THE CHALICE OF LIFE

PROLOGUE—Sage and Chronicler

"Heroes," mused the Sage. "What’s happened to all the heroes? And where in the name of Ereb are they when you need them?" He took a long drag on his pipe, then leaned his chin on his staff and went back to staring into the fire.

Not wanting to rush him, the Chronicler waited patiently. However, as the silence dragged out the space of many heartbeats, she began to wonder if he had forgotten her. Had he wandered into that realm where dream meets memory and so become ensnared? Or had he merely fallen asleep? "That remark is not one I would ever have expected to hear escape your lips," she prompted at last. "Master," she added, as if the concept of master and pupil went beyond her ken.

But when the Sage lifted his eyes from the flames, his glance looked as keen and focused as ever. He regarded her for a long moment: an observer might have thought he was trying to peer into her heart, her soul, into the corners of her being for which she had no name. Then, with sudden good humor, he spoke. "For your people," he commented, "the mindscape exists as a waking reality: an effect, I think, of your ability to don and shed a physical form as need dictates. For those like Tuhl mired in a physical body—" Here he thumped his small chest. "—the paths of the mindscape constitute a twisty mazework. You must forgive an old fool for getting lost in them! It was not aimless rambling but a sincere attempt to guide your footsteps."

She smiled kindly. "I think you have only ever intended me good. You do not need to apologize for the way you go about achieving it." And you are about as much a fool as I am a Lemurian , she thought.

"I do not need to apologize ," he chuckled, "but perhaps I do need to explain. I was following the trail of my own memories back to the beginning. What you cannot glean from speaking with the questors themselves or from watching their story unfold in the Flames, I must try to make clear for you myself so you can write this great chronicle—and already I’ve muddled your thoughts by doing no more than thinking aloud! That remark was neither curse to hurl at the gods from Tuhl’s own lips nor idle musing. Tuhl was quoting, quoting someone you already know and will come to know better hereafter. Those were the words of Mistra herself."

"Mistra!" the Chronicler gasped. Hastily, she flipped back through the reams of notes she had scribbled. "But I have heard from your own lips that of all the servants of the One in Creation, she was the most loyal, the most true, the most—" She shrugged in a show of helplessness and offered up the thick wad of notes as evidence. "By every god in the Pantheon, when we struggled our sorry way back to peace and faith on Thalas, it was she even more than the King who set us our example! Was it not the gods themselves who took her and set her above all others to—?"

Tuhl slapped a finger to his lips to quiet her, then touched it to the side of his nose and winked. "Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, young Peri. You will only confuse your history if you insist on calling the adventurers King this or Princess that. Their given names will do." He sighed. "The gods know each of those fine people did his own name great honor by taking up the burden of that quest of quests when the Call came, and greater honor yet by staying true to their collective purpose. And none rose higher in the test than Mistra of Caros."

He puffed a moment, framing his thoughts before he went on. "Mistra is, to my mind, the brightest star in the firmament of the Royal House of Caros—strong she is and skilled, brilliant and brave. When her patroness, Minissa, marked her for the quest, Mistra submitted with as much grace as any I have ever seen or heard tell of—no crying, no screaming, no shouted recriminations. I did not misspeak: she is devoted to Minissa and the rest, as devoted as if the whole lot of them were her family rather than her gods. But devotion has consequences, and even our best-loved gods make demands of their most devoted servants. Because devotion demanded she acquiesce to those demands, she was quiet and pale and withdrawn when she arrived here, and her heart was broken nearly in two. In the end, it was the waiting that did her in." He shook his head. "Still, that one outburst about heroes was all I ever heard on the subject. Angry it was, but not without reason."

He shifted his gaze into the middle distance; his eyes took on the bright yet hazy focus of the diviner watching a scene obscured from all eyes but his own unfolding across an expanse of time and space. "As a light Mistra was to her companions, a fire blazing on a mountaintop in the blackest night. And there was light waiting for her at the end of the tunnel she entered on that day so long ago—light so magnificent it would have blinded a lesser soul. But that tunnel had so many twists to it that she herself remained in darkness till she had come nearly through to the other side. On the day she came to me and I understood all that had been asked of her, all that she had willingly sacrificed, even I wept. I searched in it all for the wisdom of Caros or the justice of Ereb or the compassion of sweet Arayne." He let out a ragged breath. "But my search proved vain." He shook his head again and poked at the fire with his staff.

Peri had remained absorbed by his discourse, but now she pouted a little. "Hmph. None of my people was even chosen for this quest, though every other race in the Union was represented. Goddess bless! Complete outworlders were chosen! We would not have been so easily grieved had one of us been selected."

Tuhl smiled sympathetically, but there was the memory of pain about his eyes. "Oh, I think Minissa knew exactly what she was doing when she chose them for that task and you for this . The questors were sprinters, however difficult and dangerous the course they ran. Your course will be longer—less difficult, maybe, but one whose end only those who possess the attribute of endurance will see. And you will endure. You will labor even as Tuhl does; this Chronicle will be only the beginning. Your station, like Tuhl’s, will be that of the hero who remains ever in the background yet performs deeds as valorous as those of the bravest knight. A mysterious figure you will be, like Tuhl; many will regard you as no more than legend, and most will discount you as no better than myth: they are of the foolish. But your business, like Tuhl’s, will be with those who thirst after knowledge, and they will come to fill your days and nights soon enough." The old bearded lips parted in a serene smile. "The Pantheon, and beyond them the One whom they serve, have ordained in their wisdom a place in Creation for both the sprinters and the distance runners."

She nodded, satisfied. When she returned to her notes, though, her brow puckered into a small frown. "Waiting?" she muttered, then addressed Tuhl. "You said it was the waiting that did her in?"

"Hmmm?"

"What waiting?"

He chuckled. "Ah, yes, I understand the bards are already hard at work making mincemeat of the quest’s details. I can hear them now, casting it all into verse and saying that blessed Minissa struck the ground with her Rod of Plenty—" Here he gave the ground near the fire circle a good, solid whack with his staff. "—and up popped all seven questors, provisioned and in full battle array, all ready to launch themselves through the first Portal the instant she gave the word." He underscored his verbal irony with a histrionic flourish.

"Well," Peri asked in a small voice, "isn’t that true -er- in essence, if not in substance?"

He cocked an eyebrow at her as if he would either snap her head off for the stupidity of the remark or ask if the minds of her folk were as flimsy as their natural form.

"I mean," she stumbled on, "even if Minissa did search them out from among the living rather than creating them from scratch, isn’t the point that she got them here, and they entered the first Portal as one?"

He kept the eyebrow cocked a moment longer, then relented: it may have been the way she looked so desperate to melt back into the Ether to avoid his glance. "Mistra was chosen long before the others," he finally said. "She had to be! There were so many intricacies to unlocking the power of the one artifact potent enough to free the King, the artifact she bore alone for all those months, and she had to learn them all! She always was a quick study, but this one time her talent played her false. She was left with many empty hours to fill before the others began to arrive. A good month it was until all of them gathered here. Some came from far away." He chortled. "And some, it turned out, had been lurking unknown under our very noses for years..."

He reached into the small urn at his feet and drew out a pinch of grey dust. "Watch!" he commanded as he cast it into the fire. The flames blazed up as if they would blot out the night sky above them, then burst into a shower of sparks that descended back to earth like a veil of red and silver lace.

And from that lacework, images began to form...

CHAPTER 1 —The Call

"What is abhorrent to you, do not to your neighbor. This is the Ethic; all the rest is commentary."

  —Strephan of Caros

  In a marketplace in the Carotian capital, a diminutive figure lounged against a wall. She was doing her best to blend into her surroundings and escape notice, and she was, on the whole, succeeding. Like Tuhl, she was a Lemurian. Unlike Tuhl, she had not undergone the Sleep of Transformation that set the old sage apart. In this, she was not alone. When the Lemurians had learned of Tuhl’s existence 20 years ago, the news had swept the Lemurian colony like a violent tide. A Lemurian who had undergone the Transformation still lived? Incredible! However, even with Tuhl as a living example that the change could still take place, the Lemurian who chose that path when he came of an age to do so was rare indeed.

Her fur was tawny, touched with rose and striped with pastel green. Green feathered away as the stripes crossed her breast and throat; her face was a sea of unbroken tan. Her eyes were that variety of hazel whose color shifts, in her case to bright emerald when she was angry and to a brown mottled with green and gold sparks when she was truly pleased. This interplay of colors brought to her coat and eyes the hue of dappled sunlight on a forest floor. No true child of Minissa—or of any of the other deities involved with art or nature—could have looked upon that woodland palette and not had his breath stolen away.

She hated it. It was her bane, her curse, the source of her misery. Those markings the Carotians would have found so exquisite formed no distinct pattern: there were no whorls, no branchings, no true shaping of light by dark. Her coat announced to any who gave her so much as a perfunctory glance that she was a foundling and that no family had ever claimed her.

Her name was Habadiah. She hated that, too. As distinctive markings would have come from clan recognition, so would a host of names: patronymics, metronymics, honorifics, addenda without end that would tell the world she had come of age and that her forebears were Lemurians of quality. The community of the People of Lemur had looked out for her, after a fashion. Through the years, clan after clan had taken her in for a time, given her food and shelter (she would have said kitchen scraps and unheated garret rooms), and put her to work as the least of servants. That she could read and do sums at all she owed to an agile mind and a spirit that refused to be quenched no matter the icy sea of antipathy in which it was constantly immersed.

And to one thing more: her fingers were more nimble than any others in the colony. She had been forced to purloin that first grammar, that first book of numbers, and that with a degree of trepidation. Stealing is wrong had been drilled into her head by every family that had ever taken her in: most said it as though they believed robbing them blind became the thought foremost in her mind the instant she arrived on their doorstep. And one day, something in her simply snapped at the presumption. Stealing may be wrong , a little voice inside her head rebutted, but virtually enslaving defenseless little kids is worse . She also thought, You expect that you need to nail your valuables down as long as I’m under your roof? Fine! Let’s give the people what they want. With those statements made only in the silence of her own heart, she embraced her newly-discovered aptness of hand. Entire new vistas opened up to her. There was nourishing food to be had, and warm clothing, and after them gold and jewels.

In all of the years Habadiah had been plying her trade, she had been caught only once, and that at an age where it was written off as the adolescent prank of a poor relation. At least, the local magistrate had seen it that way. Her family-of-the-moment had taken a more dim view: they had beaten her and sent her packing. The incident, rather than discouraging her, had taught her finesse. After that, she was rarely suspected, never caught in the act, and never found with damning evidence in her possession.

With success had come a little pride. She shortened her name to Habie as a symbol of liberty. Habadiah had been a slave in all but name; Habie, clan-bound or not, was free. Habadiah had had the luck of the draw go against her at conception; Habie drew her luck from the very Ether and shaped it to suit her needs. Habadiah with her indistinct coloring might as well have hung a sign around her neck that said, "Orphaned Bastard Child Up For Grabs—Exploit Me!" Habie with her sense of presence just might be able to pass her coloring off as that of a clan-bound youth, mature in form but still too young for anyone to expect her clan-pattern to be well defined.

Until today, she had limited her excursions, stealing only when she could justify the theft, taking only what she could use immediately or share with a friend in need: she was not the only Lemurian left orphaned and homeless by the war with Thalas. However, when she had come of age a week ago, the clans had formally disowned her. It was their right according to the law: since she had no proven kinship ties and no family had ever offered to adopt her, the colony was only obliged to provide her safe harbor till her eighteenth birthday. She had no place to go, and without the formal protection of a family, she was fair game for anyone— Lemurian, Carotian, Tigroid or outworlder—whose only reason for not lashing out lay in fear of vendetta.

No worries, she said to herself . One quick strike at any of these merchants—at these overfed, overcompensated, under-worked mountains of draffing drek, she corrected herself —and I’ll be set for life. One quick strike, and I can ditch the Lemurian quarter completely. I could find work at the palace, maybe leave Caros completely! Not much guild action around here, but I’ve heard great things about the thieves’ and assassins’ guilds on Thalas, and that sort of protection would draw rings around anything the clans could dish up.

She shook off the laziness that came with daydreaming in the warmth of the suns at their zenith. She had been hanging around the market all morning observing. She had her victim marked already—a seller of fine cloths at the tent-like stall across the lane. Soon...

She looked up as a trumpeted fanfare sounded. A royal party was approaching, and from a direction that would draw folk away from the stall she intended to burgle. The party was on foot rather than mounted, and that was odd enough in itself, but the standards the guards carried were not those of the Carotian court. Patrons who had been leaving the stalls in ones and twos now came pouring out like a herd of sheep being driven to market. Habie could not understand why the party was commanding so much attention. The entire court parading through town mounted and decked out in their brightest festival garb had not caused this much excitement the one time she had seen it. Well , she thought, who cares what they’re all rushing to see as long as the spectacle holds their attention ? If the whole barmy lot of them cause a human logjam the city watch can’t penetrate if this guy does raise the alarm, so much the better.

An onlooker would have seen those green and gold sparks set her eyes aflame as the merchant himself emerged to see what the commotion was all about. "Better and better," she murmured when he continued a few paces up the lane. In less than three of her own heartbeats, the expression on his face went from one of curiosity to one of recognition to one of absorption so complete she thought he would not notice if she set a pronucleonic grenade on his head and pulled the pin. Not one to miss an opportunity, Habie skittered across the lane to the stall and slipped around to the back. With a quick nod to whatever god looked out for thieves and a promise to tithe if ever she found a place to do him worship, she drew her dagger, made a slit in the canvas just wide enough for her to enter, and crawled inside.

