Lightning reflected off the courtier's scalp as he ran to inform his mistress. Molin slid behind a dirty tapestry into the honeycomb of narrow passages the Ilsigi builders had put in the Palace and which the Beysibs had not yet unraveled. Barely the height and width of an armed man, the passages were foul smelling and treacherous, but they kept the remnants of the Rankan Presence in Sanctuary united, to the consternation of their fish-eyed conquerors.

Molin emerged in an alcove where the sounds of the storm were inconsequential in comparison to the fury emanating from a nearby room. An unnatural brilliance filled the corridor before him. His skin tingled when he crossed the sharp line from shadow to light. Thirty-odd years of habit told him to fall to his knees and pray to Vashanka for deliverance-but if Vashanka could have heard him there would have been no need for prayer. He told himself it was no worse than walking on the deck of a sailing ship, and entered the nursery.

The blond, blue-eyed demon he'd named Gyskouras, on the advice of a S'danzo seeress, was the focus of the brilliance. He was shouting as he swung his red glowing toy sword, but the words were lost in the light. The other child, the peaceful child of that S'danzo seeress, had a hold of Gyskouras's leg, trying to pull him away from the motionless body he was battering. Arton, though, was no match for his foster-brother while the god's rage was in him.

Molin forced himself deeper into the blazing aureole until he could grab the child and lift him from the floor.

"Gyskouras," he bellowed countless times.

The boy fought with the determination of a street urchin: biting, kicking, flailing with the straw-sword until Molin's damp clothes began to steam. But Molin persisted, imprisoning the child's legs first, then trapping his arms beneath his own.

"Gyskouras," he said more gently, as the radiance flickered and the sword fell from the child's hand.

'"Kouras?" the other child echoed, clinging now to both of them.

The light flared once and was gone. Gyskouras became only a frightened child wracked with sobs. Molin stroked the boy's hair, patted him between the shoulders, and glanced down where one of his priests lay in a crumpled heap. With a gesture and a nod of his head, Torchholder commanded the others to do what had to be done. When he and the children were alone he sat down on a low stool and stood the child in front of him.

"What happened, Gyskouras?"

"He brought porridge," the boy said between sobs and sniffles. "Arton said he had candy but he gave me porridge."

"You are growing very fast, Gyskouras. When you don't eat you don't feel good." Since they'd brought Arton into the nursery some four months earlier, both children had grown the length of a man's hand from wrist to fingertips. Growing pains were a living nightmare for all concerned. "If you had eaten the porridge I'm sure Aldwist would have given you the candy."

"I wished him dead," Gyskouras said evenly, though when the words were safely out of his mouth he fell forward against Molin. "I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I told him to get up an' he wouldn't. He wouldn't get up."

It was only Molin's experience with the children that let him make sense out of Gyskouras's garbled syllables-that and the fact that he'd known, in his heart, what had happened as soon as the storm began.

"You didn't know," he repeated softly to convince himself, if not the child.

Gyskouras fell asleep once his sobs subsided; the Storm God rages always exhausted the small body of their perpetrator. Molin carried an ordinary child to a small bed where, with any luck, he would sleep for two or three days.

'"Kouras can't stay here any longer," Arton said, tugging at the hem of the priest's much-abused tunic.

The S'danzo boy rarely spoke to anyone but his foster-brother. Torchholder let Arton take his hand and lead him to a corner away from the others who were beginning to return to the now-quiet nursery.

"You have to find a place for us, Stepfather."

"I know, I'm looking. When I hear from Gyskouras's father-"

"You cannot wait for Tempus. You must pray. Stepfather Molin."

Talking with Arton was not talking to a milk-toothed child. The seeress had warned him that her son might have the legendary S'danzo ability to foretell the future. At first Molin had refused to believe in the child's pronouncements, until Arton had utterly rejected Kadakithis and the Prince had finally owned up to Gyskouras' true paternity. Now he trusted the child completely.

"I have no gods to pray to, Arton," he explained as he walked toward the door. "I have only myself and you- remember that."

He pulled the curtain shut. The two acolytes who had been arranging Aldwist's corpse on a simple pallet moved aside to let the Hierarch speak the necessary rites of passage. A war-priest, Molin had sanctified the deaths of so many unrecognizable chunks of mortal flesh that nothing could bring a tremor to his voice or gestures. He had come to believe himself truly immune to death's outrages, but the imploded face of the gentle old priest brought twisting pangs of despair to his gut.

"We do not have enough bitterwood for the pyre. Rashan took what we had with him," Isambard, the elder of the two acolytes, informed him.

Molin pressed his fingertips between his eyes, the traditional priestly gesture of respect for the departed and one which, coincidentally, dammed his tears.

Rashan: that conniving, provincial priest whose sole purpose in life, even before Vashanka's death, had been to thwart every reform Molin instituted. A cloud of rage worthy of Vashanka swirled up invisibly around Molin Torchholder. He wanted to confront Rashan, the so-called Eye of Savankala, shove every splintered log of bitter-wood down the whey-faced priest's gullet and use that nonentity to light Aldwist's pyre. He wanted to take his ceremonial dagger and thrust it so deep in Gyskouras's chest that it would pop out the other side. He wanted to take Isambard's tear-stained face between his hands....

Molin looked at Isambard again, little more than a child himself and unable to hide his grief. He swallowed his rage along with his tears and rested comforting hands on the acolyte's shoulders.

"The Storm God will welcome Aldwist no matter what wood we use for his pyre. Come, we three will carry him back to his rooms and you will be his chorus."

They bore their burden in silence. Molin chanted the first chorus with them, then departed for his quarters hoping that the sincerity of the young men's grief would compensate not merely for the missing bitterwood but for Vashanka, Himself, and for his own heart's silence. The priest used another set of passageways to reach a curtained vestry behind his priest's sanctum. A robe of fine white wool was waiting for him and Hoxa, his scrivener, could be heard prodding the brazier on the other side of the tapestry-though just barely. His wife, and whatever gaggle of disaffected Rankan women she'd gathered since dawn, were clambering in the antechamber that separated his sanctum from their conjugal quarters.

He pulled the tunic over his shoulders and winced as the cloth reopened a wound he didn't remember taking. Fumbling in the darkness he found a strip of linen, then emerged into his sanctum clad in boots and loincloth; his robe draped over one shoulder; blood running from his left forearm and a strip of linen between his teeth. Hoxa, to his credit, did not drop the goblet of mulled wine.

"My Lord Torchholder-My Lord, you're injured."

Molin nodded as he dropped his robe on top of Hoxa's carefully arranged scrolls and studied the pair of bloody horseshoes on his arm. The street urchins, possibly, but more likely Gyskouras. With his good arm and teeth he ripped the linen in two. He pulled a knife from his belt and handed it to Hoxa.