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Coming out of the last corridor, Cassa had been beside him. Impossibly, they were arm in arm and Garm put his hand over where hers would have been.

You said you wouldn't leave me.

The words were like the strange mood he had woken with, like the ghost at his elbow. Garm didn't know if he imagined her saying them or they had come from his own lips. He had never let her go and he never would.

His hand still over hers, he stood at the entrance several moments before realizing he knew where he was. Risent Common. Round sided, the high dome was supported by arches that spread their legs to arcades within. He was in one. Sunshine on marble the color of new leaves—a false sun on stone leaves—a small green world in the depths of the Palace in low orbit over Ri. On the banner above his head, in one or more of a dozen languages, was written the names of the shops he had just passed.

“Tea, lord? Leaves from Visnet, the finest amber…”

A vender, only the closest of several targeting him as he left the shelter of the arch, all of them dressed much the same in bright rags. A… man, Garm thought, deciding on the sex even as he had no idea of the species. Obviously dyed red hair, the vendors face striped with the same color. Painted on—the makeup had caked in the creases around his wide mouth—the sight left him vaguely relieved without knowing why.

“… steaming hot, sweetened with…” The hand not holding the bowl under the spigot of the urn held the price formed by fingers without apparent bones to restrict the shapes they made. Tea bowls hung from a waist cord, he wore the urn like an extra hip.

“Tea, yes. Tea.” But not here and not standing. Garm signed a negative but was followed in his retreat.

“Fruit buns, sugar rolls…?” Another vendor had joined the first.

Facing the common were several cafes, their tables like game pieces thrown to occupy as much as of the open area as possible. Tea and a rest, he decided as he knelt at the closest table with a thick cushion over the floor. His legs bent reluctantly and his back complained. One of the servers chased the vendors away. Garm turned his back to the fading argument and sighed with relief.

A spider-like Wa'tic sorted beads across from him, the rhythmic tic‑tic of its words keeping time with the clacking of the bone rounds. As expected, the small creature ignored him. A table away, a pair of young girls exchanged pastries, giggles and confidences. About him? He was being peeked at, but the whispers were exchanged behind sheltering hands and he couldn't hear.

He shook his head. No one here knew who he was and had no cause to wonder. A tired old man—a common breed in age if not in species.  

Swollen fingers entwined, he stretched his arms until the joints popped. As he folded his hands back in his lap, the smell of rotting meat replaced the scent of tea and pastries. The talisman hidden up one sleeve had fallen out. Small white flowers, each with six cupped petals—crushed now and turning brown—were attached to a narrow silver tube. Complex braiding surrounded the tube but done in red strands, not the usual black. The entire thing fit in the palm of his hand.

A call of luck in the color and an offering to Cassa in the silver, and the talisman placed on the threshold of a service door just outside the ruined portion of the Imperial Suite. He had found it an hour earlier.

He remembered that the plainness of the door had appealed to him. Unpainted wooden planks, it had felt warm, alive. Another ghost? Or a welcome change from what he was leaving? With the door held open, he hadn't noticed the talisman on the floor until he stepped on it.

Putting it there certainly should have been noticed by High Council Security, although he doubted his own Security routinely extended that far any more. His taking it would have been noticed by both, his entrance into the secured area noted and his exit watched for. Minutes after picking the thing up, he'd had to wave off his flitter, his message in the Net to the pilot and the guards inside, quite clear: leave me alone. And knew his Security wouldn't do anything of the kind. He was certainly being peeked by more than curious children.  

Tucking the flower back in his sleeve, he turned to find the serving woman watching him. “Tea,” he said. “Roasted honey-leaf and strong.” As blond as most here, her round face spoke of frequent smiles, but now the smile looked as painted as the stripes the vendor wore. Her eyes had been on the talisman.

Cookies he hadn't ordered came with the tea, nutmeg in the crisp rounds, and the plate scattered with candied rose petals. He wouldn't pay for them he decided as he crumbled a rose petal; he wouldn't subsidize another's hope. 