She stayed low till she made certain the shop was completely vacant. The proprietor might not have stepped out had there still been customers inside, but why take chances? A quick survey, and a broad grin crossed her face: the place was empty. And there, fully visible from the spot where she crouched, sat the object of her excursion—the small strongbox that held the loot. She stole over to it and tried the catch. It held fast. At least the proprietor had had the sense to lock his cash box before he had stepped out. Out came the tools of her trade, and—snick, click—up popped the lid.

Just as the lock opened, she heard voices outside. First came the proprietor’s, and he was addressing at least one "your majesty." It sounded as if this royal party from wherever-it-was had come to market specifically to see the very bolts of fabric that rose to the ceiling all around her. Oh, swell , she thought. Just draffing incredible. I burgle the best dry goods shop in the market the same day some idiot noblewoman decides she needs a new ball gown! Habie’s common sense told her to forget about the robbery and get moving. But a second sense— avarice—flared at the sight of the small mountain of gold cached in the box, and she could not easily let the opportunity go. Moving quickly as panic started to mount, she collected most of it in the leather pouch she had brought along, then jammed the pouch down the front of her shirt, slammed down the lid of the cash box, and dived behind the nearest display counter. A heartbeat later, the tent flap opened.

In walked the proprietor and his guests. Habie held her breath, then peered out when no footsteps came toward her. Whew! No one had spotted her. The entire group remained near the entrance, most of them milling around in a loose knot. If she kept her head, she could escape before anyone noticed the gold was missing. She backed toward the slit she had made, not daring to look behind her for fear of losing sight of a single one of the intruders. Identifying them or their exact number had not crossed her mind when she had first glanced in their direction, but now she saw that the entire party was human, although only about half looked like they were from Caros. All were armed; the guards were simply more heavily armed than the rest. Her nose would have barely come to the waist of some of the men. Unlike the bulky proprietor, the newcomers boasted contours that suggested they would stand a fair chance of winning a fight against twice their number had they cast their blades onto the nearest midden heap. She would have taken her chances against a like number of Lemurians, but this was definitely not a crowd she wanted to tangle with! Well , she thought, two more heartbeats and it won’t be an issue . She felt her heel knock against the wooden support she had sighted as her landmark and slid her toe back to feel for the slit.

It was gone.

Considering that this might be a manifestation of panic or that she had simply misjudged the distance—but discounting both possibilities—she turned her head to look.

Nothing.

She looked some more, certain that she was in the right place, but, try as she might, she could not find the opening she had made. She cringed as she heard the proprietor pop open the lid of his strongbox—and bellow out that he had been robbed. There were too many people in here for her to hide from all of them for long; even the tiny sound her dagger would make if she slit the canvas again would have the guards on her in an instant. She would just have to make a dash for it!

Still keeping low, she positioned herself so she had a clear shot at the tent flap. She tensed. She cast a dirty look heavenward as if to tell her theoretical god of thieves that this was his fault and that she would be keeping her tithes to herself, thank you very much. Then she sprang forward.

Time seemed to halt around her; shapes faded to a soft blur. People— big people—screamed and grabbed, and she heard swords being drawn, but the sounds seemed to come from a great distance. One thing only remained in focus: the tent flap. Three meters, and she would be through.

Two meters...

One...

She had dodged every other person who stood between her and freedom, but with bare millimeters to go, a tall nobleman stepped into the gap between her and the tent flap. The fact that he was not Carotian barely registered as she was lifted cleanly off her feet by two burly guards. They held her so she was forced to meet his eyes. She felt her look of earnest defiance crumble away till there was nothing left but bewilderment, for the nobleman wore the last expression she had ever expected to see on the face of a captor—an amused smile.

***

"Well, Allred," the nobleman said to the merchant, "was this a demonstration you arranged for us, or is this a genuine thief?"

"Or something out of our hands entirely?" murmured the one woman in the party who was not arrayed as a soldier.

"Whatever it is," growled Allred, "it’s the little scamp who emptied my cash box, I’ll wager. All right, out with it!" he barked at Habie. He leaned down so his face filled her whole field of vision. "These are the High King’s soldiers, see Missy? And if you fuss, they’ll take you straight to the castle dungeons rather than the nice city jail, so just you up and hand over my gold!"

Habie made a face, then reached into her shirt and pulled out the leather pouch. With a wistful look, she surrendered it to Allred. The guards set her down, putting up their weapons but holding her fast. As they sheathed their swords, however, one snagged the left shoulder of her tunic. The light fabric was no match for steel, and the tunic tore—just a bit, so her left shoulder was exposed. She winced. The clothes on her back were about all she had come away with when her last family had turned her out; she had nothing with which she could replace a damaged garment.

She winced a second time as a gentle hand touched her shoulder. Then she looked, her eyes traveling from hand to arm to shoulder to face. Standing over her was the lone woman attired as a civilian: a full-blooded Carotian noble by the look of her. For a moment, as her eyes met the woman’s, Habie wore the expression of a child of the streets who has gone begging and found a door that opened not on charity, graceless and grudging, but on the welcoming home she has sought all her life. The woman smiled back as if she grasped the direction of Habie’s thoughts and understood them—as if, in fact, she knew that for Habie, the road to that door might somehow begin here before her with this moment of shared communion and was content that it should be so.

"Odd place for a tear," she commented, and her voice, too, was kind in the way it could only be if gentleness and mercy formed an essential part of her nature. "May I see?" She waited till Habie, still wearing a bemused expression, nodded vaguely. Then she did a curious thing: she widened the tear slightly and nodded once as if satisfied on some point that she and the other humans had been debating. She gestured to the others to look. A hush stole over the room. Suddenly, all around the two women, people were kneeling and bowing their heads, making signs of blessing and murmuring prayers of thanks to the Pantheon. Of the men, only the nobleman who had intercepted Habie remained on his feet, but there was about him the same sense of awestruck reverence that had taken the rest in its grip.

The nobleman waited a beat as if to give the moment its due, then tilted Habie’s chin up—not roughly, as if he suspected her of lying or worse, but carefully, as though he liked her and just wanted her to meet his eyes so she could see that for herself. And she looked. If there was a spell here, it was one the man and woman cast by virtue of their mere presence—and in that moment, she was utterly ensnared. "Looks like it won’t be the dungeons or the city jail for you, little one." His face had never lost its spark of amusement, but his voice, like the woman’s, was kind.

"What, then?" she demanded, shrugging away from them both. She made the mistake of listening to the words instead of the tone of voice and felt the threads of the spell start to fray at the edges. She might have been expecting him to tell her she was about to be flogged—which she had been, more than once.

"You mind your tone, girl," growled Allred. "This is the High King and Queen over the entire Union you’re talking to."

"Yeah, so? A lot of good they’ve ever done me !" Defiance personified, no matter the cost. The last thread snapped, and that was it for the spell. She tried to back away from everyone at once and met nothing but a wall of guards.

"It’s all right," Avador, the King, assured the merchant. He had not taken his eyes from the young Lemurian’s face; his voice was still kind despite her deliberate affront. "I read a hard life in this one, a life of preparation that has often seemed to her nought but senseless pain."

"Don’t be frightened," soothed the woman, whom Habie now understood to be Ariane, the High Queen. She stooped so she and Habie were more nearly eye-to-eye but made no attempt to touch her again. "You have been marked for service by Minissa herself."

" What ?" the girl exclaimed.

"Look at your shoulder."

Squinting and crossing her eyes, Habie could just make out a dark brown patch in the fur on her left shoulder. It was shaped like the head of a great stag. "Where did this come from?" she fumed. "What is it? What’s it mean? Get it off me! Here, I don’t worship your gods. I don’t worship my gods!" She looked like she wanted someone to come forward and excise the mark for her—now! Since no one did, she spat on her fingers and tried to rub it off, as if it were a smudge of dirt.

"No need to worship any gods, if they need you," Avador said congenially. "I think you’d best come with us."

She looked sullen. "I’ve just been caught scrobbling this gentleman’s money. Don’t tell me you’re not going to attend to that first." She might have been daring him to punish her. The defiance in her posture, though, hid a moment of self-doubt. Was it possible that half a lifetime of escaping detection was attributable not to her own skill but to the intervention of some goddess she’d never had anything to do with? Eek ! she thought. What if it’s true and she’s decided to cash in all those favors at once like so many poker chips??!! Wait a bit, though , she reasoned . Can’t I make them take me to jail? A long enough hitch in the nick would wipe the slate clean and keep me from doing whatever service they had in mind for me, right?! Right ? RIGHT??!! " This last came out as a desperate mental scream.

Her brashness, however, did little to faze the High King, and she hid the sudden fit of nerves well enough that he did not remark on it. "Oh, I think Allred will forbear to press charges for now," he said amiably. "If you returned everything you -er- scrobbled?"

Looking less contrite than resigned to her fate, she pulled from an inside pocket the jeweled ring she had palmed when she had returned Allred’s gold to him. The merchant snatched it away, shaking his head and looking heavenward in mute appeal.

***

  No one ever asked Minissa what she sought when she scoured the cosmos in search of the perfect questor, nor could she have easily put her thoughts into words. There were times when her fellow deities wondered what was in her mind (or simply if she had lost it) when she visited the Stag of Minissa on some unsuspecting creature who had never heard of the Union or its antecedents, or of the Pantheon, of the Ethic or the Art or the Disciplines. But they had never asked, and she had never offered to explain, and her chosen had never failed to acquit themselves. Not yet , some of her divine siblings grumbled when they got a look at the place from which her lone outworld questor hailed, but they kept silent about their misgivings till they had taken the time to study the man himself. And the more they studied, the more those misgivings vanished into the mists...

Mosaia, Lord Clear Water, was a man of such virtue that his brother knights often made sport of his piety. "What will happen if you miss your prayers once?" they teased. "Will your hair fall out?" Or, "Would being with a woman one time deprive you of your strength?" They were generally good-natured about it, as they might not have been with a commander who had erected his wall of piety as a barrier to distance himself from his fellow man. Mosaia had many fine qualities—compassion, swift judgment in the field, a keen intellect, a sense of humor—so his men found him easy to admire. He also had the strength of a small giant: though he had what many would have referred to as a long fuse, no one in his right mind wanted to be on the receiving end of his wrath if that fuse ever burned to the point of ignition.

He took it all in stride.

He loved the lore of living things. Sometimes, when he would retreat to the woodlands to commune with the Divine, the very trees would incline their branches toward him, and small woodland creatures would hop up and look on in adoration. Had Mosaia done any of his praying or meditating in a Carotian woodland, the dryads themselves might have popped out of their trees to converse with him, and the woodland creatures might actually have spoken—things they would not have done for every Carotian who came their way.

Though the exigencies of his homeland had brought him young to the battlefield, Mosaia had always been happiest when he was studying the arts of peace in tandem with the arts of war. He loved poetry, philosophy, and the contemplation of the mysteries of the universe. He saw in chivalry an ideal for which all men should strive rather than a sterile code of conduct that could only be a means to an end. He was a keen observer of human nature as well as a fair judge of character, so his men, though they teased, often came to him for advice. He had developed a reputation for fairness on those occasions when he had been forced to discipline his men or to serve as judge in his father’s baronial court.

But now, Mosaia himself had a problem that begged advice, and no one to whom he could easily turn. A strange brown mark, in form like to the head of one of the wild stags that roamed the forests, had appeared on his left shoulder. No warning, just—poof! There it was one morning when he awoke. Although use of the Black Arts was rare on Falidia and its practitioners vigorously prosecuted when they were found out, he toyed with the thought that the mark meant he had become the victim of a curse. He immediately rejected that line of reasoning as nonsense. Nevertheless, when both praying and trying to scrub the mark off in the shower failed to excise it, he became sufficiently alarmed to seek help.

Being a knight in holy orders, as were his father and most of the knights in the barony, he sought out the family’s house priest: a jovial, canny, and ridiculously knowledgeable older man named Brother Paulus. Rather than make the sign against the evil eye and order Mosaia exorcized (or any other such foolishness), he examined the mark thoughtfully, saying, "I can’t picture anyone trying to lay a curse on you, my boy, or to cast a spell—unless it were maybe a love spell." He clapped Mosaia on the shoulder in a show of camaraderie—an older brother telling a younger his teasing is only meant in good fun—when the younger man colored at the suggestion. If women still escaped Mosaia’s notice, it had been some years since he had escaped theirs.

Brother Paulus led Mosaia to his library. He made a great show of ascertaining that no one was hiding under the tables or in the study nooks and that they were not otherwise being observed, all of which puzzled Mosaia. He understood the reason for the display of secrecy, however, as Paulus slipped a hand behind one of the numerous dividers that separated one bookshelf from the next. A soft click and Paulus was carefully swinging open a concealed panel. Inside was not a single volume or even a sparse collection but an entire library—everything from small monographs to huge, weighty tomes bound in velvet and lettered in gold. While Paulus pulled out several of the largest volumes, Mosaia cocked his head in an effort to read some of the other titles. A bemused frown on his face, he reached a tentative hand to touch a spine here, a spine there. The titles whose languages he could read told him this was a collection of works on the theology and symbologies of cultures not his own. A few described the faiths of the diverse cultures of Falidia itself, but most dealt with those of the worlds beyond the system to which the small, relative backwater of Falidia belonged.

