No, I don’t. Slightly desperate, because the horrors of a screaming, sun-seared image he had never seen were beginning to trickle into his head. Like I told you, I was never fucking there.

Gave me nightmares for months, that. The imperial seemed to be ignoring his protests. But perhaps he had to, perhaps they all had to, the same way Ringil had to resist each apparition’s false assumptions about him, in order to go on existing at all. Still get it sometimes when it’s a tough summer, still wake up sweating and screaming, dreaming about the scale faces coming up out of the sand all around us. You ever have dreams like that?

The Scaled Folk came from the sea, Ringil told him firmly. They were never in the desert. They came out of the western ocean and we threw them back into it. That’s what I remember, that’s what fucking happened. And I don’t know who the fuck you are, either.

Surprised hurt in the soldier’s eyes. Ringil thought of Darby’s face when he offered him the money, thought of how he must have looked when Iscon Kaad skewered him. He dropped his gaze, ashamed.

“You got to hang on, Gil,” Grace-of-Heaven said uncomfortably. The unknown soldier was gone, but the garden remained. “It’s for the best.”

“Yeah?” Ringil slurred. “Whose fucking best is that then?”

“No one wants you hurt.”

“Fucking trade-up piece of shit. With your house in the Glades.”

“Oh, I see. That’s reserved for the Eskiaths of this world, is it? I guess I was just supposed to stay colorful for you here in the slums.”

Ringil summoned a defensive sneer. “What’s the matter, Grace? You want to be like me? You’re trying way too hard.”

Milacar turned away. Ringil waited for him to dissolve like the soldier, then discovered he wanted him back after all.

“I’m sorry about Girsh,” he called. “But I think Eril had time to get away. I think he made it.”

Grace-of-Heaven gestured impatiently—fast, angry motion, face still turned away. He would not look back or meet Ringil’s eye.

THEY CAME OUT OF THE CAVERNOUS DARKNESS AND PICKED THEIR WAY over a litter of massive granite boulders embedded in smooth white sand. Ringil couldn’t tell how long they’d been walking; the garden was the last thing he remembered clearly, and before that, less clearly, the forest path. Now, overhead, the rough, climbing roof of the sea cave they’d just emerged from made a jagged upper frame for his view down the beach to the surf. Above the sea, the night sky showed a handful of stars and—

Ringil slammed to a halt. “What the fuck is that?”

Seethlaw paused between two boulders, spared a brief sideways glance. “That’s the moon.”

Ringil stared at the softly glowing dirty-yellow disk that sat fatly just above the line of the horizon, the darker patches like stains across its radiance.

“It’s like the sun,” he murmured. “But it’s so old, look at it. Like it’s almost used up. Is that why the light’s so weak here?”

“No.”

“Is it the Sky Home the Majak talk about?”

A note of impatience crept into the dwenda’s voice. “No, it’s not. Now keep close. This isn’t wholly our territory.”

“What do you . . . ?” Ringil’s voice faded out.

There were figures in the surf.

At first he thought they might be statues or just approximately human-looking rocks for all the movement they showed. But then they did move, and Ringil felt a cool gust of fear up his spine at the sudden change. They were some twenty yards distant, and the light was uncertain, but he thought they had breasts, huge luminous eyes, and circular lamprey-like mouths.

“Might help if I had a weapon,” he hissed at Seethlaw’s back.

“You do,” said the dwenda absently. “Your sword is on your back and that grubby little reptile tooth you’re so handy with is in your belt. Much good they’ll do you if this goes bad.”

Ringil clapped a hand to his shoulder, found the strap of his scabbard hung there, the pommel of the Ravensfriend in place and within reach. He would have sworn only moments ago that he had not felt the weight.

“Don’t touch it.” There was a taut warning in Seethlaw’s tone. “Just smile at the akyia, stay away from the water’s edge, and keep on walking.

Chances are they’ll leave us alone.”

He led the way out around a tumbled pile of granite blocks. The smooth pale sand was soggy underfoot now, and the surf was closer. The figures in the water shifted about, and one or two of them disappeared beneath the waves, but otherwise they seemed content simply to watch their visitors go past.

“They’re not armed,” Ringil pointed out.

“No, they’re not. They don’t need to be.”

Along the gently shelving beach, in and out among the half-buried boulders and tilted blocks of stone. Light from the feebly glowing phantom sun made the rocks into black silhouettes against the sand. Now Ringil saw that the—he groped for the name Seethlaw had given them—the akyia were keeping pace, diving beneath the surface in sequence, a handful at a time, coming up twenty or thirty yards farther along and waiting for the rest of their companions to catch up. A chittering, sucking noise seemed to come and go faintly on the wind, gusting between the sound of the waves.

Seethlaw stopped and cocked his head to listen. Ringil thought a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

“What’s so funny?”

“They’re talking about you.”

“Yeah, right.”

Now their path apparently took them away from the shoreline again. The cavernous overhang of the sea cave had given way to sections where the cliffs above had collapsed altogether into mounds of gigantic rubble. Seethlaw led him in among it all, up through a narrow ravine between drunkenly angled blocks each the size of an upended imperial coach. They began to climb away from the sea. Ringil touched his hand briefly to the pommel of the Ravensfriend again.

“When did you give me the sword back?”

“You’ve had it from the start. You just weren’t aware of the fact. It’s a simple enough trick. That one, I could teach you.”

“I’ve been carrying this thing all along? Even in the forest, when we camped?”

Seethlaw looked back at him, mouth quirked again. “We haven’t reached the forest yet.”

Ringil felt the strength run out of his legs like water. The rock wall to his left seemed suddenly to be toppling over on him.

“Then . . .”

“Shut up!”

Seethlaw had locked to a halt in the narrow space ahead of him, one closed fist raised, point-man-style, for silence and stillness. Very gently, without moving any other part of his body, he nodded upward. Ringil followed the direction of his gaze, and stopped breathing.

Fuck.

One of the akyia had not, it seemed, been content to stay in the ocean and watch them leave. It crouched on top of the right-hand block, two yards over their heads, poised lizard-like on arms splayed wide. Powerful-looking hands curled like claws into the fissures and features of the granite.

Ringil’s hand flew to the pommel of the Ravensfriend. The akyia’s head tilted, lamp-like eyes fixed on the movement.

“I said don’t fucking touch that!”

For the first time since he’d known the dwenda, Ringil thought he heard genuine fear in Seethlaw’s mellifluous voice. He dropped his hand back to his side. The akyia shifted its head again, met his eyes directly. It felt like a physical blow.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” said Seethlaw, very softly. “Don’t move, don’t do anything sudden at all.”

Ringil swallowed and remembered to breathe. Held the creature’s gaze, stared at it while his mind stumbled after comparisons.

The akyia looked like a harbor-end pimp’s nightmare of womanhood. Like something dreamed into being from the fumes of one too many flandrijn pipes and the constant, stealthy background slap of water against the pilings under the wharf. It was long-haired and full-breasted, pale-skinned in the light from the worn-out moon, and smoothly muscled from a lifetime in the water. But the hair straggled back from a skull built out of angles to make you scream. The eyes were the size of clenched fists, and for all that Ringil sensed a ferocious intelligence in their stare, they were set in sockets that had more in common with the skull of a lizard than anything human. Thickly ridged cheekbones forced them back and up, separating the upper features from a chinless lower face that seemed wholly prehensile, and currently held the circular lamprey mouth aimed at the intruders like another massive eye.