"I don't know how to fight, of course. I simply did the best I could in an emergency. I suppose I'm fortunate that my dancing and riding lessons have kept me limber."
'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Tazi said, picking up her throwing knife from the floor. "Nobody handles a weapon the way you did without training and experience."
"Well, I've watched your father and brothers fence," Shamur said. She took hold of the broadsword's leather-wrapped hilt and, with considerable effort, dragged it from the gorgon's corpse. "I tried to copy what they do."
"And I still say that's a load of pig manure." Abruptly Shamur noticed something had changed. Changed for the worse, almost undoubtedly, though at that moment she welcomed anything that might serve to divert Tazi's attention. "The music is louder," she said.
Tazi frowned and cocked her head, listening for herself. "You're right. I suppose it means the magic's getting stronger."
"Yes. Which makes it even more desirable that we stop the opera without further delay, and certainly before it reaches its conclusion. If my suspicions are right, and it's weaving a kind of spell, then chances are excellent that all the oddities we've encountered thus far are merely preliminaries. The truly potent effects will occur at the end."
As they headed for the rear of the building and the amphitheater beyond, they encountered a series of disquieting marvels. The orc Shamur had beaten unconscious was gone but had left a tarry, malodorous stain on the floor, as if it had simply melted away. A tantan floated jingling down a passageway. Small pine trees grew from the molded ceiling of one chamber, and a troop of piebald imps played kickball with a severed head in another. Andeth's theater had become a realm of coral formations and green water in which countless iridescent fish swam to and fro. Tazi gingerly poked her forefinger into the doorway, and the digit came away wet.
The women also encountered more of the Hulorn's retainers, though never in any condition to aid them. Most had fallen victim to the same trance that had overtaken the majority of the people in the amphitheater and proved resistant to any effort to rouse them. Others lay dismembered, slain by some beast now roaming the building. One fellow-or woman, it was hard to tell-looked as if something had reached down his throat and turned him inside out. Several more had changed into inert figures of gnarled wood, red clay, glass, or, in one instance, a patchwork of all three.
Tazi studied the carnage with ghoulish fascination. "This is not a spectacle being staged for your amusement," Shamur told her in disgust. "These were innocent people, senselessly slaughtered."
"If I sniffle and dab at my eyes, will it bring them back to life?" Tazi replied. "Besides, if it's all so tragic, why are you looking so bright-eyed and chipper?"
"I'm not," Shamur said, yet, now that Tazi had prompted her to consider herself, she couldn't help wondering if the girl was right. Oh, she felt all the emotions that any ordinary woman would if trapped in the same ghastly situation. Pity for the victims of Bloodquill's magic. Anxiety for Tazi's life and her own. But along with the fear came a delicious sharpening of the senses. The addictive intensity in pursuit of which a lass from one of the wealthiest families in Selgaunt had embraced the perilous life of a thief.
She was still trying to banish or at least conceal her exhilaration when she and Tazi passed a mirror. The reflections inside the glass lay at right angles to their sources, as if the two women were walking straight up a wal*****
No. Shamur wasn't looking at her own recumbent reflection, not anymore. She was standing beside the ornately carved canopy bed of a young woman who looked exactly like her and had even borne her name. Her grand-niece, of whom she'd grown fond in the tendays since she'd slipped back into Selgaunt, and who had mysteriously and quite unexpectedly died in the night.
Hook-nosed, curly bearded Lindrian, Shamur's nephew and the dead girl's father, hammered his temple with the palm of his hand. "Why?" he sobbed. "Why, why, why?"
"To destroy us," Fendo growled. He was Shamur's brother, now hideously aged to a bloated, gouty old man and head of the Karn family. Despite his physical decline, his wits remained as keen as ever, and Shamur didn't doubt that his inference was correct. Somehow, his granddaughter had been murdered.
Once Shamur had come to terms with the fact that the interplay of magical forces in the crypt had somehow exiled her in the future, she'd decided to return home and discover what had become of her family. It ought to be safe enough if she was careful. Even after half a century, it was unlikely that the other merchant noble families had forgotten or forgiven her thefts, but they no doubt assumed her dead, or at least withered into a doddering crone.
When she'd revealed herself to Fendo, he'd welcomed her with open arms. Still, all was far from well. The Karns had recently experienced a succession of disastrous business reversals, and now stood on the brink of bankruptcy. Fendo firmly believed some hidden enemy had engineered the family's ruin, but had had no success in discovering the culprit's identity.
Shamur contemplated a new series of robberies, but the Karns' debts were so enormous that even she couldn't steal enough to keep them afloat. The only hope was an alliance by marriage with another merchant noble house willing to provide a massive infusion of cash.
Happily, Thamalon Uskevren then sued for the hand of Lindrian's daughter, the only marriageable child in the family. The Uskevren were rich, but many of their peers still scorned them for once trafficking with pirates. Perhaps Thamalon was willing to pay dearly for a Karn bride because he hoped the union would help his own house regain respectability. Or conceivably, as he professed, he truly loved the girl. Either way, it didn't matter. What did matter was that deliverance was at hand.
Or it had been. Until the Karns' unknown foe had employed poison or black magic to snatch it away. Now…
Fendo gripped Shamur's arm with his dry, feeble, liver-spotted hand. Surprised, she turned to face him, and was taken aback by the feverish glitter in his rheumy eyes.
"You look exactly like her," he said, "and no one outside the household knows you've returned."
"Mother?" Tazi said.
"Yes," Shamur said, wrenching her gaze away from the mirror. "I'm all right. Let's keep moving." As they stalked on down the corridor, she wondered grimly why the magic was forcing her to relive all the bad times, the moments when life took a calamitous turn for the worse.
Well, no point brooding about it. Better to stay alert and savor the pleasantly edgy feeling that came from knowing danger was all around. That and the gladsome weight of a broadsword in her hand.
The hallway took a turn that hadn't existed before the start of the opera, then came to a dead end. The obstruction at its terminus resembled a plug of raw, fatty mutton. The Uskevren women backtracked and ultimately found another route that led to the exit they'd used before.
"Let's hope this still goes to the Hunting Garden, and not to the Great Glacier or someplace," Tazi said wryly. She opened the door.
The music swelled, and Shamur's head spun. The dizziness passed in an instant, and she saw that the door did indeed still provide access to the amphitheater, not that the look of the place was especially inviting.
The bowl in the earth seethed with violet sparks, as if millions of fireflies were swarming there. The luminous cloud was so thick that it was difficult to make out the forms inside it, but Shamur could tell that most of the audience still sat entranced. One figure, however, its arms vanished and its legs fused together, was laboriously worming its way up one of the aisles, while on one of the benches farthest from the stage, a man and a woman were feasting on the brains of a corpse with a shattered skull.