"You just appreciate that I’m showing you these at all, young Mosaia," Paulus scolded congenially as he paged through one tome after another. "If our Pontifical College had a less scholarly bent, I reckon I could be burned at the stake for having so much as handled some of this material, and let’s not even discuss all the dark and dangerous days and nights I spent coming by most of it." He reached over and tapped the spine of a book lettered in an alphabet Mosaia could not begin to comprehend. "See this one here? It describes a culture that worships no deity at all but only Primordial Chaos. That one next to it discusses the veneration of what we would call Hellspawn; its companion volume there discusses the opposite, the society that acknowledges no godhead but lives by a simple ethic finer than the code of law espoused by our greatest leaders. One or two of them talk about cultures that hold no good higher than the Law. It’s all very interesting to read about, not that I can imagine trying to live in some of these places!" he chuckled. "Well, I knew all of this would come in handy one day, and for more than my own intellectual curiosity..."

He tried various "hart" and "deer" entries without success, but when he tried "stag," he was rewarded. In a volume bearing the curious name Sidereal Singularities and the Societies They Shape (a title Paulus as a serious student of cultural anthropology could not resist adding to his collection), he found the information they sought. A detailed chapter on the Carotian Union described not only the celestial messenger called the Stag of Minissa but the mark that bore its name; included in the section were several photographs of the mark as it appeared on living tissue of various sorts.

"`The Pantheon of gods worshiped in this system,’" Paulus read, "`is said to indicate those they single out for special favor by marking them physically at birth or later...’ Hmm... `typically appears on the left shoulder... the rarest of all these marks... not unknown in races outside those in the Union...’ Ah, here we are! `The Stag of Minissa is less a mark of favor than a means of pointing out those few chosen to go on a quest of great moment to the Carotians and their near kin, the Erebites and Thalacians.’ Well now! I always knew you would save the world one day, my boy, but I expected the world you saved would be Falidia! It looks like our Great Lord in Heaven may have other plans for you, though He chooses to work them through an agent with whose name we are unfamiliar!"

"Minissa," he went on, flipping back a few pages, "seems to be a nature goddess of some sort. The entry says that in the past the parties chosen by her have done all sorts of marvelous things—unearthed long-lost relics that were the key to timely knowledge that saved empires, felled malign beasts that were ravaging entire worlds, freed prisoners from spells so baneful they could have enslaved a whole race." He grunted. "What an interesting collection of domains these deities have: life and death, mercy and justice, wisdom and scholarship..."

"The great dualities of life," Mosaia murmured, peering over the priest’s shoulder. He touched a hand to a photograph of a high meadow at whose center stood an ancient, shaggy tree of immense girth. It may have been a trick of the light, but a soft glow seemed to emanate from the leaves. By a sense beyond the physical, he thought he could hear the music of harps. There was a strange gleam in his eye, and it was not one of offense at these concepts so at variance with his own beliefs. He was glimpsing a pool of living brilliance through the trees near his front door and confronting a tiny spark of hope that the brilliance might be more than a trick of the moonlight. For a brief moment, he allowed that small, struggling spark to break free and saw himself approaching the trees to find nestled among their branches not moon shadows, but an elven queen, and among their roots not trampled grass, but a shimmering trail of fairy dust.

But the edifice of practicality that contained that small spark had been long in the building; its walls were thick and very high. He shook off the vision. "What else does it say?" he asked, his veneer of prosaic calm once again in place. Yet he wondered even as he said it if his air of nonchalance was coming off as a bit too practiced.

Paulus grinned, but his regard was that of one who sees through the artifice of a small child. "Not too much more about the Stag of Minissa. The system itself certainly is strangely configured: three worlds similar to ours in climate and atmosphere. Well, that’s not strange at all, but it seems they share a single orbit, like points on an equilateral triangle, around a double primary. Its inhabitants are said to be—hmmm... interesting!—powerful workers of magic." He grinned whimsically. "Well, I should hope so—I don’t see what else could hold such a configuration together!"

Mosaia backed at the overt mention of magic and caught himself making the sign against the evil eye. So much for his small spark of hope! A lifetime of conditioning would not be an easy thing to undo. "Magic? On a world whose deities embody such noble concepts?"

Paulus looked thoughtful as he scanned the entry. "To read this, I would say that their magic is what we might call the benevolent arts of the spirit world. I see nothing here that suggests they treat with the Fiend or bend nature in any way that our own good God would censure."

"And this is where I must go?" It came out so doubtful as to be gruff, yet deep inside him that little spark was tugging ever more insistently at his heart.

He sucked his cheeks. "`Must?’ Obedience is a virtue, Mosaia, but I think neither their Minissa nor our Heavenly Father is best pleased if we obey from of a sense of obligation that has no love to motivate it, be we priest or page or knight-errant."

Mosaia grunted out a laugh, but it was a mirthless sound. "And when was the last chance I had to ride on errantry with the countryside at war since I was small enough to hide in the skirts of your cassock?"

Paulus scratched what was left of the hair on his head. "Well, my boy, those wars may have deprived you of your chance to ride on errantry, but at least some good’s come of them—as far as you’re concerned, at any rate. The last peace accords declared the city of Waterford a neutral zone and set up a body to oversee Falidia’s contact with other worlds. The Carotian Union has no representative there, and never will while the church keeps its stranglehold on the collective mind of the civilized world. However, if I’m not mistaken, there is an office there for the Independent Trading Worlds, of which the Union—" He indicated one of the footnotes. "—is a founding member."

The spark of hope tugged a bit more insistently at Mosaia’s heart, as if to say, "Look at the way the forces of the universe are allying with one another to ease your path, you great oaf!" A mighty river was beckoning to him, as near as it was vast; the speed and strength of its current would sweep him away if he took a single step forward. He had been raised with the axiom that smooth and straight lay the path to perdition while the road to Paradise was strewn with obstacles. Still, try as he might, he could not believe that this path, however smooth, was the path of evil. He looked for a moment as if he would take that step: something in him longed to respond to the way those visions of rivers and paths were reaching out to embrace him. Again, he shook himself free of the spell, and for a reason far more worthy than any he had yet given, and infinitely more fundamental to his nature. "But—why me? Why anyone from Falidia at all, but why me ? I am no one of any great remark, I serve my father, I serve our one good God, I—"

Paulus burst out laughing. "Don’t use that protest with me, Mosaia—I’ve known you too long! You are a worthy knight and your father’s heir in more than body and a loyal servant of the Church. But if you keep to yourself the idea that we should not profane the Mysteries of another people just because those Mysteries have forms dissimilar to our own, I know you think it; you simply don’t profess it aloud because you fear to bring dishonor to the Clear Water name by being branded a heretic. An open mind about such things is a precious rare commodity on this world, Mosaia; we would have been at peace long ago, if the Pontifex Maximus acknowledged that the light that illumines all of Creation is one, though the vessels that bear it take other form than ours. I shudder for the day he tries to excommunicate the entire population of one of the few worlds with whom we’ve established cordial trading relations! No, Mosaia, if this Minissa has no other virtue to her name, then I think well of her that she must value such a mind as yours to have chosen you. I wish more thought as you did!"

Another short laugh as mirthless as the last. "More probably do, but like me, they fear a black mark from the local pontifex. And how could a pontifex—how could anyone with a brain in his head or faith in his heart—justify such an action? Are not the roots of our own faith polyvalent? Do we not revere as heroes men who have come to our aid from the Tribes, heroes who worshiped an All-Mother rather than an All-Father, or the many spirits of wood and river?" His brow darkened and furrowed with frustration as if this were a debate he had had a score of times with many score fools since the day the light of truth had first illumined his great soul. If fruitless polemic had eventually taught him the wisdom to keep his own counsel—at least, till he was sure he had obtained a hearing—he had never lost sight of those beliefs. Those beliefs, as well as the hope that there was a spirit world with which men could interact and live to tell the tale, had come to possess a special, sheltered place in his heart.

Paulus, regarding the interplay of frustration and hope on Mosaia’s fine features and recalling many a long talk they had had in the privacy of his study, framed his thoughts this way: Here , he thought, is a man who once, in childhood, saw evidence of the existence of angels and dryads and other goodly folk of the spirit world. Here is a man who has just taken a look deep within his own soul and found something still clinging to hope that such a spirit world might be, even though he believes his evidence vanished long ago and every prosaic Falidian instinct he possesses tells him all his "evidence" ever amounted to was the fancy of childhood. And here is a man who, for all he has come into the flower of Falidian knighthood and put away childish things, has suddenly felt the breath of air that might, if he were to allow it, fan that small spark of hope into flame . And in the silence of his heart, he uttered a prayer—not his first, but certainly his most fervent—on his friend’s behalf. Go, Mosaia , he said, focusing every last particle of his will. Find the adventure that will acquit your hope, then come back and save us all.

Aloud, he said, "You prove yourself more worthy of such a call with every word you speak." A glimmer of pride flickered in his eyes. "As to the gods—theirs or ours or anyone else’s—I think a name matters little so we do with a good will the work it is given us to do. A Pantheon whose fruits are peace and justice is, if you need to hear it from the lips of a priest, one you may serve in good conscience. Think of it as one of the community barn raisings the tenants have from time to time. Folk from all around come to help, though it’s not their farm. You could look at yourself as being on loan to the next holding, eh?"

"Though that holding is halfway across the galaxy?" he laughed, and this time the sound was like a wellspring of giddy joy gushing forth from the center of his being.

Paulus’ face broke into a smile almost of recognition. "`Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here,’" he said in a bemused sort of way.

Mosaia knew a quote when he heard one, though he had not heard this particular one pass the priest’s lips before. "Is this a bit of outworld scripture you’re quoting to speed me on my way?"

Paulus chuckled. "Not at all. Really, Mosaia, you must broaden your horizons! It’s from a blessing used by one of the Tribes:

'Hold on to what is good, even if it is a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree that stands

      by itself.

Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here.

Hold on to life even when it is easier letting go.

Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.’

"Whatever its source, whatever its wording, go with the greatest blessing this foolish old man can bestow on you."

Warmed by the priests’ words, Mosaia touched a hand to the book they had been reading; it lay open to the page that spoke of the assemblage of deities the Carotians simply called "the Pantheon." "A fool’s errand, some would say," he mused, deliberately trading on Paulus’ humble (but to his mind, highly inaccurate) characterization of himself. "Well, perhaps in the Carotian Union their gods require fools rather than knights to achieve the great deeds of their times." He smiled reflectively, and the gleam that had taken up residence in his eye as hope won out over doubt moved outward until it encompassed his whole face.

***

"OK," Habie said once they were out in the street and she was satisfied they were heading in the general direction of the palace rather than the jail. "I’ll bite, as long as you’re tossing out the bait."

"Minissa has chosen you for a quest," Ariane explained, "one vital to the survival of the Union. Whoever accepts this task and succeeds at it will become the sort of hero whose deeds live on in legend and history for generations."

The chortle she hooted out was bigger than she was. "That’s a laugh! Me save the Union? Me become a hero? What, were her `holy messengers’ like this Stag of Minissa playing hooky or having you on or something?"

Ariane gave her a tolerant half-smile. "Yes, yes, no, and neither are we."

It took Habie a moment to come up with a rebuttal as she tried to connect the Queen’s answers with her own questions. "So, I get to do it all by myself?" she tried with as much challenge as curiosity.

"No, not unless you want to scamper off ahead of the rest."

"Oh, so is it all street kids doing your dirty work for you? Is that it? Round us all up and send us packing, conveniently blame the choice of participants on one of your goddesses, and if we all go belly up and don’t come back, it’s that many less mouths for the State’s dole queues come the start of the month?"

Ariane flashed the smile of a person who has gotten the point of a joke everyone else is missing but does not want to advertise the fact, but it was Avador who spoke. "Yes, Habie," he said smoothly, "it’s a new plan we’re trying out to ease the public relief. The economists devised it, the priests sanctioned it, and the best sorcerers in the Union put it into effect. It’s our job—Ari’s and mine—to run around `discovering’ people marked with the Stag and to see them bundled off on a quest we made up one day when things were a little slow in the ruling-the-kingdom department. It’s only one of several economic initiatives we have in the works. May I ask you as a citizen in the street and one of our first test subjects what you think of it?"

Ariane had gone up a few points in Habie’s estimation when she had not come unglued at Habie’s attempts to undermine what she as Queen undoubtedly held sacred, but Avador’s speech stopped her in her tracks. She had never heard a human, let alone a king, deadpan before. She slanted her eyes up at him, but his expression was so inscrutable she was forced to feel around inside his head a little to see if he was mocking her. He wasn’t, she decided from the quick scan. He was only needling her, something he only seemed to do to people he liked—or wanted to like. She wrinkled her small face in thought as she made the assessment: reaching for his mind had been more reflex than anything else, but she had felt a sensation like a shield being lowered just before she connected. Had he had some sort of mental defense in place and deliberately lowered it to let her in? Hadn’t she heard somewhere that the humans had rules about mentalic interaction, that breaching a mind uninvited was a more serious crime in their society than physical assault? If he had sensed her probing, why had he let her in at all? Briefly, she wished she had at some point made friends with a priestess of Eliannes, or someone in her own society who could have helped her refine her use of the mindtouch.

While she was grappling with all of this, Ariane stepped in with, "My own sister, Mistra, was chosen—chosen first, in fact, before any of you. Her native facility with the Art excels even mine, and if you insist on acting like such a vainglorious snob when you meet her, she may just turn you into a toad."

Here was something she could deal with. "Vainglorious? Snob? Me?"

"Intolerance and bigotry can work in both directions, Habie."

Strike number two between the eyes. "Well," she recouped weakly, "who says I’m going anywhere anyway? I told you I don’t subscribe to your gods—yours or anyone’s."

"Well, you’re not losing any love on these people," observed Avador.

