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  The bell of Soma rang seven times, and the last note hung in the air, and the musicians waited—still, poised—until the final shivering whispers died away into the morning hush. Then, at a spoken signal from someone still in the compound, they launched into the Wedding Dance. The dancers leaped in the street, catapulted themselves into the air, and launched into great, rattling flips and clattering spins. The heavy fringes of beads rattled like another phalanx of drummers on their metal costumes. The dancers carried curved swords that they swung at each other’s legs with blinding speed and jumped over as they moved forward; they shouted the names of the god of the week, who was Duria, the spinner, and the god of the day, Bronir, who was the god of joy—and they never missed their footing. Graceful, glorious—they presented a grand and noisy spectacle.

  The sides of the streets all the way from the embassy to the Dokteerak House were already lined with workingmen and women dressed in their finest clothing, out to see and be seen. The paraglese of the Dokteeraks and the city’s parnissas had already jointly declared Durial Bronirsday a holiday, and the common people of Halles were determined not to miss an instant of the grand wedding parade that had come to amuse them; free entertainment came hard in the city, and not often.

  Behind the acrobatic sword dancers came the jugglers; oddly, all of them juggled flashing swords, three at a time. The folk who lined the streets murmured to each other that the trick wasn’t so much—everyone knew jugglers never used sharpened swords. But everyone agreed that the way light caught the edges of the false weapons made them look sharp.

  The concubines followed the jugglers. They flirted with the crowd as they swayed forward, waggling their hips, jutting their breasts, seeming a bit uncomfortable in the unaccustomed covering of their wedding finery.

  The people of Halles had hoped for trained tigers next, or perhaps for some of the weird beasts that inhabited the Scarred lands, but none were forthcoming. Instead, sixteen powerful litter bearers in full dress uniform brought out the first litter, in which sat a handsome man and a rather sturdy-looking woman, both oddly dressed in heavy cloaks, with the customary beaded fringes covering their faces from forehead to upper lip. Behind this first litter came a seemingly endless succession of others, each litter gaudier than the last, each couple swathed and veiled in more or less the same manner. Crimson and black, a sanguinary Galweigh river studded with flashes of gold poured forth from the embassy, and in that outpouring the breathtaking gleam of gemstones seemed as common as mere stones in the bottom of an ordinary river. Glittering faceted rubies and cabochon onyx on everything; studding the litters, the litter bearers, the bride’s family. A few of the more knowledgeable marked the unending flow of gemstones as almost surely glass, but even they had to admit the glitter made for a gorgeous spectacle.

  A choir of male singers accompanied the last litters, those of the ambassadors, the Galweigh paraglese, and finally the bride. They sang the standard selection of wedding songs, dedicating the marriage to Maraxis, the god of sperm, seed, and fertility, in whose month the wedding took place, and dedicating the bride to Drastu, the goddess of womb, eggs, and fertility.

  As was customary, the bride was completely veiled; the younger married women in the crowd tried to make out the lines of her face beneath the swaths of red silk and the gold-beaded fringe (for seeing the eyes of a bride before her wedding was supposed to be an omen of fertility in the coming year) but had to content themselves with responding to the generous waving of her jewel-studded hands. Those gems, everyone agreed, were real. The Hallesites passed rumors back and forth about the bride. She was beautiful and kind, she had taken a meal in the street, eating common food, she had been generous with gifts and money to those she’d encountered in the streets. She had good wide hips, excellent for bearing babies. Breasts big enough that those babies would have plenty of suckle. She wasn’t clever or witty and hadn’t seemed terribly ambitious—always a plus in a woman who would be the bride of a second son.

  Altogether a fine young woman—that was the common consensus. Perhaps too good a girl for their paraglese’s second son, who had the reputation throughout the city for being spoiled, and something of a shit.

  Another batch of sword jugglers and musicians followed the bride’s litter, but they weren’t any great surprise. As wedding parades went, the people decided, this one hadn’t been bad. A few tigers, less clothing and more cleavage on the concubines, and perhaps a couple of fire-eating midgets and it would have been perfect.

