The rite was heart-wrenching and exhilarating. Only when they carried the white-silk-draped bier past the window did I falter. But I closed my eyes and prayed that the songs of the Dar’Nethi would echo far from Avonar. “Wherever you are, my dear one, listen well,” I whispered. “Let the beauty of this night give you comfort.” I would not grieve. I would not.

Even after the procession wound out of sight, the singing rang through the frosty air, echoing off the mountain peaks well into the night. But time for my departure had come, and I could no longer permit my thoughts to linger on either beauty or sorrow. I donned the shapeless garb of black and brown and allowed Gar’Dena to tie a red kerchief over my eyes.

“Please forgive this,” he said. “Each piece of our mosaic must remain separate lest we reveal the whole picture too soon.” He led me through his warm house, scented with spices and flowers and baking bread. And then we stepped through a magical portal, so the chilly prickle of my skin told me, into an echoing room with no scent but cold stone.

“Now, my dear lady”-Gar’Dena spoke loudly into my ear, as if my blindfold might be hampering my hearing- “our honor and blessings go with you. In fourteen days you will be contacted, and shortly after, as the Way leads us, we shall be together again, rejoicing at our success, your son safely in our care. Until then…” He grasped my hand in his meaty one and kissed it. “Now, take three steps forward, turn immediately to your left, and then left again.”

Three steps forward. A tremulous disturbance of the air. Another chilly ring surrounding me. As I turned left and then left again, a grim voice spoke in my head. Do not be afraid. You are not alone…

One more step and the air and space around me changed dramatically. Hot. Dry. The scent of smoke and ash and seared stone. Air, stale and close. I believed I could reach out and touch walls on every side. Cool, damp hands grasped my own, and a man whispered in my ear, close enough that I could feel his warm breath. “Quickly, step forward. One moment…” I stood in the hot, airless darkness for a moment and felt the quivering boundary of the portal vanish. “You may remove your eye covering. You’ll not see me again after this day.”

I yanked off the kerchief. The tiny, windowless room was lit by one candle. My companion pressed his ear to a wooden door and then faced me. Wearing a well-tailored coat with a high collar, trimmed with a great deal of gold, and knee breeches and hose of light tan, he was almost as large a man as Gar’Dena, but a much harder man, who crowded the little room with his muscular presence. Yet, despite his robust frame, his complexion was gray and unhealthy-looking, and the hollows of his eyes were dark and sagging. My stomach tightened considerably when I saw that he wore the plain gold earring of the Zhid and that his eyes were cold and empty as only those of a Zhid can be. He bowed. “Welcome to Ce Uroth. This is quite a risk you take.”

“Perhaps not so much a risk as you take, sir.” To live as a Zhid, hiding one’s soul…

“But I have a great deal for which to make amends, which you do not, and I am accustomed to my risks. Now to our business-”

From somewhere not far from this room where we spoke so politely intruded such a dreadful scream that I thought it must be an animal at the slaughter. Such a notion was banished quickly when my host bowed his head. “One thing at a time,” he whispered to himself, the cast of his skin even more sickly for that moment.

Unwrapping a square of coarse brown cloth, he revealed a thumbnail-sized slip of stamped metal. “The shipment of uncollared servants to Zhev’Na will occur at dawn. You will be added at the last moment. This is your identification tag. You know of them?”

“Yes.” Gar’Dena had told me of the plain metal tag, fixed to one’s left ear like the earrings of the Zhid, that carried a Drudge’s name and assigned duty, and the enchantments that compelled the servant’s obedience.

“To attach it will cause only brief discomfort. Your tag will carry your identification and a false enchantment- lacking any power of compulsion-but you understand that the least failure in obedience on your part will be noted and quickly remedied?”

“I understand.” I said it calmly. But my fists did not unclench until the sting in my earlobe had dulled, and I had proven to myself that I could still move and think as I wished.

A loud knock on the door made my host frown. He waved me into the deepest shadows in the corner of the room. I crouched in as small a space as I could manage between two stacks of crates.

“Slavemaster Gernald?” called the intruder.

