Lok-iKol was sitting as usual in the armchair by the open window, the papers and documents on the worktable against the far wall untouched and gathering dust. He allowed no attendance, not even from his own people.

“My lord Tarkin,” Tel said, and waited to be acknowledged.

“Speak,” the man by the window said in his heavy voice.

“The Lord Dal-eDal has returned, and brings with him a prisoner.”

Tel gasped with pain as Lok-iKol was suddenly beside him, holding his upper arm in a grip that stopped Tel’s breath.

“Where?” The man’s breath was like rotting fish and Tel did his very best not to turn away.

“City gates, my lord.” Tel spoke through clenched teeth, unable to keep himself from squirming in an instinctive attempt to pull free. The man holding him took no notice whatsoever.

“The throne room,” the man said, dropping Tel’s arm and turning away. “When they come, tell them the throne room.”

“Yes, Lord.” Tel blinked back tears and sucked in air as circulation restored itself to his lower arm and hand. Lok-iKol turned away, no longer paying him the least attention, so Tel just turned and ran from the room.

Maybe he would send a message to his father, after all, and beg to come home.

The part of him that was Lok-iKol squirmed and would have turned aside, preferring not to enter the throne room. But he ignored it. He needed to know for certain whether this woman was a Seer. He needed to know whether she had already Seen the Lens. Then he could deal with her as he’d dealt with all the others.

And then he would only have to wait for the last piece to arrive and he would be whole again, in the first shape he’d known, in the shape that, perhaps, might be the key to freeing him from any shape. Whole, he would be safe, for without the Seer, there could be no Lens. And without the Lens, the Sleeping God would never awaken.

He saw the men who waited in the throne room, but he didn’t speak. They talked too much, these shapers. He sat on the throne.

As they rode along the narrow streets immediately inside the city wall, heading for the wider avenues that surrounded the precincts of the Dome itself, Dhulyn had to stop herself from taking off the hood. It was not the lack of sight that disturbed her, but the way her skin crawled and the hairs stood up on her arms. There was something wrong. She’d expected what Parno called city noise to disorient her, to mask the little telltales of scent and sound she’d been using to keep track of her group, and stay aware of her surroundings.

So where was it, then, the city noise?

These were, more or less, the same streets she’d been through not that long ago, and she wasn’t hearing what she should, nor smelling what she should either.

It was much too quiet for early morning. In this part of Gotterang there should have been-there had been when she’d come through with Parno and Mar-people hawking their wares, the squeaking un-greased wheels of hand- and donkey carts, children running and playing, chanting their games, and the buzz of conversations, the tiptap of hundreds of footsteps, the hum of hundreds of pairs of lungs pushing air in and out. But the noises were few enough that Dhulyn could detect and identify them almost as easily as she did the people who were with her. A woman wearing stale perfume scurried by on the right with what smelled like a basket of radishes, fresh from the ground with the earth still on them. Dhulyn’s stomach growled, and she realized that there was no smell of foods cooking, but only the smell of burning, faint but noticeable. Not so faint was the smell of filth-clearly the night soil had not been picked up in days.

“Turning left in a few paces,” murmured Karlyn, with a light touch on her left leg.

As they turned, the breeze brought the unmistakable odor of a decomposing body. Her companions were singularly silent, though Dhulyn knew they must have noticed the stench. Better not ask, she told herself.

Closer to the Dome, the streets smelled marginally cleaner. but there were even fewer sounds of people. At one point Dhulyn heard rapid hoofbeats in the distance, but they came no nearer.

Bloodbone’s muscles bunched and relaxed in a new way, and Dhulyn sensed that they had started up the incline that was the road to the Carnelian Dome. The Dome itself had originally been a fortress on the edge of the escarpment that overlooked the Talgus River, but as Imrion had grown, and the Tarkins had settled on Gotterang as its capital, they had all added to the original structure. Rather than building outward, however, when each subsequent Tarkin had needed more space, they had built up so that the Carnelian Dome was, in fact, layer upon layer of buildings, from the lowest ancient kitchens, to the highest lookout towers. The outer wall was almost as thick as the city walls, and built in the time of Jorelau Tarkin, that most paranoid of leaders.

Their hoofbeats made an entirely different kind of echo when they reached the open plaza of the Tarkin’s Square. Another touch on her thigh told her they were stopping-but at a point she judged well back from the gates themselves.

“The gates are open,” Dal said. He kept his voice pitched low and soft, so that it would not carry over, but his shock was evident. Dhulyn understood. The outer gates of the Carnelian Dome stood open only when the Carnelian Guard was parading in the square, and her ears told her that other than themselves, the square was empty.

“It’s only the pass door,” Karlyn said. “Whatever may be the explanation for this, we cannot turn back now.”

“In a tale,” Dhulyn said, “those words would be the signal for an attack.”

“That is what comes of reading too much.”

They stopped again at what Dhulyn estimated was well within bow-shot of the gates, and therefore too close for comfort if they really expected to be attacked. She heard the creak of Dal’s saddle as he stood up in his stirrups.

“Give answer,” he called. “Who attends the gates, give answer.”

“I attend,” came a man’s voice out of the air.

“I am Dal-eDal Tenebro, the cousin of Lok-iKol Tarkin. May I pass?”

Dhulyn grinned. Would anyone else find it significant that Dal-eDal was so careful to say which Tarkin he was related to?

“Enter, enter, enter…” said the voice in the air, fading as though the speaker was turning and walking away. Around her were the noises of her companions dismounting, but Dhulyn stayed where she was.

“You’ll have to duck down,” Karlyn said from around her right elbow. “You’ll just fit through the door if Bloodbone walks carefully.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Dhulyn said rapidly reviewing the knots she’d used before deciding none of them would either pull loose or become dangerously tight if she bent enough to get through the door. Such doors, she knew, were specifically designed to prevent the entrance of people on horseback, but Bloodbone was not large, and if Dhulyn could lay practically flat along the mare’s neck…

She pressed her cheek against Bloodbone’s mane, and felt the loop around her right knee tighten painfully. Just as she was about to sit up again, she felt a hand loosening it. “Thank you,” she said, knowing it was Karlyn-Tan.

The quality of the echoes thrown off from hooves and footsteps once they’d passed through the gate told Dhulyn the inner gate was already open, and she could picture the look of disgust that must have decorated Karlyn-Tan’s face at the carelessness which allowed both gates to be open at once.

Dhulyn closed her eyes and concentrated her senses-there was more wrong here than sloppiness with the gates.

“Are there archers in the recesses?” she asked. There should be, she knew. There had been archers at the slitted openings high in the curve of the tunnel walls when she had passed through here with Parno and Alkoryn.