GREEN IS THE COLOR
John M. Ford

[06 feb 2002—scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

John M. Ford is the author of several popular fantasy and science fiction novels, including the World Fantasy Award winner The Dragon Waiting, the Star Trek novels The Final Reflection and How Much for Just the Planet?, and many short stories of distinction. "Green Is the Color" takes place in the shared world of Liavek, a fantasy world invented as a literary game by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, into which they have invited other authors to write stories for "shared-world anthologies. " The characters and the story are the invention of Ford, while background elements, such as the Green Order, belong to the setting of Liavek in common. Most shared-world stories are, frankly, undistinguished when removed from their immediate game-playing context, but not so with Ford's. This is one of the finest stories of love, death, and enchantment in all of modern fantasy fiction.

Arianai had gone two blocks down the narrow, empty lane before she realized she'd missed Wizard's Row. Or it had missed her; sometimes the street vanished on a moment's notice. It was never individual wizards' houses that came and went, always the whole Row. She wondered just who decided the issue.
It was a gray, gloomy spring afternoon, matching her mood. She half hoped for rain, though she wasn't dressed for it, in white cotton shirt and pants and a thin flannel cape. Rain would at least be something definite—she could point to it and say, "Look, it's raining, no wonder we're all unraveled."
No, she thought. She didn't need cheap excuses. She needed Wizard's Row, and that meant she needed someone to give her directions.
There wasn't anyone on the little street, and all the houses seemed to be shut tight. Some of the doors were boarded up. But a little way ahead there was a glow of light, a shopfront, two high narrow windows and a high narrow door.
There was a rattle like bones overhead. Arianai looked up. Hanging from a wooden bracket, apparently as the shop sign, was a puppet on a string. It danced in the slight breeze—didn't just swing, but actually danced, throwing out its elbows and knees. The only sound on the street was a whisper of air. There was something eerie about the marionette, dancing to no music.
Arianai went inside. It was surprisingly spacious within. The narrow storefront was only a third of the shop's actual width.
There were shelves filled with stuffed animals of cloth and fur, dozens of dolls, some with porcelain heads and arms, little ships with linen sails. More marionettes hung on the walls, and kites of paper and silk. A table displayed boards for shah and tafel and other games, dice, decks of cards; on another, two armies of toy soldiers faced each other in precise ranks, brightly painted in the liveries of Liavek and Ka Zhir four centuries ago. There were smells of sandalwood and hide glue, and a faint taste of raw wood in the air.
A long counter crossed the back of the shop. Behind it sat a pale-skinned man with long, slender limbs and very black hair. He was working at a piece of wood with a small rasp. Other tools and bits of carving were laid out on the counter within his reach. Behind him were more shelves, more toys; on the topmost shelf was a wooden train, a model of the one being built along the coast from Hrothvek to Saltigos. It had shiny brass fittings and red-spoked wheels.
"Good afternoon," the man said, without looking up. "Browsing is free. The prices are outrageous." His voice was pleasant without being friendly.
Arianai said. "Excuse me, master ... I am looking for Wizard's Row. I seem to have gotten lost."
"You, or it?" said the dark-haired man.
"I'm not certain," Arianai said, and laughed, more from the release of tension than the joke.
"Well," the man said, "the Row is either ninety paces to the right of my door, or else it is not. Happy to have been of assistance, mistress." He held up the piece of whittled wood, blew dust from a hole. He picked up a length of braided white cord and ran it experimentally through the hole.
"That's a shiribi puzzle, isn't it?" Arianai said.
"It is."
"I'd always wondered where those came from. You see the White priests with them, but ... "
"But you cannot imagine White priests making anything with their hands?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to insult your faith."
The man laughed. "If I had a faith, that wouldn't be it." He put down the wood and cord, picked up another stick and a file, went back to work. He had long-fingered, spidery hands, quick and very smooth.
Arianai turned toward the door. An arrangement of soft toys drew her eye; in the center was a fuzzy camel as high as her knee, with a ragdoll rider perched on the hump. The rider, dressed in the robes of the desert nomads, had one arm upraised, with a yarn whip coiled down it—an ordinary pose, but there was something about the way the person was bent forward, and the camel's neck was bent back, that let Arianai hear the rider muttering and grumbling, and the camel—most obstinate beast that ever the gods devised—well, snickering. The toy was a perfect little sketch of a stubborn camel and its hapless owner, in cloth and stitches and yarn.
Perhaps, Arianai thought, there was luck in her wrong turn after all. "Who makes these toys?" she said.
"I do," said the black-haired man, "when I am not interrupted." Arianai was not certain if it was meant as a joke.
She said, "I am looking for something for a child."
"That is very usual in a toyshop." The man stopped his filing, but still did not look up. "Even if the child is oneself, many years late."
"This is a child who cannot sleep," Arianai said.
"Perhaps a music box," the toymaker said, examining the bit of puzzle in his fingers. "I have one that plays 'Eel Island Shoals' with a sound of waves as background, very restful. Or the flannel cat on the third shelf, beside the carousel   . inside it are a cam and a spring; when wound up, it makes a sound like a beating heart. Some people find it quite soothing." The toymaker's voice had warmed. "Then again, all your child may need is something to hold. A woolen monkey, or a satin dolphin. A friendly caution—if the child has lost a pet, or greatly desires some particular animal, choose something different. Toys should not come with bad memories or unfulfilled promises attached."
"Why have I never heard of you before?" Arianai said.
The man looked up. His face was fine-boned, somewhat sharp, with hazel eyes of a remarkable clarity. "Why should you have?" The warmth was gone again.
"I am Arianai Sheyzu."
"Yes?"
"The children's physician. My house is just around the corner."
"Oh. Forgive me for telling you your trade, Mistress Healer. Please browse at your pleasure." He went back to his work.
"The child—her name is Theleme—is afraid to sleep." The toymaker said nothing, but Arianai went on, the words just spilling out. "She fights sleep for as long as she can, sometimes for days, until she falls into an exhausted sleep. And then she screams. Chamomile and valerian are no use at all, and she has become too frail for stronger drugs."
"I understand now why you were seeking Wizard's Row, Mistress Healer. I do hope that you find it."
Arianai bit her lip. "I'm sorry, master   ."
"Quard."
"I didn't mean to burden you with my troubles."
"I never accept such burdens," Quard said. "To the right, ninety paces."
"Thank you." She turned to go.
"Take the flannel cat with you," Quard said in a quiet voice. "It's wound through the seam on its left flank."
Hesitantly, Arianai picked up the stuffed animal. As she moved it, she felt the springs inside loosen and the wooden heart pulse. Something in the mechanism purred softly.
"No charge for the loan," Quard said.
She looked at him. He was looking back, his eyes bright in his pale face like the eyes of a porcelain doll. Arianai tucked the cat under her arm, gave the man a hard stare back, and went out of the shop. Above her head, the sign-puppet kicked up its heels on a fresh wind from the sea.

Sen Wuchien was strolling through the Levar's Park when he heard the sentry call midnight. He paused for a moment, shivered, and felt an irrational impulse to touch the vessel of his luck. Instead he simply leaned slightly on his walking stick and thought on his vessel, drawing power into his bones to stop the chill. Foolish to have gone walking on such a chilly night, he thought, but the air was clean and pleasant, if damp. He would make tea when he got home, Red Orchid blend, and share it with his cat Shin; then all would be well.
His magic warmed him. With his empty hand he stroked the air, as if Shin's head were there, and tightened his abdomen, pulling power up to his eyes. Around Sen, the landscape brightened, sharpened. The images of catsight reminded him of an ink-and-water drawing; it occurred to Sen that he had neglected his brushes of late. That was not good. New rituals kept the magic responsive, the power fluid.
He stretched his vision, watched an owl gobbling a mouse, a badger waddling off toward its hole, a pair of lovers in deep consideration. He thought, amused, that he would do a pillow-book painting, the sort young people did, indeed the sort he had done as a young man in Tichen. And the text   .
Backs shape heaven's arches 
Dark hair braids with fingers 
As the tea grows cold.
Sen realized that he was tracing the calligraphy in the air. It was idle, no light trailed from his fingertips; he had moved, but not invoked. He was old now but not yet so careless. He wiped the power from his eyes, let the magic flush of warmth drain away, and walked on.
He heard a musical whistle, turned his head. There was a figure sitting on a boulder, a long white pipe to its lips. Sen Wuchien wondered that he had not seen this one before—he was not indeed so careless. There was power involved here. Sen looked closer.
The person wore a sashed full robe in the classical Tichenese style, all pure white with the sheen of silk, and white slippers. The face was smooth and finely featured, a young woman's or a beautiful boy's, Sen could not tell, with black hair in a long braid across one shoulder. The piper played a few notes, bowed slightly. Sen Wuchien bowed in return.
Sen said, "I had supposed to meet you in Tichen."
The piper gestured meaninglessly with the white flute, which Sen could see was made of a long bone. The bone of what? he wondered. It was too long to be a man's, or even a horse's. 
Sen said, "Pardon me. I spoke falsely without intent. I meant to say ... " But he could no longer recall what he had meant to say.
The person in white stretched out a slim hand, pointing the bone flute at Sen, and spoke in Tichenese. "Come, if you are coming."
Sen smiled at the thought of having some option in the matter, and put his hand on the flute. It was very cold. Sen controlled his trembling without the use of his power, and looked into the face of the white piper.
"Oh," Sen said, "it is you—"
He looked at his hand. It glowed with a cool green light. He tried to let go of the bone flute, but could not. He reached for his power, but his mind was cold and would not move that far. Through the green haze that now wrapped his whole body, Sen looked again at the piper's face, understanding now why he had been offered a choice, and that in fact the offer had been real.
But as the cold caressed his heart, Sen Wuchien thought that he had already made the choice, thirty years ago.
The Levar's Park was large and not heavily patrolled; it was about an hour and a half before the two Guards came by on their rounds. They saw the glow long before they could see what it came from.

The next day was still gray, and drizzly as well. The puppet over the toyshop door seemed to clutch at himself and shiver in the wind, and there was a sad drip-drip from his nose and his toes.
Lamps were lit inside the shop; Quard sat near a lamp with a large glass lens that threw light on the doll's face he was painting. As he stroked cobalt blue on the eyebrows, he said, "Did you find Wizard's Row?"
"Yes," Arianai said, "and a strange thing happened there."
"Most who seek Wizard's Row are disappointed if one does not."
"The Magician at Seventeen and Doctor Twist both recommended you."
"As what?"
"As one who knows something about dreams."
Quard put down his work, wiped his brush with solvent. "In addition to an entire street named The Dreamers', the apothecary at Canalgate calls his boat Dreams. Maydee Gai at the House of Blue Leaves retails them fairly and to most tastes; Cimis Malirakhin is most to mine. Liavek has many splendid theaters, though I do not attend them. I'm a toymaker."
Suddenly a chipmunk appeared from beneath the counter, nodding and chittering, a blue nut in its paws. "Yes?" Quard said to the animal, then, "I quite agree. She has made a mistake." 
Squeak, squeak? 
"Yes, Doctor Twist will probably refund her money, but Trav? Never. It would offend his moral principles."
Finally Arianai realized that the chipmunk was a puppet on Quard's hand. "You do that very well," she said, "but I'm not so easily insulted."
"No insult intended," Quard said, now sounding tired. "I only wished to get a point across. Sometimes puppets are better at that than people." He pulled off the glove-puppet and put it on the counter, where it looked rather unpleasantly like a dead real chipmunk.
Arianai said, "You haven't even seen the child."
"I assume that you have confidence in your own abilities as a healer. And you have already named the most noted sorcerer in Liavek, as well as the craziest. What is there for me to look at?"
"It was the wizards who named you."
"So you said. Perhaps I've upset them somehow. They are subtle and quick to anger, you know."
"Surely you must care what happens to a child."
"Because I'm a toymaker? Bad proof, mistress."
"I think you did prove it to me. When you first spoke, about choosing toys."
"As a children's healer, you must know a certain amount about lice and worms. Do you love them?"
She stared at him. He had picked up the doll-mask, and turned the lamp lens to examine it.
"She slept last night, master. With your cat in her arms, she slept for almost the whole night."
"Then you have no further need for me. You may keep the cat."
After a moment Arianai said, "The girl is dying."
"So are we all, Healer—with all due respect to your profession."
For several minutes there was no sound in the shop. Then Quard said, "Did Trav tell you I'd be difficult?"
"Who?"
"The Magician."
"He did not tell me you would be hateful."
"Trav is like that. Bring Theleme tomorrow at five hours past noon."
It took her a moment to realize what he had said. "There's a long night between now and then."
"True. Five tomorrow."
She felt puzzled and relieved—too much of both to be really angry. "Tomorrow, Master Quard. Thank you."