  * * *

  In the White Hall of the Sabir House in Calimekka, brilliant morning sunlight slanted in through colored glass windows, throwing harlequin patterns of tinted light across the carved white marble floor so that it looked like a field of jonquillas and rubyhearts and bluebells bursting out from beneath a sudden snow. The delicate vaulted arches of a vast stone canopy soared over the circular stone room, and the ceiling curved with them, echoing back every soft sound born within the room’s confines. In this beautiful sanctuary, the Sabir Wolves walked the final arabesques of their power-building spell, joined by arrivals just in from Halles—Imogene and Lucien Sabir, the head Wolf and his consort. The Wolves murmured in unison, their voices joined by the ghost-whispers of their distant colleagues who moved—insubstantial and only half visible—along the path with them . . . and perhaps joined by other, stranger spirits as well.

  The scent of honeysuckle suddenly filled the room from nowhere, and as it did, all whispering and treading of the path and steady chanting ceased at once, as abruptly and as completely as candles snuffed out by a sudden draft. On the path, the Wolves in the chamber and the ghostly images of Wolves that walked with them from Halles and Costan Selvira and Waypoint halted as one, feet solidly planted on the worn stone lines, heads turned toward the central pillar—which was not carved stone, as the pillar in Halles had been, but solid gold. The air, tinged with spicy curls of caberra incense and with the thickening sweetness of the honeysuckle, and with malevolence, shimmered expectantly. A voice spoke clearly into the mind of each Wolf: “The time has come—let the sacrifice begin.”

  Something pattered softly across the room, unseen but felt by the Wolves nearest it as pressure in the chest, as icy air that stirred not one hair on a single head when it moved by; and all breathed in the cloying honeysuckle reek that thickened, tainted suddenly with the underlying stench of something long dead and rotting.

  Silence. A sense that more than the Wolves within the room waited—that other, older eyes watched, that other ears listened. The walls of the sanctuary sighed, then murmured on their own; words in a long-forgotten tongue that might have been full of meaning or might have been the babble of some long-dead madness.

  Further silence.

  A moment passed, and another, and then a third. Then the faintest of drumbeats rippled through the air. One, then another, then a third, ghostly, drummed by something that was not and had never been human, pulsing through the air, increasing in speed and strength as they increased in volume. The sound was the starting of some monstrous heart that gathered resolution and power as it moved nearer the source of its lifeblood: the White Hall and the center of the Sabir magic. That beat moved nearer, and still nearer, became louder and more forceful. Quickening as it moved nearer. Nearer.

  The Wolves stared straight at the pillar, eyes never wavering toward the room’s single arched doorway, through which the roar of that hellish heartbeat now ripped and raced like the pulse of a stag pursued by wolves.

  A girl appeared, hanging in the air, floating in the embrace of nothingness. Her long black hair had been braided with elaborate attention to detail and woven full of flowers, so that, as she floated through the patterned sunlight, she seemed for an instant to be another flower in that stained-glass garden, an ephemeral creation of light and shadow.

  She should have been beautiful; her delicate cheekbones, fine lips, straight nose, and large, slanting eyes were perfectly shaped. Her hands, resting folded in her lap, were works of art. B
eneath the gauzy whiteness of her gown, her small, perfect breasts curved away to a slender rib cage and a tiny waist.

  She should have been beautiful. Surely, she had once been beautiful.

  But the deadness of her expression, the unnatural pallor of her skin, and the faint tint of bruises imperfectly covered by powders and creams, and revealed by the sharpness of the morning light, gave her the ghastly appearance of a corpse animated by something other than life.

