They stood upon a cliff, some hundred yards west of the docks, which looked out over the harbor and the unmanned coastal wall. The sky was blue, but for the dark gray halo which stretched around the horizon. Zigrel shook her head often, tutting, quietly chastising the inhabitants for ignoring such an obvious omen. Ayricalt, as his habit predicted, had found a gnarled, old juniper bush to lean against. His eyes were closed, while the eyes of his pipe bowl dragons glowed, and smoke plumed from both their nostrils and his.

The afternoon was marked by nearly constant commotion at the docks. People yelled incessantly--at least every time they spoke. Shoving was common, and not just a few hands had already been thrown. Mierel watched it good-humoredly. He preferred, pridefully, to consider the sunken dock, and the wrecked corbita on the harbor floor, the source of this bellicose atmosphere. He eagerly waited for it all to blow up into pandemonium.

“It’s a great view up here, Ayry,” said Mierel, snickering at a handsy argument which had just erupted down below. “But I don’t know what you’re hoping to see.”

Zigrel frowned. “Well, he’s not going to see anything sitting there with his eyes closed.”

“Rethinking your decision?” chided Mierel. She’d been insistent upon joining the Sprunishmen, despite (indeed, because of) Arzado’s patronizing, and rather vicious, protestations. He went off with the Galites--with Kelcetrix, who had firmly announced his desire to split with Ayricalt and Mierel.

She kept her squinted gaze on the horizon, a more than slightly vexed furrow in her brow. Mierel returned his attention to the irate mob contending with their crippled infrastructure. Someone had come to smack the would-be pugilists’ heads together, and tenuous peace resumed.

Meanwhile, nude sailors populated the harbor, ferrying messages from the port to their respective vessels, or tethering sunken pieces of ship to a great ass-run winch at the stable foot of the broken pier. From the water’s surface, they heckled those lucky enough to moor (who were unloading their cargo with no more alacrity than ever), and hurled chunks of sodden wood at them. Retaliatory curses preceded volleys of expectoration, raining down on the swimmers’ bald, bobbing heads.

“Filthy creatures,” Mierel muttered. Zigrel snorted disdainfully.

Merchant parties circled around the bewildered local authorities, kicking the firm ground forlornly while their chiefs bellowed ineffectual complaints, offered imbecile gesticulations. Threats, both real and preposterous. Mierel drank it all in cheerfully.

What a good day it’s been, he marveled, and after such a good evening…

“I hope there’s Sprunish lads at the inn again tonight--” he began, but was quickly distracted. A group of locals had meandered into the fray, surrounded by a wedge of sturdy, armed men. Mierel scratched his beard, and peered closer.

The men wore pale, sleeveless tunics embellished with pastel whorls. Their bare arms were replete with polychromatic bangles that shimmered incandescently in the daylight. Their baggy trousers, which cropped off just below the knees, had little in the way of inseams--maybe just an inch or two before the ballooning crotch. Their hair was cropped above their ears, and those with some still on their pates wore it in flat bangs across their foreheads.

Two women joined them, wearing cloaks of many billowing layers, all shades of white, which covered most everything from their necks to their ankles. Each showed a single arm at the side, which was sleeved with a delicate lace glittering with implanted gemstones.

Nonetheless, they weren’t the best-dressed people on the dock (certainly, there were Galite merchants violating some sumptuary laws). Mierel only noticed them because of the conspicuous ease with which they walked into the conflagration--they were a serene pocket in the boisterous crowd. Not even their guards showed any particular roughness as they parted through. Though their interruption considerably slowed the laborious process of unloading cargo, their presence nevertheless demurred the angry sailors.

“Nobles in the dockyard,” muttered Mierel. “Probably own the place.”

"They're not nobles," said Zigrel, "they're aristocrats."

Meanwhile, Ayricalt had finally opened his eyes, and blinked them into the daylight. “We should go and meet them,” he said. “Can you translate, Zigrel?”

“Er, yes…of course,” she responded, but he hadn’t waited for an answer. He was already trotting (at his full, unmatchable gait) down the road, still busy packing away his pipe as he shifted around the bewildered traffic.