The wizard Gorodain sat in his attic room, contemplating a table-top. The wood was covered with a disk of glass, etched with a six-pointed star and inscriptions in the language that had centuries ago evolved into the S'Rian tongue. From each of the points of the star, a line led to the center of the disk; above the intersection was a small, darting green flame that burned without fuel or ash. One of the points was empty. Small objects rested on the others: a small bronze mask on a chain, a leather shoelace coiled in a complex knot, an arrowhead, a wooden doll, a silver dagger with a wickedly curved blade and an emerald in the hilt.
The previous night all the points had been filled, a little paper scroll on the sixth.
Gorodain examined the objects on the glass as a man might look over a crucial position in a game of shah—which, after a fashion, this was. The creation of the board, the collection of the pieces, had occupied most of thirty years. This was no time to rush the endgame.
He picked up the mask. It had horns, and finely crafted eyes that were chips of carnelian in onyx. He put it down again on its point, looked out the garret window at the moon rising through torn clouds. It was nearly eleven o'clock. Time to start.
Gorodain concentrated on the vessel of his luck, reached out with an imaginary hand, closed fingers of power on the bronze mask. He began to push it along the cut-glass line, toward the flame in the center.
He met resistance. He concentrated again, pushed harder. The mask wobbled but did not move. Gorodain felt his strength draining away. He ceased to push.
He raised his right hand, brushed his smallest finger against the boss of the ring he wore. A small blade, no bigger than a fingernail trimming, flicked out. He drew back his left sleeve, spoke some words, and nicked the skin of his arm. A drop of blood fell into the green flame.
The flame guttered, flattened, pooled on the glass. A darkness appeared, and Gorodain looked into it. He saw a man with pale skin, lying on a narrow bed, one arm thrown out straight, the hand clutching the bedpost.
So, Gorodain thought, the key was not yet fully in the lock, the door was closed to him tonight. It was possible still for him to send another nightmare, perhaps force the issue. But that would cost more of his already depleted magic, and the ritual of feeding the flame was exorbitantly costly. There would be time. He had waited thirty years; he could wait another day. He made a gesture and the flame went out.

It had rained all day, and by five in the afternoon showed no sign of stopping. Arianai and Theleme met no one on the street except a pair of cloaked and disgruntled City Guards, who looked after them as if bewildered that anyone would take a child out on a day like this.
They sloshed and bustled down the side street—it didn't seem to have a name posted anywhere—to the sign of the dancing puppet, which now stood nearly still, just shivering in the wet.
There was no one in the front of the shop, though lamps were lit. "Master Quard?" Arianai said. There was no answer. A small light came from a door behind the long counter.
Arianai took the damp cape from Theleme's shoulders. The girl was five, or perhaps six, but her face was ancient, hollowed under cheekbones and dull, unfocused eyes. "Wait right here, Theleme," Arianai said. "I'll be back in just a moment. Don't go anywhere, now."
Theleme nodded. Arianai went behind the counter. "Master Quard?" she said into the dimness beyond the doorway.
"No farther," Quard's voice came back softly. "How did the night go?"
"The cat did help," Arianai said. "She slept for a few hours—but then she began to scream again."
"All right. Go back to her. I'll be out."
Arianai did so. She saw that Theleme was slowly looking around the walls of the shop, at the toys. Perhaps, Arianai thought, they had made an opening; perhaps the key was in the lock.
Quard came out. He wore a long robe of blue and yellow, with a matching skullcap. Without a word, he went to the windows and lowered the blinds. The lamps were already lit. Then he bowed low to Theleme, and settled down to sit cross-legged on the floor before her, his clothes billowing around him. The effect was at once clownish and impressive.
"You would be Mistress Theleme," Quard said in a respectful tone.
Theleme nodded.
"I am Quard Toymaker, Quard of Dancing Wood, and your friend the healer Arianai has brought you to me, through the storm and the cold and the wet, because I need your help in a thing."
"Yes, master?"
"Sit down, mistress." Quard spread his arms above his lap. Theleme looked at Arianai, who nodded. Theleme sat down, cradled on Quard's knee.
"Now, mistress," he said, "do you know of the Farlands? The Countries of Always-Cold?"
"Anni has told me stories."
Quard shot a curious glance at Arianai, then said, "There is a princess in the Farlands—just about your age."
"What does she look like?"
"I have never seen her," Quard said, "but they tell me she has yellow hair like yours, and violet eyes like Mistress Anni's, and the pale skin of all Farlanders."
"Like yours?"
"There you have it. Now, mistress, the princess is to have a birthday soon. Lean close to me." He whispered in Theleme's ear, and she nodded gravely.
Quard said, "Now you understand how important this matter is?" Theleme nodded again. Any Liavekan, even the youngest, understood the seriousness of revealing a true birthday.
"Now, mistress, comes my problem. The princess must have a gift for her birthday. But there are so many things in my shop, and I know them all so well, that I cannot choose one for her. Do you think you can help me?"
Theleme put a finger to her mouth. She turned again to Arianai, who smiled and nodded.
Quard helped Theleme stand up again, and she began to wander around the shop, looking wonderingly at the toys. She put out a hand hesitantly, drew it back.
"Please touch," Quard said. "You will not break them."
Theleme searched among the toys for a third of an hour. Arianai caught herself fidgeting; Quard just sat, smiling crookedly, his hands crossed in his lap.
Arianai noticed that the backs of Quard's hands were entirely smooth, without a single hair. His face was just as bare below his eyebrows, without the shadow of a beard. Was Quard a woman? she wondered. The flowing robe made it difficult to tell. Not her business, she supposed. If this succeeded, she did not care if Quard was a troll.
Theleme had picked up a toy and was bringing it to Quard. It was the soft camel-and-rider Arianai had seen on her first visit. Quard held out his hands and received the doll. "Why, this is it, Mistress Theleme; that is just the present for the princess. I never would have guessed it." Quard stood up in a fluid motion, holding the stuffed toy in both hands. "Perfect, perfect. I must arrange at once to send this to the Earlands."
Theleme looked up at him, still as a sculpture, watching with dead eyes as the toy camel left her.
Quard turned away, then spun full circle, his robe floating out. "Wait," he said, and sat down again. "Come closer, mistress."
Theleme did so. Quard said, "My eyes are not what they once were, you know. Will you look closely at this toy, very close, and tell me if anything is wrong with it? A princess's gift must be perfect, you know."
Theleme took hold of the toy, began to minutely examine it. As she did, Quard reached slowly to the back of her neck, began to rub it. Theleme leaned over the soft camel. Quard stroked downward. Theleme's head tipped forward and was pillowed on the camel's hump.
Surprised and a little alarmed, Arianai said, "What did you—?"
"Let nature take its course," Quard said softly, and then pressed a finger to his lips. He leaned close to Theleme and said, "They will ask me why, you know. Not the princess—she will be delighted, I am sure—but all the lords and ladies at court, they will want to know, 'Why that toy? Why a camel?' Surely you know how lords and ladies are, when they see something that is special to you. They always want to know why."
Eyes still shut, Theleme said, "Yes, Master Quard."
"Tell me what the princess should say to them."
Theleme said, in a startlingly clear voice, "The green man is there. He has to go away."
"Is the green man bad? Is that why he has to go?"
"He wants to hurt the princess. He wants her to die."
"Do you see the green man, Theleme? Is he here?"
"Yes, Yes!" The child struggled. Arianai bent forward. Quard hugged Theleme and said, "Look away from the man, Theleme. Look away. Do you see something coming there? Do you see a camel, and a rider? I think they're coming. Do you see them?"
"Yes ... I see them."
"And does the rider have a whip? Can you see the whip in the rider's hand?"
"Yes."
"Look, Theleme! The rider's reaching down for you. Catch the rider's hand as the camel comes by. Quick, now! Catch it!" He gripped Theleme's hand in his own.
"I have it!"
"I'll pull you up now!" He tugged gently at Theleme's hand. "Hold tight, hold tight! We have to ride fast!" He slipped his hand around Theleme's waist.
"I'm holding, master!"
"Now, we must ride for the green man. You have to be brave now, Theleme, for we must drive him out. Do you see the whip in the rider's hand?"
"Yes, I see it. I'll try to be brave."
"Very well. Here we come. And here comes the whip." Quard gestured to Arianai. She raised her hands and clapped them as hard as she could. Theleme twitched, but held tight to the stuffed camel.
"Here it comes again!" Crack!
"Is he running, Theleme? Can you see the green man run?"
"Yes! He's running! He's running away ... " Theleme's voice faded, and she relaxed in Quard's arms. He rocked her gently.
"I think she will be better now," he said finally. "Here—can you take her?"
Arianai did, and Quard stood up, the stuffed toy under his arm. He put it in Arianai's arms beside Theleme, who cuddled it without waking. Then he walked to the door. "I'll go up to the corner and get you a footcab. There must be an enterprising few of them out in the slop." He opened the door, letting cool air in from the dark outside. "Well. It's stopped raining."
"Quard, I—"
"I doubt she'll remember the story about the princess as any different from the rest of the dream. If she does, tell her that I made another camel, just for her."
"Quard."
"Let me get the cab. You don't want to carry her home, do you?"
"I wouldn't mind. If you carried the camel."
" 'I'll carry the child if you carry the camel.' " Quard's voice was suddenly flat. "That must be the punch line to a joke, but I don't remember it."
"Come and have tea. I'd like to talk to you."
"What, and wake Theleme with our pillow conversation?" sounding more sad than funny.
"Do you have other appointments?"
"There's your cab," Quard said, in a tone that made Arianai hug the child tight. He went running out the door, and was gone for minutes, and minutes, the door wide open. Then a footcab did appear. Arianai went to meet it, found the driver had already been paid. But Quard was nowhere in sight. Arianai closed the shop door and rode home. She put Theleme to bed, the camel still in the child's grasp, and then sat in her office making notes on the case and rereading medical books that had been dull the first time. Finally, at almost midnight, she went to bed, and her sleep was very sweet.

