Hungry. Tired. Alone. Give in to Me, Zaranda Star, and you shall know satiation of every appetite, surcease sweet beyond imagining, and the comfort of Unity with something greater than yourself. Yield to Me, Zaranda; pure pleasure awaits…

A scratching came at the bars that covered the opened windows; no innkeeper in Zazesspur was ingenuous enough to believe the mere fact that a room lay on an upper story offered any insuperable barrier to the city's enterprising thieves. Zaranda snapped awake with the jarring suddenness of a catapult arm slamming into the stop. She had a woozy, disoriented moment, and a lingering hallucination of arms and hands, gray-fleshed and black-nailed, withdrawing into the wadded sheet.

She looked toward the window to see a hunched and winged black shadow crouching on the sill.

14

The great house looked as if it had been assembled out of bits and pieces of many architectural epochs, not all of them of this world. Zaranda paused in the midst of darkened Love Street to admire its many dubious splendors, though she had seen them before. Its facade was a riot of pilasters, friezes, a colonnaded portico with a single sapphire-blue lantern on top, windows wide, windows narrow, windows little more than slits, set without apparent regard for story, some lit, some not. The roof was a composite of planes and angles, chimneys and dormers of sundry styles and shapes; among forests of finials, gargoyles disported with caryatids, or perhaps menaced them.

Perhaps the oddest feature was that, taken whole, the effect was not of chaos-or rather, not pure chaos, but chaos with order imposed upon it, chaos channeled and restrained but not overmastered, leading to an effect both of harmony and tension. It seemed a natural thing, grown not built.

From all around her came rustlings and small murmurs from the shadows, skirting the edge of intelligibility without ever misstepping and falling into it. Zaranda felt no alarm. Wizard's houses were that way, this one more than most.

Let's get it done, she told herself. She squared her shoulders and marched up beneath the portico to double doors with stained-glass panels in their upper halves: on the left, the occupant's rune, on the right a stylized balance scale. The glass doors announced that this was the residence of a powerful mage no less than the rune; no one else would dare offer thieves so alluring a target.

A tug on the golden chain of the bellpull produced not chimes, but a thin eldritch cry, which seemed to echo in distant corridors of time and space rather than the hallways of a house. Then it produced a wait, stretching itself into what seemed to Zaranda's growing impatience like infinity before the doors were opened by a human footman, yawning and scratching himself through an indigo velvet waistcoat starred with a galaxy of diamond studs.

"Something?'' he drawled, all indolence and insolence.

Zaranda set her lips and handed him the object that the winged black faceless being hunkered on her win-dowsill had pressed into her palm not an hour before- a glazed tile, palm-sized, displaying the selfsame sigil as the left door: a dragon's eye in black, with what seemed a genuine star sapphire inset as the pupil.

"Huh," he said, and ushered her in with a perfunctory bow. "Down the hall to the end, then past the stairs to the chamber with the open door. Can't miss it." He reseated himself on a stool with a red velour cushion, and subsided instantly to snores.

Entertaining but briefly the notion of kicking the stool from beneath him, Zaranda followed his directions. The hallway was brightly lit, with white walls and gilt trim. Doors opened left and right, giving glimpses of emphatically decorated parlors in which strange and richly clad hunched beings, of a generally humanoid cast, stood with heads together in apparent conversation. Only a few favored Zaranda with so much as a glance as she passed. Nonetheless, she had the sense of eyes following her-given the existence of such creatures as beholders, not a comfortable feeling.

The hallway debouched into an open space or shaft. A quick eye flick showed galleries mounting upward until they blurred into shadow at a seemingly higher level than the house's highest point visible from without. Stairs from the floor immediately above, balustraded with obsidian, descended to the left and right. Zaranda turned left, availing herself of the chance to peek back the way she had come. As expected, she saw nothing but the dozing doorman.

Proceeding, she came into a chamber. The walls were panels of quartz, milky white, and running through them sparkling veins that might have been gold. A soft, diffuse light shone from them. There was no furniture as such, only stands and cases and pedestals, likewise all of polished stone: jadeite, nephrite, agate, feldspar and onyx, glabrous gray chalcedony. Like the walls, some of them glowed gently. They held gems and semiprecious stones in fabulous array, some polished, some rough, turquoises, amethysts, topazes, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and everywhere sapphires. There were sapphires of yellow and gray and orange, sour-pallid green and faint pink; sapphires of every hue of blue, from the pale, heartless blue of the sky in the Savage North at high noon on Midwinter Day, to stones of indigo so rich as to appear black.

The only item in the room not stone was its occupant. A woman stood with her back to Zaranda Star. She was a few fingers shorter than Zaranda and slen-der as a kobold's hope of redemption. Raven hair hung straight down the back of a gown of velvet the same shade as the midnight-blue star sapphire globe, as large as an orange, which she held contemplatively in one slim-fingered hand.

"You did not come to see me," the woman said, replacing the sapphire sphere in its holder, carved from onyx in the shape of a claw, which stood atop a pedestal of self-luminous quartz. "That's why I had to summon you thus, in the midst of night."

She turned. Her face was as pale as marble and shaped like an idealized heart; her hair grew down in a widow's peak. Her eyes matched her gown and the globe in her hand. Her nose was thin, and so were her lips, features so perfect that the first impression was that she was plain. In fact she was beautiful, but her beauty was not the sort to inspire passion, nor the kind to haunt dreams, such as was often found in elvish folk. Rather it was the kind of beauty to inspire awe.

As to her age, Zaranda would have said she looked mature, but could have hazarded no further guess. Certainly the flawless features showed no wrinkles nor sign of drying on the high slanted cheekbones. She seemed ageless and precise as a drawn blade.

"I didn't have that which you bade me bring you," Zaranda said with a shrug. She did not bother mentioning that the sorceress might as easily have summoned her in the daytime. Nyadnar had small patience with complaint, and heard no irony but her own. "There seemed small point in paying a social call."

"You were wise to forbear to waste my time. What do you plan now?"

Zaranda set her lips against her reflexive reply, which was to ask what business the sorceress had with hers. Unlike her wealth and age, Nyadnar's patience wasn't legendary. Rumor in Zazesspur, where she had allegedly dwelt, off and on, for centuries, held that she was as powerful as Elminster. Zaranda doubted that, but she was sorceress enough herself to sense that Nyadnar's power was great indeed; in the crawling of her skin she could sense enormous dweomer seeming to hover about the sorceress, as when Chen's emotions threatened to run away with her. Zaranda feared her, and for that reason had to guard against her own first reflex, which was defiance. The mage was not such to be either truly a friend or truly a foe of anyone, but her goodwill was much more to be coveted than her displeasure.