WAS A GRIZZLED SOLDIER IN IMPERIAL cavalry rig who said he knew him and talked incessantly about campaigns in the desert Ringil had never been a part of.

Not like we didn’t warn old Ershnar Kal not to quit the outcrops that time, is it? Fucking coast huggers, got no clue how to fight a desert war. Not much surprise the scale faces took them apart before we got back. You remember what they did to Kal’s ribs, the way they left him?