Shiel ola Siska blew through the narrow bronze pipe, sending a narrow jet of flame from the spirit burner onto the tinned wires in her left hand, brazing them to a circular copper plate as broad as three fingers. She tongued the blowpipe, spraying fire around the copper, producing a pleasing rainbow finish on the hammered metal. She slid her fingers to the other end of a wire, bent it around, then fused it to the plate. Another wire was curved and twisted over and under the first before being brazed in place; then the next, and the next.
The end product was a copper brooch bearing a coil of wires, tangled, complex, yet pleasing in form. The purpose of the item, the ritual, was antimagic: When luck was driven through the brooch, spells cast at the wearer would be ensnared in the coil, their energy twisted and untuned and dissipated. Certain spells, at any rate. "The most crucial of magics," ola Siska's instructor had taught her, "is the illusion that wizards are infallible, but their customers can foul up any enchantment."
And as with any magical device, it was temporary; it would lose its luck on ola Siska's birthday, or with her death. No wizard could truly create. A true adept could bind luck into a thing and make it truly magical—but only once, for the bound magic was gone from the wizard forever. The brooch was just a brief diversion of luck, as a spinning top that could stand impossibly on its point until it slowed and toppled.
Ola Siska stroked her finger across the wires. They played a faint series of notes, not quite music. She snuffed the spirit burner, took the brooch to a table covered in white linen. A high window let the light of the three-quarter moon shine upon it. She took up a pair of forceps, and with them lifted a small silver casting of a spread-eagled, naked man. She started to lower it into the nest of wires.
There was a slight rumbling beneath the floor. The copper brooch bounced into the air, rolled across the linen, and fell to the floor, where it kept rolling. Shiel muttered darkly and turned to catch it as it wheeled away—had she been thinking of spinning tops? Was that why the thing was acting so—
The brooch bumped against metal with a little tinny clink and fell over. The thing it had struck shifted; it was a boot, of lapped bronze plates.
Ola Siska looked up, slowly. Above the boot was a bronze greave, a knee-cover, then, resting on the knee, a jointed bronze gauntlet. The hand pushed down, and the knee levered up, and the figure of a man in full metal armor stood up, a bronze man shaded green with verdigris. His breastplate was heavily engraved with intricate designs, and his helmet bore winglike flanges at the temples. Its crown nearly brushed Shiel ola Siska's ceiling beams.
His faceplate was a mirror-finished sheet of metal, without features, without holes for sight or speech or air.
Her throat felt tight. So it had not been time and chill night air that had taken Sen Wuchien after all, she thought. She should have known.
She should have been told!
The bronze man walked toward her, holding out its hands. Ola Siska saw that its forearms were spiked down their length, like a crab's arms. She was quite certain that the jagged metal points had not been there a moment ago.
She flexed her hands. If she had not been at work, there would have been a ring on every finger, half a dozen bracelets on each of her wrists, each one the ritual of a spell. But she still wore amulets, around her neck and ankles, in her hair. And most important, she had the vessel of her luck safely on her person.
She caught her full skirts in her hands, swept them upward like a butterfly's wings, then released the cloth and touched a square pendant of interlaced steel and glass rods.
As the skirts fell, a circle of something like stained glass, though impossibly thin for glass, appeared before her. Grainy color radiated from the center of the disk, and thin black veins.
The bronze man collided with the colored disk. There were showers of sparks where his armor touched it. Ola Siska reached to the top of her head, pulled out two long golden pins. She raised her hands and breathed deep, feeling the power rise from her vessel to the pins.
A bronze gauntlet punched through the disk in a spray of colored fragments. Cracks shot through the glass, and in a moment it collapsed to the floor, and evaporated.
Ola Siska stiffened, but did not break the incantation. She threw the two pins. They flew true as arrows through the air, and pierced the bronze man's hands, nailing them to his breastplate. Ola Siska raised her right fist, slammed it into her left palm, and the pins shone with unbearable blue light, hissing as they welded themselves into place.
The bronze man struggled to pull his hands free, as Shiel ola Siska groped through her boxes of jewelry for the proper ritual device. There was a grating noise, then a rhythmic clinking, like a music box but deeper and flatter. Ola Siska seized a bracelet and turned.
The bronze man's arms had fallen off at the shoulders, and dangled from his chest by the nails through their gauntlets. From the sides of his breastplate, another pair of arms, thin and rodlike, was folding out, oiled cables gliding in grooves along their length.
Ola Siska dropped the bracelet—no use now to sever the thing's legs—and turned, and ran, out the door and into the night. She could hear the clanking of the bronze man behind her, and could not help but waste a moment in looking back: There were now spikes and hooks and blades down all its limbs, and steam hissed from its joints.
She ran up the street, trying to keep a grip on her thoughts and her skirts, unable to order her luck with the brazen thing behind her. She seemed to feel a dull red heat from it, but that was only in her mind, surely in her mind—
She paused, leaned against a doorframe, turned to face the thing. It was twenty paces behind her, taking slow long strides. There was no steam, no furnace glow, and even its steps were not overly loud; it had a sort of quiet dignity as it came for her. She held up a hand in a warding gesture, saw that her fingernails shone brilliantly green.
Into the pit with dignity, she thought, and hiked up her skirts and ran. She heard the clank of metal behind her, dared not waste the time to turn but knew it was gaining. Could it tire? Metal fatigue, she thought, with—irony? Ha, ha, ha.
Suddenly she thought of a place to run, a thing to run for. She had cast the spell away uncast, and now—
She stretched luck down to her right foot, felt the anklet there rattle and loosen. There was no time to stop, take the thing off, do this properly; it had to be timed just right—
Ola Siska kicked off the loop of silver. It sailed out before her, spinning, expanding from a bracelet to a belt to a loop broader than her shoulders; it struck the pavement; she leaped into it—
And landed on her hands and knees, gasping, half the city away, where Park Boulevard met the Street of the Dreamers. The shop called the Tiger's Eye was dark, its awnings folded. There was only the slight glitter of streetlamps on the items behind its windows.
Shiel tried to stand. She couldn't, not yet; the spell had drawn most of her strength. She was terribly cold. And her nails and knuckles were greenly luminous.
She pushed herself upright and went to the door of the shop, groped at her belt for a gold-and-silver key that hung there. She rubbed the pendant, pulling hard at the last of her luck.
Her hand spasmed and the key fell on its cord. Of course the shop would be sealed against magical entry. She pounded on the door, still short the breath to shout.
Behind her was a sound like a key in an unoiled lock. She looked into the dark shop, and in the glass saw the bronze man reflected, tall and shining and severe, his arms stretched out to her.
Ola Siska leaned against the door. With just a moment to recover herself, she could break the glass, reach through   . no, that was too obvious, the inner bold would require a key. There was no sign of a stirring within, no lights, just a twinkling like stars on crystal and silver and brass. Only an inch of wood and glass between her and that whole constellation of life.
Something blurred her view: It was her face, shining green in the glass. Was that truly the way it was, then? Was she really so tired of running?
She turned, leaning back against the door, hands on knees that glowed greenly through her skirts. She looked up at the bronze man, who stood above her with his metal hands outstretched. His face was green as well   . no, it was just her reflection.
"Come," said the bronze man, his voice rasping and twanging like a saw cutting wires, "if you are coming."
"I could have run farther still," she said, breathless but with dignity. "I could." She held out her hand, but remained sitting, so that he would have to kneel to her, like a courtier and not a conqueror.
Which he obligingly did.

The sun came out the next morning, in more ways than one; Theleme woke wanting breakfast, and almost smiling. Arianai gave her some buttered toast and juice, knowing the child would be hungry but that her stomach would be in no shape for a heavy meal, and then they tossed on light cloaks and went for a walk along the canal.
As they crossed the lower bridge, they ran into a cluster of people on the street, around the Tiger's Eye, and a line of Guards keeping them away from something. Arianai recognized the officer in charge, a tall, hawk-faced woman with straight black hair, and walked up to her.
"Hello, Jem."
Jemuel, captain of the Levar's Guard, turned. "Hi, Anni." More softly she said, "Keep the little one away. It's not nice, what's over there."
"Can I help?"
"Not any longer, Anni. It's another green one."
"What? A Green priest?"
"Another glowing one—you haven't heard? The half-copper rags have been full of it."
"I've been busy, and you know I don't read the rags."
Jemuel said, "We've got two wizards dead in three nights. Not a scratch on either of them—but the bodies are glowing green as fireflies."
"Just a moment, Jem." Arianai led Theleme over to a baker's cart, bought her a sweet biscuit for distraction, then went back to Jemuel. "Glowing? Magic?"
"What it seems. Funny, though, you should even have to ask—Thomorin Wiln said that phosphorus could make a body glow so, but he tested, and there wasn't any, nor any other poison he could find.
Phosphorus, imagine that. More ways to die than you'd think, eh, Anni?"
"Who were they?"
"Um? Oh. Two nights back was that old Titch who lived up on the canal, Wuchien; found him in the park. And this morning when Snake opens up, she finds Shiel ola Siska glowing on her doorstep."
"Snake," Arianai said distantly, thinking of Snake's skill with the camel driver's whip she always carried, thinking too of a rag-stuffed toy.
"—so there it sits," Jemuel was saying, "one not far from his house, the other a long way the wrong side of the canal; a man, a woman; a Titch and a Liavekan—no pattern to it except that they both did magic, no motive, no sense. And an ola Siska dead, so the nobility are demanding that Somebody Do Something." She sighed. "Guess who."
"Captain?" It was a young Tichenese, Snake's assistant Thyan. "There's kaf."
"Enough for one more?" Jemuel said, indicating Arianai.
"Of course. Hello, Healer."
"Well   . will Theleme be any trouble in there?"
"I'll take care of her, mistress," Thyan said. "Part of the job. Do come in."
Jemuel and Arianai sat in wicker chairs, by a tiny brass table with the porcelain kaf service; Snake, wearing an embroidered abjahin with the long whip coiled incongruously at her waist, leaned against a cabinet, stroking her cup, looking as if she wanted to pace. Arianai recalled that the shopkeeper had quietly put out word that she was to marry shortly. Death on the doorstep must have been quite an intrusion.
"You did know ola Siska?" Jemuel said.
"Of course I knew her. Everyone involved with jewelry did. But I never carried much of her work. Mostly she sold through Janning Lightsmith, sometimes the Crystal Gull."
"Too expensive for your trade?"
"Thanks, Jem."
"Well?" Jemuel said, not apologetic.
Snake gestured with her fingertips. "Not to my taste. Shiel had a particular fondness for   , well, strange images. Skulls. Human figures twisted up. And sharp edges: she showed me a necklace once that ... " Snake ran a hand around her throat.
Arianai said, "There's a market for that?"
Snake said, in a more relaxed voice, "There's a market for everything. I'm no prude; I'll sell you a poison ring, or a pendant with a hidden dagger. But Shiel ola Siska's work seemed to ... celebrate death, and pain." She looked around the shop, at the multitude of trinkets and oddments that crowded the place. "Let me show you something," she said suddenly, went behind the counter and brought out a velvet-covered tray. She raised a spherical pendant on a fine gold chain. "This is one of hers. I bought it for the craftsmanship, before I quite saw what the thing was."
The pendant was an openwork ball of gold and silver pieces; the gold bars were straight, the silver ones coiled.
"It's a shiribi puzzle, isn't it?" Arianai said. "What's that in the center?" She put her finger to the pendant.
"Careful!" Snake cried, and Arianai stopped her hand, just as she saw that the object within the shirbi puzzle was a silver figure of a man, curled into a fetal position with one arm outstretched.
Then Snake's hand shook, and the metal sphere bumped against Arianai's fingertip; and the ball collapsed on its silver springs, into a tight knot of white and yellow metal from which a pale hand emerged in a gesture of pure desperation.
"Kosker and Pharn!" Jemuel said.
"It'll certainly be salable now," Snake said, "dead artists and all that. But I've wondered ever since I first looked closely at the thing, would I want to do business with anyone who'd buy it?"
"You think it had anything to do with ola Siska being at your door last night?"
"I've told you already, Jem, I don't know why she was there."
"And you didn't hear her knock."
"If she knocked, I didn't hear it." She put the pendant down. "There was a privacy spell on the bedroom last night."
"Thank you for saving me the question," Jemuel said. "Anni? Something wrong?"
Arianai realized she was still staring at the shiribi puzzle. "No, nothing."
From several corners of the shop, clocks began to strike nine. Jemuel said, "Pharn's teeth, it's three hours past my bedtime. If anything occurs to you—either of you—as a clue, you'll let me know, right?"
"Of course."
"Sure, Jem."
"Thanks for the kaf. I'll sleep better for it." She waved and went out of the shop, jingling the porcelain bells above the door.
Arianai said, "Snake, you sell some toys, don't you?"
"Sure. Want something for the little girl you've been—"
"No, I ... have you ever bought from Quard?"
"Quard? Yes, some marionettes. He makes the best string-puppets I've ever seen. He'd have a reputation and a half, if his shop weren't harder to find than Wizard's Row in a dust storm."
"Hard to find   ."
Snake put her hand on Arianai's shoulder. "Are you sure there's nothing wrong, Anni?" They locked eyes for a long moment, and then Snake said gently, "Oh. Yeah. Me, too   . guess you've heard." She smiled, a little sadly. "It does make it harder to look at death, doesn't it?"
Arianai nodded and went out. In front of the shop, Thyan was demonstrating cat's cradle for Theleme, who watched in amazement as the knots appeared and vanished. Arianai said, "Time to go, Theleme. Thank you, Thyan," and handed the young woman a copper.
"I shouldn't take this," Thyan said. "It's part of serving the customers ... "
"I didn't buy anything."
"Oh. I guess it's all right, then." Thyan grinned. From within the shop came the sound of a single clock striking nine, and Snake's voice calling, "Thyan!"
"Oops," Thyan said, "see you later," and ducked inside.
Theleme held up her fingers, tangled in brown string. "See, Anni? You pull, and snap she closes!" She tugged at the figure.
"Yes, dear, I see," Arianai said, and licked her dry lips. "Let's go home, now, and you can nap."