For the first time in years, this morning’s walk had taken him deep into the wreck Cassa had left of much of the Imperial Suite. And now… what of his own hopes? A long, very foolish walk as far away from the endless granite as his legs could take him. His courage had been a mood quickly over but even at its height hadn't taken him into Cassa's study where some of the stone was her.

He blew over his tea and sipped, hearing each swallow. The glass bowl clinked on the small tray when he put it down, the sound making him wince. All around him, whispers had replaced talk.

From a Piltsimic matron a full table away, he heard, “I tell you it's him. No one else would dare have taken it.” Glossy black and round bodied under exquisite silks, she whispered her words in a soft growl as she leaned to the man seated next to her. A daughter—splotchy colored still as young Piltsimic were, but looking to proof black like her mother—was up on her knees, frankly staring.

“San Garm, her tass'alt, then,” the man said, an eyebrow raised in appraisal. “Doesn't look like much.”

Raising his cup, he saluted the three. “Yes, hers.” In the new silence around him, his words were as stark as the feelings that threatened him. “Always hers.”

Thirty-five years of waiting, the ghost ready at his elbow. Always.

That last day, Cassa should have been sleeping; she had been up all night and still at Ri-altar by sunrise. A wet day, he remembered. No heavy rain, more a settling of the cloud against the low mountain. Normally visible from there, a finger width above the highest peak, Palace was hidden by clouds. Best seen at dawn, it burned like a morning star in a sky where no other stars were visible.

They had gone straight to Ri-altar on the main island, from the Imperial Hall of Justice in Palace, landing in the clearing a few minutes walk from the ring of trees that made up the altar. Only the glow from the flitter lit the ground, the hull tiles had been left translucent, turning the people inside into flickering shadows and the surrounding mist into silver threads in the weave of evergreens.

“I could swim in this air,” Cassa had said, sounding amused as she turned around only to face him again, the heavy brocade of her Audience robe sweeping about her ankles. “I feel I've been crawling all day. If I heard one more presentation of the obvious…” Her tone was higher pitched than usual, brittle—she tended to a full throaty voice which broke to a rasp when she was tired.

“Here I thought you were asleep through most of the judgments. Was I mistaken?”

She smiled. “Perhaps I was the only one obvious.” 

“But only to me.” Asleep most of the time, waking only to insist on some seemingly arbitrary change to the Justice decisions. Justice analysts and Priests both would be scrambling to decide if the differences meant anything or were a whim of a woman they had no chance of understanding. He shook his head, he certainly didn't know, and he knew her better than anyone. “Have you had the fresh air you wanted? The rest of us have beds we'd rather be in.”

“And you?”

“I'd rather you be with me in my bed, not here at any rate.” He frowned but it was play. “Or am I mistaken again, are you here to pray?”

“What would I have to say to a ring of trees?”

Playful in return and willing to be amused. He might tease her out of the mood. “And me?” he asked, letting his hands make an abortive prayer sign in Ri-native, his fingers against her skin. “What would you say to me?”

She moved against his hands. “I'd say I don't want to stay here.”

“Then…”

“And I'd say I don't want to go back. Come with me for a walk.”

“Where?”

“We could walk to the beach by dawn. Or we could swim there through the clouds. Would the way be shorter?” Amused and playful, but she moved like an awkward girl, all stiff limbs, each surprised to find themselves attached to a body. She had none of the grace so common to Empire Priests. 

“Can we swim to South Bay Temple instead? I'm thinking of breakfast.” A peace of sorts had been reached with Sarkalt, the Overpriest of Forms. South Bay was an allied Temple of that Office. And he could trust Cassa's instinct for survival, instinct augmented by pattern sense. If South Bay Temple wasn't safe, she wouldn't go there and any reason why not would do.

He continued to touch her, now drawing out the ends of the long cords that bound her wrists, now rubbing the g'ta points, tracing the energy pathways from face to neck, along her arms. And loosening the ties in the layers of robes she wore, moved to her breasts, to her waist, always stroking, his hands warm from the silk and her skin. J'yi watched from the door of the flitter, watched him, not Cassa. The tass'altin would step in only if Garm allowed.

