Another, more predictable show was beginning on the stage; Patience drew the curtain to shut out the sight of it and muffle the sound. Will opened the candle-window all the way, so they could see each other.

"Did you like it?" asked the old gaunt.

"Very much," said Patience.

"Yes, yes, you're the one I felt. You're the one who needed to see the real ending. So many were disappointed, but I felt you, stronger than any.

"How does it usually end?" asked Sken.

"Oh, with an audience like this, we usually touch each other three ways each. Scum. No sense of art." He smiled at Patience. "That was the best the ending has ever been. The collapse, with my head still up-ah, thank you, lady."

It had not occurred to Patience, though she should have realized it. Gaunts always respond to the strongest desire. No wonder they had pleased her so perfectly.

Unwyrm's intrusion had made all her passions so much more intense that of course she was the most dominating person in the theatre.

Yet even though the impulse for the ending had come from her, the execution of it was theirs. "You were beautiful," she said.

"You don't even want a taste of Kristiano here, do you?" said the old gaunt, pointing to the boyok. His surprise was obvious.

"No," she said.

"Or me. But you're hot as a bitch in heat, lady. I could feel it before you came in the building."

"Never mind," snapped Angel. Patience saw just a flicker of movement from Will, too, as if he had been prepared to stop the conversation even more abruptly than Angel.

"Who are you?" Patience asked.

"Strings," he said. "Not really Lord Strings, of course. I never heard of a gaunt being a lord, did you? Just-Strings. And Kristiano, my dear boyok, best I ever had."

"The finest artist from ice to Cranwater," said Kristiano.

It was a slogan, of course, but the gauntling believed it.

"We travel," said Strings.

"Where are you going? We'll go with you, and perform for you every night. Your need is very strong, and you guide us into beauty we crave to create."

Reck and Ruin had remained silent throughout this human entertainment. It was well known that geblings felt contempt for the human fascination with sex. Their own couplings were informed by empathy, so that each knew when and how the other was satisfied. They didn't hunger, as humans did, for some relief from isolation, for some reassurance that what one felt, the other felt.

So it was not surprising that Ruin immediately spoke against the suggestion. "We have companions enough for our purposes."

Angel coldly corrected him. "We have more than enough companions, sir."

At once Strings looked a bit ill. "I really don't enjoy disputes, if you please."

"It was a pleasure to watch you," Patience said. "But my gebling friend is right. We're here to sample the pleasures of Freetown, and then be on our way."

Strings laughed.

Kristiano touched her knee. "Lady, great lady, Strings can't be deceived, not by someone whose need shouts so clearly."

"I know where you're going," said Strings, "and I know the way."

Will spoke softly. "Let's leave here. Now."

Patience was uncertain. Obviously this gaunt was unusually adept at empathy. Yet how could empathy tell him her destination? There were no words in it, no images.

As if in answer to her question, Strings let his head rock backward at an impossible angle, as if all the muscles in his neck had gone slack. Then he began to murmur, his words an incantation. "I'm not so old now that I can forget the taste of the need like a knife in your heart. I've tasted the hunger, the yearning to climb to the ice where he waits, where he waits, where he waits. And the lady he calls is the one that he waits for, he calls you more strongly than any before you, but under the layers of pain that he sends you I feel something stronger than ever before. You are his enemy. You are his lover. And I am your guide to his lovemaking chamber."

During the speech, Kristiano had almost unconsciously begun to move, as if the words were lyrics and he the visual music. Even in the confines of the box, the shape and movement of the boyok's body were exquisite. He oriented himself, perhaps instinctively, so that the light from the candle-window played off his arms and hands, profiled his face, and made shadows that became part of the dance.

How can one so young be so experienced already in the most difficult of arts? No sooner had she asked herself the question than Patience saw an answer to it:

Kristiano was enacting the dance that Strings gave him.

Strings-and Kristiano his puppet. But that would mean that Kristiano was responding to a gaunt as if the gaunt were a human or gebling, with a powerful will.

"How does a gaunt put a dance into a gauntling?" she asked.

Strings came out of his trance, looking confused.

"Dance?" Then he looked at Kristiano, as if he had been unaware the boyok was dancing. "Not now," he said.

Kristiano at once relaxed his pose.

"You gave him a dance as you spoke to me," she said. "How can you do it, when you have no will?"

He was preparing to lie; she could see that. But if he was indeed Unwyrm's guide up the mountain-for the Wise who had come before her, and now for the seventh seventh seventh daughter-then she had to have the truth from him, and for some reason she knew that this was the question that mattered.

His face contorted. "Lady, you torture me with your desire."

"Then ease yourself, and answer me."

"I am a monster among gaunts," he said.

"Because you have a will, after all?"

"Because I wish I had one. I wish. I take them up the mountain-from the time I was little I find these men and women with the hunger on them, and I take them up the mountain to the yellow door. It's where they want to go, but they never come down. And you, such beauty you gave me, do you think I can forgive you far being such a lifegiver? Like the water down the mountain out of his palace, a lifegiver, and I'll take you up the mountain like all the others and you'll never come down and what am I to do then? How are we ever to dance again, now that we've found the audience that can bring us to life?"

Again, Kristiano danced during Strings' recitative, giving a strangely separated life to his words.

"I'm old," said Strings. "The boyok here, he is my child-self. What dance can I do now, except to stand and give the others their movements around me? Not until you came, not for years have I done anything but stand in the middle of my dance."

"Then you are powerful," said Patience. "Enough to control the others, anyway."

"I have no will, great lady, but I have desires, as strong as yours are, hot as fires, cold as the bedchamber waiting for you, and perfect, yes, I know the perfect shapes. I desire the shape of perfection from them, and they answer me, they follow me. Let me follow you, lady." His eyes pled with her.

She tried to understand the pleading look he gave her.

All that he had told her was true. But something more.

She had to know even what he kept back from her. She let the desire grow within her, pushed into the background her desire for Will, her fear of this place; she even subdued, for a moment, her need to rise to where Unwyrm waited.

His face twisted. His breath came in labored heaves.

And then, suddenly, out of a mask of agony he spoke again. "Don't go up the mountain, lady, he'll have you then, all alone, there'll be no help for you."

"I'm not alone," she said.

"You will be, you will be, except for the liar, except for his puppet, except for the wise man who went and came back, the traitor who-"

As he spoke, Patience thought of the one man who claimed to be Wise and who admitted he had been to Cranning and returned. She looked at him, and so the others did, too. Will, ready to betray her for Unwyrm's sake.