"No," she admitted. "And I guess not losing love works in both directions, too." She flicked a mischievous glance at Ariane, who smiled in a way that accorded her the point.

"Ah, so neither are they losing love on you?" the King interpreted aloud—and immediately felt a stab of pain choke his heart. He had been content to allow Habie to draw the reassurance she had needed directly from his mind a moment ago: his own mental skills were so prodigious he could have managed that with a complete psi-null. Now he saw he needn’t have bothered to allow her in; she had just pierced his defenses all by herself with that groundswell of emotion! She must be enormously gifted in the empathic skills native to the Lemurian people; all she lacked was finesse.

While that was information worth cataloguing for later action, what smote his heart in a way that told him he must act now was the agonizing sense that he had just trespassed on sacred ground. She might joke about her own station in life; that he assumed that he might also joke had been a gross miscalculation. He had just wounded her deeply. No, he corrected himself; he had not wounded but had exposed a wound that had perhaps been kept too long from the light. In that pain that had taken his heart so by surprise, there was no blame. If he had not felt it, he would never have guessed from her face what she was experiencing, and he could barely have gleaned it from the way her posture stiffened—minimally, for a bare instant.

I am sorry, kuchika, he sent directly into her mind. I am sorry for my misstep, and for the pain that has been your life.

Her head snapped around. There was wonder in her eyes, not at the presence of a voice in her head—everyone knew that the royalty of Ereb possessed such mental force that they could order the body of a dying man to heal itself from halfway across the planet and have it respond—but that he cared. She had never heard the formal language of Old Thalybdenos before, but she picked up an image from his mind: kuchika meant "little one" and was an endearment one might use with a favored younger sibling! She felt a pang of longing as she tried and failed to formulate a reply. Why didn’t I bother to nick a book on Lemurian mysticism at some point along the way? she found herself asking. The discipline she had forborne to learn suddenly rose from the grave in which she had buried it and loomed up to haunt her.

"Yeah, OK," she said, sobering a little. "So what’s the deal? If this quest has Carotian royalty in it, then you’ve got all the hocus-pocus stuff you could ever want. What does your Minissa need me for?"

Ariane flashed her an inscrutable half-smile. "When one of the Pantheon manifests, she—or he—typically tell us no story but our own."

"Huh?"

"She means we’re not clear on the specifics, Habie. That you’re marked with the Stag shows you were chosen, but you might be in a better position to say why than we are."

"To read the annals of other quests," Ariane put in, "and, believe me, I’ve read quite a few since Minissa scooped up my sister—the questors themselves didn’t always know what they had to contribute till the moment came when what they had hidden inside spilled forth."

"You mean she picks a whole bunch of real unremarkable people who don’t do anything in particular, because she knows that when the monsters attack—wham!—they’ll turn into the heroes she needs?"

Her smile widened. "You’re not at all unremarkable, Habie."

Wondering why simple kindness and truth unpolluted by craft should be so hard to bear, Habie dropped her eyes. "Yeah, I’m a completely remarkable thief. I’m draffing incredible! If Minissa needs the enemy distracted by someone making a spectacle of botching a simple robbery in broad daylight, I’m her woman."

Reading the self-derogation in the remark rather than attending to the way she had phrased it, Avador turned to Habie and rested a hand on her shoulder. It was a show of amiability, and it allowed him to stop her for a moment, but there was more. If she were the sort of empath who needed physical touch to guide her deeply into her subject’s heart, he was happy to give permission before she was compromised into asking. They had now reached one of the small parks that bordered the marketplace. The crowds thinned considerably here, and it would be easier for the masses to keep a respectful distance while he and Ariane took the moment he felt they needed to communicate with Habie in private.

"You’re a savvy young lady, my darling," he said agreeably, "so I won’t hand you a pile of drek. We caught you so easily only because we knew exactly where to look."

She blinked twice in astonishment—once at the way his sincerity was not feigned, a second time at his words. She cocked an appreciative eyebrow at his use of the local slang. She had expected to be reprimanded for using it herself in front of the Queen, not to be matched with such nonchalance. "How?" she asked, conscious that the note of challenge was slipping away.

"Minissa told me," replied Ariane, casually slipping her hand into Avador’s and signing to their entourage to halt.

Habie heard herself say, "That’s silly," but she regretted the thought even as the words left her lips. Something in the Queen’s earlier remark about the gods manifesting had hinted at this, but she had not at that point been prepared to wrap her mind around the concept of deific visitation. She wasn’t sure she was prepared now! But her ideas about preparation and visitations slid by the wayside as a sudden golden warmth suffused her. She gasped at the sudden sense of connection she felt with the King and Queen. Her lack of training left her with no explanation for the way she seemed suddenly to have entered both their minds at once. The only thing that made sense was that both the King and Queen had had enough experience with the mindtouch that they were the ones facilitating this link. They were letting her probe, welcoming her in as if they were inviting her to dinner in the most lavish room in the palace and treating her as an honored guest. She had the strangest sense that what she was perceiving about them both represented the essential truth of their being. So many Lemurians had one face that they showed to the world, a pleasant facade that hid insides that were all dark and twisty. The lavish room into which they had welcomed her was nothing they had fancied up just to impress her while they let the rest of their palace fall into ruin. The image told her that the face they presented to the world accurately reflected what lay within, that all the grace and splendor and beauty she perceived with her physical eyes completely matched their inward reality.

More surprising, they were not probing back: she had no sense that they felt it was their right to pull from her mind by force what they had willingly shared of themselves. But they could! she thought in amazement as she took in the enormity of the power arrayed before her. That someone might possess the power to undermine a will—to blot out a life with no more effort than she would use to crush a gnat!—and not use it was incomprehensible to her. Yet here inside these two living minds stood her proof.

"Minissa told you?" she asked at last, and her voice sounded weak in her own ears. Words that had sounded so clever and a bearing that had seemed so cagey a moment ago seemed suddenly vain and shallow.

Ariane smiled kindly and slipped from the link with infinite care. "The Holy Ones have honored me with visitations from time to time." Her voice had the quality of music coming from a place beyond the grief and woe of this life, and for a moment, the light of the divine shone in her face.

Habie was drawn in by the beauty that was more than physical, but she could only bear it for an instant. She dropped her eyes less from fear of the radiance burning her than from a sense that she was profaning it merely by looking. "What is it we’re supposed to do?" she asked haltingly.

"You go to find a prince who was lost many centuries ago."

The brassiness she had spent a lifetime developing could not be gotten rid of so easily, but she kept from her voice what harshness she could. "Well—isn’t there already enough royalty to go around and then some?"

"Not quite enough of the right kind," said Avador. "This one is the only one who can unite Thalas before it descends into civil war."

"So? Thalas is a whole ’nother world."

He exchanged a look with his wife that said, "You don’t know the half of it." Aloud, he said, "Ari, would you oblige me?"

She gave him the sort of smile that said she enjoyed obliging him anytime, anywhere. Kneeling so Habie could see what she was doing, she put her hands together. When she separated them, between them lay an image like a tiny, perfect hologram of their star system.

Habie’s eyes widened, and her mouth formed into a little "O" of wonder. All trace of the wall she usually maintained between herself and the outside world—the one that had been getting shakier by the minute this past half hour—vanished. "Is this us?" she asked, pointing to the greenest of the three small worlds.

Avador followed Ariane’s example and crouched so he was not speaking down to Habie in any sense of the word. "Uh-huh." He pointed. "Us, Ereb, and Thalas here." He eyed her closely. "We fought a war, you know, I’d say a year or two before you were born."

"I’ve—heard stories," she said quietly. She actually shivered.

He caught a flash like an echo of pained memory and only stopped himself from following where he had not been invited by main force of will. Even so, he saw a grave and a storm and a Lemurian woman about Habie’s age with a spectre like a death fetch hovering just beyond her shoulder. "Yes—well," he tripped over his tongue a little in his effort to curb his curiosity—what a fascinating story this youngster must have! "Right. Thalas made war on Caros and Ereb, Ariane and I became overnight heroes by winning the war single-handedly—double-handedly, I should say." He exchanged a grin with Ariane. "It’s what the bards say, if not the history books, eh?"

"I wouldn’t know," Habie grumbled under her breath.

"Anyway, we thought the Pantheon might like it if, rather than turning the Thalacians into our slaves, we united with them under a single government—that’s the two of us, our Council, the Nonacle, and so on—and treated them as equals."

"And so far it’s worked on paper," Ariane continued. "But the spirit of mistrust fostered by the sort of monarchy that would declare a war of conquest on its peaceful sister-worlds—it’s never quite gone away. The—" She paled for a fraction of a second and swallowed; Habie caught a stab of pain from her as if the Queen attached some horrific memory to this episode for all she and Avador had come out of it with the highest offices in the land. "The king who declared the war and his son, the heir to the throne, were both killed in that conflict. After them, the line of succession got a little muddled."

"To tell you the truth," said Avador, "the place was a shambles when we got hold of it."

Ariane flashed him an amused grin and went on. "After them, no one was really interested in having a king. The Toths were tyrants of the worst kind, and for a while the princes and petty barons seemed content to have their authority back."

"Too content! Do you have any idea what a coalition government is, Habie?"

She gave him a look that scathed. "I’m uneducated, not stupid."

He chuckled. "What you are, little one, is a piece of work! All right. Ereb and Caros have been worlds united under their own monarchs since the Exodus—getting the hang of dealing with a High King and Queen did not require a lot of imagination from them, or a lot of effort. Thalas was another story—still is, really."

"Their coalition of princes and petty barons isn’t working well," offered Ariane.

"Let me guess," Habie said dryly. "Once these heavyweights got their power back, they didn’t want to give any of it up again."

"Exactly. And the Thalacian royal line that sprang from the Exodus has been so badly mangled through the centuries that there is no single living person whose claim all will acknowledge."

Habie took three seconds to put two and two together. "You mean this quest of yours is one where we’re gonna go wake the dead?" Her expression was hard to read—she might have been simultaneously repelled and drawn by the idea. She settled on being drawn and gave them a perky smile. "Lethal!"

"Well, it’s not exactly bringing the dead to life," said Avador.

"It’s more like -um-"

"Bringing the living to life?" Ariane suggested with a wry grin.

"Yeah, OK, I can live with that," Habie assured them.

"Listen first. You know the humans here—what most people in-system and out just call the Carotians—came from another world." A large globe appeared in her array, larger and orbiting the suns along a track perpendicular to the orbital plane of the other three.

"Yeah, every Lemurian knows that us and the Tigroids were here first, just like the Aranyaka on Ereb and the Inygwees on Thalas."

"Queen Thalacia, the first Thalacian queen, established her line after the Exodus, but it was broken in the sixth generation. All of the histories say that both the ruling king and his heir were killed in a palace coup, the king by poison and the heir by—dark magic. But last year, when the problems on Thalas were coming to a head, people all over the Union began having visions, visions of a prince lying on a bier in a peaceful forest." She shrugged so the image wobbled a little. "Somewhere."

Avador’s voice sank to an awed whisper. Habie had become engrossed in the story some time ago; now their escort leaned in as well. Avador’s voice took on that quality Ariane’s had from time to time of being possessed not by man but by god. "We went, Ari and I, to Thalas, guided in space by a star and on the ground by a sheet of living flame. Castle Toth was abandoned after the war, pronounced desecrated ground by the priests and not fit to be cleansed. Ghosts walk there now, but it is not an empty place. There at Castle Toth, in a vault whose door was so hidden by design and debris that only the hand of the gods could have led us to it, was a small book, only about so big." He outlined a space the size of a thin journal. "It was the journal of the mage who was supposed to have killed the heir, along with his testimonial about the part he had played. And it was not the story written in the history books or sung by the bards, but something completely—other." He nodded to Ariane as if to say, "Let the real expert on magic explain it for you."

"You see, Habie," Ariane took up the tale, "his explanation was that he had cast his spell not to harm the prince but to help him. He said that a third party, a mage easily his equal and possibly the equal of the prince himself, had cast the baneful spell, the spell that should have killed. His sworn testimony was that he fired his protective spell an instant after the assassin-mage fired the one that would have killed the Prince but that the effect was—well, the effect was that, when the smoke cleared, both the Prince and the assassin were gone, and he had some explaining to do. Soon after we discovered the journal, my sister came zipping in from the outworlds saying that Minissa had claimed her. She herself, with the help of some tools we have only in the palace here on Caros, divined this story without talking to anyone, without probing anyone’s mind, without anything but the guidance of Minissa herself. She saw the quest unfold and looked into a place not in this universe—the place where the Lost Prince of Thalas came to his final rest in an enchanted sleep."

"And the long and short of it," concluded Avador, "is that if we—you—find the Prince, Eliander, then Thalas will unite behind him and survive. And if you fail—if all of you so much as refuse to go—Thalas will be destroyed." He sighed. "And right behind Thalas will be Caros and Ereb."

Habie shook off the images that had unfolded in her mind as she heard all this. "Huh?"

Avador poked a finger into the image Ariane was projecting and flicked away the larger planet, the one-time human home-world, as if it were a domino. Nothing happened. Then he did the same to Thalas. The other two planets struggled to reorient their orbits in light of the sudden change in gravitational force in the shared orbit. Then they wobbled a little. Then their orbits started to decay. Finally, they went crashing into the sun. "The gods gave our people a chance to save themselves when Thalybdenos was destroyed," he narrated. "If Thalas goes, there will be no second chance for us, and we’ll take your people, the Tigroids, the Aranyaka, the Inygwees—everybody—with us."

