Angel showed no reaction at all. He just reached out his hand in a grandfatherly way and said, "Come along, little lady. We'd better eat before I lose everything." A few people chuckled-it wasn't likely that anyone would actually say such a thing unless there wasn't the remotest possibility of bankrupting.

They ate at a place with glass walls that looked out over the lake and forest on one side, and faced a delicate and beautiful cliff garden on the other. The food was as good as anything Patience had eaten in King's Hill, though many of the fruits were dwarfed and surprisingly tart, and the meat was flavored with liquors that she didn't know.

And then, when dinner was over and darkness had come. Angel made a show of inquiring where to find the Melting Snow. The master of tables cast a long and disapproving glance toward Patience-the Melting Snow was apparently a place where decent people, even plea- sure-seekers in Freetown, did not take virginal girls.

Angel was unabashed.

"Why are we really going?" she finally asked him.

They walked along wooden runways that hung precariously over rooftops and gardens three stories down. The geblings were close behind, but not close enough to hear.

Will and Sken were too large to walk abreast of anyone; they filed along to the rear.

"Didn't you see?" asked Angel. "The little fellow sought us out. From the time he came into the gaming room. As soon as he gave me the message, he left."

"What does it mean, then?"

"Gaunts have no will, Patience. They sense the desires of the people nearest them, and try to satisfy whatever desire is strongest. They make notoriously undependable messengers, since they can be distracted so easily.

But this one was unwavering."

"Unwyrm?"

"It occurred to me that he would be able to keep a gaunt focused on a single purpose."

"Then we should avoid this place."

"As I have futilely tried to tell you before, Unwyrm is trying to get us into his lair, and we are trying to get there. It isn't until we arrive that our purposes diverge."

It was a hopelessly stupid answer. Unwyrm wanted Patience there, but he didn't want anyone else. Obviously, then, the danger was not to Patience, but to everyone who accompanied her; if Unwyrm could, he would strip them all away so that she would come unaccompanied into his presence.

She didn't have time to find out why Angel had said such nonsense, however, for they arrived at the Melting Snow and Angel at once began to arrange a table. Patience supposed that he still thought her so childish he could fob off a stupid answer while he kept his real reasoning to himself. After all this time, he still underestimated her. Or did he? Perhaps the reason for what he was doing was obvious, and only Unwyrm's pressure kept her from understanding. She would not notice if Unwyrm impaired her thinking, but Angel would, and perhaps he had already seen that her judgment was unreliable.

It frightened her, and Unwyrm's joy surged within her.

The show was just ending as the boxmaster seated them in a grill-fronted box overlooking the circular stage.

The boy ok from the gaming room was there, along with two tarks and an unusually tall, sad-looking gaunt with long, grease-gray hair. They were all naked, all fragilely, ethereally beautiful as gaunts were supposed to be. But in the final minutes of the dance. Patience realized that this was no mere sex show, designed to warm the couches in the boxes around the stage. There was a story being enacted through the dance. The sad-looking gaunt was not even aroused. He just stood, tall and straight, yet with his head hanging limply to one side, hair falling unkempt across his face, as if his shoulders were suspended by taut wires from the ceiling, but nothing held up his head at all. The boyok was trying to reach the old gaunt; the tarks, just as young as he, and almost as boyish, tried to hold him back with touches and strokes that were at once violent restraint and gentle provocation.

The boyok was aroused-the customers were paying for it, weren't they?-but he seemed uninterested in what the tarks were doing. Finally, as the music climaxed, the boyok reached the old gaunt. Patience steeled herself for some unpleasantly coarse pornographic climax, but instead the gauntling climbed the old fellow as if he were a tree, knelt on his shoulders-his balance was precarious and yet he did not so much as waver-and then lifted the old gaunt's head by the hair, until it was upright and alert as the rest of his erect body.

Silence. The end.

The audience applauded, but not with enthusiasm. Obviously, they had noticed what Patience had seen: that this was not a sex show at all, but rather dance with an erotic theme. The climax had been aesthetic, not orgasmic.

The audience was, quite properly, disappointed.

They had been cheated.

But Patience did not feel cheated. It had kindled in her, in those few moments, a longing that defied her self-control and brought tears to her eyes. It was not the sort of passion that Unwyrm put in her, not a compelling, coercive urge. It was, rather, a melancholy longing for something not physical at all. She wanted desperately to have her father back again, to have him smile at her; she longed for her mother's embrace. It was love that the dance had aroused in her, love as the Vigilants spoke of it: a pure need for someone else to take joy in you. And almost without thought, she turned to look at Will, who stood near the door at the back of the box. She saw in his guileless face a perfect mirror of the longing that she felt; and she rejoiced, for he was also looking at her, searching for the same thing in her.

Then she turned back to look at the stage. The applause had died, but still the four gaunts held their final pose. Wasn't the show over, after all? The music was gone; there was only silence, except for the breathing and murmuring of the audience in their boxes and in the cheap open seats on the floor. For a long few seconds, the pose remained perfect. Then, slowly, the old gaunt began to sag. The boyok pulled upward on his hair, as if trying to hold him up, but the gaunt sank from the shoulders, as if the boyok's weight were too much for him.

As he sank, he turned, so that when he finally stretched full length on the floor, propped barely on an elbow, with the boyok supine across him, still gripping his hair and pulling his head up, the old gaunt's face was directly toward the box where Patience sat. Indeed, his eyes seemed to see her, and her only, looking at her with supplication. Yes, she said silently. This is the perfect ending for the dance. In silence, in collapse, and yet with the boyok's effort unabated, the head still up, the face still skyward.

Then, as if her unspoken approval were the cue, the lamps were snuffed out all at once. The darkness lasted only a second or two, but when the lamps were rekindled, the stage was clear. Patience applauded, and some in the audience joined her; most had lost interest. "I want to meet them," said Patience. "Gaunts or not, that was beautiful."

"I'll go get them," said Will.

"I will," said Angel.

"Then give the money to me," said Will.

"I won't be robbed," said Angel.

"I've been here before," said Will. "You're safe on the open street, but not in the passageways of a house like this."

Angel paused a crucial moment, then gave two purses to Will. Patience knew that he had probably kept most of the money anyway, but it was a compromise, and there was no point in arguing over something stupid.

If the show had been a success, there would have been little hope of getting even one of the gaunts up into their boxes, not without a serious effort to bribe the boxmaster.

But since it had failed, only the two tarks had been spoken for-a tark was a tark, after all. Both the old gaunt and the boyok from the gaming room followed Angel when he returned to their box.