There were nine rooms in all, built about a couple of courts, Masrian style. The better of these courts I kept for my own use, the other was divided unequally between the luxurious Kochus and the downtrodden domestics. Kochus’s brother seconds and the residue of the ship’s rabble I had released from my service. Even if I wished to crew the ship tomorrow, I would find men in the Market of the World or the dock eager for such work. For the seconds, they were glad to go, still sensitive to Charpon’s slaughter. I never saw any of them again.

  Beyond my own household, I kept five men in my pay, Lyo being one of them. I allotted them portions of the city. Their instructions were to nose after stories of sorcery, legends of an albino woman who could heal and harm as I did. They were to mention my name, Vazkor, to see if any ripples stirred. Only Lyo dared say to me, “Is it a sister of yours you’re seeking, lord? Or a wife? She must have angered you, lord. Don’t vent the anger on me.”

  “No sister,” I said. “She’s twice my years. A white withered hag with cold eyes. Find me word of her, and I’ll see you rich as the Emperor.”

  Thinking of it, as ever, brought back the old poison into my veins. My dreams had been all of her, that white thing with its silver lynx face, or the black face of the shireen. My instincts, which roared to me of her presence near at hand, could surely not be wrong. I could do so much, I must be able to find one bitch.

  By sunset, twenty-three messengers had come to my barely settled apartments. The rich invalids of the Palm Quarter had been awaiting my arrival. Some spoke of gifts to come and others sent me gifts; the outer room grew bright with bits of gold-work, silver dishes, and money chains, over which Kochus gloated lovingly.

  The messengers bowed to me, a couple kneeled down. Their masters were dying of a variety of incurable afflictions-boils, gout, headache, palpitations, the illnesses of overindulgence and refined nerves. I told them I would visit

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  them, and stipulated times. I was prepared to travel to and fro, to spy out as much of this opulent landscape as I could. Anything might be of use to me; the maddening thing was not knowing quite what.

  I had also sent one messenger myself, having first seen him dressed in the black livery tailored for my servants at one of the better shops in BarIbithni. He had carried my letter to the Hall of Physicians. It required an audience of them, at which, I assured them, I intended before witnesses to turn a crone (Lellih) into a girl.

  It seemed too fine a stroke to miss, since her gods had set her in my hand. I no longer wondered if I could do it. Moment by moment I saw myself commit acts that one year before would have had me gawking if another had produced them. Out of boredom, I had raised the wine jar from its courtyard corner where it stood cooling in the shade, raised it without use of hands, by will alone. A voice in my brain had said to me then, It is the time to beware -when you begin to work miracles from ennui. Had my father, Vazkor of Ezlann, ever done so frivolous a thing as raise a jar up in the air that he might hear the kitchen girls shriek? I imagined not.

  Lellih was in the first court, Kochus’s area, shielded from the Hessek barracks by a porphyry wall, a grove of young cypress trees, and a gray marble fountain. A friendship had been struck between Thei and Lellih, a means, I suppose, of preserving the artificial sustenance of their lives. Now they crouched like a couple of cats over a Masrian board game of red and blue checkers, drinking koois in little enameled cups and smoking little female pipes of green Tinsen tobacco.

  My shadow fell on the board, and Lellih sprang around to berate me. I cut her short.

  “Tonight you will go with me to the Hall of Physicians.”

  Lellih screamed.

  “They cut up Hessek women there, and pickle their parts.”

  “No doubt wise. Beginning with the voice box.”

  Lellih cackled her cackle. “Is it to make me young, young before witnesses, eh? Is it?”

  “Yes. It may kill you.”

  “May it? Then he would raise me, would he not, my lovely darling?”

  Magicians work wonders on the living; demons raise the dead. I did not like her words.

  “I agree no bargains of that sort.”

  But she was already back to the old song.

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  “Make me young. How young will you make me? Make me fifteen, fifteen and a virgin.”

  Thei laughed. The laugh was disconcertingly a boy’s.

  “She has no modesty.”

  Lellih squeezed his waist, her elder lust tickled by anything toothsome, its sex random.

  “We’ll make a pretty pair.”

  I hired horses and a carriage. By conqueror law, no man but a pure-blood Masrian might ride or draft white mounts. Therefore, with the contrariness of my years, I chose blacks. We made a small procession, going down through the Palm Quarter to the Hall of Physicians, the carriage with its gilt and enamelwork, the six black outriders. I heard the tremor of sound start up all about: “There is the carriage of the sorcerer Vazkor.” Truly, I had not done badly in three days to get myself into such a quantity of heads.

  The thoroughfares were crowded. The Palm Quarter seemed never to sleep by night, lamps burned till daybreak.

  Women with faces in veils of paint instead of cloth leaned from their balconies; torchbearers, each torch in its cage of iron or glass, ran before some lord on his way to a theater, bisecting the road with streamers of gold smoke. On every side, pillars reached up with their round fingers to grasp the cascading panoply of roofs. The prayer-towers murmured at the death of the light, their tall minarets like slender starry war-spears massed on the blue-green dusk, while at the center of the rising terraces, suitably far toward the sky, the Emperor’s Heavenly City made a distant black diadem.