"Well," Quard said as Arianai entered the shop, "you are by far the most regular customer I have ever had." He had some of the miniature soldiers arrayed on the counter, with books piled up to represent hills and a blue scarf for a river.
"Tell me about shiribi puzzles," she said, trying not to look at the little metal men.
Quard shrugged. "They involve rods and strings. The object of the puzzle is to take it apart, and then to reassemble it." He went to one of the shelves behind the counter, took down one of the puzzles; it was the size of a small melon, of dark oiled wood and white cord, with a blue glass ball caged inside. "Some, like this one, have a thing inside them, which is supposed to be 'freed,' but the problem is the same."
"Where do they come from?"
Quard looked up. "Toymakers, when they're not being interrupted."
"I mean—"
"I know what you mean. I was being hateful again. I don't know who invented them, but they're old, several thousand years at least. And most of them come from the far West, beyond Ombaya." He turned the puzzle over in his fingers. "The White priests have decided they mean something important, and wear them as symbols of whatever-it-is."
"You make them for the Whites?"
"I haven't yet. But then they haven't asked me."
"Have you made them to order?" she asked carefully.
Quard blinked his clear light eyes. "I was once asked to make one as a cage for an animal—a chipmunk, say, or a large mouse. I'd seen them before; the puzzle has to be made of something the pet can't gnaw, of course, but it can easily be fed through the openings, and when it runs for exercise the cage rolls around on the floor, which also cleans it ... however, this customer wanted a bit more. The puzzle was to be designed so that a mistake in opening it would crush the animal to death."
In her mind Arianai heard the snap of metal. "Did you build it?"
"Is it any of your business if I did?"
She said slowly, "Do you know Shiel ola Siska?"
"The jeweler-mage. I know she's dead."
"It only happened this morning."
"They print the half-copper rags so fast these days, isn't it a wonder?" He put the puzzle back on the shelf. "Time I was going back to work. Theleme is well?"
"Yes. Theleme is well."
"I don't suppose I'll be seeing you anytime soon, then. Do come back if you need a toy."
"I'm still interested in shiribi puzzles."
"Well." Quard took down the puzzle again, spun it between his palms. "There really isn't much more to be said about them. Do you know the match take-away game, where a player can always force a win if he knows the right moves? Well, there's a general solution to these, a set of moves that will unravel any shiribi. Once you know it, they're no fun any longer."
"Any of them?"
"Quite simple and obvious, once it's occurred to you." He brought the puzzle down on the countertop and smashed it to pieces.
"Quard—"
"You did ask me for an answer, Healer. There it is. Good day."

Gorodain looked over his glass gameboard. The bronze mask was gone now; the flame had been almost greedy to receive it. The key was in the lock, and turned.
There had been a great deal of news-rag speculation on Shiel ola Siska's apparent attempt to break into the Tiger's Eye in her last moments. Gorodain was not displeased. It would confuse and distract the temporal authorities in looking for an answer, which they would not find. He had acquired the small mask from Snake's shop some years ago, through a series of intermediaries, all of them now comfortably dead; even if Snake should recall the item's sale, there was no way of tracing it to him. And the thing itself no longer existed.
It was just like ola Siska, Gorodain mused, to try to dispose of the thing by selling it, casting it to the winds of luck, so to speak; it was Shiel's habit of playing with sharp things that had brought her into the circle to begin with.
Just as it would be the pretty young healer's boldness that would bring them together, that would open the bottomless spring of death and let it flow. There were, in round figures, three hundred thousand living human beings in Liavek. Three hundred thousand deaths! The thought alone was wine to the senses.
Gorodain reached his magic to the carved glass and touched the knotted shoelace.

Teyer ais Elenaith lived in the entire top floor of a squarely dull old building in the Merchant's Quarter, fronting on the Levar's Way. The ground floor was occupied by a firm of admiralty lawyers, and the level between was packed with the lawyers' files and records, so that no one but the occasional tired clerk or nautically inclined mouse ever heard the thump of a foot from above.
The loft was one large room, closets and a tiny bathchamber along one wall, heavy trusses and skylights overhead. Folding screens could fence off sleeping or dressing areas as needed. On the walls, dancing shoes and performance props, canes and bells and caps, hung from pegs. There were several full-length mirrors and a balance rail, and in a corner were a stack of music boxes and a large metronome.
A few sweet-scented candles were burning, but most of the light came from the moon through the skylights. All the folding screens had been set up on the studio floor in rectilinear boxes and corridors. Moonlight, direct and from the wall mirrors, added panels of silver light and black shadow to the maze.
Teyer ais Elenaith leaned against the wall, arms folded, one foot on the floor and one on the wainscot, examining the puzzle she had set up. She wore a loose shirt over trousers, all crimson silk of Tichen, with a broad leather belt, something she had once fancied on a sailor's hard body, riding low on her hips. Her dancing slippers were red kid, laced around her strong slender ankles. A nine-strand braid of gold wire wrapped twice around her long throat; a compromise, but one had to keep one's luck vessel within three steps—ordinary steps, not dancer's leaps—and make certain it didn't go flying during a particularly active movement. Probably the reason there weren't more dancer-magicians; of course, it also required a bit more working room than most rituals. She looked up at the ceiling beams; ais Elenaith was not a tall woman, barely five feet, and still the trusses were inconveniently low at times. Better, she supposed, than having columns interrupting the open floor.
She went to the corner and set the metronome ticking, its brass pendulum catching moonlight on each beat. She took a few loose-jointed steps, rolled her shoulders. One, she thought to the rhythm. Two. One, two, three.
She leaped into the shadow-maze, landing on the ball of a foot barely a span from one of the screens. She arched her back, stroked her hands down the screen without touching it, spun on her toe and sidestepped, froze again, leaped again.
Ais Elenaith worked the maze with her whole body, threading through it start-stop-turn-leap, moving ever faster, coming ever closer to the screens without touching them, the smell of sweat mingling with the candles, the only music the tick of the metronome, the steady chord of her breathing, the bang of her feet on the floor, all in harmony.
She came through the maze, stepped, stretched, then repeated it, faster. She came through and repeated, and now there was music in the loft, instruments called up through the luck around her neck, cittern and hammered harp and horn. Once again and there were bells and drums; once again and there was a chorus, and sparks showered from her hands and feet as she moved.
Once again, and she saw him, standing by the metronome, in front of the mirror, which did not reflect him.
He wore trousers tight enough to show every muscle—every one—of black silk that glistened in the moonlight, and around his broad bare chest was a leather harness with small gold bells, as the temple dancers of eastern Tichen wore. One gold earring, one bracelet, one anklet. He was barefoot, and his hair was tied back like a sailor's.
So, ais Elenaith thought, was this why so many went willingly? But she was more than a heart and a will. He would have to dance for her life. She spun, clapped her hands, stepped again into the maze, hearing the temple bells chiming behind her.
Step, turn, pause. Her music was now a bright passage for horn, counterpoint to the golden bells. One, two, leap, four. She waited for him to falter, to touch the maze. He did not. Perhaps he would not; it was not necessary. Arch, step, pivot, kick—
Her foot snapped out, and a panel swung on its hinges, slamming closed against another with a crack and a streak of red fire. She danced on, two, three, kick, and another screen closed up.
She circled the maze of screens, kicking higher than her chin, shutting the panels like a puzzle box, luck in her throat like the lump of arousal. Sweat spattered from her as she moved, the droplets crackling with waste luck. The candle flames were drawn toward the center of the room.
The spell drew close. Ais Elenaith cartwheeled heels-over-head three times and drove both feet into a painted wood panel. The screens all collapsed, one on another with a crescendo of slams. All the candles blew out.
Teyer ais Elenaith wavered on her feet. There were no more sounds of footsteps or bells or music, nothing but the metronome's tick, tick—
It stopped beating.
Ais Elenaith turned. The man held his finger on the pendulum. Then he held out his hand, palm up; he did not have to speak. She knew an invitation to the dance.
She bowed. She pulled the metal braid from around her neck; it only chafed, and she was out of magic for this night. It was a strain on the strength, so much more than dancing. She pulled the lacings of her kid slippers, kicked them off. Teyer ais Elenaith took the offered hand, and saw pale green light shimmer and bounce from the mirrors in the loft.
She began to dance. There was no hesitancy in it; she had always called hesitancy the death of the dance. And it was not hard at all, even without her luck. The stiffness that she had tried to ignore these last years was gone truly. She moved with her partner like two hands at the same task, and she danced for joy—what other way is there?
They spun to the door, and kicked it open, and moved lightly down the stairway to the moonlit street. The partner held out his hands, and she leaped into them, was lifted into the clear night sky. Something fell away from ais Elenaith, the last concealment of the veil dance she had done so long; it crumpled beneath her feet but did not hinder her step, the green light of its bones through its flesh only a backlight to her firework movements, as she danced away from Liavek with the partner she had always known would come.

The House of Responsible Life was a boxy building at Liavek's northeast corner, between the Street of Thwarted Desire and Neglectful Street. Though not far from a city gate, it was not in a heavily traveled part of Liavek. So the occupants of the House, the religion whose color was green, did see the crowd around them.
The Green order did not do anything at first. It was not their way to do anything: They were a faith of sworn suicides, concerned only with fulfilling all their earthly obligations and responsibilities before making an artistic exit from life. This was not too clearly understood by most Liavekans, and crowds had stared at the House before. The Order simply took no notice; there was work to do in the House and its gardens.
They noticed the first stone through the window.
Suddenly there were more stones, and angry shouts. Glass was breaking, and people were running, and wood splintered. A hole was battered in the garden fence, and bodies crowded through, trampling vines and crushing fruit, doing more damage by accident than design. Someone tossed in a little pig, which ran about rooting and squealing.
At the front of the House, a novice came out of the main double doors and hurried to close the window shutters; a shower of stones drove her to cover. Voices were loud and without meaning. Someone lit a torch. The crowd, some fifty people, moved forward.
The front doors opened again, and a man in green robes came out. He was not tall, with long hair and large brown eyes in a soft face. He walked down the three green steps, and went straight toward the mob, to the man holding the torch. Missiles shot past him; he ignored them.
The Green priest put both hands on the burning roll of papers and jerked it out of the holder's grip. He threw it down and stamped on it.
The crowd faltered, fell back a step. They muttered in a low rumble that was not quite speech. The Green priest stood still. The crowd started to surge forward again.
There was a gunshot, and then a voice: "All right, that's enough!" To one side, pressing in on the crowd, was a line of City Guards in gray. Most had swords out; a few carried flintlock shotguns, clumsy but able to splatter men like thrown tomatoes. The shot and the voice had come from a Guard captain with black hair and a fierce expression. Her double-barreled pistol was still leveled, and people were backing away from her as from a plague carrier.
The crowd was breaking up, people colliding with one another, drifting away from the House, falling down, getting up and running.
It was over almost as quickly as it had started, the street emptying out as the line of Guards pressed forward. The Green priest had not moved. The captain walked up to him.
"Hello, Verdialos," Jemuel said. "Nice morning."
"I can recall better," the priest said, "and worse." He turned to survey the damage to the House, then walked quickly to the bush where the novice was still huddling. "Are you hurt, my dear? No, that's good. Go inside now, and tell Cook I said to give you two honeycakes and some strong tea." He turned back to Jemuel. "The gardens?"
"I've got some people back there." She took her pistol off cock and put it away. "Dialo, I realize you're sworn to kill yourself, but weren't you trying rather hard at it just then?"
"Oh," Verdialos said, and his eyes went very round and white. "I didn't   . well, it was their stoning the girl. It made me angry."
"Angry. You? If I put that in the report, no one will believe it."
"Would you then also put down that my order takes complete responsibility for the green deaths, so that won't be believed either?"
"We're doing what we can, Dialo. Do you want guards full time?"
"I'll put it to the Serenities, but I don't think so. It might only encourage another mob. We were fortunate today."
Jemuel nodded. "I wanted to tell you that I've been put on special duty to deal with this green mess. No offense."
"None taken. If we learn anything, of course we'll let you know."
"Thanks, Dialo."
"Thank you, Jem. Good death to you."
"I'll just say good day, thanks."
Jemuel took a footcab back to the Guard offices in the Levar's Palace; the runner grudgingly took a city credit slip for the fare, but insisted on a cash tip.
Jemuel made out the reports on the night's dirty work and the incident at the House of Responsible Life. The riot—she had to call it that—was really bad news; the Regent would want to know if Liavek were being pushed to the edge by the deaths, and the truth, that in a city of three hundred thousand you could get fifty people together to throw rocks on any excuse at all, would not reassure him a bit.
Only three deaths, she thought. More people than that died every night in the Old City, of starvation or other sharp edges. But these were all wizards, and even people who knew better—like other magicians—tended to think of wizards as immortal. And it was certainly a creepy way to go. Sen Wuchien's body was four days cold in the morgue, with nobody to claim it, and still glowing. Somebody wanted to keep him on the slab, to see how long he did glow. There was a typically morgueish joke about saving money on lamp wicks.
Her pen was starting to wobble. So this was special duty: she was supposed to end her shift with the end of the night watch, and here it was morning with a vengeance. She shoved her chair back from her littered desk, put her feet up, and closed her eyes. Immediately there was a knock at the door.
Lieutenant Jassil put his red-haired head in. "Captain? Someone here to see you. It's Thyan, from Snake's place."
"Sure, Rusty."
The Tichenese girl came in. Jemuel gave her forehead a pat in greeting. "What news, mistress?"
Thyan held out a small shiny thing. "Snake thought you'd want to see this."
Jemuel looked at the object. "Fhogkbefe." she said.
Thyan giggled and blushed slightly. "That's a good one, Captain."
Jemuel said, "You speak Bhandaf?"
"I work in Snake's shop, Captain. I can swear in sixteen languages."
"Come visit this office on a holiday night, you'll learn sixteen more," Jemuel said. "Come on, let's go talk to Snake."