Habie’s jaw looked like it would drop in horror, but just before it opened, she managed to scrape enough bricks together to put a portion of her wall back up. "Wait a minute! Hold it! You’re trying to trick me, forcing the two planets to sun dive with more magic or telepathy or something. Do it over again. Do it right!"

Ariane gave Habie an inscrutable smile, reset the image so all four planets orbited the binary sun, and nodded to her to try. When the girl had three times gotten the same results Avador had, Ariane brought the en igma tic smile back and said, "Magic, you see, is the entire point."

CHAPTER 2 —The Response

"The Disciplines are a thing of the Mind and are subject to the same enhancements and infirmities as the intellect itself. But the Art, the tapping of the power of the Earth to shape the Ether—what the mundanes call Magic—is a thing of the Spirit..."

  —Aramina of Caros, Headmistress, Talamazra Academy, Discourses on the Book of Life

Night had fallen long ago, but in pubs all over Caros City, the dark was being driven back by gossip, ale, and the glow of a friendly hearth. Boreo, the proprietor of the Town Scrier, leaned across the bar in the common room and cocked an eyebrow at the odd scene transpiring in one corner. There, at a table that could have seated half the City Watch, a cluster of Carotian men sat absorbed in a tale being spun by, of all things, a Thalacian. The fellow was lean and not bad to look at as outworlders went, yet he was built strongly enough that a quick glance would deter a thief from looking too long or too hard at his belt pouch. No, it’s more than just the muscles that would put me off if I were of larcenous intent, the proprietor thought. Involved as he is with telling his tale, broadly as he gestures, he’s on the alert. Anyone who thinks to rifle through that pack beside him will be risking grievous bodily injury.

"What do you make of that, Gus?" he asked his bartender, a spry Lemurian in his middle years.

"Of what, Mr. B?" asked the Lemurian. "Of a dozen of your best clients being mesmerized by the yarns of a Thalacian bard? Don’t worry! He’s attracted as many as he’s driven off, and they said to keep the ale pitchers coming. You’ll make money rather than losing it on that lot, never you fear!"

"A bard, is he?"

Gus grunted an affirmative. "And part of the Thalacian embassy, hand-picked by Ambassador Gil himself as he tells it."

Now the proprietor grunted. "Then it’s no wonder a few of my regulars backed off. Half the men who come in here fought in the war." He shook his head. "If the King and Queen—if the High King and Queen—can get past the harms the Thalacians did their families, I guess the rest of us should. But not all of us can. A nasty, cruel lot they were back then. Leastways, the royal family was, and when the old King or his son said jump, the Thalacians asked how high and in which direction. Still, it didn’t put off Ronn and his crew. Adopt him as a gesture of fellowship, did they?"

Gus screwed up his small face in a way that said he didn’t want to give his boss the lie to his face. "I don’t know about fellowship, Mr. B., not but that they’re acting friendly enough. I reckon some here would have adopted him as a gesture of fellowship, wanting no more than that, had he been no more than a Thalacian bootblack. Like as not he’s happy enough to linger in a place like this: your house must be a fair step up from the seedy corner tap rooms I remember from the one trip I took to Thalas after the war. But one thing more than fellowship holds this lot, if I may be so bold."

"Yes, Gus? Go on!"

"News. They’re hungry for news from the palace."

Boreo chuckled. Official news about the peace accords and negotiations and a mysterious quest had come from the palace, but it had been sparse and sketchy—not the way Strephan and Amina usually handled things, not by a long shot. "Is that—?" He tapped his temple to inquire if this was something the Lemurian had picked up with his empathic sense. "Or just simple eavesdropping?"

"Me, stoop to simple eavesdropping? Mr. B., you wound me!" His eyes glittered mischief. "Bit of both, actually. They were swilling ale so quickly I told Trina to attend to the other customers while I took over for her there. It’s because of them I’m so far behind in my washing up. Not ten minutes past, I was running pitchers over there so often I might as well have been in on the conversation."

"Tell on, Gus, tell on!"

Gus picked up one of the four beer steins he had been washing and drying repeatedly and picked at some imaginary dirt. The only way the glass was going to get cleaner was if he used a sand blaster on it, but swirling the dishtowel around it allowed him to keep up the pretense that he was keeping busy between ale runs to the crowded table. "Well, his information about this quest for the Lost Prince of Thalas only served to warm them up. It turned out he had news of Princess Mistra—real news, not that bilge they dreamed up about her dying in a rockslide then having a miraculous resurrection the minute her consort cleared Union airspace. He says he and some of his mates have seen her. That’s what really hooked them. For my money, right now he could be spitting on the graves of their ancestors, and they’d still be happily plying him with ale. He’s going to have a mighty buzz on soon and a wicked hangover in the morning if he hasn’t accustomed himself to Carotian spirits!"

Boreo disregarded his bartender’s attempt at levity. "He’s seen her?" Incredible! The Carotian people adored Mistra! Why would the King and Queen keep her hidden from sight if she had truly resurfaced?

"That’s what he said. No, I tell a lie. One of his mates saw her." He gave up even pretending to wash up and leaned in close so he could whisper. "As he tells it, the reason nearly a third of the delegation from Thalas is musically inclined is that they were needed to serenade a mysterious figure of some sort—to serenade her round-the-clock for the first week they were here. As he tells it, the figure was veiled from head to toe, there was a partition between them and her, and the room in which this all took place was so alive with magic that a psi-null Thalacian infant would have stifled at the feel of it. Well, leave it to a Thalacian to sniff out a plot and probe a mystery the higher-ups want kept hush-hush, know what I mean?"

"That I do, Gus, that I do."

"He went on to say one of his mates managed to sneak a peek behind the partition. Evidently, his friend could make out a few female contours and features, all of the right size, age, and coloring to be our missing princess. He lost me for a bit at that point—something about a glowing sword and a wall of computer banks being behind the partition with her."

Boreo looked thoughtful. "Glowing sword and computers, eh?"

"That’s what he said. Anyway, what this fellow here did was to sneak into the Royal Archives to see if he could figure out from some of your old lore books what might have made all that music necessary."

"Did he find anything out?"

"Apparently, he told them he learned that all that serenading could have been used on the right sort of person to help along the magical imprinting of a bundle of information. Does that all make any sense to you, Mr. B.?"

"It does, Gus, it does—especially the bit about using music on the right sort of person. I’ve heard of such things where an enchanter was forced to learn a spell too complex to get down in a hurry, or information so sensitive it had to be buried in the mind part and parcel till the exact moment it was needed." The proprietor knit his brow, thinking. He ranked as no more than average as far as access to the Art went, but he had picked up a thing or two on his travels before he had settled in to run the Scrier. "You know, Gus," he went on after a moment, "if this lost prince really exists, and if he’s really, really lost—you know, not hidden in a dark cave somewhere but really, truly adrift in the cosmos..." He began to burn with a feverish intensity he normally reserved for balancing his books in a month when business was off and bills were due. "The Pantheon," he continued, "would have to send someone after this prince who could work extraordinary feats of magic, maybe even send along some sort of enchanted object, maybe like this glowing sword, that would do the job if its spells could be tapped. And who better to wield it—who better to go after this prince who’s the last and only hope of Thalas and the Union—but a child of the royal house consecrated to Minissa herself?"

"Works for me, boss, but what do I know? Minissa’s got more sense than to send one of my kind running off into the blue on short notice to have adventures!" They had a hearty laugh over the Lemurian proclivity for hearth, home, and order. Then, abruptly, Gus’ eyes snapped up.

"What’s wrong, Gus?"

He shook his head as if to clear it, then scanned the cluster of Carotians and their lone Thalacian guest. "Dunno, boss." He brightened. "I do think I see those pitchers running dry again."

Boreo chuckled to himself at the way Gus filled six new pitchers and zipped over to the table at light speed, then served them and cleared away the empties with such care he looked like a holofilm run in slow motion. There was no one like Gus for unobtrusively gathering information! Boreo cocked his head at the group. He had less empathic sense than a week-old Lemurian child, but something about the group of men—body language, maybe, or a subtle change in some of their facial expressions—told him the emotional color of the group had just altered radically. Ronn and his contemporaries still looked as if they were extending an easy welcome to the Thalacian, but the men of Ronn’s son’s generation—the stranger and Ronn’s son Abron in particular—were beginning to look like young rams that had just scented the only ewe in heat on their entire continent.

"Repenting of their welcome, are some of our young hotheads?" he asked as Gus returned.

"It’s very strange," replied Gus. "To look at them, they’re clowning around a bit as good friends will, but when I feel for what’s going on..." He screwed up his small face again, this time as if trying to pull from the Ether the words that would explain what he sensed. "There’s an ebb and flow of feeling there. On the surface, it looks like the Thalacian is just asking questions in all sincerity and that the Carotians are alternating between having their dander raised by thinking he’s asking the unaskable and posturing down and looking sheepish when they realize that what he asked is something perfectly legitimate."

Boreo chortled. "Talking about women, are they?"

"They’re talking about this and that and the other, but—yeh, at the heart of it, they’re talking about women."

"Knew it."

"The odd thing is—and I feel it so strongly I can almost see lines of force drawn around the table connecting the stranger to our regulars—the Thalacian seems to be playing them a-purpose, same as he’d play the strings on his instrument. It’s like he’s the one in charge of making any tension at the table rise and recede. In fact, I think he wants to force them to close ranks against him, but only when he decides it’s time."

Consternation warred with a simple lack of understanding, and he thought it all came out in his voice. "Can’t say I like the sound of that, Gus."

"Nor me neither, Mr. B. But it’s what’s going on; I’ll set my word on it against my entire month’s wages."

Boreo considered, wondering if he should call last orders or simply tell everyone he was closing up early—or if he could rely on Gus to monitor them and give a holler right before the tension reached critical mass. Would the damage to his establishment if they did explode outweigh the profit to be made keeping the group in beer and pretzels as long as they remained civil?

The decision suddenly left his hands: Ronn came to his feet with such force he knocked over the table. The next instant, the entire party was standing and bracing for action. Boreo felt his mouth drop: Ronn was usually the settling influence on this particular crew, and the last one he would have expected to respond to the sort of provocation Gus had described. But he was not swinging yet; as long as he and the stranger kept talking, there might be a chance for reconciliation. Blast him for keeping his tone so clipped when he should have been shouting! All Boreo could catch to help him gauge the direction in which the exchange was about to go was something about how dilute and tainted the royal blood of Thalas had become and the words, "It’s no wonder you lost the war."

Ouch! Even without Gus’s empathic sense, he could tell the Thalacian knew he had gone a bit too far with whatever remark had precipitated that reaction. He could also tell the young man had been ready to placate Ronn—right up till the moment the words "lost the war" had passed the older man’s lips. If Carotians had more nerves to tweak than Thalacians, Thalacians still had a few, and Ronn had just trodden on the worst of the lot. The tension rose, thickened, came to a point where a single concession on either side might have defused it.

But the concession, if either was getting ready to offer it, came a beat too late. With no warning, the Thalacian catapulted across the table and tackled the older man. Down they went, swinging and kicking.

Boreo groaned.

The rest did not hesitate to jump in without invitation.

Boreo moaned. Carotians did not behave like this!

"Well, tonight I guess they do," he muttered to himself as half the pub joined in the fray. In minutes, he wondered if a customer strolling through the door in search of a pint would be able to tell who had started the brawl or who was on whose side. Alarmed at the way the fight was escalating, Boreo launched himself into the fray—not to fight but to pull from harm’s way items of value that the brawl was about to roll over. As he ran this way and that, he shouted exhortations to his patrons to remember who, what, and where they were and to stop acting like recalcitrant schoolchildren. He did not truly expect anyone to listen to him, which is well, since no one did.

The one thing that moved him to get into the fight itself was a movement he caught out of the corner of his eye from halfway across the room: the Thalacian had ducked under a table in an effort, he thought, to make a dive for his belongings. Fearful that the man was making a grab for a weapon, he dived in the Thalacian’s direction, saw he would never make it, and screamed to Gus for help. But when the Thalacian emerged, he did nothing more aggressive than to hop onto one of the few tables that remained upright. In his hand, he brandished the last "weapon" Boreo had ever expected to see.

It was a lute, and oh, how sweetly he played it! A single arpeggio, and the proprietor felt his entire body still of its own accord. A second, and he felt his eyes turn toward the Thalacian in mute appeal that he play on—and on and on. A line of melody, and the brawling around him ground to a complete halt. All around him, patrons turned one by one to listen, enraptured, some frozen in the act of delivering a punch. When the Thalacian dived into his main theme, Boreo swore he heard the music Phino and his angels had made for the One on the Day of Creation.

When he looked around again, his customers were smiling happily up at the bard, and the bard was smiling as congenially back. Playing all the while, the stranger meandered toward the door, plucking as he went, and no one moved to stop him. Something at the back of Boreo’s mind told him he should be berating the younger man for inciting a riot, then trying to collect for the damage the brawl had caused, but a drowsy warmth had suffused his limbs. And, really, hadn’t he been high-spirited as a lad and done some unredressed damage somewhere along the way? Better to let the matter rest...

But wait—what was this? The Thalacian was giving him a benevolent nod, vamping on his open strings as he reached into the pocket of his braes, then drawing out a small pouch of gold and tossing it in his direction. Boreo acted just in time to catch it. Then he surrendered again to that golden warmth. The businessman in him remarked that the pouch of coin seemed heavy enough not only to pay for the damage but to build an entire new residential wing. What a fine lad this Thalacian was! How proud his mother and father must be of him that he would show such consideration to a stranger! If only his own children had grown up with such a sense of magnanimity...