“Why not?” Mierel shrugged. “Fucking love nobles.”

They pressed into the bustle to many lowly spoken curses, but not much resistance. Mierel in the front, and Zigrel (probably) somewhere behind him. It must have been obvious that these foreigners were following the giant who’d preceded them.

The guards, who had spread into a loose knit circle around the aristocrats, looked relatively unconcerned--though they were constantly shifting their gaze toward Ayricalt. Their broad bodies were capped by wide, stiff leather collars, left hands tilting out long, wicker shields in the spaces between them. The only gaps which remained belonged to their right arms, which balanced broad, flat iron swords debonairly on their shoulders. Ayricalt approached slowly, standing a head higher than the lot of them.

It was only by chance that one of the herded nobles turned his way--but impossible for him to turn back. He looked at Ayricalt with a rather astonished smile, then said something he couldn’t understand. The guard repeated it.

Zigrel, squeezing between some curious onlookers, translated: “He says--”

“Tell him we’re the ones who broke his dock,” Ayricalt demanded, and pointed over to the scene of the crime. Zigrel, obviously reluctant to do so, nonetheless relayed it. The noble’s smile grew wider, and he elbowed the woman next to him, whispering out of the side of his mouth. Then she lit up.

“Why are they happy?” asked Zigrel.

“Because they’ll get to string us up,” said Mierel, and his hand rested innocently enough on the belt above his sword hilt. “Noriacs may look gentle enough, but they torture like Galites. Frankly, these ones look a lot like Galites, too.”

“No, Mierel," Ayricalt corrected (and he was rather snide when he tried to be clever), “it's because now they know we’re the queen’s guests.”

The armed guard never retrieved their wedge formation. Instead, they made a sort of tightened kite shape which left several guards--and empty space--between their charge and the foreign ruffians who lagged behind.

“No offense, Ayry,” said Mierel, “but we could count up the sum of your effective schemes on one hand.” He held up a closed fist.

Ayricalt, who had been practically effervescent with faith in his plan, frowned. “You’re forgetting the faeries.”

“People died that day, Ayricalt,” Mierel returned severely. “Innocent people.”

“No, Mierel.” Ayricalt frowned briefly, then continued: “I meant at…what was that town up above the Rain Fort?”

“Eagle Pasture,” Mierel reminisced. He could he forget? It was where he saw--and slew--his first werebears. “I think you’ll recall that we didn’t get paid for that one, Ayry.”

“My plan still worked, Mierel,” he retorted, once again leaning into the snide.

By his mane, Mierel thought, rolling his eyes, he’s insufferable when he thinks he’s right.

“Really?” he snapped back. “Because I thought our goal was to make money, not…well, not to do whatever it is we’re doing now.

“What do you think, fortune teller?”

“If I had an issue with your master’s plan,” she easily replied, “I wouldn’t have come along.”

Mierel held her in a gaze of cold severity. “He’s not my master.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“Oh?” she started, and earnestly added: “My apologies. I’m new to the language. But…” There was something perturbed about her insistence. “Doesn’t he…you know--rather, don’t you…serve at his…pleasure?”

Mierel pinched the bridge of his nose, grunting a thorough sigh. “Why? Why? Is it because he’s so gods-confounded tall?”

Ayricalt’s lips tightened as he snorted out a gust of repressed laugh.

“Oh for the fucking Horselord’s sake!” bit Mierel. A couple of the guards looked back, but only to cast their disdainful glances. It made Mierel’s skin crawl. Then he sniffed, pulled his sash belt up and his shoulders authoritatively back. “You sound like a Litherian. You know there’s more to pleasure than a cock in a hole, more to love than just…domination. And that goes for you women, too.”

“The Glass Path is narrow,” she muttered.

“What’s that?”

“It--” Zigrel shook some fog from her head, then continued straightly: “‘The Glass Path is narrow.’ It means I’m celibate.”

“What,” Mierel started with a smirk, “like some kind of virgin?”

“Naturally,” she said. Mierel’s face fell. They looked at each other for a few confounded moments.