Quard was reading when Arianai came in. He put the book down, said, "I'm sorry about yesterday. I was upset."
"Would you like to tell me what you were upset about?"
"No."
She nodded. "I guess the apology will have to do, then. Would you mind talking about Theleme?"
"She's not ill again?"
"No. She's fine. I wanted to ask—you seemed to slip into her dream so readily."
"You wondered if I knew something about green men?" Quard said, an edge in his voice. "Green men who kill?"
"That's not it at all," Arianai said. It was at least halfway the truth. "I was wondering ... if we could work out where the nightmare came from, so she could be protected from having it again."
Quard nodded. "All right. What's the girl's family like?"
"She doesn't have one. She was left as an infant at the House of Responsible Life—"
"The suicides' order?"
"Yes, of course," Arianai said, startled. "I don't know why. Perhaps the person who left her misunderstood the name of the order, thinking it meant 'those who take responsibility for the living,' or somesuch,"
"That is what the name does mean," Quard said, "in Sylarine   . Old S'Rian."
"There's such a thing as Old S'Rian?"
"Everything has a past," Quard said softly. "What did the Green priests do with the child?"
"They thought about taking her in as a novice of the order. But it was decided that if she were raised entirely within the House, she could never come to an unbiased decision about her own death   . isn't that odd, that a religion of suicides should be so particular about who actually dies?"
"Every faith excludes someone from paradise."
She laughed in the hope it was a joke. "Do you know, I cannot remember ever having heard of a member of the House actually taking his own life?"
Quard said, "They may not, until they have severed every link of responsibility to the rest of the world. The order isn't about death, really, but breaking links."
"There's a difference?"
"Yes, there is. That is another reason they would be unwilling to adopt a child, you know. Someone would have to take responsibility for her, and be bound again to life. To willingly take on such a bond would be practically apostasy."
Arianai paused. It was so hard to read anything from Quard's tone of voice. "Are you a member of the House?" she said.
"I once considered it. But we were discussing the child."
"Yes    They gave her to the Levar's Orphanage. She lived there for five years. Until she began to sleep badly. Could the Green order have been the source of the 'bad green man' in her dreams?"
"It seems so obvious. But it was five years between the time the Greens had her and this   . disturbance? You're certain of that?"
"Yes, certain."
"And she was only in the House of Responsible Life for a short time."
"A few days, I was told."
"Then ... no. Surely that can't be it. Not with the dream so strong."
"Does it mean something?"
"No," he said, too quickly.
"You don't think—"
"Do you intend to adopt Theleme?"
"What? Well, I'd thought about it ... or find her a foster family–"
"I think the best thing you can do to protect her from nightmares is to do just that. The Levar's Orphanage is, I'm sure, a fine place, but it surely can't be better than loving parents."
"I think you're right."
"Thank you. Now, please, I need to get some work done."
"All right, Quard." She held his hand; he looked at hers as if he were not certain what it was for.

When Arianai got home, Jemuel was sitting on the doorstep, in her officer's uniform.
"You're up early," Arianai said.
"I'm up late. I sleep when there's a chance these days."
Arianai said, "I've found a cure for—" and shut her mouth.
"So I hear. What does your gentleman friend do nights, Anni? Beggin' your right to privacy."
"Jem, do you know how long it's been since I've had a ... gentleman friend?" She tried to laugh, but it came out forced and high.
"Your little patient told Thyan. Thyan's not very good about secrets."
"Third-hand gossip, Jem? Are you really so short of clues for your two dead wizards?"
"Yes. And it's three. The Hrothvek dancer, Teyer ais Elenaith, was found last night, in the middle of the Levar's Way." Jemuel reached into the pouch at her belt, put a small cool object into Arianai's hand. "Seen one of these yet?"
The item was a glass skull, not much bigger than the end of Arianai's thumb, filled with green liquid. The crown of the skull seemed to be threaded in place. "What is it?"
"Poison. Fast and neat. I'm told it doesn't even taste too bad."
Arianai sat down on the step next to Jemuel, with rather a bump. "Where are they coming from?"
"At last a question I can answer. Remember Old Wheeze the glass-blower? His son, Little Wheeze, came up with the first ones. He claims it was his girlfriend's idea. Now there are five glass-blowers turning them out so fast that there's a shortage of green poison. They're dyeing white poison   . Pharn's fangs, I didn't mean that pun."
"But what's the idea?"
"Random green death, according to Little Wheeze's girlfriend. If you never know when you're going to suddenly glow green and drop dead, well, why not carry your own?"
Arianai looked at the skull. "And are they actually using these?"
"Not yet. I'm not going to worry until they stop shocking the grownups. When that happens, the kids'll need a new shock. And then we might be in trouble."
"Are you going to do anything about it?"
Jemuel produced another of the skulls, tossed it in the air and caught it. "Legal age to buy poison in Liavek is fourteen. So far, that's been strictly observed. There's no legal minimum to carry poison, because who would have passed such a dumb law? And if you use the thing, you can't be charged with much, except maybe littering, or blocking a public sidewalk, which come to think of it we're guilty of now. Move along, please, mistress."
They stood up. "We did," Jemuel added, "put the lid on a fellow who wanted to do them in rock candy and lime."
Arianai shook her head. "Would you like to come in for tea and a biscuit?"
"I'd rather come in for tea and a clue   . Anni, I do need help. Is there any chance that this friend of yours knows anything?"
"I don't think there is."
"Are you not thinking there is, or can you provide him with an alibi?"
"Jem, there's a line. Don't cross it."
"All right," Jemuel said, sounding nearly sorry. "I'll see you around, Anni. Say, what's your luck time?"
"Three hours. Why?"
"You might want to study magic. I think there's going to be a shortage." Jemuel went off down the street, juggling a pair of glass skulls and whistling "Positively Cheap Street."

Prestal Cade thought that her life had a rather marvelous symmetry to it: she had become a magician on her fifteenth birthday, successfully forcing her magic into a wooden doll in one long and nervous night. Then for forty more years she had practiced the mysterious and confusing art, leaving her birthplace in Ka Zhir for some time at sea, a few years in the Farlands, a few more in Tichen, before finally arriving in Liavek to stay as a quiet practitioner of the luck-craft.
She worked through dolls, composing her spells in carving and painting, dressing and detailing them; as a result, her magic was mostly involved directly with people—cosmetic spells, protection from hazards (while at sea, she had crafted a doll of cork, whose spell preserved absolutely from drowning), and the occasional bodily complaints, though always with the assistance of a healer.
And of course there had been the special doll, her part of the spell that they had all cast together, that was now coming back to them all and dressing them in green.
Well, she thought, that completed the symmetry. For after fifteen years without magic, and forty with, she had had fifteen again without. Fifteen years ago there had been a man who was jealous of her luck, her dolls, her craft. Durus had loved her, she still did believe that; she was convinced that it was because he loved her that he found the vessel of her luck and broke it, set her magic free so that all her spells failed at once.
Prestal Cade had been walking home from the greengrocer's when it happened. She felt her heart squeezed, she fell and was sick into the gutter as fruits and cabbages rolled away from her. So this is it, she thought, the knock at the door and me without my magic to answer it. But the Liavekans on the street, used to the vagaries of luck, knew better than she what was happening; someone, she never knew his name, gathered up her groceries and led her home.
There she found Durus on the floor, a knife in one hand and a small cedarwood doll without its head in the other. Had he only waited a few more months, the break in his heart would have healed, and the patch she had put on could have failed without harming him; but Durus was always impetuous.
He had not, of course, destroyed her vessel on her ill-luck day; on any given birthday since that night, Prestal Cade could have stuffed her luck into some new vessel, been a practicing magician again. But she had not. She was, she thought (when she thought about it at all) becoming old, and would inevitably start using magic to confuse that inalterable fact. She had seen all the places she had meant to see, except the Dreamsend Hills (and who ever got there?). She would only begin to repeat herself, another this, another that, another Durus.
Still, there was the one small thing, each night.
Prestal Cade stood in the largest room in her not-large house, as she did every night just before midnight. The only furnishings were a chair just big enough for her, and a table just large enough for a teacup and a cake plate. The rest of the room was filled with dolls, more than three hundred of them, tiny dolls made from a single piece of wood and some as high as her waist, with jointed limbs and eyes that moved; dolls clothed as kings and jesters, sailors and fops, heroes out of legend and beggars from the Two-Copper Bazaar. Some of them had been spell dolls, a luck-twisting purpose in their every feature, but most of them came after that. If not for those she had sold or given away, there would be twice as many of them in the room.
For most of those in Liavek who knew Prestal Cade, she was the Doll Lady, had never been the Doll Witch. It was, she thought (and this she thought rather often) a satisfactory name to depart with.
She looked among the dolls on their shelves, took one down. It was a little lady as tall as Prestal Cade's forearm, with a porcelain head and arms and a cloth-stuffed body, under a long, full gown of blue velvet. It had been the style of court ball dresses two centuries ago, preserved in children's stories. Prestal Cade adjusted the hem of the gown, saw that the tiny fur slippers were securely in place. She stood the doll on the floor, and waited for midnight to strike.
A wizard who could invest, but did not, had one trick left: on the minutes of each day corresponding to the moment of birth, the power flashed by. Only a little luck, the most immediate of all the instant magics, but sufficient, perhaps, to hold the line between power and the void.
The hour came by. Prestal Cade felt her luck rise. She reached out with it.
The blue velvet doll straightened up, began walking in stately fashion toward the door. When she reached it, she raised a porcelain hand, and the door swung open. The doll curtsied to the figure beyond the door; Prestal Cade bowed.
The doll did not rise. The moment was gone. Prestal Cade looked up, smiling. The room was already suffused with green light.

"Verdialos, you're crying."
"Oh. Am I?" His eyes went wide, which stopped his tears. He was sitting in the dining hall of the House of Responsible Life, over a cup of cold breakfast tea and a half-eaten slice of melon. "I'm sorry, Serenity." The title did not mean a great deal; the hierarchy of the Green Order was loose at best. It just was necessary to have something to call the people with more authority than others.
"Don't be sorry. Do you mind telling me what the matter is?"
"I was just told that Prestal Cade had died. Did you know her?"
"I don't believe so."
"She was a dollmaker."
"A wizard?"
Verdialos smiled slightly. "She had been. But her vessel was destroyed."
"Oh."
"Well, no, not like that, not quite like that, Serenity. Her luck was just freed, not lost. She could have reinvested, but she didn't."
"Do you know why?"
"Not so well that I would be comfortable saying so." He picked up his piece of melon. "I was there the night her luck was freed, you see. It was fifteen years ago, and I was just barely a novice of the Order, and I saw this woman fall down   " He examined the melon rind. "She had a bag of groceries."
"Groceries."
"I picked them up for her. I remember thinking, as soon as I'd sorted out what had happened, that I should convert this woman to the faith, that I should at least preach the truth to her ... "
"But you didn't?"
"No, I didn't. There was so much going on at the time, you see."
"And now the woman is dead, and it's too late to preach to her. You shouldn't cry over what can't be mended, Dialo."
"I'm not," Verdialos said plainly. "I'm sad because I've lost something, and I can't decide whether it's a reason to live, or to die." He shook his head. "One would think after fifteen years as a priest I'd be beyond such ambiguities."
"I've been a priest rather longer than you," the Serenity said. "If it weren't for ambiguity, what need would we have for faith?"
Verdialos nodded. "Thank you, Gorodain."
"That's what I'm here for," the Serenity said, and started up the stairs to his attic room. "That's what we are all here for."