  Three pairs of eyes glanced away from the pillar long enough to study the girl—to be sure that the signs of days and nights of torture and rape and degradation were sufficiently hidden by the makeup and fine clothes to ward off censure or punishment. Crispin, Anwyn, and Andrew then looked to each other from their places on the path, all of them disturbed that Danya didn’t look as convincingly pristine as she had when they’d prepared her in their quarters. Crispin gave the faintest of nods, though—affirmation that if her appearance caused a commotion, he would be the one to deal with it. With no other sign, the three of them returned their gazes to the pillar.

  The girl floated in the cloud of frigid, honeysuckled air to the center of the room, where invisible hands lowered her to the ground and held her against the golden column with an unbreakable grip. She shivered with each beat of the phantom drum, but otherwise gave no sign of life.

  The drumming died into silence and the room sighed again, the walls breathing softly, whispering unintelligible things. The Wolves beneath did not permit themselves to be distracted by the murmurs; they immediately set to the task of casting the spell into which all the preparation had gone. Years of research, more years to cull the proper spell from Ancient texts and reform it from the old tongues of wizards into the rich, rolling Iberan language, months of power-building, hundreds of lesser sacrifices, the kidnapping of a young and powerful enemy Wolf, a delicate diversionary plot and the commitment of all the Sabir Family resources, in both material and manpower—all moved at last to this single time, this single place, this single irrevocable irretrievable opportunity to annihilate the Family’s hereditary enemies, the Galweighs, from Calimekka. No faltering now, no going back, no second thoughts. The dead were in attendance; the living must act.

  In unison the Wolves began the chant.

  Chapter 13

  “Something’s wrong,” Kait said.

  Dùghall looked up from patting the sobbing Tippa. “Wrong in what way?”

  The feeling of all-pervasive evil had, in the last few moments, grown unendurable. Kait felt it as nausea and joint pain and a pounding headache behind her eyeballs, and as the crawling of thousands of invisible spiders up and down her spine. “I’ve felt something evil in Halles since the night of the Naming Day party,” she told him, “but now I feel almost as if it were going to . . .” She frowned. “As if it were going to burst.”

  Dùghall turned to Tippa. “Lie down, child, and breathe as slowly as you can. You’ll feel better soon.” He waited until she curled up on the velvet-upholstered bench, then came over and sat next to Kait. “You’ve felt the presence of evil. And you feel it now.” He frowned, but to Kait he also had the scent of excitement about him.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you feel it?”

  “I don’t know how. I just do.”

  “That isn’t what I meant to ask. Describe the sensations by which this evil tells you of its existence.”

  Kait nodded, understanding. “First as pressure against my skin. And tingling along the back of my neck. A sort of . . . of greasiness, I suppose, that seemed to move around and through me. Now . . . I feel as if my eyes are about to explode from my head, and I want to vomit, and I hurt everywhere.”

  Dùghall’s eyes were wide. “Yes. Yes. And the sensation of greasiness?”

  “I still feel that, but everything else is so much stronger that it doesn’t bother me as much.”

  “Yes. Precisely. Tell me . . . have you had dreams recently?”

  “Nightmares. Every night. Monsters chasing me, and death everywhere—I haven’t had a good sleep since we got to Halles.”

  “Just so.” Dùghall had begun to grin. The scent of excitement around him intensified. “I’m going to do something. Tell me what you feel.”

  Kait waited. Dùghall sat with his hands clasped on his knees, eyes squeezed tightly closed . . . and did nothing. And then, suddenly, Kait’s headache was gone, and the nausea and the pain with it. She felt wonderful—as wonderful as she had the moment she ran into Hasmal. Perhaps even better, since her discomfort and anxiety had been so much worse to begin with.

  “It’s all gone,” she said. “All the evil, all the pain.”

  “Marvelous,” Dùghall murmured, so low that only she could hear him. “This is simply marvelous, Kait-cha.”

  “Why?” She kept her own voice pitched nearly as low and soft as his.

  “What you sense is magic being worked. I must assume that no one taught you to do this . . . ?”

  “No. Of course not.” Bewildered, Kait stared at her uncle. Magic? She sensed magic being worked? But no one did magic—its practice had been forbidden ever since humans had climbed out of the rubble left by the Wizards’ War and set about rebuilding the world. “Why would you say I felt magic?”

