“I’ll take it. Or did you imagine me drowning my sorrows in a pool of my own blood?”

Aloê noted the bitter bantering tone in his voice and chose to ignore it. “No,” she said frankly.

He winced and sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s too late to pretend now that I’m something other than I am.”

They sat in the garden, empty of other patrons as the blue chill of evening approached. Without looking at the server, a young woman with streaked hair who looked at him with sad, sympathetic eyes, Naevros ordered pork seared with cherries and thrummin on the side. Noreê had a plate of jeckfruit and grondil. Aloê ordered chicken and mushrooms, and they shared a carafe of the house wine.

“I suppose you’ve come to break down my resistance,” Naevros said, when they all had a glass. “You want to ask me questions, expecting no answers, just hoping to plant doubts that will soften the real examination on the Witness Stone. Is that it?”

“What if it is?” Aloê replied.

“If it is, to hell with it. Ask me your questions. I’ll answer. I’m not going to put on a defense. I did what I did, and I’ll pay for it without whining.”

Perhaps only a little whining, Aloê thought to herself. Naevros favored her with a green glance, and she wondered if he had understood her unspoken response. It repelled her, but their rapport was as strong as ever. Aloud she said, “I know what you did, and most if not all of your fellow conspirators. What I don’t understand is why you did it.”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“A simple reason, for a Guardian. I did it to maintain the Guard.”

She looked at him without speaking.

“No, really!” he insisted.

“You’ll have to put some more lines in the drawing, Naevros. I don’t see what you’re getting at. How did murdering Earno help maintain the Guard?”

“I don’t know all the details. But Lernaion and Bleys had a plan to save the Wardlands from the effects of the dying sun. Earno was planning to interfere with it, or they thought he was. So he had to be killed.”

“Why would you believe them?” Aloê asked.

Naevros seemed genuinely surprised. “Wouldn’t you?”

Aloê looked away instead of answering. She wondered if he had always been this stupid and she hadn’t noticed it, or whether something had happened to him. She marveled that she had ever felt torn between this clever, shallow, pretty man and ugly, powerful, crafty Morlock Ambrosius. She missed him very much at that moment, and there was a shrill, fearful quality to the feeling. She was worried that the loss was permanent, that he would never return from the journey he’d begun.

She pushed the feeling away. The food came then, and she managed to ask Naevros a few more questions through the meal, but she didn’t learn much, and she was increasingly convinced that she never would learn more from Naevros.

After the meal the two vocates parted company with Naevros and rode westward to the lockhouse in Fungustown.

“Would your father say Naevros was a real man?” Aloê said, breaking a long silence.

“Unquestionably. Why?”

“He seems the mirror image of Ulvana. He killed and lied and betrayed every trust so that he could have what he wanted.”

“A hero’s mantle, you mean? Yes, I agree with you there.”

“And what good would it have been to him if he had it?” Aloê asked. She felt the cool pressure of Noreê’s regard and turned toward the older woman. “Do you mean this was really about me? He was trying to impress me?”

Noreê laughed in surprise. “Your insight is sharp, Vocate. That is what I almost said. But I didn’t say it because, on second thought, it seems to me too superficial. Naevros always seems to have a woman against whom he measures himself and whom he tries to impress. If it weren’t you, it would be someone else. If you had ever yielded to his charms he would have despised you the way he does every woman he has seduced, and he would have found some other bitch-goddess to pray to.”

“I don’t like that term applied to me,” Aloê said quietly.

“I don’t, Vocate. I apply it to his idea of you.”

Aloê thought she was right and yet not all right. Still, it was a trivial matter to waste the dying sun’s light on.

They arrived at the lockhouse to see Bleys. He was the last Guardian in the lockup; Lernaion, Naevros, and the thains had all sworn self-binding oaths to appear at Station; only Bleys had refused.

The thains at the lockhouse door were divided among the purple-legging crowd, the red-cap crowd, the green-armband crowd, and some thains who had not yet been branded by their masters.

“Guardians,” said Aloê, “do not hinder me or Noreê or any vocate going about her self-set tasks, and you may remain. If you challenge me, you will curse the day you chose to pledge yourself to the Graith.”

“That is agreeable with our orders, Vocate Aloê,” said one of the green armbanders, and the rest of the gray-caped chickens took up the chorus: orders-squawk-orders-squawk.

Aloê dismounted in their midst, waded through them, leading Raudhfax by the reins, and finally tied up her palfrey outside the lockhouse.

Noreê left her horse in custody of one of the unmarked thains—one of her own, no doubt—and strode through the crowd to follow Aloê inside.

“Some of the other vocates disliked the thought that I had sole mastery of the prisoners,” she explained, “so they recruited their own thains and sent them to assist.”

“You see what you’ve started. Will every vocate now have a personal army of thains to do her bidding?”

“Perhaps they should,” Noreê said good-humoredly. “This is only for the emergency, Aloê.”

“After this one there will be another.”

“Perhaps.” Noreê seemed determined not to fight with her, so Aloê gave up—for the moment.

The entrance to the basement was guarded by thains with an ill-assorted rainbow of badges. Aloê brushed them aside and descended, taking a coldlight from a pocket of her cloak as she descended the crumbling stairs to the basement.

A dizzying wave of stink swept over her. The sting of urine was in her eyes and nose, and it wasn’t the most alarming thread in the reek. . . .

She took the songbow from her shoulder and gripped it in her hand like a club. The hot smell of fresh blood rode the foul air.

The chaos of the basement made no sense to her eye at first. She had stumbled over a bundle of something at her feet before she realized it was a bundle of limbs—a Khnauront, lying on its side, its throat cut from ear to ear.

“Call your thains,” Aloê said over her shoulder.

“Oh, there’s no need for that, Vocate,” said Bleys’ warm voice from across the dim basement.

Aloê lifted the coldlight high to see better and caught sight of the summoner across the floor of the basement, strewn with dead Khnauronts. He was holding a bright piece of metal in one hand and with the other was pulling at the nose of a Khnauront to expose his bare neck. Two quick slashes and the Khnauront was spraying blood, dark in the bluish light. Bleys released him and he fell on his side.

The summoner stepped over to where the last Khnauront was sitting upright, his back against the far wall. He looked at Bleys and his bloody little piece of metal incuriously.

“Don’t!” shouted Aloê.

“With you in a moment, my dears,” called Bleys cheerily. He slashed the throat of the last Khnauront and let him fall. He dropped the piece of metal beside the dying body and then picked his way carefully across the carnage toward the thunderstruck vocates.

“You don’t need to thank me,” Bleys said, as he got nearer. “Although I don’t think it would be a good idea to take my hands.” He held them up: they gleamed with blood. “After a few days of probing their minds, I determined that these objects could be no use to themselves or anyone else, and decided to get rid of them . . . since the Graith, in its usual way, could not decide what to do with them.”