  The Hall of Physicians was crammed to its doors. They had come to mock, as they were telling each other, to deride this obscure showman who dared try to deceive them with some common trick. The talk had an oiled quality of deprecation and laughter, but when the usher led me across the mosaic of winged horses that served as a floor, a silence fell like the night.

  The Master Physician peered at me though a spyglass of topaz while the usher announced me, for all the world as though none of them might guess who I was. There was then a discussion between this fool and that, the purpose of which was to keep me loitering. I broke in.

  “I am aware my name and my intention precede me,” I said, “or I should not have been granted audience here at all. Thus, gentlemen, shall we get on?”

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  Kochus and three others escorted Lellih in. Two underlings of the Hall were selected to strip her, for the physicians’ observation, to a dry, curd-colored nudity. Lellih leered about her, unabashed, from inside that case of flapping dugs and bald loins, still irrepressible. Brazen as their scrutiny was merciless, she poked their well-fed sides for every touch she got from them.

  The Master Physician spoke.

  “I doubt you can do more with her than soften her flesh a little with some oil or balm, such as Tincture of the Princesses. For her teeth, perhaps an artificial set of ivory or whale-rib. The breasts might be cut and padded with membrane, but there is a risk of infection and this practice has grown unpopular.”

  “Sir,” I said, “don’t presume to teach me cosmetic medicine.” The ponderous old wretch was unaccustomed to plain arrogance in others, and could not collect himself sufficiently to reply. I said, “The woman is eighty years. I mean to make her young, a girl. And without recourse to any such rubbish as you mention.”

  Affronted, he dropped his spyglass. An usher bounded to retrieve and hand it back to him.

  Lellih meanwhile screeched, “Tell the frog to sew up his jaws. He shall see, he shall.” And she drew the attention of one sleek young man who had attracted her notice to the straightness of her spine, she, who had gone crooked from birth till I healed her.

  At last I inquired if they were satisfied, and the physicians drew away, shaking their heads, smiling, gesticulating, saying I was deranged, every man tense as a bowstring. I had a stool brought and set Lellih on it. She would keep up her chatter; I put her in a trance, as much to have peace as because I thought she might feel pain at what I did. I motioned the assembly to stand as close as they wished to me, and to her. The Master Physician had stopped looking through the topaz, and leaned forward in his chair so far that he was almost out of it.

  I placed my hands on her little skull. I thought, as one does suddenly when there is no road back, Maybe I shall find now I cannot do it. But something in me struck the hesitation aside. You are a god, Vazkor, son of Vazkor. And you do this thing not only to make a path to a witch’s hiding place, but to prove to men what has come among them.

  I had never completely felt the true pride of what was in

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  me before, not even when I had turned the storm, had walked on ocean. Hubris had mingled with surprise that day. Now, it stood alone with me.

  I was flooded with a surge of Power, of life itself. I felt the flood sear from me into Lellih under my hands, bright as a bursting sun.

  Not intending it, unguarded, I glimpsed her brain, the squawking crows in their mind attics, the dusty cerebral mansion of an old woman’s soul. Then the light had scattered the dust and crows. I drowned that inner room with it. I gave her my Power for that instant, let her feed from it, and felt the dying tree tremble in its bark.

  The nearest physician uttered a cry, and actually ran backward.

  Lellih’s skin was crackling and twisting like paper in a fire. In the prosaic seconds before the sense of glory came on me, I had never anticipated anything this showy, the flesh sloughing from her like plaster from a wall. Her left hand appeared first, like a pale flower pushing up from dead roots. One perfect woman’s hand with almond nails and a lotus palm.

  “Stop,” the nearest physician, no longer so near, shouted. “This is a blasphemy. Stop, you will kill the woman.”

  I kept my fingers on Lellih’s head, and watched him till he dropped his eyes and averted his whole person in fright. I could feel her thin hair lifting by its roots under my fingers. The left breast, rounder than it had been, juddered with a heartbeat quick as a sparrow’s. Her flower hand lay on the yellow twig of her knee, which gradually peeled like a split chrysalis to let out the firm new limb of a girl.

  Abruptly she rose to her feet, leaving me, going forward, stepping out of herself like some strange woman-serpent rearing from the expended skin.

  I had never in my life seen anything that abhuman, that terrible. It thrilled me; I had made this happen.

  The physicians were shouting and pressing away from Lellih as if she carried plague, yet were unable to take their eyes off her.

  Her hair was growing up, spilling from her skull like black water from a fount, thick black Hessek hair, girl’s hair. Like gray scales the old body rained into dust on the mosaic. Her back was white and smooth rising from its vase of white ample buttocks. She moved, I saw the outline of one breast, perfect to its candied tip. The profile was polished alabaster, black eye, a mouth to entice bees, white little teeth. She

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  looked over her shoulder at me. It was an unexpected face, alluring, yet cold as unheated metal, the colors too fresh, unlived in.

  She was young as the world before the world knew men.