  He took her hand and held it between his own. “Don’t think that because it is forbidden, magic isn’t practiced. Or even that it is solely the tool of evil. If you can sense it, girl, you have the potential to use it. And you could do good things with it—magic was once one of the paths to enlightenment.” He sighed. “Even being able to tell when you are around magic, though, will be invaluable to you as a diplomat in the Family’s service. We always need to know when our enemies and allies have capabilities that we don’t.”

  Kait considered that for a while. Magic was heresy of the worst sort; doing magic was worse even than being Karnee. If she could sense magic, did that mean she was doing magic? Was she guilty of this further heresy in spite of having never sought it out?

  She probably was. It didn’t matter. She could only die once, and the automatic death sentence she carried just by being Karnee couldn’t be made any worse if she added a cartload of other sins.

  Dùghall seemed able to follow the tenor of her thoughts, for he said, “You think about it and discover that things can’t get any worse for you, don’t you?”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “Well, now I’ll tell you how they can get better. You must let me teach you how to tap your talents with magic. Once you know how to use the forces all around you, you’ll be able to avoid the pain you feel when you are close to those who are working darsharen, which is the magic of Wolves, and the sort of magic that is making you feel sick. And with farhullen, which is the magic of Falcons and a force for good, you will be able to overcome—and even prevent—some evils. Your ability to serve the Family will increase beyond your imagining.” As he told her this, his face lit up as if he were a boy receiving a great gift, and he radiated scents of pleasure and excitement.

  Kait remained cautious, though his enthusiasm allayed most of her misgivings. Everything Dùghall had ever done with Kait had made her life better. She trusted him. So she asked, “If this is so—if magic can be used for good and not just for evil—why is it forbidden?”

  Dùghall made a disgusted face. “Because the parnissas would rather forbid what they don’t understand than learn how it might be of value if it were permitted. This is, I think, a characteristic common to those who seek public power. Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.”

  Kait despised the parnissas. If ever they discovered what she was, they would demand her death that same instant. Her parents had risked their own lives for five years substituting another child for her in the inspections on the Day of Infants. Yet she had done nothing to deserve death; and she could not forgive the parnissas for enforcing the laws that demanded it. “Teach me,”
she said. “I’m quick, and I work hard. You’ll find me an eager student.”

  “We’ll start tomorrow.” He smiled, then looked over at Tippa. She was sitting again, and sobbing twice as loudly as she had been before, and now she was rocking back and forth, too. His smile tightened and Kait could see strain in his eyes. “Meanwhile, I can see that your cousin feels she’s not getting the attention she deserves. Excuse me while I tend to her . . . or else I suspect she’ll resort to tearing her hair and clothes and wailing like a war mourner.”

  He moved to her cousin’s side and left Kait to contemplate magic and what it meant to her, and to her world.

  * * *

  “Sacred is the binding of two lives, sacred the bond between two families, sacred the promises made this day.” The parnissa who presided over the wedding shifted on her dais, and the morning sunlight caught her hair and spun a silver nimbus around her head. She smiled down at the veiled bride and bridegroom who stood before her on the rise at the north end of the basin. She smiled at the representatives of the two Families, the ranks of blue and gold filling the stone risers on the west side of the amphitheater, and the wall of red and black that rose to the east side. She even deigned to smile briefly at the troops of entertainers who crowded all the way around the rim of the amphitheater, though most parnissas would have not noticed them; the gods had nothing to say to their sort on these occasions.

  Norlis, the embassy master sergeant, was playing the part of Macklin Galweigh, father of the bride. He watched the swordswoman playing the bride slide her right hand slowly into the deep folds of her skirt. He forced himself not to stiffen and he kept his breathing easy in spite of himself, and in spite of knowing that the same anticipation ran through the veins of every other man and woman in the Galweigh troops. Almost . . . almost . . .