“What?” he uttered, incredulous. Fortune-teller and a virgin. He shook his head mournfully.

“How old are you?” he soberly inquired.

“Thirty-four,” she frowned. Ayricalt chuckled. Mierel just squinted quizzically.

“Thirty-four fucking years on this earth and not once--”

“Sexuality is a sullying thing,” she interrupted, her temper obviously cracking. “Especially for sodomites like yourself.”

Mierel didn’t know what a “sodomite” was, and wasn’t bothered to take any heed of her insults. He looked at Ayricalt. “It’s a tall ask,” he said, “even from a god.”

Zigrel scoffed. “It’s not for a god, it’s for myself.”

Mierel bristled. “A witch!” he hissed, and his face was full of violence, his right hand jolting toward the blade on his left hip.

“Mierel!” Ayricalt snapped impatiently. “She’s not a witch!”

Mierel tightly relaxed, and fixed his glare on the Tushikan. She certianly didn’t seem like a witch…

But in the absence of gods, he couldn’t help but worry, perhaps she’s found demons.

They were led into the hills, up the same road they’d traveled the day before. Traffic was thinning in the late afternoon, and many parties of well-attended aristocrats turned off onto long parkways which led to their estates. The guards whom they followed turned at just such a path, and their highborn charge flowed easily within them, steered like (ceaselessly bleating) sheep.

If the impact of the market forum in the morning had been lost on Mierel’s provincial disposition, then the estates they passed on the ridge astounded him. They arrayed the hillside, stretching across the valley and over the shallower opposite grade. It was an orchard of glittering white plaster, glaring tiles of brass and gold, weeded with sea-green copper statues and domes.

“If you took all the forts,” Mierel muttered, “and all the palace gardens on the rivers of the Rittleden, you couldn’t fill this valley.”

Ayricalt squinted suspiciously. “I don’t know about that, Mierel.”

“It’s a conceit, Ayry.” He looked over the valley, from one end to the other, spinning as he walked the stone-paved path. Conveniently, the port town was just obscured by a curving edge of green, rocky hills. Beside that, a placid triangle of pure, blue sea emerged from the vertex. And the row of dark clouds still hung above it. In the other direction, a few mounds of striped farmland rolled lazily into the distance.

“Bedazzled by their own gilded roofs, the Bluebird Noriacs look to the dark faces of their fellows. They dare not look up, or they will be blinded by their own idolatrous artifices. They do not see the ring of dark fate which surrounds their heavens…

“How’d you like that?” Mierel grinned. Zigrel stared through him, a puzzled look on her face--like she’d lost someone, and was about to start turning her head to search for them.

“What’s an idolatrous artifice, Mierel?” asked Ayricalt plainly.

“Oh, like…a thing. A thing that’s made by mortals and offends the divine.”

“Do you really suppose,” began Ayricalt with a curious frown, “that the gods are offended by golden roofs?”

He wasn’t asking critically.

“Well, I wouldn’t speak for their gods,” Mierel answered. “But I suppose it comes down to the state of their temples.” He chewed on that a bit, bobbing his head noncommittally. He was giving theological advice, after all--a grave task. “They’d better be made of gold.

“Anyway, the Horselord wouldn’t stand for it. Though I suppose to Ans, any house is an affront.”

“I thought Old Sprune built a palace in Golden Hills, Mierel.”

“No,” Mierel scoffed, “no. He built a fort, better to fight the Sandrites.”

“Hm,” Ayricalt decided, after mulling it over.

“Quite the fundamentalist, aren’t you?” Zigrel chimed in.

“It’s called humility. I accept the superiority of forces beyond me, and am prostrate before…” he trailed off as their destination loomed before them.

This palace was certainly the largest in sight--almost as big as the three edifices which surrounded the forum, and considerably shinier. Six foot walls surrounded the complex like a maternal, earthen hug, white-washed and glittering. Soldiers marched deliberately around the top of it.

