“Bird stay,” Oreb announced, then squawked and took wing as Saba cut at him with her quirt.

“Sorry, Calde, I didn’t try to hit it. Have a nice breakfast?”

“Baked horse-fodder,” Hyacinth told her.

“Horde bread, you mean. We turn little girls like you into troopers with it.”

Silk said, “I had assumed that we would be questioned by Generalissimo Siyuf.”

Behind him, Incus began, “We are holy augurs. You cannot simply—” He was jointed by Remora, and Remora by Spider.

“Quiet!” Saba snapped. “I’ll have the lot of you flogged. By Sphigx, I’ll flog you myself!” She counted them, her lips twitching. “Eight, that’s right.”

She raised her voice. “You’re going up in my airship. The calde said he’d like to see it, and he’s going to. So are the rest of you, as soon as they drop the ’ishsh. We’re taking you home so the Rani and her ministers can have a look at you, but anybody who gives us trouble might not get there. She might sort of fall off first. Understand? If you — if…”

Seeing Saba’s eyes sink and grow dull, Silk took his arm from Hyacinth’s shoulders. “Can you and I walk a step or two, General? I’d like a word with you in private.”

Saba’s head nodded like a marionette’s. “I’ve been in here all morning, Silk. She thinks you won’t come back.”

“I see.” He drew Saba aside. “But she isn’t going to kill us, or she wouldn’t have threatened to. I’m not worried about myself, Mucor; the Outsider will take care of me in one way or another. I’m worried about Hyacinth, and about you.”

“Grandmother will take care of her, Silk.”

“At the moment, Hyacinth’s taking care of her; but no doubt you’re right. With your grandrnother gone, however, there’s no one to take care of you.”

Saba laughed, a mirthless noise that made Silk shudder even as he worried that the watching troopers had heard it. “I’m going with you, Silk, way up in the air. The man who broke his wings is there already.”

“You can’t! Can’t you understand? You absolutely cannot!” Assistant Day Manager Feist trotted at Sand’s side, snapping and yelping.

“It’s right up there, Sarge.” Hammerstone waved toward the sentries before Siyufs door. “See the twist troopers? Got to be it.” The “twist troopers” in question were moving the safety catches of their slug guns to the ‹font size=2›FIRE‹/font› position.

Ignoring them, Sand grasped the front of Feist’s tunic and separated his highly polished shoes from Ermine’s three-finger-thick stair runner. “You say we can’t go barging in, right?”

Feist gasped and choked.

“Fine, we’ve got it. So you’re going first. You’ve got to talk your way past those girls and get inside.”

Sand paused at the top of the stair, displaying Feist to the sentries while covering them with his slug gun, gripped in one hand like a needler. “When you get in, tell the Generalissimo we got big news to trade real cheap, and if—”

The intricately-carved sandalwood door of the Lyrichord Room had opened; a tall and strikingly handsome brunette in a diaphanous gown peered out. “Hi. You want to see Generalissimo Siyuf?”

“You got it, Plutonium.” Sand strode toward the door, as an afterthought tossing Feist over the ornate railing. “You tell her the First Squad, First Platoon, Company ‘S,’ Army of Viron’s here. You got all that?”

The handsome young woman nodded. “Close enough, Soldier. I’m Violet.”

“Sergeant Sand, pleased. You tell her we won’t take much of her time and we aren’t asking much, and she’ll be shaggy glad she talked to us.”

“Wait a minute, she’s getting dressed.” The door closed.

“What do you think?” Slate asked Hammerstone. “She goin’ to see us?”

“One way or the other,” Hammerstone told him; almost too swiftly for the eye to follow, his hands shot out, grasped the barrels of the sentries’ slug guns, and crushed them.

At length, when repeated knockings had produced no result, Maytera Marble’s friend Scleroderma employed the butt of her new needler to pound the rearmost door of the Calde’s Palace. A second floor window flew open with a bang, and a cracked male voice called, “Who’s there? Visitor? Want to see the Calde? So do I!”

“I’m here to see Moly,” Scleroderma announced firmly. “I’m going to. Is she all right?”

“Mollie? Mollie? Good name! Fish name! Relative of mine? Don’t know her! Wait.”

The window slammed down. Scleroderma dropped her needler into the pocket of her winter coat, drawing the coat so tightly about her that for a moment it appeared buttonable.

The door flew open. “Come in! Come in! Cold out there! In here, too! Wall’s down! Terrible! No Mollie. You mean Mucor? She’s here, skinny girl! Know her?”

“I certainly do, she’s Moly’s granddaughter. Maybe—”

“Won’t talk,” the lean old man who had opened the door declared. “Asked about Mollie. She talk to you? Not to me! Upstairs! Want to see her? Maybe she will!”

Scleroderma, whose weight gave her a pronounced aversion to stairs, shook her head emphatically as she pushed the door shut behind her. “She’ll catch her death up there, the poor starved little thing. You bring her down here right away.” Waddling after him through the scullery and into the kitchen, she called to the old man’s fast-vanishing back, “I’ll build a fire in the stove and start her dinner.”

High above the Trivigaunti airship, Oreb eyed the cage-like enclosure swinging below it. The question, as Oreb saw it, was not whether he should rejoin Silk, but when. It might be best to wait until Silk was alone. It might also be best to find something to eat first. There was always food at the big house on the hill, but Oreb had a score to settle.

Bright black eyes sharper than most telescopes examined the good girl pressing herself against Silk without result, then scanned the orderly rows of pointed houses. The target sighted, Oreb began a wingover that quickly became a dive.

“You,” Pterotrooper Nizam told her new pet, “are going to have to be as quiet as a mouse in this barracks bag.”

“Ess, laddie.”

“As quiet as two mice. As soon as we get aboard—”

A red-and-black projectile shot between them with a rush of wind and a hoarse cry. The new pet bared small teeth and claws in fury. “Add, add word! Laddie, done by scarred.”

Sand’s soldiers filled the Lyrichord Room’s luxurious sellaria with polite clankings as Siyuf returned his salute. “I have hear of you, Sergeant. Why do you come?”

“You got a couple prisoners — “, he began.

“More than this.”

“Two I’m talking about. This’s Corporal Hammerstone.”

Hammerstone stiffened to attention.

“He’s married, only you got his wife and his best buddy. We want ’em back, and what we got to tell you’s worth ten of ’em. So here’s what I say. We tell you, and we leave it up to you, sir. If you don’t think it’s worth it, say so and we’ll clear off. If you do, give ’em back. What do you say?”

Siyuf clapped her hands; when the monitor appeared in her glass she said, “Get Colonel Abanja.

“To begin, Sergeant, I do not know that I hold the wife or the friend of this soldier. Violet my darling, bring for me the list that was last night from Colonel Abanja.”

Violet grinned and winked at Hammerstone. “Sure thing.”

“The wife, the friend, they are soldiers also?”

Hammerstone said, “No, sir. My wife’s a civilian. Her name’s Moly. She’s no bigger’n you, sir, maybe smaller. My friend’s a bio, a augur, His Eminence Patera Incus. People think he’s the coadjutor. Really he’s the Prolocutor, only people don’t know yet.”

The monitor’s face gained color, reshaping itself to become that of Siyuf’s intelligence officer.

“There is here too much of warlockery, Colonel. You see here soldiers, marvels we should have in museums but here fight us, and for us also. They are come to offer a bargain. Am I not a woman of honor?”

Violet nodded enthusiastically and Abanja said, “You are indeed, Generalissimo.”