Arianai went looking for Wizard's Row, and was rather surprised to find it present.
Present, but scarcely all there: in place of the usual outlandishly styled houses, there were plain stones, shuttered windows, and silence, except for a raw wind blowing dust and trash up the street.
Number 17 was on this day a modest stone dwelling with lead-paned windows that admitted no view. A small enameled sign by the doorway arch carried the street number. The knocker on the heavy oak door was of black iron, and as Arianai reached for it, it rattled of itself and the door swung open.
Arianai entered a narrow corridor with a worn red carpet, hazy light filtering through small windows high up. The passage led to a room with one small lamp on a table: it was otherwise so dark that the objects on the walls, the walls themselves, were uncertain.
In a large leather chair next to the lamp sat The Magician. He wore a long red gown with brocade trim, black leather slippers. His face was difficult to see in the glare of the lamp, but his hands were as youthful as always. His small silver-blue cat was in his lap, the fat black one curled up at his feet.
"Arianai," he said, and that was all.
"Magician."
When he did not answer, she said, "Your hospitality is usually better than this."
"Times are usually better than this."
"What's the matter with the times? It doesn't seem to me to be a bad time at all. Unless of course you're a wizard."
"You are acquiring a bitter humor, Arianai. I wonder from where." His voice was that of a very young man, but it was shot through with ancient weariness, so terrible that she had to pause before answering him.
"You sent me to Quard."
"I referred Theleme's case to him. There is a difference."
"I'm tired of hearing about all these subtle differences! Is Quard involved with the dead Wizards?"
The Magician was silent.
"You want a fee?" She threw a handful of silver on the floor. The sleeping cat jumped up and ran away into the darkness. She took a step forward. "I think you're scared. You're afraid you're going to die, too."
"Young lady," The Magician said firmly, "I know that I am going to die. It taunts me every year with its presence. I ceased to be afraid of it before your several-great-grandparents were conceived." He stroked his cat. "That is why these   . colleagues of mine are dead: because they had no fear."
More quietly, Arianai said, "Is Quard a murderer?"
"No."
She licked her lips. "But is he the wizard-killer?"
"There is no way to answer that question in a way you will understand."
"Then tell me enough to understand! Please, Magician   . Quard said your name was Trav."
"I've thought about changing it." He sighed. "What you are seeing now are the last in a long series of actions. Call them moves in a game. The object of the game is power ... a power as much greater than our magic as the sun exceeds this lamp."
"Are you playing the game?"
"At present, only observing it."
"So who are the players?"
"Originally—thirty years ago—there were seven. Their leader's name was Imbre. He was an extremely powerful wizard, with a luck time of almost two full days. There was, in fact, a time when he might have become The Magician of Liavek in my place. But he had an obsessive streak in his nature that led him into   . experiments. And not long after the start of the one that interests you, he died."
"Did you kill him?"
"Thank you for your confidence. His closest associate in the seven killed him, fairly or not, I've no idea."
"And took over."
"There was nothing for him to take over."
"But you said the power—"
"It is not that kind of power. Not something that any of Imbre's group—or all of them together—could use or control to their own ends. All they could do was release it on the world."
"And if they did?"
The Magician said nothing.
"And if they did?"
"Do you pray to a god, Healer?"
"I   . pray. Healers do that quite a bit."
"And what happens when you pray to whatever god it is? Does some actual being use its power to touch you back? Or does your own wish, your own prayer, give shape to some abstract power?"
"What difference does it make?"
The Magician made a gesture over the cat in his lap. It began to rise, levitating almost in front of The Magician's face. The cat seemed to enjoy it, curling and stretching in midair. "I reach into myself and do this," he said, "but I am not a god."
"How do you know?"
The cat sank back into The Magician's lap, presented its belly for scratching, and was rewarded. The Magician said, "Because I look back and regret my wasted efforts. Only mortals look back."
"Is Quard mortal?"
"If you cut him, he will bleed. But Quard is also a gateway to the power that Imbre's seven reached for."
"He has the power?"
"No one has the power!" The Magician's voice softened. "Because Quard has a mind and a will, he may not simply be walked over. Think of his will as being a lock on the gate. Imbre's successor has spent thirty years assembling the key to that lock."
"And the glowing dead—they're the first light coming through the keyhole?"
"Spoken like a wizard."
"But if you know all this—if you've been 'observing the game'— why in all the gods' names haven't you done something?"
"Because I believe that the play will fail, and by interfering I would do no good and might cause many more deaths."
"All right! Tell me what I can do."
"You have already done it," The Magician said tiredly. "You put the key into the lock."
Arianai stared. "I ... what did I ... do you mean Theleme?"
"Imbre fathered Quard to gain access to power. Imbre's successor fathered Theleme to gain access to Quard."
Arianai's throat clamped shut. The Magician just sat in his darkness, stroking his cat.
Finally she said, "Theleme   . ? The   . green man is her father?"
"Planted in her dreams for Quard to find."
"But you sent me to Quard!"
"I sent you back to Quard. His sensitivity to dreams is real. Theleme would have died without him, and the unlocking process would still have begun. Now do you start to understand just how complex this game is?"
"Tell me the rest of it! Please."
"The rest of it is Quard's story. He will have to tell you."
"You could tell me more, but you won't."
The Magician sighed again. "I could tell you to leave Liavek, to have nothing more to do with Quard, but you won't. That is one mistake that I have made, and am bitterly sorry for: I forgot what it meant to be lonely, and not be proud of the fact."
"At least tell me the name of the green man."
"If I tell you, you will go to him. If I do not tell you, you will discover it anyway."
"Then you might as well tell me."
"No. I will not. So that I may pretend that my hands are clean. Good day to you, Healer Sheyzu."
The lamp went out. After a moment of darkness, Arianai found herself standing on Healer's Street, at the intersection with Wizard's Row; but the intersection, and the Row, were gone.

"I've been to see Trav," was the first thing Arianai said to Quard.
He did not look up from the piece of wood he was whittling. "On first-name terms with him now? That's good. Did you get your money's worth?"
"He told me you were involved with   . some sort of power."
"I thought Liavekans always called it luck."
"Don't be hateful to me, Quard."
"I'd be glad to do it in your absence."
Arianai breathed hard. "Forgive me for wearing sandals," she said. "If I'd known the self-pity ran so deep around here, I'd have brought my boots."
Quard put down the rasp. "That's not a bad line."
"The Magician said I was learning,"
"How long is your luck time?"
"What?"
"I didn't ask your blessed birthday, just the span of luck. How long was your mother in labor?"
"A little more than three hours."
"Not long for a Liavekan," Quard said.
"My family are healers, not magicians," she said. "We don't believe in prolonging pain."
Quard said, "Then you know that it is done."
"Of course. A student magician has access to power only for the duration of his mother's labor. I've heard of it being stretched out for forty, fifty hours." She shook her head in disgust. Then she thought of what The Magician had said about Imbre—two days' luck—and shivered.
"Is labor pain really as terrible as all that?" Quard said, with a sort of distracted curiosity.
"It is."
"Then to extend it for ... say, twelve days   . that would be a very bad thing, wouldn't it."
She stared. "Twelve days?"
"It would have been twelve weeks, if they could have done it. Twelve months, if only they could have. Imagine that: an unending luck time. But it does leave the question of one's ill-luck time, at the opposite pole of the year. I think they might have been satisfied with six months and a day   . just to see what happened on that day when luck and counter-luck overlapped. An irresistible force and an immovable   ." He gave a nasty, barking laugh.
"But your mother—twelve days? That's impossible!"
"No. Not impossible. With drugs and magic and clever surgeries, not impossible for the pain to last that long. But impossible to survive, yes." His voice rose. "My father and his little clutch of wizards stretched my mother's pain until there was no more flesh to cover it. And then, as she was dying and I was being born, just when any human being would have thought the obscenity could not be increased, they cast a spell. It took all seven of them, because the luck of a birthing woman is overwhelming—how else do you think the thing happens? These seven people, with enough power between them to have done anything, anything their souls desired, they, they—" He gestured wildly. "—they stopped my birth instant, my mother's death instant, and we hung there, me struggling to be born, she struggling to die, for an hour from midnight—"
He fell forward on the counter, sobbing without tears. He reached up and clawed at his hair, pulling the wig away, displaying a skull utterly smooth but for a few strands of false hair stuck in spirit gum. He tugged at an eyebrow, and it came away as well.
"Quard—" She reached around his shoulders.
"Three of them—" He shuddered, pulled away from her arm. "Three of them were women."
"Quard. You have a will of your own."
He straightened up. "A small one .. I destroyed my vessel of luck, years ago. It was almost harder than the investment had been. I did it at the wrong time, though. The luck is only loose, not gone."
"As long as you use your will, your mind, no one can use you. The Magician told me that."
"You don't understand. I was created for a purpose."
"I don't doubt your power. But the power belongs to you. No one else can use it, if you don't let them."
"No. No. That was the experiment, but not the experiment's purpose. Do you remember when we talked about the Green faith? And I mentioned what its name meant, in the old language?"
"Yes."
"When that language was spoken, the Order was different from the one you know. Now they spend their time plotting their own deaths—and rarely succeed. But not so long ago, they contrived the deaths of others, and they did achieve them. Do you see?" He leaned toward her, and his clear light eyes shone feverishly. "Death as an art form. The death of the whole world as their masterwork." He stood up, turned away from her, braced his hands against the wall as if to keep it from collapsing upon him. He took a deep breath. "My father didn't want a powerful magician, you see. He wanted to create a god. To have Death as his own obedient son."
Arianai went around the counter, put her hands on his knotted shoulders. "But he failed," she said gently.
"No!" He twisted away from her, pulling the shelf from the wall. A shiribi puzzle and a stack of alphabet blocks crashed to the floor. "No, he didn't! The death is in my soul, just waiting to come out in the world. Don't you see? Don't you know who the rest of my father's gang were? Sen Wuchien. Shiel ola Siska. Teyer ais Elenaith. Prestal Cade. All of them dead, and still they control me. I've killed them, in my midnight dreams, and I'm still the slave of their wish." Quard stared at the shelves of toys, and began to sweep them aside. Puppets were tangled and broken, music boxes spilled their tinkling clockwork, porcelain dolls shattered.
"Stop it, Quard," Arianai said firmly. "Do you think I haven't seen an unhappy child throw a tantrum before? I said, stop it!"
Quard's shoulders slumped. He looked up. There were tears and dust on his face, and he smiled, a joyless doll's smile. "Tantrum? It's midnight, Mistress Healer. Allow me to show you a tantrum such as gods throw."
He stretched his hand toward a pile of ceramic bits that had been a doll's head. There was a flicker of green, and a small tornado swept the pieces into his palm. He closed his fingers around them, and squeezed; green light leaked from his fingers, and the bones showed through the skin. The hand relaxed. He flipped something to Arianai, and she caught it.
The object was a perfectly formed porcelain skull just smaller than an egg.
She threw it down. "Come home with me," she said quietly. "I'll change your dreams."
"What, in bed?" he said incredulously. "Wrestle and gasp and pledge the world, and then wake up counting the days till the world ends?"
She was too angry to turn away. "I'm not frightened, Quard."
"Then you're stark mad." He circled around her. "I can't stay here any longer," he said. "If I can't get away from my destiny, at least I'll be the death of someplace less than Liavek." He went into the back of the shop, paused in the doorway. "The toys are innocent," he said in a hollow voice. "Give them to children who will love them."
The door closed, the latch clicked. Arianai knocked at it, called to Quard, for half an hour. Then she went home.
Theleme was sleeping fitfully, tossing and turning. Quard's stuffed toys were beside the bed, apparently knocked aside by Theleme in her sleep. Arianai wound the spring in the flannel cat, listened to the soft beat-beat of its wooden heart, put it carefully against Theleme's chest. Theleme curled her arms and legs around the cat. Her breathing quieted.
Arianai picked up the camel and rider, carried them from the bedroom into her office. Some of the stitches on the rider's hood had broken, and it was askew; Arianai straightened it, put the toy on her desk. She poured a cup of nearly-cold tea, sat down behind the desk, and looked for a long time at the stuffed beast and its harried driver. As ever, the cloth tableau made her want to laugh out loud.
But she didn't. She put her head down on her arms and cried herself to sleep.

