"What makes you think this is a way out?" asked Patience as they ran. "It's right against the mountain face."

There was a spiral stairway leading upstairs to the actors' rooms, where the pleasures of the performance were often continued through the night, with improvisation and audience participation. Since there was nowhere else to go, they climbed. Patience, between the geblings, stumbled and fell against the stairs.

"Unwyrm knows what I've just done," she said. "I can feel it-he's trying to punish me for leaving Angel."

She tried to climb, but could hardly take a step. Unwyrm was pounding at her; she was a storm of conflicting passions; she could not think.

Ruin ahead of her and Reck behind, they dragged and pushed her up the stairs. There were rows of dressing rooms here, with naked gaunts and humans busy cleaning themselves up from the last show or preparing for the next. The geblings held her by the arms and led her down the corridor. Step. Step. The movement gave her something to concentrate on. Unwyrm's surge began to weaken-he couldn't maintain such a powerful call for long. Gradually her self-control returned to her, and she began to walk faster, without the geblings' help.

"Are there windows in the dressing rooms on the outside wall?" she asked.

"This one," said Ruin.

A naked young gaunt was glittering his crotch when they came in and tried the window.

"It's cold out there," he said mildly.

"Lock the door, please," said Patience.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It doesn't lock."

"Pretty far down," said Ruin, looking out the window.

"And the walkway isn't very wide there. A lot farther down if we miss."

Patience looked out the window. "Child's play," she said. She swung out the window, hung from her hands, and dropped. The geblings had no choice but to follow her. Reck ended up sprawled on the walkway. "We geblings are not wholly descended from apes," she said.

"We don't have your instincts for jumping out of windows."

Patience didn't bother to apologize. The night was dark, with clouds only a few meters above them, and it was hard to see where they were going, but they broke into a run. Suddenly Patience felt very tired. It was a long way up the mountain. She hadn't slept since last night on the boat; why couldn't she just go back to her room and rest? She wanted to rest. But she shook off the feeling; she knew where it came from. Unwyrm was not going to make anything easy for them. As long as Angel had been with them, Unwyrm hadn't had to put obstacles in their way. But now, if Unwyrm was to keep the geblings from arriving with Patience in his lair, he would have to use other people to try to pry them from Patience.

Or kill them. Patience had no desire to face Unwyrm alone. She knew his strength, and needed help; if the geblings were all the help she could get, then she certainly didn't want to lose them. She could trust no one else. Everyone was her enemy.

They stopped at their rooms in the inn long enough for Reck to get her bow and Ruin his knife, and to take cloaks for the climb upward into winter. There was no human conspiracy working against them, only Unwyrm sensing the nearest people and arousing them against the Heptarch's party. So there was no particular danger in going to their rooms-only in staying for more than a few minutes. They did not separate: the geblings stayed with her in the room she had shared with Angel and Sken, and she in turn went with them to theirs. Someone knocked on their door as they were preparing to leave.

"It's probably just the innkeeper," said Reck.

"It's death," said Patience. "Unwyrm will see to it that we meet nothing but death on our way up the mountain."

Ruin thrust open the window. Patience climbed out.

The window hung over a thirty-meter drop. It was too much even for her. But she had always been a good climber, and she saw it would be easy enough to get to the roof. "Trust your human half," she said. "You'll need all your ape ancestry for this." She stood on the sill, reached up to the rain gutter, and pulled herself up.

Reck followed right behind her. Ruin had barely joined them on the roof when they heard a roaring sound.

Flames leaped out of the window of the room they had just left.

"We'll have to be quick about this, won't we?" said Ruin.

"Up," said Patience. They ran along the rooftop to where a ladder connected it to the walkway of the next level. How many kilometers to the glacier at the top of Skyfoot? Patience didn't want to remember. She just set her hands and feet to the ladder and climbed.

Chapter 16. ANGEL

SKEN STRUGGLED TO UNTIE WILL, UNTIL HE SAID TO HER, "Wouldn't it be faster to cut it?"

"Oh, now he can talk. Why didn't you say anything before?" She sawed with her dull eating knife. "When I was tying you, why not a word about how you were innocent?"

"Because somebody wasn't innocent, and I didn't know who."

A cord finally separated. "It was Angel."

"I gathered that." His hands and feet came free, once the central knot was cut. He got to his feet quickly-he hadn't been tied long enough to become stiff.

Just as he reached the door, the boxmaster ran by, waving a cudgel and leading a group of highly irregular soldiers. Certainly not the official guard, just a spur-of-the-moment mob gathered to serve Unwyrm's purpose.

Real soldiers would be summoned soon enough. Will decided to make no effort to follow them. He knew Patience and the geblings well enough not to fear for their safety yet. And he had another matter to attend to.

"Is there enough of that cord left. Lady Sken, to bind this fellow before he wakes up?"

Sken stepped into the corridor and joined him beside Angel's unconscious body. "They left him?"

"Unwyrm was urging them on. He doesn't let his people have many distractions."

She prodded Angel with her toe. "Are you sure nobody's home? He's a crafty one."

"Poke him long enough and he's bound to wake up. I don't want his hands free when he does."

Sken tied him-Will knew from experience what an admirable job she could do-and together they carried the old man back into the box. Only then did Will pay any attention to Kristiano and Strings. The old gaunt was awake again.

"What happened to me?" asked Strings.

"Angel thought your story was getting too personal."

"Story? Oh, yes. Yes, my story. I tried to lie. I could feel how much Angel wanted me to lie."

"But you told the truth anyway?"

"The girl. She wanted the truth more than he wanted the lie. It was very distressing. I think I fainted."

"You were helped along."

"I knew him," said Strings. "I knew them all. But Angel-he was a good one, a bright one. When I took him up the mountain, there wasn't a trace of evil desire in him."

"I couldn't even guess what a gaunt thinks is evil," said Sken.

"We think the same as everyone else thinks," said the gaunt. "And like everyone else, our actions have no relation to our opinions of good and evil. I wasn't chosen accidentally as the guide for the Wise. I'm very clever."

"Your dance was beautiful."

"Clever. Merely clever. It's the best a gaunt can hope to achieve. Yes, Krisfiano?" He tousled the hair of the beautiful gauntling beside him. "I am the peak of gauntish ambition. But don't grieve; we are the ultimate innocents.

We are never the cause of our own actions. It allows us to reach a ripe old age untroubled by guilt."

Will thought he heard irony in the old gaunt's tone.

"You knew what you were leading them to?"

He shrugged eloquently. "They all wanted to go."

"I also want to go," said Will. "Will you take me?"

"He doesn't want me to take you," said Strings.

"And he makes the most urgent requests of me. I have never denied him."