"To find Jordan. He's still running from the Winds, and it's our fault. The only way he'll be safe is if we get him off planet."

How to put this? "Axel... I understand your impulse to help this man. But Calandria's half-right. We need to do something to attack the larger problem."

"What larger problem?"

"The Winds."

He stopped stuffing the pack. "What in hell's name can we do?"

Marya stretched. "We continue signalling for a ship, you're right about that. Meanwhile, though, we go back."

"Back where?"

"To Memnonis. To steal the corpse of this man Turcaret."

Calandria paused at the crest of a hill and looked back the way she'd come. She felt a vague disquiet, leaving like this.

The feeling raised old memories. She remembered crying for days after overhearing that the children she'd thought her friends, had been hired as her playmates by her wealthy mother. Now she felt the same almost-guilty feeling she used to have when leaving residence parties early and alone, at the Academy. She always reached a point where she could accept no more closeness. Her basic alienation came back to haunt her. When that happened she had to leave, and today she was leaving Axel and Marya. It was not, she told herself, that she was afraid of the Winds; if she were, she would have agreed to his plan to leave Ventus as quickly as possible. No, she had come here for a purpose; her resolve was greater than his, that was all.

She chewed on the reasons for her leaving him as she rode. It was easy to suppose that she was saving Axel and Marya from unnecessary risk. It was also true that every day they left Armiger alone, he moved a step closer to taking over the vast and invisible machine that surrounded her. What it finally came down to, however, was that she and Axel could never work together as a team. Calandria liked to pass like a ghost through the worlds she visited. She was the perfect chameleon, adopting personalities and appearances as they suited her. By tomorrow she would have changed, and no one, possibly not even Axel, would recognize her. This was the right way to do the job she had come to do: by dancing around the edges of the human world, darting in only for the quick surgery that would remove the cancer she had come to kill.

Axel wanted to marry every woman he met, and get drunk with every man. He was probably headed for some inn now, to drown his anger at her in a tankard or two. Well. When they met again it would be apologies all around, she was sure. She would have to plan how to conduct those. She didn't want to lose Axel's friendship, after all. Certainly not over their work.

Jordan... Once she killed Armiger, the link, and with it the thing that made the Winds interested in him, would be gone. He would be just a normal man again. And with any luck, he would use what she'd taught him to get rich.

She was doing the right thing.

Her thoughts turned easily to Armiger. How to pursue, how to kill him? Her eyelids flickered; her horse walked on; and Calandria began to drop the Lady May persona, becoming once more the hunter.

26

The landscape was all curves. Gentle undulating dunes of a wonderfully pale tan color stretched off into a hazy horizon. The sky was full of rounded, white balls of cloud. The sun was bright, but it wasn't hot, which somewhat dashed Jordan's preconceptions about what deserts were like. The rolling hills, though, the color, and the taste of grit in his mouth were all the way he'd imagined.

They had been travelling for several days now. To his own surprise, Jordan felt pretty good. For once he wasn't under the control of somebody else. He could plan the day's travel, set their pace, and admire the scenery as he wished. His thoughts seemed to be getting clearer with each morning that he woke to find himself master of his own fate.

Tamsin's shoulders were slumped like the dunes. The farther they went into the desert, the more despondent she became. She had not spoken about what she expected to find here, but Jordan had his suspicions. None of those thoughts were good.

He walked his horse up next to hers. The horses were a bit nervous in this vast emptiness, but Jordan had Ka constantly scouting for water holes, and so far they had been lucky. At one hole the water had been a red color, and Ka said it was poisonous. Jordan had commanded the water to purify itself, and it had.

Miracles like that should have puffed him up with pride, but they did nothing to penetrate Tamsin's air of gloom, and that was his main concern right now. He had no miracle to cure her of her grief.

She glanced wearily at him as he matched her pace. "How are you doing?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I dunno."

Jordan took a pull from the waterskin he had bought in a hamlet outside Rhiene. "Shall I tell you a story?"

She considered this idea. "What kind of a story? I don't want you to cheer me up."

"Well, I could tell you something depressing, then."

"No."

"How about something that's just true?"

"I don't want—" she gulped. "To hear a story."

They rode on in silence for a while. Jordan was thinking. Eventually he asked, "Have you ever seen the queen's summer palace?"

"No."

"You want me to describe it to you?"

Tamsin sat up straighter. "Look, you don't have to—okay, why not. But not like it is now, all covered in blood. Tell me what it used to look like before the war."

Of course Jordan had never seen it that way, because Armiger had arrived well into the siege. He could imagine it though, with his mental blueprints and eye for the architectural detail buried under the siege scaffolding. And there were many places inside that were untouched.

"They built it in a valley where there's a tiny oasis, centuries ago. The first building was a chapel of some kind—you can still see traces of it in the stonework at the base of the high tower. It's all built of stone the same color as the sand we're riding over. Now there's a big ring wall around the oasis. This has five big towers on it, and one smaller. The biggest tower, on the east side, has a big causeway stretching up to it, and you'd think that that would be gate, but the entrance there was bricked up centuries ago. It's the west tower that has the main entrance.

"If you come in the main gate you're channeled between two more walls to the main keep. This tower is huge, Tamsin! It must have six floors, at least, and it steps at two points. Sometimes the queen walks around these balconies and she can look out over the hills and watch the sunset. Her chambers are in this tower, high above the earth.

"Let's see... if you come in the main doors of the keep, you're channeled again through it, to the great hall which is a big rectangular building attached to the keep on its east side. The great hall is magnificent. It's buttressed, with a pitched roof, with mullioned arched windows and a beautiful staggered triple lancet window on the east facade—"

"A what? What does it look like?"

"Oh. One time when Armiger walked through the banquet hall he looked up at it. It's three very tall arched windows separated by thin mullions—pillars, you know. The glass is leaded in a flame-like pattern. Very beautiful. But I only caught a glimpse of it, because Armiger never looked at it again.

"Anyway, the queen's garden lies south of the great hall. Then there's houses and shops all around the foot of the keep on its north and south sides. The rest of the ground inside the big ring wall is full of tents now. The rest of the queen's army. But I guess it was parade grounds and so on before the war."

He did not tell her that the beautiful copper roof of the great hall was holed in a dozen places by Parliament's steam cannon, or that the arched windows were half shattered, nor that the lovely pink marble floor of the banquet hall was almost invisible under a maze of stacked provisions.