“Like the man and woman who rode out just a day after you arrived.”

He started to frown then caught himself. His instincts suggested it was better to go on matching her light, casual air. “Keeping track of us, Sunlady?”

“Everyone’s keeping track of you, Captain. You’re objects of great curiosity. So be gallant and satisfy mine. Who were those people, anyway?”

“Just scouts.”

“On horseback. When I’ve just heard you extol the advantages of reconnaissance from the air.”

“You see things from on high that you wouldn’t from the ground, but occasionally the reverse is also true.”

They sauntered up on a sentry. He was one of Hasos’s men and looked like he couldn’t make up his mind how much courtesy he owed to Aoth. In the end he decided to salute, and Aoth acknowledged it with a dip of his spearhead.

“Interesting,” Cera said. Aoth couldn’t tell if she meant his explanation of the spies’ mission or the sentry’s reaction to him. “Do you know, you seem like a very… practical sort of person. If I had to guess, I’d have said you weren’t profoundly interested in any religion, let alone a mad cult like the Church of Tchazzar.”

“Well, that answers one of my questions. Daelric sent you a message conveying his opinion of me.”

“It’s one of my great blessings that my superior writes me often, with an abundance of observations and instructions.”

“Well, he was wrong about me. I couldn’t care less about the Church of Tchazzar. I didn’t let him roast the fools in that parade because I feared it would start a riot.” He smiled crookedly. “Of course, before we were through, Luthcheq had a riot anyway. But at least I tried.”

Down below them, sellswords started chivvying the plundered goats and sheep into the butchers’ pens. The carts rolled on toward the bakers.

“That’s good to know,” Cera said. “In dangerous times, people need to put their faith in the true gods, and the lords the gods appoint to watch over them.”

“You’re sure Tchazzar’s not a real god?” asked Aoth, simply to see her reaction. “Plainly, you know far more about such matters than I do. But as I understand it, it wouldn’t make him the first creature to start out mortal and ascend to divinity.”

“If he’d truly been a god, he wouldn’t simply have disappeared.”

“Didn’t Amaunator? For many centuries? When I was young, he was just a distant memory without a worshiper or altar to his name.”

She smiled. “When you were young, indeed! You don’t look all that withered and decrepit to me. But as for the Keeper of the Yellow Sun, we now know he was with us all along, in the guise of Lathander the Morninglord.”

“Then couldn’t Tchazzar put on his own disguise? The stories say he was always a shapeshifter, sometimes a man and sometimes a wyrm.”

“Are you sure you’re not a cultist?”

“I promise. When I pray, it’s to Kossuth.”

She cocked her head. “Not to Tempus, or some other war god?”

“During the War of the Zulkirs, when my comrades and I fought necromancers and the undead they sent against us, the fire priests were our staunch allies. I’ve never forgotten that.”

He supposed that even after all this time, he’d never quite forgotten Chathi, the Firelord’s priestess, either. For a moment, sadness cast its shadow over him.

Cera’s blue eyes narrowed. Apparently she’d noticed that fleeting change in his mood. But instead of asking about it, she said, “That’s understandable, and Kossuth is a legitimate object of veneration. So I won’t bore you with another theological argument explaining that technically, he’s not a god either.”

“The sunlady is as merciful as she is wise.”

Cera chuckled. “Thank you. And you don’t seem nearly as savage and depraved as a Thayan mage and sellsword ought to be.”

“I tried to learn to bite the heads off kittens and puppies, but I have bad teeth.”

“Perhaps I’ll give a banquet so that others can see what I see. It might make it easier for you to conduct your business here.”

“If they’re willing to eat at the same table with an arcanist, that sounds good.”

“Oh, they’ll come if I invite them. Especially since we’re all afraid of the Great Bone Wyrm, and you’re here to protect us. Now, shall we head back? I’m due at the temple soon, and it looks bad if the high priestess of the supreme timekeeper turns up late.”

As they strolled back the way they’d come, she chatted about the people he could expect to meet at the forthcoming feast. Humorous, gossipy, and occasionally salacious, the discourse lasted long enough to see them back to the top of the gate.

Hasos and his companions were gone. Aoth escorted Cera to the top of the stairs that would take them to the ground.

Though Soolabax was scarcely one of the great fortress cities of the East, the gate itself was a massive piece of stonework. The wooden stairs spiraled down an enclosed shaft with only a few windows narrow as arrow loops to light the way.

The dimness was no inconvenience to Aoth with his fire-kissed eyes. The cramped quarters, however, required that he and Cera stop walking arm in arm. She courteously waved for him to go first.

They were about a third of the way down when he saw something that brought him to a sudden stop. Cera bumped against his back, and he was glad she hadn’t done it harder. Because he wouldn’t have wanted her to knock him farther down the steps.

Just as he could see in the dark, and see even farther than a griffon, so too did he see the world in minute and exquisite detail. And thus, just as he was about to trust his weight to the next step, he’d spotted the webs of tiny cracks running through the half dozen risers immediately below him.

“Is something wrong?” Cera asked.

He reached with the point of his spear and touched the first stair below him. Most of it crumbled. He tapped the next. It disintegrated too. The fragments pattered on the undamaged steps one twist beneath them.

“They were fine when we climbed up,” Cera said.

“Yes.” Some spell or alchemical solution had weakened them in the brief period between Hasos’s descent and now.

And if not for his inhumanly keen vision, an edge Aoth liked to conceal from the world at large, the trap might have caught him. True, he had a tattoo to provide a soft landing if he fell, but it took an instant to activate the magic. Caught by surprise and dropping a relatively short distance, he could have cracked his head or broken his leg before he managed it.

Rushing footsteps thumped risers farther down the stairwell. Someone had been lying in wait to finish Aoth off if the plunge didn’t kill him. Now that it was plain that his target wasn’t going to fall, the assassin was trying to get away.

Aoth wished he could see the bastard. But even spellscarred eyes couldn’t peer through the plank stairs blocking the view.

He could give chase, though. He activated the tattoo, jumped through the hole created by the missing steps to the intact ones below, and charged onward.

He bounded all the way to the bottom and out into the street that ran parallel to the wall. Where people of various sorts were going about their business-they gasped and shied as he lunged into their midst with his spear at the ready.

“Did someone run out this doorway ahead of me?” he asked.

For what seemed an interminable moment, they all just gawked at him. Then a woman with the feet of a dead chicken sticking out of her wicker basket shook her head.

“Wonderful,” sighed Aoth. The would-be killer had evidently either exited the gate while invisible or used a spell or talisman to shift himself through space. Either way, he’d made a successful escape.

Aoth tramped back up the stairs, and warm yellow light gleamed down at him. Cera still stood where he’d left her, but now she was glowing. She’d raised her power in case she needed to defend herself, and her resolute expression made a marked contrast to her lighthearted manner from before.