“So I left. Came up here and worked in timber. Had my own crew after a while. I became an Arbiter a few years ago because we needed one and no one else wanted to do it.”

“That’s the best reason.”

“So they say. It’s been more good than bad. I don’t call myself ‘honorable’ or any of that fake stuff anymore. If people think I’m honorable, I won’t need it in my name. If they don’t, they won’t think it because I say it.”

“Truth.”

They were silent for a long while. Aloê repressed a yawn, understanding that Ulvana had something else to say.

In the end she said, “I was angry that they sent you at first. I thought it was a deliberate insult. Now I see. . . . I’m glad it was you. You’re tired; we should sleep.”

“I’m glad we’re in this together,” said Aloê, a little more warmly than she really felt. She felt some guilt about Ulvana, and that feeling had grown rather than diminished because of Ulvana’s forgiveness.

She crawled into the bed closest to her bag, and it seemed as if Ulvana was going to say something again. But instead she just doused the light and got into another rack.

Aloê wondered if she’d happened on Ulvana’s favorite bed and her hostess was going to ask her to switch. But that seemed unlikely: the bed was not terribly comfortable and not terribly clean. In fact it had an odd reek to it . . . an oily muskiness, mixed with something like sour milk.

It smelt like a man, in fact—one of these greasy young things standing outside wineshops trying to impress each other and anyone impressionable who happened by.

Ugh. Aloê almost climbed out of her own accord to try another bed. But for all she knew the next would be worse. And she was tired. She hoped her nose would go to sleep with the rest of her.

Deep in the night, she dreamed someone was deep in her. She felt his weight on her, the oily slickness of his hairless chest sliding against her as he thrust himself into her, grunting the way men sometimes do, haloed with cheap musky scent. Her dream-eyes focused on his dream-face in the dream-shadows and she realized he was Naevros syr Tol. And from the glazed expression on his sweaty face he was coming inside her.

Fuck, no! she wanted to say, and woke up as she was actually coughing out the words.

“Excuse me?” asked Ulvana. Aloê opened bleary eyes to vaguely see Ulvana standing in a doorway filled with morning light.

“Nightmare,” Aloê said thickly.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Absolutely not.” Aloê rolled out of bed, hawked, spat out of a convenient window, and set about her day with a deliberate fury. This was real and that was a dream—and a terrible dream, at that. Somehow the filthy scent in the bed and Ulvana’s evening talk about Naevros had mingled in her mind, and the little dreammaker who lived in the basement of her brain had sent that thing up to annoy her. That was all that it was. There was nothing else about it that was real. Nothing.

They breakfasted on salted meat, pickled vegetables, and fresh mushrooms, all fried in oil. It was good, but afterward Aloê drank half her weight in water before she was free of the taste of salt in her mouth. After a minimum of ablutions, she moved with Ulvana toward the garth, where the horses were contentedly awaiting them. Ulvana had watered and fed them when she got up before dawn, and then went looking for mushrooms in the wood. A valuable companion, clearly: Aloê didn’t think she could have had better luck, and she told Ulvana so. It was interesting to watch Ulvana blush at the compliment: the embarrassed girl was still alive in there, inside the lumber merchant and Arbiter.

They were travelling up the shining pale stones of the Road much faster than the captive Khnauronts had travelled down them. Before midday they came to another vile campsite. Aloê knew without sniffing around (which did not promise to be one of life’s great pleasures, anyway) that this was not the murder scene. They rode on without dismounting.

In midafternoon they came to another of the old camps. Aloê felt the unpleasant sting of insight here. She dismounted and walked some distance from the campsite and the Road, ignoring Ulvana’s puzzled query. She lay down on a cold patch of grass and ascended into vision.

It took a timeless time to find it, but she stayed aloft in the visionary state because she knew it was there—she could feel it. Burning with contaminated tal, some drops of blood lay on the ground, wrapped in a shadow of absence that felt like Earno.

She descended to the world that women and men think of as real and lay there on the grass reflecting. The blood was Earno’s, shed in his sleep—enough to imprison the shape of his dream self there. And the taint in it. . . . It stank like the spell anchors that they had dug out of his body.

There was not enough blood present for this to be the murder scene. But they were getting closer: Earno’s wound had still been fresh when he lay here.

She stood up and walked back to Ulvana. “We ride on,” she said, and they did.

Before nightfall they came to the place itself. Aloê knew before dismounting. They were just beyond the woods, and the tidy heaps of earth covering the Khnauronts’ dung stood out clearly against the dry green-gold grass of the plain. Sun and rain had washed away the stink of piss, thank God Avenger.

Aloê dismounted without speaking and walked away from the scene. She sat cross-legged in a field, with her head in her hands, and left her body behind.

The dry, empty field blazed with talic light in her vision: there was life everywhere: grass, bugs, worms, the long shimmering light of the living land itself, life everywhere.

Except there.

She drifted toward the clot of darkness in the shining web of light and life. It was another shadow of Earno, haloed here in poisoned blood.

The talic aura of the blood trapped another shadow: Earno’s killer. The image was too distorted to be identifiable; it was a twisted shape overlain with many twisted shapes. The murderer had moved around Earno’s body as he or she killed him.

The unheard thrum of a binding spell was still in the air. The killer must have spellbound Deor and Earno before beginning the grisly work. When they woke, perhaps they thought they’d had a nightmare.

The murderer would have established the wilderment over the two Guardians and the sentinel mannikins then cut the summoner’s throat. The murderer must have quickly sealed up the wounds and established the anchor spell holding the seal. All that was clear. Then the murderer seemed to have spent some time going through Earno’s clothes, or fondling his body, or something—their shadows were oddly mingled.

Repelled, Aloê’s mind drifted away. She longed to ascend further, lose herself in the bright arc of the living sky. But if she did that, she might never return to her body.

She turned away from her vision, rejecting it and the world full of life’s light. She opened her eyes on a coarse void of matter and energy: the real world, as some called it.

Aloê sighed and wearily rose to her feet. It was terrible to lug one’s greasy flesh around after one has been floating free between heaven and earth. But that was what life was all about, apparently.

Ulvana had dismounted and was stretching her legs on the field when she caught sight of Aloê returning.

“It was here,” Aloê said in reply to the unspoken but obvious question in Ulvana’s eyes.

“Do you want to look around?” Ulvana asked.

Aloê almost answered, I just did, but then she reflected that the killer might have left something physical behind. Perhaps a signed letter expressing his intent to kill the summoner or something very helpful of that sort.

In the event, they found nothing, not even a decent set of footprints. It was after dark by the time they stopped looking.

“Let’s make camp across the Road,” Aloê said to Ulvana. “I don’t like this place. Unless. . . .”