“What is it?” growled my companion, holding the candle in front of his chest and pulling the door slightly open.

“Sir, Dujene has two more collars for this lot and wants to know if you intend to set the seals. He had already sealed the first, when I told him of your desire to set more of them yourself.” I could not see the speaker through the narrow opening of the door.

“Good.” The man snuffed the candle and set it on a stack of crates beside the door. “Yes, I want to be there for all collarings until further notice. I’ve had too much work and too little pleasure lately. Nice when one can experience both together.” He stepped out and closed the door behind him. The rattle and snap of a hasp left me feeling not at all secure.

For half an hour or an hour I huddled in the dark room. It seemed to be a storage room for ledgers and documents of various kinds. My anxieties were not soothed by the bone-chilling screams that occurred twice more. Shortly after the second instance, I heard voices outside my hiding place. “Is that all, Slavemaster?”

“I’ve no more need of you tonight. I plan to sup, to make one more attempt to find the records Gensei Seto requested, and then to retire.”

“As you wish, Slavemaster.”

A door closed. Shortly thereafter, my own was unlocked and opened. The Zhid shoved a small flask and a plate of meat, cheese, and bread into my hands. “I would recommend you eat this. You’ll get nothing decent until your mission is complete.”

“Thank you.” I touched the small round loaf. It was cold and dry.

He lit the candle with a touch of his finger. “None but I have entry to this room. Nonetheless, I will lock the door until I come for you in a few hours. Do you have the scarf to cover your hair? No female servant is permitted to have uncovered hair.”

I pulled the red kerchief from my pocket. “I have it.”

“Don’t forget it. I wish you a safe night. May our work be the redemption of the worlds.” He didn’t sound like a man who could have caused such screams as I had heard, but I suspected that he was. Perhaps that accounted for the diseased look of him.

The door closed behind him again, the lock snapped, and I was abandoned in the pool of candlelight. As I picked at the tasteless cheese and bread and sipped from the flask of warm ale, I imagined with a twinge of jealousy how Paulo would curl up on the hard floor and be asleep in an instant. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to sleep in Zhev’Na. Of course, as is often the case when sleep seems impossible, at some point in that night, my mind let go and I drifted off. But some time later, when the key turned in the lock again, I was on my feet, wide awake, before my host reappeared in the doorway.

“Quickly. Quietly. Follow me.” He led me through a large, bare room with a wide desk and a single chair, and then through a dim passageway rife with unwholesome smells. Just outside a wooden door fastened with a long bolt, he motioned me to be still. After a moment’s listening, he quietly guided the bolt from its latch, cracked the door, and peered through. Beyond the door a goodly number of people were murmuring and milling about. A harsh-voiced woman shouted for attention.

The Zhid closed the door, grabbed my arm, and drew me close. He held up three fingers and pointed toward the door. I didn’t get his meaning until he motioned again, counting one finger and then two… When the third finger came up, he cracked the door open just wide enough to shove me through. I stood at the rear of a line of fifteen or twenty rumpled, sleepy people moving slowly forward through a cavernous room. All were dressed as I was.

Another, larger group of Drudges-perhaps fifty altogether-were being led through a wide door into another room, prodded by three Zhid with long sticks who kept yelling at them to be quiet or he’d have them eating sand for a week. Behind them a gaunt man, barefoot and wearing a short gray tunic, dragged a wheeled sledge piled high with rough mud-bricks. The wide metal collar around his neck told me he was a Dar’Nethi slave.

Near the head of the line in which I stood, three Zhid stood at a fuzzy discontinuity in the air that I now recognized as a magical portal. One of the Zhid, a woman, questioned those in line and ticked off items on a list. Another seemed to be matching the responses with the ear tag. A third Zhid laid his hand on the head of every person before they passed through the portal. Hunting Dar’Nethi, certainly.

“Name and service,” snapped the woman writing the list to a hunched man in line ahead of me.

“Grigo, butcher.”

“Step through.”

“Name and service.”

“Mag, scrub.”

“Step through.”

“Name and service.”

“Eda, sewing.”

“Step through.”

And so I did and found myself at last in the heart of all my fears-Zhev’Na.