They were led through the central gate, a riveted lattice of iron bars housed in a deep, slightly depressed arch which jutted out a foot or more from the wall on either side of it. Four guards, posted at the vaguely craterous base of the gatehouse, examined the intruding foreigners suspiciously as the escorts marched them through. Little, biting spats of Noriac shared between them. Mierel didn’t ask Zigrel what they'd said.

“His hooves! What, are they kings?”

“These are just summer homes,” Zigrel dismissed. “This is a small island, with an easier climate than the more populous--and far richer--cities out west.”

They came up from the depression into an immaculate bit of garden, not much different from those which the Queen of the Ellusenese kept. Apricot trees, pruned into parasol canopies, stood in a dozen rows from one end of the complex to the other. Their golden fruit hung from their stout, flattened caps of foliage like condensate. In the even space between, leaves like broadwords erupted from low shrubs, surrounding a thimble shaped trunk which wore their single, flame red flowers like enormous crowns. The fragrance, Mierel thought, was intensely pleasant--distracting, even.

At least distracting enough that he didn’t fully register what had already stopped Ayricalt in his tracks. He spun in circles, examining the carefully shaded orchard with derisive wonder. Everywhere marble benches, with honeyed rose complexions, empty as tomorrow’s grave. Various squares of vine-wrapped trellis revealed circles where four lounging platforms surrounded open pits, their once sooty insides scoured clean.

Thoroughly impressed, he looked to his companion, raising his eyebrows . But Ayricalt, apparently, did not share his hapless enthusiasm. He merely stood there, stone-faced, his hand resting on his sword hilt. Never, Mierel thought, had he looked so utterly uncomfortable, so obviously lacking that steady optimism which had always driven him. He looked… fearful?

Mierel traced his line of sight directly down the center path, lined with ancient, weathered busts and extinguished torches. At the end of the walkway, between a pair of broad, rounding staircases which led to the front door, stood a statue. Towered a statue, really, in a granite dark and sparkling as a star-streaked sky. The sheer brutality of it made Mierel blink, he had to shake away the fancy smells, the genteel air which breezed so easily in this manicured orchard. Even then, he had to double take, triple take the otherworldly figure before him.

“What the hell is that thing?” he spat. He meant to laugh, really he did. After all, the thing looked so perfectly absurd in the pale context of its surroundings. Even the palace facade, with its gold-tipped columns standing like petrified trees, its intricately bordered geometric faces of boldly painted stone, was diminished by the statue’s grotesque presence. But he did not laugh, his lips suspended in open horror.

Its shape was something like a human’s--vertical--but it bore no further similarity--except that there was something distinctly intelligent about it. In spite of that, it had the head of a dolphin, or shark, its broad snout carved out from its shoulders in one uninterrupted curve. Its maw split down to its chest, revealing rows of cut-pearl teeth which shimmered murderously in an oddly emotive grimace.

Neither was its torso anything like Mierel’s or Ayricalt’s--or for that matter Zigrel’s. It was more rounded, cresting dramatically at the sternum. The even striations of unfamiliar muscles wrapped it round, distinguished through the rough dimples of scaly plating. It wasn’t hard to imagine that its back might culminate in a dorsal fin.

Instead of legs, it stood upon a long, coiled tail, striped with the ribbon fins of an eel.

“A ghost,” Ayricalt whispered.

“It looks more like a demon.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “it does. It’s as strong as one, too.”

Mierel frowned with playful scorn. “What do you know about it?”

“I’ve never seen one before, but--”

Mierel balked at him and turned away, following Zigrel up the polished staircase which flanked the sculpture. Passing around the thing’s carnivorous grin, he couldn’t shake a dreadful feeling.

“I don’t like this,” Zigrel, turning around, whispered.

“Neither do I, witch,” he admitted. “Let’s hope Ayricalt’s ‘plan’ works.”

“What is it?” she demanded.

“Damned if I know,” he chuckled. “Truthfully, you don’t want to know. Likely enough, his plan concluded back on the docks, and now he’s just… going with it. Trust me, witch. It’s easier to just plan on improvising.”

“You’re joking,” she nearly growled. And Mierel laughed aloud.

He was not.