When Obas came to Liavek from Ombaya, he brought with him six shafts of ebony from the tree behind his house. The tree was old, and strong, and lucky; it had been planted on the grave of Obas's thrice-great-grandfather Udeweyo, a mighty wizard of earth and air, and the black tree's roots and branches kept his luck alive. Obas's mother had gone out into the yard where the tree stood to give birth to him, done the labor that gave Obas his birth luck on the ground that fed the tree, in the shade of its leaves.
Obas shaped his luck in the making of arrows, and when he left home his mother gave him the blackwood shafts, sealed in a pouch of moleskin, saying, "These are for no ordinary magic, not for wealth and not for power, not for the people of the lands you visit, for their own trees in their own earth will be strong enough for that. Someday, my son, you will need the luck of the house you were born in; these will touch you to Udeweyo's luck."
That had been fifty years ago; and in that span Obas had been hungry and poor, and he had been afraid, and he had needed luck that had not come to him; but he had not touched the ebony shafts.
Tonight the moleskin pouch was open and empty, and Obas was crafting the last of the six black arrows.
Their points were silver, and their flights were from a red flamingo, taken without harming the bird. The smooth black wood was carved with words and symbols, the carvings then rubbed with a mixture of herbs and Obas's blood. Each arrow had a name, and the names were Seeker, Binder, Blaster, Blinder, Flyer, and Slayer. Each arrow had a purpose—and the purpose would come for Obas at midnight, but Obas would meet it armed with ancient luck.
Just before midnight he put the arrows in a quiver and strapped it to his back. Around his left wrist he tied a band of oxhide. He put on a short cloak of skin, and went out into the Levar's Park in the city's northwest, the place where Sen had died. He did not have to go to the park; he did not have to go to his opponent at all. He knew that he could be found. But he wished to meet the enemy in the open, under the sky, earth under him. Sky and earth might strengthen the gift of Udeweyo's luck; Obas did not know. But if he was to die, let it be in the room he was born in: the room of the world.
The park was quiet, and bright with the light of the nearly full moon. Obas smelled damp grass and cedarwood, heard a fly buzz past his ear; he turned, but the fly—if fly it had been—was gone. He was alone.
No, he thought, feeling luck stir in the soles of his feet, not alone.
Obas drew out the first arrow, the one named Seeker. The vessel of his luck, a broad silver arrowhead on a cord around his neck, was cool against his chest. His heart was slow and his breathing was even. He twirled the shaft in his fingers, filling it with his luck. Little lightnings flashed from the silver head down the shaft, making the carved chants glow, sparking from the red feathers.
With a snap of his wrist, Obas cast Seeker. It flew from his fingertips, trailing behind it a ribbon of silver light. The ribbon arched, bent, dove. Then Seeker began to whirl, spinning a ring, a braid, a column of light. The arrow struck the ground, its magic spent, and fell apart in black ashes.
Within Seeker's windings stood a tall warrior with a shield and a spear. He wore a striped skin, and his own dark skin was painted with figures of white and red and yellow.
In Ombayan the warrior's name was Barah. He was the First Hunter, the one who had learned to use wisdom to overcome prey stronger than himself. Obas felt suddenly old, and weary, and small. At the same time, he had hope: he did not fight an inisha, the wind or the earth, but the Hunter, who though a god had been a man. Barah could fail. A hunter might abandon the kill, if the prey proved too strong.
Obas raised the arrow Binder, spun it. It flashed and flew, striking the earth between Barah's feet. The shaft swelled, and sprouted branches, growing into a tree with its trunk at Barah's back. The branches reached for Barah's arms, the roots coiling to trap his legs. Barah struggled, but the tree drew luck from earth, and held him.
Obas drew the next arrow, Blinder, gave it magic, and cast it. It whistled like a diving shrike and flew toward Barah's eyes. The Hunter tried to raise his shield, but the branches pulled his arm aside. Blinder reached his face, and opened into a hood of blackness that tightened over Barah's head, covering his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his mouth, so that Barah's face was a smooth ebony sculpture, all senseless.
Obas raised Blaster, whispering his luck into it. The silver arrowhead grew warm against his chest. The luck was there, the luck was strong. Hunter and prey had changed their skins. Obas cast the arrow, and it flew for Barah's chest.
Blaster erupted in fire that flowed down Barah's body, along his pinioned limbs, melting the skin from his bones. Dark flesh fell away, and the bones beneath showed green.
The fire spread to the binding tree, haloing it in the night. Bark began to slough from the branches, dripping thickly, like black mud.
Where the molten bark struck the Hunter's bare green bones, it clung, shining red over black over green, clothing the bones, muscling and fleshing them.
Barah stretched out his new limbs, still held in the tree's branches and roots, and tightened his new muscles. The tree groaned. Barah bent his back, and brought the tree up by its roots.
Earth fell away from the dead tree's roots, and tangled in them. Obas could see white bones: the skeleton, he knew, of Udeweyo, the breaking of his luck.
The first Hunter shook off the tree as a man throws off a cloak. Its trunk and Udeweyo's bones crunched together into black and white splinters. Barah struck his spear on his shield and took a step toward Obas.
Feeling his heart pound, his lungs strain, Obas raised Flyer. He cast the arrow, and as its flights brushed his fingers he grasped the feathers. Flyer lifted Obas, carried him into the sky.
He was afraid, he was fleeing. Could it be cowardice? The prey was too strong.
Far below, Obas saw Barah drop his shield to the ground, stand upon it. The wind rose, rippling the grass. Barah's shield rose on the wind, carrying him aloft. Barah raised his spear and flew after Obas. Together they soared above the housetops of Liavek, curving over the shining pan of the sea, riding the wind toward distant Ombaya.
Barah rose above Obas, stood on air, a dark shape against the moon. His spearpoint flashed in the moonlight. He threw the spear.
Obas raised his left wrist. The band of hide around it began to grow, until it was a shield. Obas raised it as the spear flew toward him.
Barah's spear struck Obas's shield, and pierced it.
And stopped, the spearhead barely two fingers' breadth from Obas's heart.
Obas let the shield and spear fall away. They caught fire, a green shooting star toward the roofs of the city. Obas grasped his last arrow, the one named Slayer. He pulled at his magic until his heart burned, and then he cast the spell. Slayer shot burning at Barah's heart, and the First Hunter's shield was between his feet and the wind.
Barah reached out and plucked Slayer from the air. As he held the arrow, it seemed that neither he nor Obas were flying, but simply standing, two men face to face in the darkness. Obas looked into Barah's eyes. The hunter was mighty. The prey was not.
"Come," said the voice of Barah, louder than the wind, "if you are coming."
The moonlight took on a green cast; Obas looked at his open hand, empty of arrows, and saw that the green light came from him.
Barah cast Slayer back at its maker.
Obas's vessel of power melted, and the liquid silver trickled down his skin. If he cried out, it was lost on the wind. He lost his grip on the arrow Flyer, and he fell. Below him, the towers of Liavek thrust up like the bones of Udeweyo, and embraced him.

It was nearly noon when Arianai awoke. She dressed at once and went out to buy a Cat Street Crier; the front page had the news of Obas the Arrowsmith, found dead in the Levar's Park with the ground dented beneath him, though the earth there was not soft and there was no mark on Obas's body. Excepting of course the green glow of his bones.
Arianai crumpled the paper, shook her head. She carried the sleeping Theleme next door, leaving her in the care of that healer's nurse, and went to the toyshop.
The sign-puppet showed no more motion than a hanged man. Arianai tried the door, found it unlocked. Quard was not in the front of the shop; quietly, Arianai went around the counter and into the back.
It was a mess even by young-bachelor standards, shelves and tables and most of the floor haphazardly covered with paint jars and glue pots and tools, partially finished toys and drawings for others, odd books and dirty dishes, with dust and wood shavings filling all the gaps.
Quard was asleep. The bed was small and hard, but so finely carpentered it must have been his own work. He was sprawled on his stomach, head turned to one side. His wig was off, and the smooth complete hairlessness of his head and neck and face made him look like an unfinished doll.
She put two fingers to his temple. His pulse hammered. His eyelids twitched as he dreamed.
"Who killed Imbre?" she said into his ear. "We can stop him if only we have his name."
"No," Quard muttered. "Can't go there."
"Imbre. Who was Imbre's friend? Who killed him?"
"Die, all die."
"We have to drive out the green man. Who is he?"
"Gorodain," Quard said. "Friend, priest, kill. Gorodain."
She kissed him and went out, went north, to the Street of Thwarted Desire, and the House of Responsible Life.
She asked to see Gorodain. The clerks sent her to a small office, barely big enough to pace comfortably. Its walls were painted a pale green. Arianai thought that she was becoming quite physically sick of green.
After a few minutes an unprepossessing man came in. "Are you Gorodain?"
"My name is Verdialos," he said, in a lame little voice. "I am ... oh, say that I deal with requests."
"I'm not here to die."
"But you are looking for someone who is?"
"I want to talk to the priest called Gorodain. Tell him it's about five dead wizards."
"I will tell him that. But he won't see you on that matter."
"Then tell him it's about Imbre."
"All right," Verdialos said equably. "Dead wizards and Imbre. Please wait here. Sit if you like."
"Your chairs aren't very comfortable."
"Most of our visitors have other things on their minds." Verdialos went out.
He was not long in returning. "Serenity Gorodain regrets that the press of duties keeps him busy for the next several days. If you would care to make an appointment, or leave your name ... " He sounded vaguely uneasy.
"Arianai Sheyzu, eighty-five Healer's Street." Then she recalled what The Magician had said, about her discovering the green man's name. The Magician was one of the murkiest of an opaque lot, but what was in the fog was always truth.
Verdialos had started writing the address. He looked up. "Are you well, Mistress Sheyzu?"
"Yes," she said. "I've got no intention of dying anytime soon."
"A good death to you nonetheless," Verdialos said.

Shortly after the Healer Sheyzu had gone, Gorodain came into Verdialos's office. "Did she leave her name and address?" the Serenity asked.
Verdialos gave him the paper. "Forgive me for asking, Serenity   . but my schedule is rather light this week, and if I could assist you   ."
"I forgive you for asking, Verdialos. And I forgive you your ambition. You do know that you will succeed me as Serenity, when I finally"—he smiled—"achieve the goal?"
"I had supposed I was one of those in line."
"Good. One should not face death with false modesty." He glanced at the paper, then crumpled it. "If the woman should return, another dose of your usual kind firmness, eh, Dialo?"
Verdialos nodded as the Serenity went out.
It was in fact a busy day for Verdialos; the mob had done quite a bit of superficial damage to the House, especially the gardens, and the repairs had to be supervised and accounted. They were, Verdialos thought, very often an order of bookkeepers and tally-counters, and he wondered if perhaps the work they did for the House bound them to it, created exactly the responsibilities they were supposed to be severing in their quest for the regretless death.
And then again, he thought with a stifled chuckle, neither the tomatoes not the tomato worms would feel guilt at the gardeners' passing.
It was quite late when the last note had been written on the garden charts, the last cracked window mended against the night air. There was nothing artistic about any death that involved sneezing.
Verdialos ate a light dinner, a chop from the rioters' poor pig, and began a discussion with his wife concerning the healer and the Serenity. She ended it shortly by saying quietly, "Asking for an extra opinion never killed anyone." Verdialos laughed and kissed her warmly. Then he put on a cap and cloak of neutral gray (because prudence in troubled times had never killed anyone, either) and went out to talk to a City Guard.
He was directed to the Guard office in the Palace itself, and finally to Jemuel, who was studying reports and drinking kaf thick as syrup—"It's not supposed to taste good," she said, "it's supposed to keep me standing."
Verdialos told her about the day's event. "I am troubled by all of it," he said, "both the healer's interest in us, and the Serenity's interest in her."
Jemuel said, "It bothers me, too. I want to have a talk with your Serenity."
They shared a footcab back to the House, and climbed the stairs to Gorodain's chambers. Verdialos knocked on the door.
"Come in," said a voice that was not Gorodain's. Verdialos opened the door. His eyes widened. Captain Jemuel said, "You."
The Magician sat in a wicker chair, looking at a table with an etched-glass top. There was no one else in the room.
"May I ask," Verdialos said, "how you come to be so far from your usual, um ... "
"A fool's errand," The Magician said. "I came to talk a priest out of his faith. But I arrived too late; he has already gone."
Jemuel said to Verdialos, "I have the right to commandeer the fastest horse in the neighborhood. I hope you have it."
"I have a faster horse," The Magician said, "and we all may ride. Open the window, please."
"Trav—the Serenity—"
"Is a branch of the Old Green Faith," The Magician said. "Those Who Assume Responsibility."
"Yes. I had been rather afraid of that. In our defense, he was never allowed to—well. Nothing to say now, is there." Verdialos opened the window.

Arianai had been dozing, nearly dreaming, when the knock came at her front door. It was a faint tap, hesitant. Shaking herself awake, she rushed to answer it, swung the door open. "Qua—" she said, before seeing anything in the dark, and only gurgled the rest.
Gorodain's hands were crossed in the grip called the Butterfly; they closed easily around Arianai's neck, fingertips thrusting into the hollows at the base of her skull, tightening, lifting. She lost the power of speech and movement at once. Her toes scraped the doorstep. Gorodain held her for several heartbeats, wishing that there were time for something more elaborate. So often he felt like a master chef who knew a thousand exotic recipes and was forced to prepare a single bland pudding for a toothless stomach patient.
Then, he thought, minimal art was still art, and this was the brushstroke that would complete his masterpiece, to confound a metaphor. And there simply was not time. Gorodain flexed his wrists, and there was a single sharp crack from Arianai's neck.
He lowered her, turning her on her back so that she lay across the threshhold of her front door, her head draped—quite elegantly, Gorodain thought—over the edge of the step. It might well be taken for an accident. Not that it mattered what it was taken for. Then, on impulse, he knelt beside her, stretched out a hand, tapped into his luck. The green glow would be simple enough to induce. Closure, that was what a work of art needed, a bright green line to link all the deaths.
There was a cold pressure at the back of Gorodain's neck. For a moment he thought it might be Quard—but the time was not right, it was still most of an hour until midnight. Then the touch resolved itself into pistol barrels. Gorodain looked up, saw Verdialos approaching, and with him The Magician—himself, out of his house!
The gun pressed hard against him, and a woman's voice said, "Just move, you dirtwad; just do us all a favor and make one little move."
"Don't, Jemuel," The Magician said, in that irritating pretty-boy voice of his. "The favor would only be to Gorodain."
Gorodain grinned involuntarily. The Magician was right. There was nothing they could do now, any of them. Death would come for his dead lover, and to save her be forced to admit that he was truly Death, take the power that could not be controlled. In less than an hour, Imbre's son would be loosed upon Liavek; before dawn, Liavek would be Necropolis. He wondered if the glow of all the dead would shine out upon the sea, like a green dawn.