Both her hands on his arms stopped him. A dead weight, there was no strength in the crippled wrists. “I don't need this, let me go.”

His hands said he would in a polite shape, then denied the possibility as he lifted her already damp hair from where it lay against her throat and smoothed it back. He was constantly surprised to find her face to his; too often he felt he held mist in his arms.

Leaning forward, as though to whisper in his ear, she relaxed against him. He welcomed what he had thought was the return to his attentions. That her desire for flight was a thing of the moment. She couldn't hold such thoughts for long.

Her next words weren't whispered, he thought they weren't spoken at all, but burned directly into his mind. “Damn you, let me go.” With the words came frost, the mist made solid on his skin. The hair on his arms looked like winter-fast grass at the edge of a pond.

“How could I?” he asked through a brief, instinctive panic, only glad he wasn't capable of seeing the rise of pattern energy she was capable of calling. If she killed him, he didn't want a warning. His throat was dry; he could hardly breath to speak. “You chose me. If I'm damned, then it's your doing.”

O'lin'te, her Chief of Staff started from the flitter, pushing J'yi back when the tass'altin tried to follow. Two of the Guard circled around. The Net lead showed Garm what the Temple-trained ti'Linn could see and he could not: the overpattern threads like lines of fire all around him and Cassa. Garm ordered the others back to the flitter and cut the lead at the same time.

Listen to me, feel me… his hands still said the important things to Cassa and he listened in the same way. Where he couldn't see that kind of pattern energy, he could feel her and force her to feel him.

A walk it turned out to be, but to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean. Dressed only in the innermost shift, she sat on a stone ledge. Braid ends from her bound wrists flowed between her knees. Some time into his effort to reach what existed of the woman within the Priest, the Audience robe and layers of petal shifts had been abandoned. 

O'lin'te brought him a blanket. The ochre ti'Linn carried the light of the flitter in the reflections from the hard chitin of its exoskeleton. Using serrated pincers, the first pair of limbs shaped a sign of formal Opening. “Sarkalt seeks allowance to join her here.”

The Overpriest was apparently on his way—the faint whine of a flitter grew as the sound bounced off the higher mountains in back of them. “I'd have thought he had enough of her during the Judgments.”

The ti'Linn nodded towards Cassa, mouthpieces clicking in another language before deciding on the usual mutilation of plain-tongue. “Walk or swim, best we leave. She drifts on a dark wave.” From the direction of the flitter, he heard the two Guards making a similar clicking sound.

When he made the necessary allowance for the Overpriest's pilot into the Net lead O'lin'te offered him, the ti'Linn blinked its distress, the jeweled lights in the eyes momentarily darkening to red. Bred out the Wa'tic line, but larger, and the ti’Linn’s four eyes weren't faceted in the same way.

Niv, Sarkalt's tass'alt, joined him beside the slight shelter of a large rock, but the Overpriest walked to be with Cassa at the edge of the cliff, the two watching where the ocean would be if there had been anything to see but gray cloud. They didn't talk, they rarely did.

Niv had been speaking of South Bay. “He said we would go. Saleyin, the ranking Priest, was told to expect us. We should…”

“Saleyin has been told differently by now.” Garm gestured to Sarkalt. “He’s where he wants to be.”

Blue nails clicked against each other, showing the tass'alt's distress. “He looks at her. What does he see?” The words held a faint lisp carried from the native Camerat.

Sarkalt's eyes hadn't left the clouded ocean but he thought Niv might have meant at the Judgment Assembly earlier, the young Camerat didn't appear to have a highly developed sense of time. “What are you worried about? Not the Priest in him certainly. And what remains of the man… if you're to his taste, she certainly isn't.”

Walking from the flitter, J'yi joined them. Wearing formal clothes still, as Garm was, but in the style favored by the Tass'Holding at Palace and which complemented his grace. The wet had the lace weave dragging along the rough ground, gathering cedar twigs and leaves with the hem. “O'lin'te says she's still not stable,” the tass'altin whispered, sparing Niv both a glance and a half-formed sign with his fingers that requested privacy. Garm countered it.