***

The bard, Deneth bent Elias by name and Lord Kinonde by birthright, breathed a sigh of relief as he reached the door that opened on the street. Continuing to vamp, he felt for the doorknob, then jumped when the entire door burst inward. He looked up, breathed a second sigh of relief when he saw that the intruders were his friends from the delegation. He jerked his head toward the street. He knew the spell he had cast with his music would wear off shortly after he stopped playing, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near the pub when it did. "’Night, folks!" he called with a genial wave. They all waved back. A few even raised their glasses to him. He chuckled to himself.

Outside, one of his friends said, "Well, Deneth, when we learned we had lost you, then heard the sounds of a brawl, we knew just where to come looking."

"Just having a little fun, Bradys, at the expense of a few hypocrites," Deneth replied. He slung the lute across his back and turned up the street, ambling toward the palace at an easy pace. His comrades fell into step beside him.

"What did you do to provoke them?"

"Me? What makes you think it was me?"

"Deneth."

His laugh was earthy. "Oh, I let the hypocrites play nice and ply me with the local brew and pump me for information. Thought I might goad them a bit just to see how long it would take them to show their true colors. To be honest, I’m getting sick of hearing about the men in the delegation making the politist of overtures to the ladies of the court only to get lectures about Carotian mysticism shoved down their throats. Our mate Jerem even got formally called out, and for what?" He grunted in disgust.

"So you were—what?—striking a blow on behalf of the flower of Thalacian manhood?" Bradys asked his friend in a tone of voice so dry it should have desiccated every major body of water on the planet.

"Not for the flower of Thalacian anything so much as against Carotian hypocrisy. Everywhere I turn, it seems like I run into Carotians who proclaim publicly the past is the past, then act in private like they still believe the great warrior race is out to even the score."

"By dishonoring every specimen of Carotian womanhood it comes across. I know the drill."

The third member of their party slapped Deneth on the back. "It’s good to know the honor of your house lives on in you, old son," he laughed. "So what did you do that started that riot, ask if any of those fellows had daughters or sisters they wanted the score evened with?"

He grinned, an odd blend of the diffident and the wicked. "Well, not in so many words, Kort."

"Well?"

He cleared his throat. "I asked about the tal-yosha, about how their orders of spiritual kinship worked in practice, about tales I’d heard about exactly what it takes to bring a Carotian child to birth—that sort of thing." He was keeping his tongue very firmly in his cheek during his recap of the conversation.

"In all innocence, of course."

"Of course."

Bradys emitted a snort that suggested just what he thought about Carotian mysticism. "The Carotians have a church-sanctioned relationship to cover every intimacy of body or mind sentientkind has ever dreamed up. The Erebites are almost as bad. And, really, what does it all amount to? A social convenience dreamed up by the lawyers—or, here, more likely the priests—to pacify a people who need desperately to believe there are spiritual roots to what’s fundamentally an exercise in physical gratification."

"My point exactly: how’s a Thalacian to make sense of it all? So I asked, and all they came back at me with was a long list of platitudes about consortium and marriage and their orders of spiritual kinship and all the rest being `matters of the spirit.’" He inflected the last four words as if mimicking a sage puffed up on his own conceits and gestured for effect. "Tsk. What they were leaving unsaid, I could hear as a dull roar."

"How’s a Thalacian to grasp anything at all about things of the spirit?"

"Exactly. Most of ’em barely think we have souls as it is. So I said as how I supposed, if they couldn’t explain it any better than that—y’know, it being just among us men and all—I’d simply have to go out and get myself some first-hand experience."

"And did you hint that you wanted to get this first-hand experience at the hands of any maiden in particular?"

Another earthy chuckle. "The young lady you feel so certain we were serenading. And I did a little more than hint."

Two loud guffaws at that. "You’re lucky they didn’t just blast you to a cinder on the spot. They’ve a proprietary view of their royalty, these Carotians. Very protective."

"Very different from the average Thalacian on the street," Kort laughed, "who’d disown the entire Toth dynasty the way any other race would disown a bastard child."

"It’s not only House Toth some of us want to disown," Bradys shot back in a low growl. Then, to Deneth: "You think a member of any other race in the quadrant would have gotten that reaction using those tactics? Gods of hell! Who but a Thalacian would have gotten their backs up by hinting he wanted to explore the mysteries of this `spiritual kinship’ nonsense with their sisters and daughters? If you’d been a Crabman from Tincto, they’d have been wondering if any kids you had would come out speckled or parti-colored and betting on how many limbs it would have."

"And if it would have pincers or fingers," observed Kort.

"If you ask me, the idea of confederation is rot and so is this quest, no matter what their high-and-mightinesses all say. Give me no confederation at all and Thalas as a republic, and I’ll be a happier man for it."

An alarmed Kort hushed him, but Deneth said, "Say it a little louder, Bradys, I think someone in the next star system might have missed it."

"So? I’m not the only one who thinks it or says it. But it’s possible I’m one of the few actually doing something about it. Here, Deneth," he went on, forcibly redirecting the conversation, "you’re cut up and bleeding. Let’s have a look at you." He pulled Deneth into the pool of radiance cast by the nearest streetlight so he could get a better look at the gash his friend had taken across his back. Something on Deneth’s shoulder caught his eye. "Hey, what’s this? New scar?"

"What’s what?" Deneth craned his neck to look, focused, and then did a double take. "Nah, can’t be," he murmured.

"Can’t be what?"

"It’s something you’d class as rot, old son, if rot is what you think this quest is." He frowned, troubled.

Kort joined them and looked closely at the mark Bradys had indicated. "It’s what Gil was saying would mark those going on the quest for the lost prince," he said in a hushed voice. "It’s the Stag of Minissa." He looked at Deneth in wonder, as if he expected his friend to sprout wings, take up the harp, and turn into one of the seraphim that were said to serve the Pantheon. Beside him, Bradys looked more like he expected Deneth to sprout horns and take on the aspect of Ahriman himself.

Deneth took in those two expressions so at variance with each other yet so akin in the way they suddenly set him apart from two men who had been his friends since bardic college. He wanted to shake them both, to slap them silly, to expunge those equally repugnant looks from their faces, to scream, "It’s me, you fools!" and "Quit staring!" In the end, instead of doing any of these things, he turned his eyes heavenward and pointed to the mark. "Hey! Hey, you up there! Is this a joke? You’ve gone and aimed this mark at someone you wanted, and I got in the way. Here, you don’t want me, not after what I’ve just said about your precious Carotians!" He kept his gaze up for a full minute as if he expected a reply. Getting none, he frowned and heaved an exasperated sigh.

"Bloody gods can’t do anything right," he grumbled.

***

"Well, I’m stumped," the priest on duty in the temple of Ereb in Ereb City said to his colleague. "You ever seen anything like this?" He drew the other man into the office that abutted the small ward in which their patient lay. The wards themselves were bright, airy, and spacious, the better to lift the patients’ spirits. The offices, meant chiefly to allow the priests to do paperwork or take a brief respite from their labors, were no less bright but tended to seem smaller than they were due to the accumulation of paperwork and tomes on various illnesses.

"Not that was refractory to treatment like this is," the second priest said now. "Whyn’t they take him over to the temple of Thalybdenos? Their hospital is really better supplied, and they’re really our superiors as far as healing goes. I’m not ashamed to admit that."

"Why would you be? We all have our sub-specialties. Not that an outworlder would know that. I think most that can tell us from the Carotians, even in the Independent Trading Worlds, just see an Erebite on the street and think `healer.’ This one knew a little more, or his Dad did—theirs is a warrior culture, and he wanted his son in the hands of the priests of a god of war rather than one who sanctifies healing or meditation or childbirth or any of the rest."

"The Dad important, is he?"

"An ambassador from one of the worlds on the fringes of the Dantonian Empire—one the High King and Queen would very much like to be sympathetic to us rather than to the Dantonians."

The second priest sucked in his cheeks. "So we really, really want to make him all better, eh? As a gesture of good will? Think we’d be pushing our luck bringing in someone from the temple of Thalybdenos?"

"I think so." He grinned. "When I said the Dad didn’t want his son in the hands of the priests of any of those other gods, I was putting the most polite spin on it I could. I won’t use his exact words, but `milksop’ barely hints at the mildest of them."

"Thinks we’re manly men over here, huh?"

"I guess he’s not the first to grasp only that our Ereb is a god of war and miss the `Justice’ and the `Righteous Cause’ bit."

"Hmm." He frowned. "Well, I guess we could petition the boss for permission to bring in the King."

"I’d do that in a heartbeat if I could be sure we’d completely exhausted our own resources."

"You’re not sure?"

His brow knit briefly, then he nodded. "OK, I’m sure."

"Wait a minute, though. Our resources aren’t just us old-timers. There are the lads and lasses just going out to start their own ministries."

"I thought most of them left right after graduation."

"Most did, but there are a few who were waiting for a small contingent of pilgrims to arrive. They’re all heading off to Jaffra later today; the newly-ordained priests and priestesses are going straight to their postings once they complete the pilgrimage rites." His face brightened. "And you know who’s still around?"

"Who?"

"Did you ever have Torreb bent Eroch assigned to your service?"

Now the first priest’s face brightened. "Sure, I remember him! Best scholar I’ve seen come through here in all my days as a teacher—always looking for opportunities to study the rare and the strange, like it was his mission in life to cure every malady of every race in the galaxy. Some of the initiates, you have to beat the simplest techniques into them with a stick and threaten them with latrine duty to get them to come in from weapons practice and attend to their studies. Not Torreb: he’d have a technique mastered and be working on his own refinements of it while the rest were still getting the basic mindtouch down. Only initiate I’ve ever had ask me to load him up with extra work, was Torreb."

The second priest chuckled. "I think he was out to prove the temple had invested wisely when it brought him in on a full scholarship. He went through the program so fast, sometimes I thought we should have been paying him. Twenty-five and he’s getting his first independent posting already. He’s a good lad."

"He is. Except—" The first priest put a hand to his mouth and stifled a laugh.

"What?"

"Well, for all his brilliance, I have to admit sometimes his bedside manner left somewhat to be desired. He’d go charging in thrilled to death that he’d found a new disease to study and cure—"

"—and sometimes forget there was a patient on the other side of the rash or the broken bone or the magical wards or the whatever. I remember."

"And with a problem on such a—well, on such a delicate area of the body..."

He considered a moment. "You have to admit, though, once his patients understood why he was asking questions of such a personal nature and saw that he had their best interests at heart, most of them responded to his sincerity."

"Most—yes. Good thing he had his mace with him that one time, though."

"Ah, yes, his mace. Odd choice for a warrior-priest consecrated to Ereb."

"Well, we all have to give up something, or adopt a limitation of some sort, when we’re close to ordination. His was never to fight with a weapon that spilled blood."

He chortled. "Oh, sure, there’s no blood spilt when a mace crushes a bone!"

"Well, not shedding blood by slicing and dicing—you know what I mean."

"Yeah, OK. Well, all right, then, let’s do this. If this fellow succumbs to the arms of Bronys and anyone finds out there’s something we didn’t try, all the pleading in the cosmos about how his soul was ready to make The Great Journey won’t save our jobs—or our hides!"

A short time later, Torreb bent Eroch was seating himself next to the bed of the young man in question. His face was youthful even for his 25 years; his robes, though new, hung on his lanky frame like hand-me-downs passed down too soon from an older and burlier brother. He spoke quietly to his patient, who, though he began to blush furiously and at times eyed Torreb as though he doubted the young priest’s sanity, answered his questions.

From across the room, the two older priests watched with interest as Torreb dived in with childlike enthusiasm. The outworlder answered at first in monosyllables. Two-word sentences came next, though it seemed to the two priests that the words escaped his lips only grudgingly. Both were reminded of deadfall being swept along a river swollen with snowmelt, then damming the water completely as the currents forced them into a stricture too narrow for the whole mass to pass at once. Three minutes of tension causing the words to stick in the patient’s throat, though, and it seemed like the back pressure of the water finally kicked the deadfall loose. The priests wondered if Torreb’s initial questions—certain to be embarrassing considering the nature of the man’s affliction—had put the patient off, that he finally had the sense (or sense of indignation) to sputter, "But what’s that got to do with anything?" after which Torreb explained himself in terms he could grasp. Once the man had satisfied himself that Torreb did not ask from prurient interest alone, once he saw the sense of where the young priest was going with his questions, he relaxed and became eager to help. A few minutes of this less forced sort of conversation, and Torreb was reaching for the contacts in the man’s temples and settling himself into the healing trance.

Not ten minutes later, he was rising and approaching them. He explained the exact nature of the problem and the steps he had just taken to initiate the healing process. He went on to suggest how they might conduct their further treatment of the young man, then took his leave of them with the quip that he was off to tend his own flock.

He speaks with such an affecting degree of humility! the first priest projected to the second as Torreb explicated his views.

Especially considering he’s just elucidated for us in a few minutes the nature of a problem that’s been defeating us the better part of two days! the second projected back.

A courteous young fellow and a great respecter of his elders is our Torreb.

And so conscious of the sensibilities of us old-timers!

Impressed with Torreb’s comportment, they were even more impressed when, returning to their patient, they found him well on his way to recovery.

***

But a few hours later, when the group of pilgrims departed for Jaffra, Torreb was not with them. Instead, he was closeted not with the Chief Priest of the temple in which he had trained but with the High Priest of Ereb—the cleric who was head of the order for the entire planet.

