We could drop a purse of steel on the open street and come back a week later and find it untouched."

"People are that honest?" asked Angel.

"The robbery is more organized. The big thieves make sure that little thieves don't interfere with their profits.

Street crime? Just keep to the main streets, the well-lighted streets and walkways and stairs. We'll be safe.

The thieves will be waiting for us indoors, at the gaming tables and in the whorehouses. No one leaves with much more than the price of passage back home."

"What happens when they find out we're just passing through?" asked Patience. "That we aren't here to lose a fortune and then go away and tell other people what a wonderful time we had?"

Will smiled. "We may leave some corpses behind us when we leave. Angel told me you were good at that."

His words, his expression gave no hint that he remembered their conversation. He was a deceiver, then, a concealer; either he was hiding his love for her now, or he was wearing it as a false mask then. Either way, Angel was right-he could lie.

They called good-bye to River, who ignored them; then they left the wharf and took rooms at an inn three levels above the river. Patience and Angel passed as a rich young woman and her grandfather, with Will as bodyguard, Sken as servant, and Reck and Ruin as gebling merchants who had traveled with them as their guides.

The surprise was Ruin. Will insisted that he dress the part, and when he appeared on the dock bathed, brushed, and finely attired, with his sister elegantly at his side, Patience saw that his previous undress and uncivility were from choice, not ignorance. Together they were king of the geblings, and could look the part if they needed to.

All this time that we traveled together, thought Patience, I believed I was the only one in disguise. But we were all in disguise, and are in disguise again. When we reach Unwyrm, if we're still together, will the last disguise be gone, and the truth of all of us be known?

If there is any truth. Perhaps we are what we pretend to be, taking on new identities with each change of costume.

She knew that she, at least, would have no disguise when she faced Unwyrm. No hiding place. No protection but her wits and what strength she could muster. It made her feel naked, as if everyone could see through her clothing to the thin and white-bodied girl that Unwyrm called.

"You must come down to the gaming tables," said Angel.

"I have better things to do with my time," said Patience.

She sat at the window, looking out over the harbor and the forests beyond.

"Sit and brood? Feel his fingers close in on your heart?"

Sken piped up from the bed. "If I can bathe every day, you can go down and play Kalika."

"Sken is right, you know. We're here pretending to be pleasure-seekers. We therefore must seek some pleasure.

Whether it pleases us or not."

"Visit the whores for me. Angel. Do double duty."

But she left the window and walked to the mirror. Her hair was still cropped short, and deeply marred by the surgery. Still, the stubble was now a good two centimeters long. "Angel," she said, "cut the rest off, will you?

To this length."

"It's not your most attractive style," said Angel.

"I may need to shed my wig somewhere along the way. Be a good fellow." She smiled flirtatiously. Since Angel was the one who taught her how to smile that way, she knew he would see it as a joke. And, indeed, he smiled. A trifle late, though. He was preoccupied. It was harder for them to pretend to be calm when they were here in Cranning, with Unwyrm's lair somewhere above them.

Angel took the shears from his trunk and began to cut.

It gave her a severe look, to have her hair almost gone.

"Where is the nearest tunnel from here?" asked Patience.

"Reck says we'd be insane to try the tunnels from here. It would take three times as long, and there are robbers who live in the shallow caves."

"I didn't ask if we should use the tunnels, I asked where the nearest tunnel entrance was."

Angel sighed. "There's probably one in the back of this place. Somewhere. Along this cliff, though, the houses are built half on top of each other. Who knows which ones touch the mountain face at a point where a tunnel comes out?"

"If I could once step inside a tunnel, I'd know where he is. I have the geblings' memory of the labyrinth. I'd have a sense of where we're going, then."

"And what's to stop him from forcing you to go through the tunnels? He can keep you safe enough, Lady Patience, but we'll have no protection. I imagine he'd be just as glad to have us all dead somewhere in the tunnels, and bring you safe and sound-and alone-to meet him."

"If I want to step into a tunnel for a moment, Angel, I don't see why I can't do it."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Doyow want to?"

Or was the idea coming to her from Unwyrm? She frowned into the mirror. "Are you trying to make me doubt everything?" she asked.

"I just want to make sure you're doing what's best."

Patience kept silent. Everyone seemed so eager to give her advice. As if the presence of Unwyrm's urging in her mind made her incapable of making decisions on her own. Or was her resentfulness coming from Unwyrm, in his effort to separate her from her companions? She wondered if she could trust her own judgment. It would be so comfortable to concentrate on keeping Unwyrm at bay, while letting Angel lead her up the mountain. Angel could keep her safe. Perhaps she should have been taking his advice all along. She thought about Will and Reck and Ruin in the next room, and wondered if she had been wise to take the road through Tinker's Wood after all.

They were just an added complication. Angel was enough, with Sken to help them where brute strength was needed.

Reck and Ruin were too unpredictable-when had human and gebling interests ever coincided? And Will-what insanity, his religion. With Patience as deity, a love goddess, a sacrifice; that morning on the boat was a dream, a deception. How could she go up the mountain with these strange people tagging along? Who knew what they might do?

She almost suggested to Angel that they ought to leave now, without telling the gebling king, just disappear into the crowds. As soon as she was far enough from Reck and Ruin, Unwyrm would repel them from Cranning again; they could never follow her.

But she felt uneasy about that. A fleeting memory of lips on her cheeks, fingers touching her body. Am I such an adolescent, to be held by such meaningless stirring in the blood? But it held her. And something else, too: the memory of being the gebling king herself. She felt the pressure of that, too, the sense that Cranning was herself, that all the millions of geblings who lived their busy lives here were her responsibility, hers to protect, hers to command. She remembered clearly that she had ruled here once, when only a few thousand geblings inhabited the place. She couldn't cast aside that responsibility, not easily, anyway. So she said nothing.

Angel set aside the shears. "Lovely," he said.

"You look like a prisoner just getting out of Glad Hell," said Sken.

"Thank you," said Patience. "I find the style becoming, myself." She put on her wig and became a woman again. "What's the game of the house?"

"Actually, this is more of a show house." Angel smoothed the back of her hair. "There's a theatre here, with a company of gaunts. But they do have worm-and- slither fights, and the betting gets quite intense sometimes."

"I've never actually seen a worm-and-slither," she said.

"Not pretty," said Sken.

"We ought to bet something, or they'll think we aren't gamblers, and they'll worry about whether we're worth keeping around." Angel tossed a heavy purse into the air and caught it. Sken's gaze never left the bag.