Quard was sitting on the floor of the toyshop, arms and legs at odd angles, like a marionette cast aside.
He had intended to go away. He had started to pack a bag with everything that was meaningful to him, and then realized that such a bag would be empty. He had been sitting on the floor for most of the day now, waiting for night, for midnight, the hour of his birth and his power. There was nothing for him in Liavek but Death, but there wasn't anything more for him anywhere else.
So he would stay, and when next someone came into his shop they would find him on the floor, green.
The door swung open and Theleme came in. "Master, master! You have to come, master!" She rushed to him, and without thinking he opened his arms and hugged her.
"What is it, Theleme? What's wrong? Where's Anni?"
"Anni's sick, master, sick. The green man. You have to come. You have to ride the camel for Anni."
Quard's throat tightened. He tried twice to speak and failed. On the third try he said, "Where is she, Theleme?"
"Home," Theleme said. "Come, master. Captain Jem will take us."
"Who   . ?" Quard stood up, walked with Theleme to the door.
Just outside was a woman in Guard officer's uniform. Her face was pretty, but hard as a cliff. She had a pistol out, casually ready. "Good evening, Toymaker," she said, in a cold voice. "I've been wanting to meet you. But we've got some other business first."
Quard walked mechanically down the stairs. The Guard captain pointed at the toyshop door. "Aren't you going to lock up?"
"Why?" he said. "There's nothing in there that isn't mine."

It was not far to Arianai's house. There was a sphere of lucklight illuminating the scene, in the grainy, unreal fashion of magic.
Arianai was lying on the doorstep, half-in, half-out. The healer Marithana Govan was there, kneeling next to Arianai. Quard looked around at the rest of them: The Magician, Verdialos the Green priest   . Gorodain.
"Welcome, son of Imbre," Gorodian said, and pressed his palms to his forehead. No one paid any attention.
Jemuel took Theleme inside. Quard said quietly, "Give her something to make her sleep," and Marithana went inside as well. The others stood out in the cold, around the body.
When the two women came out again, Jemuel said, "Well?"
"Her neck's cleanly broken," Marithana said. "She didn't suffer."
"I am an adept of my order," Gorodain said.
In a tightly controlled voice, Jemuel said, "If you speak out of turn one more time I will surely shoot your balls off."
"Can you mend the break?" Quard said abruptly.
Marithana said, "Young man, she's—"
The Magician said, "I can mend the bones, with guidance from Mistress Govan. Marithana, if they're splinted by magic, will they knit?"
"Trav, she's dead. "
"If that changed?" The Magician said, and all of them stared at him, except for Gorodain and Quard, who looked at one another with unreadable expressions.
"In time," Marithana said. "Perhaps more than a year. Your birth time   ."
"If it takes that long, Gogo can renew the spell."
"You're serious."
Quard said, "More than you know. Do it."
The Magician said, "Marithana, concentrate on the bones as they should be. We'll do it together."
Marithana Govan put her hands on Arianai's throat, straightening it, massaging it. There was a faint sound of grinding, crunching. Verdialos looked worried, Jemuel impassive, Gorodain positively merry.
The healer and the wizard moved back. Quard stepped forward. He said to The Magician, "If something goes wrong—if I come back before she does, it'll mean that—"
"I'll do what I can," Trav said.
Quard knelt by the dead woman. Gorodian was speaking again; Quard shut him out, looked up. Full moon at the top of the sky. Close enough to the crease of midnight. Quard stared at the moon, feeling the weight of luck tug at his heart, the tides of fortune raising his salt blood.
He stepped from his flesh and into his birthright.

Around him was still Liavek, still streets, houses, windows, rooftops, still just as lovely and hideous as any other Liavek; if anything, perhaps a little more precisely defined, cleaner of line and truer of angle, small where it should be small and grand where grandness was deserved. For it is not true that the dead know all things—indeed the dead know nothing that the living do not. But the dead have perspective.
Quard was surrounded by wraiths, human figures in translucently pale shades of green: not the dead but the living, dwelling here in their minds as they wished for death, in the degree of those hopes. Marithana Govan and Jemuel were barely even visible, delicate as soap bubbles. Verdialos was nearly solid, but without luminance; certain but not eager.
Quard looked at The Magician, who stood there with one hand already in the quiet world; Quard examined the rest of The Magician, studied his wish, and almost laughed. He did not: laughter and tears were things of the full world.
Quard looked with interest at Gorodain, who flickered, wavering to and from oblivion. Quard reached out and touched Gorodain's shade. Its eyes opened wide, and the figure knelt out of Quard's way, growing fainter as it did so. As ever with the voyeur, Quard thought, recoiling at the actual touch. He walked by.
There was no source of light in the city: it was uniformly dim, dull perhaps, though the effect was not drab but soothing. And there was no glass in the windows, nor glasses on the walls, nor puddles on the ground—nothing at all that night cast a reflection.
He moved easily on the dustlessly clean streets, passing among the shades of the still living, looking up at windows luminous with their death wishes. "I felt Death breathe on me," their living selves would be saying, in the full world; "someone is walking on my grave." Quard could see easily through the windows, or the walls for that matter, and no door was closed to him: even Wizard's Row would be present, should he desire to travel it. Nor did he have to walk; others rode, he supposed, or flew, but walking was the one way he knew.
Quard paused at a house on Cordwainers' Street: in an upstairs room, a crowd of shades stood around a man on a bed. The supine figure was deep green, and his shade was very thick.
Quard held out his hand. "Come if you are coming," he said, and there was a sound somewhere between a sigh and the pop of a cork, and the shade on the bed was suddenly a body dressed in clothes of subdued color. The man rose up and followed Quard, as the shades they left behind—some fading, some thickening—threw themselves upon the empty bed.
There were others after that, the sick, the old, the murdered and suicided, a Vavasor who had eaten a spoiled fish, and nine sailors drowned off Eel Island. Some of their bodies were young and robust, some old and elegant in appearance, but they all walked steadily, and there was among them no mark of decay, no wound, no lesion, bloat, nor worm.
They all followed Quard, winding through the streets of that other Liavek like a streak of smoke, pointing and touching and talking among themselves in a low murmur, passing through the green shades of the wishful living without notice—as indeed they could not see them. That was for Quard alone.
Finally, after he had fulfilled his duties among the lastingly dead, he returned to find Arianai, in her house, searching through the rooms cluttered with what she loved. "Theleme," she said, "Theleme, where are you?" She ran her hands over Theleme's bed, touching, seeing nothing.
Quard saw Theleme, asleep on the bed even as Arianai's hands passed through her shade. Theleme clutched the cloth camel and rider to herself, and her wish shone in the cool-colored room. Quard shook his head and took Arianai by the wrist.
She looked at Quard, and in an instant she understood. Quard did not know what the dead saw in him, and there were no mirrors to show him. He led her from the house, to the street where the column of dead waited. Arianai saw them, standing patiently and calm, but looked right through the shades of the living clustered around her, each of them waiting for some kind of miracle.
Quard knew there were no miracles.
Arianai said, "You came to bring me back."
Quard said, "This is not the story you think it is. I did not charm you free from here. There was an exchange."
"Who? Not Theleme!"
Quard was silent.
"It is Theleme? Or is it you? I won't accept such a trade."
"You are dead," Quard said, "and have no choice in the matter."
"If someone will die in my place, surely I have the right to know."
Quard said, "No knowledge is ever taken from this world." He pointed at the street, where he could see the shade of Marithana Govan kneeling. "Go, if you are going. We have a final destination, and you may not see it."
Arianai looked at the column trailing behind Quard. She seemed to be trying to recognize individual faces, but Quard gestured again, and she lay down on the ground. The air shuddered, and in place of the solid Arianai there was now a shade, even less substantial than Marithana's.
He had not lied to her. Gods never lie, even if they then change the world to suit their words. He had struck the bargain with himself.
Quard turned and left the square, the dead in quiet files behind him.

"Is he dead?" Jemuel said.
Marithana held a bit of polished metal to Quard's nostrils. "To the best of my ability to tell." She looked down. "Dear Lady around us," she said. "Anni's breathing."
Jemuel said, "He could do it, then."
Gorodain said, "Ah, but that is only the beginning."
"Shut up," Jemuel snapped at him, than looked at Quard, crouched motionless over Arianai, who was now only sleeping peacefully. "Gods, how are we going to tell her?"
"I'll tell her what needs to be said," Quard said, unfolding and stretching his limbs.
Marithana said, "You were—"
"I slept. I sleep very deeply."
Gorodain said, astonished, "You return—"
"You are a complete fool, Gorodain," Quard said, in a voice that made Gorodain step back from him. "You wished for Death to take the whole world down with you. But Death serves no man's wish, nor does it wear one face. Death is particular to all it touches."
The Magician nodded. Then Quard turned to face him. "And you sigh with relief, Magician, because your guess was right, because the city did not die for your miscalculation? What of my mother, who was tortured for nothing? Of my father, who died for nothing? Of the other five?"
The Magician looked Quard in the eyes, and nodded again. "But Anni and Theleme live," he said, without any force. "And I suppose I shall, too."
"Kind of a shame," Jemuel said, poking at Gorodain with her pistol, "all those other wizards dead, and not this green toad."
Quard said "I am ... what I am. Justice is another thing entirely."
Jemuel said, "Fair enough. We'll see to justice," and pointed at Gorodain. "I know a nice little cell just your size."
Gorodain shifted his hands. The Magician said quietly, "Don't trust to luck." Something appeared between his fingers, and was as quickly palmed.
Gorodain smiled grimly, shrugged, lowered his hands. "Do you think," he said to Verdialos as if the others were not there, "that you could provide me with one of those little green skulls the youth are so fascinated with? Think of it as your first task as a Serenity."
"Pharn take that," Jemuel said. "You'll die on Crab Isle."
"True enough," Gorodain said, "for I am old, and once you destroy my magic—as you must—I will be older still. Better that Death come quickly for me."
Quard began to laugh. Gorodain looked at him, and went very pale. Quard threw his head back and laughed from the bottom of his lungs. Gorodain put his hands to his mouth, and his eyes were wide and black. Jemuel looked bewildered, Verdialos turned away, and The Magician was simply gone. Quard just kept laughing as he picked up Arianai in his wiry arms and carried her into the house.

Arianai woke damp with sweat, her neck stiff and sore as if she had slept with it twisted. Her scalp prickled, and she struggled to recall what her dream had been, but it had melted and run away.
She rolled over, pulling free of the sweaty sheets. Quard was on the floor across the room, cradling Theleme in his arms. Theleme shifted a bit, giggled in her sleep. Quard didn't move.
Quard didn't stir at all. He just sat, eyes shut, pale limbs wrapped around the child.
Arianai felt a chill touch her eyes, her spine. Draping a sheet over herself, she went to Quard's side, crouched, touched his shoulder. His skin was quite cold. She bit her lip and tightened her grip.
Quard's eyes snapped open. Arianai nearly screamed.
"Hello," Quard said softly. He shivered. Theleme stirred, but Quard rocked her to sleep again, then put her gently down, her head pillowed on the toy camel.
"You scared me," Arianai said.
Quard's face was mostly in shadow, but two little reflections stared her straight in the eyes. "Well. The world is full of possibilities this morning."
He got to his feet, and they went out of the room, with a last look at Theleme asleep and dreaming sweetly.
Arianai turned up the lamp in the office. Quard blinked in the light then said, "Is that really what you want to be doing?" and looked down at the soft, thick carpet.
She chuckled. "Then you've no other appointments."
"Not this midnight," he said, in a different voice, and looked her in the eyes again: in the better light she could see that his eyes, which had been hazel and clear as water, were now the color of green olives.
She turned out the light before she could see anything more. She felt Quard embrace her, felt him stir.
"You're like fire," he said, and pressed his cold lips to hers.
Only mortals look back, she thought, and knew that she was mortal.
He pushed her away to arm's length, said distantly, "How can you love me?"
"Day by day," she said, "until the end of the world," and pulled him close again. She felt Quard's tears, freezing down her cheeks, and prayed she would not wake up counting the days.