That he had come to be here was not his own doing precisely. As he had changed into his traveling clothes after his visit with the young outworld patient, he had noticed a strange brown mark on his left shoulder—one that had certainly not been there when he had dressed that morning. His own incredulity had delayed his recognition of the Stag of Minissa; his reaction upon recognizing it had fallen somewhere between Mosaia’s and Deneth’s. What??? was followed quickly by Why??? and What was Minissa thinking??? But being of a more reverent cut of cloth than Deneth and infinitely more familiar with the Carotian Pantheon than Mosaia, he had catalogued all three reactions as childish and arisen to do his duty.

A trip to his immediate superior had started him on his journey up the order’s chain of command and, in a few short hours, landed him here. His head was still whirling from the speed at which he had been passed up the ranks and at the thought that the High Priest had made time for him on such short notice.

"Come in, Torreb, come in!" greeted the High Priest as he ushered the younger man into his office. Unlike the offices in the hospital area, this one was spacious; shelves carved of a rich, dark wood lined the walls and held enough healing tomes to fill a library.

"Thank you, my lord," he said with a diffident lowering of his eyes.

"I hear it’s been quite a day for you," he went on, gesturing Torreb to a chair near his desk. "First your miraculous cure of the ambassador’s son, and now this."

Torreb’s eyes snapped up. "Ambassador’s son?"

"Didn’t you know? Ereb above, it would have caused a diplomatic incident with the poor fellow falling ill here if we hadn’t been able to cure him! The Dantonians aren’t the only warmongers in this part of the galaxy—they’re merely the most aggressive. We sometimes forget there are others who would make trouble for us over something this frivolous. You’ve done a great service not only for your patient and your temple, but your entire world—your entire system, I should say. I hope someone’s thought to thank you before this."

His eyes dropped again. "Well, the priests who asked my opinion, of course, and—well, a courier did come with a package from the young man’s family."

"Something nice, I hope?"

"I don’t know, I never opened it." He raked a hand through thick brown hair. "There was my packing to finish, and then the Stag appeared, and then there were the ethical considerations: I thought of just handing it over to the temple. It doesn’t seem right to take a gift when I was just doing my job."

The High Priest laughed heartily. "You’re a wonder, Torreb. I wish I had a hundred more like you. No, you keep it. And if a gift comes from King Thalon and Queen Naloth, or from the High King and Queen themselves, you keep that, too. Er– may I inquire into the nature of this ailment that so muddled two of my senior clerics?"

Eyes up again, and a light had come to them. Torreb may have been uncomfortable with talk of war and ambassadors and gifts, but here was something he could latch onto. "Well, my lord, the supreme irony would have been if their government had declared war on us if we’d failed to cure him. I don’t often say this about a patient, but in a sense the poor chap brought it on himself."

"In what way?"

"Had word reached you of the symptoms he was experiencing?"

He frowned. "Something about a rash with rather bad lesions centered on—well, on..." Taking Torreb’s innocence into account, he outlined an area that circumscribed his own hips and thighs. "The –er– generative organs?"

"Exactly. How can I put this? You know how some races conceive of Ereb as a god of war rather than a god of justice and war in a righteous cause? Because of our society’s view of—well, of relations between the sexes, sometimes people misinterpret that, too. They hear our dictum about sharing the gift `with wisdom’ and sometimes interpret that as `with complete abandon.’"

Not as innocent as all that, then, the High Priest mused. "I have seen diplomatic incidents arise from that particular misinterpretation," he chuckled. "I’ve also seen a number of outworlders turned into things small, green, and scaly for the affront—transiently, of course, and only by the Carotians. So one of our women cursed him with an illness?"

"That’s the strange thing. It’s really more like he cursed himself."

"But I thought in his society it was considered somewhat—well—to a man’s credit to have a few outworld conquests."

"I think it generally is, sir, but he was following the dying wish of an honored aunt that he become a monk, and monks of the order he was planning to join are held by a vow of complete abstinence almost from the time they make their intentions known. I’m not sure I completely understood this part, but he said they believe their strength flows from complete purity of body and mind, as if purity and commerce with a woman, even a bondmate, were mutually exclusive quantities."

"In some cultures, the two are regarded that way. Their people are capable of practicing neither temperance nor discretion, so they embrace denial as their highest goal."

Torreb looked like he wanted to ask if children in such societies were conceived in Petrie dishes but thought better of it when he remembered whom he was addressing. "Apparently—" Here he shrugged helplessly as if befuddled by the complexities of the universe. "—it’s their world’s most respected order and families pray and make sacrifices every day in hope one of their number will be accepted into it."

"More even than they want them to be great generals?"

"Yes. It’s taken very seriously by the entire culture when a young man makes his intention known: if he were caught with a woman of his own race, he’d be barred from the order, but the woman would be publicly stoned." His eyes widened in incredulity at what he was reporting to his superior.

The older man frowned thoughtfully. "Interesting take on gender equality. Go on."

"Well, he had mixed emotions about joining: he would never dream of not granting his aunt’s dying wish, but he had been planning on making a career in their military. So what with one thing and another, I guess when he accompanied his father here, he saw Ereb as his last chance to experience that aspect of life he’d been forced to foreswear before he was really ready."

His eyes widened. "And he felt he’d found a woman who classed accommodating him as sharing the gift with wisdom?" He shook his head. "I must have a word with the High Priestess of Arayne about what they’re teaching our young folk in the adulthood training these days."

Torreb looked like he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or gawk at the remark—not quite the comment he would have expected from the Chief Priest of his own order! He settled for a small grin, but his front teeth appeared almost immediately on his lower lip. "I won’t speak to the young lady’s motives, but I will say each of them could have been a bit better informed of the other’s culture before they made the decision to act. From what he describes, she had just been forced to break off a consortium because of the approach of the tal-yosha: she and her consort just weren’t ready to take the step into marriage and family yet. So she may have been hurting, or she may have been rebelling, or any of a thousand other things. Whatever the reason, she must just not have been thinking clearly." He sighed and looked distant for a moment; his voice sank to a distant whisper that got more and more quiet as his vision turned inward. "They teach us that the mindscape is so vivid for our folk, that so much of the act of joining happens on a level that isn’t physical at all. Touching this young man’s mind brought me face to face with just how vivid it all is. I’d never before confronted how forcefully everything not of the body can reach out to another to seek reunion, or how profound that yearning of soul for soul can be for a woman in that condition. I think she expected he would understand, that he would be prepared and know how to guard himself. And he knew nothing at all." He paused, sighed, raked a hand through his hair again; both eyes and voice returned to the present. "I guess the concept of joining being other than physical is not well developed in his culture. So when he felt her soul reach out to him and he had no idea how to respond, he heard a shriek of psychic anguish of such proportions that—Arayne above, my ears are still ringing with it!

"I don’t know how far along things went; I don’t know that it’s important. I just know that both of them were suddenly, painfully aware of how not-wise the thing they were doing was, and that he hurried away in an agony of guilt and shame and profound loss. The next morning, he awoke with the rash and clusters of these brittle, weeping sores. I guess he couldn’t quite bring himself to discuss it with his own people, or even with the good clerics who asked me to speak with him. And I guess because he was afraid the healing link would mean our clerics might wrest from his mind by force what he feared to voice aloud and freely, he resisted their best efforts: they couldn’t initiate the mindtouch securely enough to do him any good."

"But you did?"

"I don’t think I did anything more than get him to quit fighting the mindtouch so I could work. There was really very little physical damage for me to assist his body to heal."

"And the damage to his psyche? It must have been a profound insult that his body would react so."

He emitted a small laugh of self-derision. "Well, I wish I were better at talking to people out loud. I’m sure my attempts to reassure him were clumsy at best. I know my initial attempts to draw him out had all the finesse of a herd of cattle stampeding through the city square on market day! But once we met in the mindscape and he saw my concern was genuine, and that I was also a young man with aspirations to the priesthood who had made many mistakes, his sense of mortification started to drain away. I don’t know if he’ll go to his father and say he’s just not cut out to be a monk or if he’ll just resolve to become the best monk he can, but I think this will be the last time he tries to find a loophole through his own society’s conventions by exploiting the conventions of another!"

The High Priest smiled at him. "I reckon so. You’re a good fellow, Torreb. I hate to lose you. But now it seems that not only our temple but our entire world must lose you!" He frowned in bemusement at the less than merry expression that came to Torreb’s face. Torreb’s was not the sort of face that bore deceit well: his efforts not to show his disappointment made him look twice as disheartened as he really felt. "You don’t seem pleased, my son. Surely you’re not upset at your election by sweet Minissa?"

"Not upset exactly," Torreb replied. "To say truth, I think I’m still in shock! I was all set to take off to Jaffra and then to assume my new duties as priest to my own flock. I’d been looking forward to it and planning for it for all these months!"

The High Priest smiled tolerantly. "We condition all things upon the will of the Pantheon, do we not? Evidently, Minissa had plans for you that she did not see fit to relay to Ereb! You are, you know, free to refuse."

"Oh, no! I could never refuse with so clear a token. But..." He trailed off.

"Yes, my son?"

"Well, why me? I mean, I feel like I’m hardly more than—well, if I were a tradesman, I would say I felt like hardly more than an apprentice. Why not a senior cleric—a master, so to speak, or a journeyman, or at least someone in service to Minissa?"

He looked thoughtful. "He who serves one deity serves the Pantheon, and the people. As to your lack of experience—perhaps you were chosen just because you’re not settled in yet. There would be no child left fatherless, no wife left husbandless, no flock left shepherdless were you not to return."

"The political life of Thalas and the Union—and the physical life of the entire system—are at stake! If my life is required that Prince Eliander might be found and returned to his people, I will go to the arms of Bronys gladly."

This time the smile was fond: there was not and had never been any artifice about Torreb’s sincerity when it came to serving his god and his people. "The scholars who study these things say Minissa chooses her questing groups as an organic whole," he mused. "She chooses each questor for his particular gifts, yet she also chooses so her questors’ individual gifts complement and reinforce one another. If they work together with diligence and care, the questors she chooses become those best able in the cosmos to achieve the task she gives them. And if you and her other nominees learn to work together with that same diligence and care, I think it entirely likely that you’ll all be coming back—neither unscathed nor unchanged, but alive." He rested a hand lightly on Torreb’s shoulder. "My son, I was being glib just now when I said perhaps you were chosen in part because you have no strong attachments to a parish or to a wife and family. I don’t try to second-guess Ereb; how should I even try to second-guess Minissa?" He chuckled at his own vanity. "But never, ever think any of us look on you as no more than an apprentice or a journeyman. Your thirst for knowledge, your dedication to curing the incurable, your tenacity, your humble approach to your own prodigious gifts—it’s been an example to us all. I think your fellow questors will believe themselves lucky to be in the company of a priest who doesn’t stop looking for a way to alleviate suffering while there’s one more stone to overturn."

"Even if he sometimes forgets there’s a man behind the malady?" he quipped.

The High Priest looked philosophical. "I’ll take a man—a priest! —who knows and acknowledges his weaknesses and works with them over one of greater skill who blunders blithely ahead in ignorance any day of the week." He chuckled. "But, yes, Torreb, do do your best to remember your patients have both a psyche and sensibilities that need to be taken into account."

"I will, sir." He smiled, then went back to looking completely overwhelmed.

"I’ve arranged passage for you on a transport that leaves for Caros in the morning. You may have one last night with your family, if you wish."

"Thank you, sir."

He signed Torreb’s brow in blessing. "Gods-speed, my boy. Goodly souls from all over the Union will be praying for you and your success."

Torreb held onto the sigh in his throat till the older priest had shut the door behind him. With what little he had gleaned about Eliander having been locked in a place outside of normal space and time, he thought privately that those "goodly souls from all over the Union" should be praying not for the questors their success but for a miracle.

***

In the woods not distant from Ereb City, yet another had been touched by the hand of Minissa. Her name was Alla. She was one of the curious, shape-shifting race that had inhabited Ereb long before the refugees from Thalybdenos had made their home here. The Erebites called them simply "Forest-Dwellers," Aranyaka in the ancient tongue of Thalybdenos. Where the Lemurians had integrated into the society formed on Caros by the refugees and thus ostensibly prospered, the Forest-Dwellers had kept apart, stayed true to their nature—and dwindled. They were solitary creatures, aloof and ageless; their interactions with the humans were most often limited to the more mischievous among them confusing unsuspecting Erebites with their shape-shifting abilities. Their normal form was humanoid, perhaps some years to either side of middle age as the Erebites would reckon appearances, but they could alter their bodies to appear to be any age at all, or to take on the forms of the woodland creatures among which they lived. This ability, they maintained, was unrelated to the use of the Art as the Carotians and Erebites knew it; it gave them no power over any other living creature. It did, however, confer upon the Forest-Dwellers great understanding of the province of Minissa; from this understanding arose profound powers of healing and communion with the natural world.

Alla’s folk acknowledged the gods and goddesses of the Pantheon but did service, rather, to the Great Mystery, the All-Parent—the principle that compassed the primal forces of nature that drove the universe. No Erebite had ever tried to bend the Forest-Dwellers to his own theology. In truth, there was very little in Aranyakan belief that was openly at odds with it.

Dryads who said they were the servants of Minissa and naiads who said they served Thalas visited her from time to time; they intimated that her care of the woodland creatures who made their way to her cottage door had found favor in the eyes of their goddesses. When Alla heard such things, she would smile to herself and go on with what she was doing—mending a broken wing or poulticing a rheumy chest. She and her kind had looked after the wildlife of Ereb generations uncounted, long before they had ever heard of these new gods, and they would have continued on had the refugees never come.