  One of the physicians went on his knees. She turned to look at him, as if he offered homage to her, which indeed perhaps he did. And as she turned, her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She fell forward without a sound across the wings of the jade horse in the mosaic.

  It was known all over the Palm Quarter by sunrise; all over the city by noon. A crone changed by magic into a maiden in the Hall of Physicians.

  She lay in a stupor in a room of the second court, by the porphyry wall. She lay there five days.

  I half thought a mob from the Commercial City might come to the gate, but they did not. They were afraid of the devil-sorcerer Vazkor.

  I had meant to kill Charpon simply in order to be sure of transport; I had most definitely killed LongEye by making an assassin of him. Presently I should have to fight and kill Sorem, one of the Hragon princes, a youth I had barely spoken with, a youth who reminded me of my own self. All those things came about through my Power and my quest, my cowardice and pride, my inability to strike a balance in myself between man and mage. And still, I had used Lellih in yet another of these games of mine, these random games that resulted in self-fear and guilt.

  Those five days when she lay insensible, I had other matters to handle, for I must visit the rich about the Palm Quarter, heal their ills and garner their coins. These sophisticates did not fear me. They welcomed me, hungry for something different. It was a gaudy drudgery. The fine houses, the costly furnishings, the whining of fat patricians whose Hessek slaves-all Masrians, it seemed, had Hessek slaves-lay in half-starved heaps about the lower kitchens or scurried to obey, with purple whip-scars on their necks.

  Besides this, no word came to me of the woman I sought, the sorceress. I would lie awake in the nightingale nights of eastern BarIbithni, and I would tell myself I had mistaken her, the smell of evil that I believed an indication of her presence. It was the city which was rotten, that and my deeds in it. The glory had paled. Any sunset, no matter how glamorously bright, means the sun is going out. And with my-

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  self, also, a period of inner dark had followed the light. I seemed trapped in my own careful plan.

  I had been waiting, too, on edge, for Sorem’s formal challenge. By the aristocratic code of honor, a certain season of days must elapse from insult to battle, so the participants might burnish their skills and see to their affairs. This time of pause was now over. I had noted that the rumor of Sorem’s altercation with me had flickered out in the city. Some dampening force had clearly been at work there, hushing up the business. The Emperor’s men, perhaps. It scarcely mattered; I should have to meet Sorem, finish him. At least on this occasion it should be clean and with a blade. I would keep to their ludicrous code because I was surfeited with magic, sick of myself.

  Then, the challenge did not come. No band of jerdiers with set faces slinging some parchment scroll on the floor and marching out. I wondered what kept him, if he had been forbidden this duel.

  There was a silly woman, the wife of one of my patients. She had been sending to me constantly. She was pretty enough, and she wrote in delicate Masrian script, unlike the picture-writing of Hessek, describing how she would die and see that I had the blame for it if I did not tend to her. Her servant, a foxy fellow with an earring, informed me that I should find her in the white pavilion of her hugband’s house, and, wanting distraction, like a fool I went. She was dressed in true Masrian style, skirts of flounced brocade and a jacket of beadwork, and where there was not guaze or silk or sleeve or flounce, there were bracelets, necklets, rings, and ribbons. It would be easier to strip a porcupine.

  I stayed with her till the red shadows of afternoon turned to blue on the white lattices of the pavilion. She told me I was cruel not to care for her when she had betrayed her husband in order to pleasure me. It was the sort of stuff countless stupid girls had meowed in my ears since first I began to lie with women. She told me, too, that I was not a god, as her Hessek slaves had said, but only a man, and would wish for her again. I did not need her lessons.

  I went back to my rooms, hoping for some tidings there of any sort.

  There were tidings.

  Lellih was gone.

  Lyo stood in the court. He said, “She slipped out at dusk,

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  they say. But there’s a man gone also, one of your sailor guards.”

  I asked him who. He told me the man was called Ki. The name nagged me till I remembered Ki was the Hessek Charpon had imprisoned below deck because he swore he had seen me walk on the ocean. I had had the story from Kochus.

  “Another thing,” Lyo said, “at your door.”

  He held up before me a black crow, or the corpse of one, its neck severed to the spine. It was some while since I had seen a bloody carcass, and obviously this had not been slain for its meat.

  “Why that?”

  Lyo winced.

  “The Hesseks say it is a token of the Old Faith. An offering.”

  “To whom?”

  “To you, lord,” he said, “to you.”

  I did not instigate a search for Lellih. She had shown my powers to the Physicians Hall. It was enough. I did not need her value as a peepshow, despite what I had said. Something in what I had done unnerved me. I was almost glad the proof was missing. Where she had gone and what she did, I did not speculate on. Only the memory of that half-turned face-that primeval, virgin, wicked face-disturbed me, that and the dead crow left at my door. Sacrifice to a god. Not Masrimas, for whom they slew white horses at the midsummer festival, but some darker effigy, the Ungod of the Old Faith. I questioned Lyo briefly. A Seemase, he could tell me little. The Hesseks, when I spoke to them, gibbered and muttered. The vanished Ki, they admitted, might have known how to tutor me in the ancient religion of Old Hessek.