“Your woman confessed!”

“After being raped and abused and hung from a ship’s mast all night! Do you call that a confession?”

The ironsmith returned his rod to the fire. “You were seen at the site of the silo burning.” He waited with his hand on the rod.

“And why should I have been so clumsy!” snarled Joesai, releasing his emotions now that he was certain they would not betray the truth. “Would I do a thing like that in broad sight? For what gain? The Kaiel have wheat and cannot sell it to you because of the mountains. Recall that when the silo was bombed, the Mnankrei were negotiating with your Stgal to sell you wheat! Perhaps those two infamous clans plotted this together! By so doing the Stgal could rid themselves of your like, hoping to betray the Mnankrei later. The Mnankrei would see such a deal as an opening to betray the Stgal and so gain dominion over the coast. My wife overheard the Mnankrei scheming to burn your silo and we scoffed at her but prudently deployed ourselves to prevent such an atrocity, failing in a way that made us look both guilty and foolish.” He did not wait for a reply. “Do you wish your Oelita out of the tower? I’ll bring her out.”

The smith’s eyes were narrow with suspicion. “Why?”

“To clear my name,” he lied. “I have not enjoyed the way the Stgal have made a fool of me.”

“No one can escape from the tower.”

“Give me iron spikes and a rhomboid jack. Do you have that? I need nothing else.”

The smith’s mother appeared at the inner doorway, rag in hand, a feeble woman, half blind, half deaf, a candidate for the tower in times of famine. “Who is he? Why do you shout?”

“I will let you follow me,” implored Joesai, striding now more boldly toward the fire. “You will see for yourself that your Oelita remains safe. Her friends can help. If I’m lying and I remain here and she remains in the tower, how can I harm her? If I’m telling the truth, how can I harm her if I carry her down while all of you watch my every movement?”

“What’s he babbling about,” croaked the old woman hysterically.

“Old mother. The man needs a jack.” He returned his attention to Joesai. “Of what use is a jack?”

“And spikes. I’ll look at all the jacks you can find, and pick the best one.” He turned to the hag and spoke slowly and with directed volume, for she was evidently hard of hearing. “And you, kind woman, if you’ve got some hot soup, I have a long climb up the outside of the tower, and soup would do me good. Your son and I are going to rescue our beloved Oelita!”

The woman beamed, understanding at last.

Totally in control, Joesai approached the furnace and picked up a glowing rod with a pair of tongs he appropriated. “I’ll need spikes that fit between the stones of the tower. This is too thick. I’ll show you.” He began to hammer the metal until it was the shape he wanted. “Like this! Can we make them?”

“No one has ever climbed the tower without a scaffold,” said the ironsmith, taking the spike and quenching it.

Joesai grinned. His cloak was steaming and his diagrammed face had already begun to sweat. “Ho! That’s why we’ll get away with the preposterous feat of stealing our heretic away from the Stgal!”

THE CARAVAN OF a hundred and twenty men stretched along the Itraiel desert. Behind them lay the mountain range called The Pile of Bones and, to their left, the implacable Swollen Tongue. Here the land was flat or gently rolling, but greener, though the vegetation was never more than waist high.

Three massive Ivieth clansmen pulled the wagon in which she rode. There had been four but one had died. That meant meat for a day. The woman who bore the outward name Humility, yet who was driven by a more lethal inward name, had enjoyed the stringy toughness of roast Ivieth but was less pleased with the walking that became necessary to alleviate the load on the remaining three porters. Without a full team, the passengers often had to push the wagon themselves when the road was rough.

Tonight they were making camp on a rise where the Ivieth kept a murky well but maintained no permanent settlement. She ran to exercise her limbs, dancing even, for she was a dancer and the suppleness of her body gave her great delight. When she skipped too far from the caravan road a giant Ivieth trundled after her. The Ivieth herded their passengers with care.

“Wanderlust is not wise,” his voice boomed reproachfully.

“Look!” She held up a spray of blue flowers whose tips deepened to purple. “Have you ever seen anything so gay?” She shook off her hood and put the sprig in her hair, defying the giant to be angry with her.

“It is not wise to touch what you do not know.” He checked her leggings to see that she was properly protected for a walk in the desert.

“These innocent little blue flowers?” Humility grinned up at him and slipped her slim fingers around the elbow of her self-appointed protector. His elbow brushed her shoulder. She let him lead her back through the brush to safety elated by her uncommon discovery.

In the blue flower lurked a poison rare enough that it was unrecorded in the literature. The petals, when sun-dried and then leached in alcohol, yielded a sweet essence so powerful that drops of it could kill a man. It numbed like one whisky too many, filling the body with a rosy warmth, a pleasant drunken stupor, and then the heart stopped. Assassin’s Delight was the only name by which she knew the flower.

Her own name was recorded as se-Tufi’87 but she was addressed as the se-Tufi Who Walks in Humility. Like every Liethe woman Humility wore her line signature in scar. The se-Tufi were signed by seven nodules running from the base of each eye to the jawline like a string of jewels, and a bracelet of nodules on the upper left arm. She was not adorned with the sign for 87 because every Liethe of a line expected to be used interchangeably with her sisters. Unlike the bodies of normal women, Liethe were uncut except for the line signature. Humility also carried a secret name which she had taken, as was the custom, on the night when she had seduced her first priest — a white-haired priest of Saie, now dead. The name locked in her breast was Queen of Life-before-Death and that was how she thought of herself.

After pressing her precious flower, Humility used her brass mirror to retouch the facial makeup she wore to disguise her almost scarless features under appropriate artistry. It was taboo for a Liethe to reveal her clan while travelling. She ate rations of biscuit and honey and mash standing up against the wheel of her wagon, and then wandered ahead to spend the last of the evening by the fire of the Ivieth, her cowl over her head against the sudden cold.

She loved the Ivieth songs. It was the musician in her. How they sung about Scowlmoon! She could not imagine what it was like to have a moon in the sky since she had lived all of her life on the far side of the planet. As if it were a slowly rising cookie in the sky’s oven, the moon nudged above the horizon, day by day a little higher. It was exciting.

The giants laughed so. They enjoyed their songs so. How could she resist snitching a small harp and singing to them one of their own ballads? Liethe Code would not permit her to sing a Liethe song. Liethe music was for the priests. She threw her melodiously high voice farther than the reach of the fire.