Still, in these gentle spirits of wood and water, Alla knew she had found creatures who were not only friends and sisters but allies. Before they had begun to visit her, if she found a creature so badly wounded that she could not help it mend, she would keep solitary vigil, comforting it till it passed into the Great Beyond. Now, faced with a creature wounded beyond the point where her skill would heal it, she knew she could go into the forest and call on the wood spirits for aid. They would help her if they were able. If they were not, they would say simply that Minissa was calling her creature home, and then help Alla to ease the creature’s way into death. Later, they would sit and grieve with her, and later still, they might invite her to join them in the celebration of the great spiral dance of life.

Tonight, Alla had built a small fire in the clearing outside her cottage. On it, she sprinkled mineral salts so that the flames danced with all the colors of the woodlands. It was the summer solstice, the festival the Erebites named High Summer. She was prepared to observe it alone—the dancing flames and the great starry vault of heaven were company enough for her—but as she finished her meal of grain and vegetables from her garden, a fawn trotted into the clearing. It cocked its small head and gazed at her.

She smiled and held out her arms. "Come here, little brother," she called in the voice no goodly beast had ever resisted. "Come here." The fawn approached and laid its head in her lap. "What’s the matter, little friend?" she cooed. "Did you lose your mother? It’s all right. Well, you just stay right here with your sister Alla till your mother finds you; you’ll be safe with me." She fetched some goat’s milk for the fawn and went so far as to bring some blankets so the two of them might stay in the clearing keeping warm till the fawn’s mother came along. Chanting quiet invocations to the Great Mystery, she fell asleep with the fawn nestled in the curve of her body.

She woke—or her spirit rose, she was never quite certain which—to the light of the full moon bathing the clearing. The fawn was nuzzling her neck. It kept right on nuzzling till she sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Then, when it was sure it had her attention, it scampered to the edge of the forest, where it began to grow.

And grow.

And grow.

Within a few moments, it had transformed itself into a mature stag. "Majestic" fell far short of describing it, as did "magnificent" and the few other superlatives upon which Alla’s addled brain could seize. She had seen stranger things under the great canopy of the forest in her long life, but not many.

She found herself wanting to speak, but she felt suddenly self-conscious under the weight of that solemn gaze. "Uh-huh," was the best she could manage. She said it mainly to herself, and it came out as a long, drawn out "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuh-huuuuuuuuuuuuuh," as if her eyes were acknowledging the existence of a sight her brain could not accept. For a long moment, all she could do was stare.

With a toss of his mighty head, the stag approached her. He touched his antlers ever so gently to her left shoulder and breathed into her face a breath that was sweet and warm. It was written later in the annals of the quest that Alla became in the next instant one of only a handful of creatures who had ever heard the voice of the Stag of Minissa.

What he said was this: "Arise, my child. Arise and go to Caros, for I have need of you. There, in the enchanted wood of Tuhl the Sage, you will find what I have purposed for you."

"Caros?" she gasped. "I’ve never been off-world in my life! I’ve hardly ever been as far as Ereb City!"

"The way will be made easy for you, my dear. Long has my mistress watched you. You have found—"

"Favor in her sight, I know. The dryads tell me that all the time. If she really expects me to believe it, why doesn’t she come herself and tell me?"

His response was placid. "The deities I serve show themselves when there is a need—where faith grows cold, when righteousness wanes. You have always served with a simple, honest faith in the beauty and order of things, a faith that is deeper and more true than that shown by the highest of her clerics. It does not matter that you do not worship her in name—you worship her in spirit and in service."

"Oh." She looked abashed at the pride that had colored her words. "Caros?" she asked in a small voice. Worldly she was in many ways, but her universe had never extended much beyond this clearing and the section of wood in which it lay.

"Caros, and much farther. But you will have companions, good ones and true. You go to seek the lost prince of Thalas, Eliander, who was magicked to a far away place many centuries ago. Minissa sends you to seek him that the Union may live."

"I see," she said, wondering how clear it was to the beast that she didn’t. "But how do I start? And—oh!—mayn’t I see her just once? It’s so many years the dryads have been telling me about her, and I know the Great Mystery is nothing mortal mind was meant to comprehend, but if the Pantheon is really the way She speaks to us in a way we can understand, is it so wrong to want to—?" She broke off and stood looking imploringly at him. She was a little out of breath: she rarely said two sentences together and had never babbled like this in all the centuries of her life.

He flashed her an understanding cervine smile, then bowed his great head and closed his eyes as if he were communing. Suddenly, a voice kindly as summer came from the air around them. "Yes, child," it said. "Perhaps it is time you and I met face to face."

Before the change in timbre of the voice registered, Alla was ready to take exception to anyone with such a youthful voice calling her "child." When it did register—the Stag’s voice had definitely been masculine, while this new voice was as clearly the voice of a woman—her eyes widened. The next moment, she was dropping to her knees in a spontaneous show of reverence; the next second, she had prostrated herself completely. The Stag had vanished into the mists at the edge of the clearing, but before her stood Minissa herself. It could only have been Minissa! The dryads had described for her on many occasions the way Minissa adopted human form when she came among them and the appearance that form took: a tall, radiantly beautiful woman garbed in white and crowned with spring flowers. Her eyes were the green of the finest emeralds; the hair that cascaded past her waist was that auburn so dark it appears brown until the light catches it and it turns to a river of molten gold. Had Alla been struck blind the moment before

Minissa materialized, still she would have known in whose presence she stood. Before that Presence went grandeur; in its wake followed peace; from the air around it fell the sweet savors of holiness. And within it—within it lay a radiance so bright and pure and beautiful it could have illumined the heart of a dark star. The Forest-Dwellers were by their very nature a construct of that one Light that illumines all, and Alla was far from being the least of her people, but even she trembled as the impact of the raw power that had entered her domain beat upon her brow.

Alla was on the point of wondering why in Creation she had done such a foolish thing as to beg—no, to demand!—that she be granted converse with a living deity when a voice sweeter than the warbling of nightingales touched her mind. She felt her fears melt away like mist in morning sunlight. The goddess approached, raised Alla up, and proceeded to treat the Aranyaka not as a supplicant but as an honored guest brought to her celestial garden in that Home of Homes. Chief in Alla’s mind ever after stood images of the goddess embracing her as a mother would a favored daughter, of her kissing Alla’s brow and even serving Alla tea with her own hand.

And they talked. Oh, how they talked! They spoke of the ways of the forest, of the genesis of every living plant and creature, of the secret lives of trees, of the mysteries that lie hidden at the heart of the tiniest bud of leaf and flower. They spoke of the ways of the cosmos, of the genesis of the great celestial luminaries, of the secret lives of stars, of the mysteries that lie concealed at the heart of the greatest sun. And though Alla eventually dared look Minissa in the face and they spoke till the sky became rosy with the promise of dawn, a single image remained in Alla’s memory forever after: a pair of eyes in whose sparkling depths lay the answers to every question sentientkind had posed an obdurate universe since the dawn of time.

The next morning she awoke, unsure if it had been a dream or a vision till she found in her hand a flower from the Immortal Realm and upon her shoulder the mark of the Stag.

***

Deneth, after swearing his comrades to silence, returned to his rooms in the palace and went to bed. He was fervently hoping that the appearance of the Stag on his shoulder had been a hallucination induced by his having downed one too many drafts of Carotian ale and that a good night’s sleep would cure him of his malady. A fluke of metabolism allowed the Carotians to consume huge quantities of spirits without getting more than a little sociable. It took a good ten ounces of absolute ethanol an hour to get a Carotian drunk and keep him that way; therefore, the spirits they usually imbibed in the pursuit of drunken euphoria were in a different league altogether than those served on other human worlds.

Sure, he thought, that’s it. The brew they plied me with last night’s made me hallucinate. And they have the nerve to pass that stuff off as ale on unsuspecting outworlders!

He slept well, and, in the morning, the Stag was still there.

He swore.

Deneth did not think of himself as a religious man. The gods were out there somewhere, he assumed, and there they could stay for all the connection they seemed to him to have with his day-to-day life. He never prayed (it never struck him that his music might be categorized as such), but he occasionally chatted. He tried that tactic now, saying, "Look, folks, I know you meant this thing for someone else. I don’t mind if it’s a mistake. I don’t mind if it’s a joke. But you’ve had your fun now, and I’m sure you want to get down to giving it to whomever you really meant it for. Now, I know these things take time, so I’ll wait till—say, tomorrow morning. It’s not that I don’t want to go, or that I wouldn’t go if I really believed it was me you wanted—like I’m not afraid or anything, see? It’s just that—well, if I’m the best you can do for a holy quest, the Union’s in a whole lot more trouble than I thought."

But, next morning, the Stag was still there. It was, if anything, more well defined. As he glared at it in the mirror, he even fancied he saw it flash him a self-satisfied grin. He directed a second glare upward, in the direction in which he supposed lay the Home of Homes. Then he stormed off down the hall to seek an audience with the High King and Queen.

***

A third race shared Caros with the Lemurians and the Carotians: the Tigroids, a race of huge, intelligent cats. When the High Queen had been a spirited, teen-aged princess, her actions had brought about a lasting peace between the Tigroids and the humans on the planet. Minissa herself had then appeared to several of the high-ranking Tigroid nobles and ordered them to revise their strict caste system, and many of them had begun to worship her openly in the years that followed. Their clerics had said (and some who had seen Minissa concurred) that the lone goddess they had previously worshiped was merely Minissa in feline form, a form with which their folk could identify.

So it was that Prince T’Cru, whose father and grandfather had made peace with the Carotians, woke one morning from a strange, half-remembered dream to feel a burning sensation on his left flank. When he maneuvered into a position from which he could see the area, he thought he could make out the silhouette of a stag, a creature known to be beloved of Minissa. Straightaway, without consulting either his father the King or his counselors, he went to the clearing in the nearby wood that served as an open-air cathedral to seek the advice of his priest.

The two bowed to each other in the elongated stretch that, among their folk, constituted a display of respect of the highest order. "Your highness is up and about early today," remarked R’Nar the priest. His tail twitched expectantly.

"Yes, my lord priest," replied T’Cru. Even the nobility were courteous to the clergy, and T’Cru had been reverent even as a cub. "Come and take a look at what brings me here." He indicated the mark, which had appeared as a white patch marring the pure black of his coat.

R’Nar arched his whiskers in surprise. He had never heard of a splotch of white tainting the coat of one of such pure royal blood. "It’s white!" he exclaimed, and took the liberty of swatting at it with one paw in an effort to eradicate it. The act reflected his distress: in his world, only menials had prehensile forepaws. A member of the upper castes did little with his forepaws that did not involve rending flesh.

"Stop it!" T’Cru ordered, no longer so polite. "White?" he hissed a second later. He put his head between his paws. "Disgrace!" he sighed. "What have I done to bring such dishonor on my family?"

What might have been a frown crossed the priest’s face as he reconsidered the mark. He found he had to visualize it in sable before he could make of it anything but a blemish. "I see why you came to me, Prince T’Cru. This mark has the form of—well, I think the Carotian clerics call it the Stag of Minissa. You are marked for a great task by the goddess herself."

"She blesses me with one hand and curses me with the other!"

"Tsk, tsk. Do not forget it was Minissa herself who ordered us to change our ways."

"Then she has little regard for what we cherish!"

He considered. "Perhaps we cherish the wrong things," he said in contradiction of his actions a moment ago. "Why, do you realize that, when your grandfather was king, a commoner could be executed for drinking from the same body of water a member of the nobility had just used? We weren’t even sure back then that commoners were people in the proper sense—you know, souls and intellect and all. Maybe this -er-?"

"Blemish?"

"No," he reassured the Prince a little too quickly. "Mark. Yes, that’s it—mark, and a sacred one at that. It may be that," he added in a well-intentioned effort to placate his young friend, "not only is it a sign for you, but a warning for us all."

T’Cru grunted. "Next you’ll have it that the warrior class should be permitted to marry into the low nobility and be wondering what pretty patterns such a match will produce among their offspring. Two generations of that, and we’ll all end up with stripes and spots!"

The priest began to say, "Minissa forbid!" but a thunderclap emanating from a cloudless sky cut off the remark. He looked contrite. "The –um- signs have portended a great happening, recently. Stars. Disturbances in the elements. Animal migration patterns."

"Does it all spell out what I’m to do?"

"No. But I have ways. Wait here a moment." He went to the open bole of a nearby tree and nosed out a crystal that shone in the morning light. He rolled it across the clearing till it sat between him and T’Cru, then bent over it and incanted. Soon, a rosy glow appeared at the heart of the crystal. A moment later, a tiny image of the Chief Priestess of Minissa materialized.

"We are pleased to welcome our honored brother to the sacred precincts of Minissa," she greeted when she recognized R’Nar.

R’Nar returned the formal greeting, and then indicated T’Cru. "Turn so she can see the Stag," he instructed. To the Priestess, he said, "The hand of Minissa has evidently visited us. Can you advise the Prince?"

She squinted at T’Cru, then nodded. "Yes. Even through the crystal, I can feel the emanations of its power." She looked around as though someone might be listening. "I can only say so much using the crystal now. You know the enchanted wood of Tuhl the Sage?"

"Yes."

"Prince T’Cru must go there. There, all will be explained." Abruptly, the crystal went dark.

"Odd. She can usually talk the wings off one of Minissa’s Unicorns. Well, T’Cru?"

"I know the way."

"Shall we call your retainers?"

"No. No one else must see me like this. That way, if I do not return, no one will know. My father will not be shamed."

"Well, what if you do come back? The mark may not disappear."

"Then it will be a symbol of victory, and the shame will be balanced with honor." And off he bounded.