“I hear no discourtesy from him,” Niv lisped softly.

J'yi bowed. “The access is increasing and not residual. I must agree that the Overpriest being here…” He stopped, his eyes on Niv. “The medic scan can't reach her, she's stopping anything we try. She requires proper attention, at the very least a neural blocker. Her reserves are over-extended from the Judgments, her body can't handle much more without her becoming ill.”

At J'yi's words, Cassa turned her head and looked at them. Simply the look of a woman, he had been surer of that than the tass'altin. If there were still a problem then O'lin'te would have delivered the message either in person or through a tight Net lead. He told J’yi as much.

Niv watched J'yi leave. “Is he to the Empress's taste?” Asked as softly as his earlier words, but the few strands of crest hairs showing under the cloak's hood deepened to the same cobalt as his scales. Without waiting for an answer, he left to join Sarkalt.

Cassa stood, the clouded dawn behind her and started back to where he waited. Wet silk clung to her, was molded to her slight frame, the pearl colored light showed each caress of cloth on skin. She looked like a child returning from bathing.

As Niv passed her, she said something to him. The Camerat stopped only a moment, Garm couldn't see his face or hear an answer. He met Cassa halfway, she barely appeared to notice as he wrapped her in the blanket warmed by his body.

 

He remembered Niv's more gentle anger and his own. Constant and biting. Had the passion in him burned out at last? What had driven him to use those words?

“I hardly remember who I was then,” he said out loud.

“San?”

He jumped. Bending over, the serving woman's face was inches from his. “San, I've sent my boy for the Common's Security,” she said, apparently speaking to his nose. Her own wrinkled as though at a bad odor, and the smile, forced or not, was gone. It took a moment to realize she had addressed him by his title. “San, they should be here by now, you need an escort. Your own people… I couldn't get through, the Net is closed to everyone without high clearance.”

Even so close, her voice was almost lost in the noise surrounding them. While he dreamed of things years past, the quiet had vanished.

“Tass'alt. Hers. The Empress' man.”

“San Garm, please wait…” He didn't wait or respond to her pleading. He didn't think, he just moved. The voices followed as he ran out and still waited ahead of him. Touches for luck—he was being pawed—and prayers, the shouts made his ears ring.

At the mouth of the arcade he fled towards was an ancient man, human, but his species lost in the ruin of age. A seller of candies with bowls of sweets arranged in front of him. He called as he rocked back and forth, his hands folding paper into cones by rote. “Two-a-penny.”

The heavy edge of Garm's robe tagged one bowl. Narrow sticks flew out as the bowl spun, red and white in a dizzying roll. “Two-a-penny,” the hawker called regardless, his voice reedy and thin. Yellow—the only colour left him—streaked down his beard from either side of his mouth.

With the side of his foot, Garm began pushing all the sticks he could find towards the man. The hawker kept singing as he started to fold another cone of paper, his voice ringing louder and louder. “Two-a-penny, five a two penny.” His blue eyes were white streaked and shrunken, the rims a watery red.

The sound of boots on marble stopped behind him with a brittle crunching sound. Garm turned to the scent of roses and a curse. Reaching for his usual Net link, he had to put the House mark in the calling before it would respond and again before it would break out of the Imperial Suite's system. The man's name and rank fell out of the air like a leaf in an autumn storm. Three Crescents Temple. Sarkalt's. And the man: a Security First.

Suddenly, the candy seller's thin hand grabbed at Garm's sleeve, the paper cone crumpled against the yellow wool, the man's other hand fumbling in the bowls, scattering more candies than he picked up. “For her sake, San,” he said, pressing the sticky things into Garm's hand. “Ask her to come back. The stone in her rooms, we'll all be like the stone if she don't come back.”

His hand full of the candy, Garm bolted, almost tripping over a Wa'tic in the darker corridor, the small creature skittering back with a scream.