Chapter Seven

The Pitch

He left on a grey morning two days later, and the leaving was the easiest lie he never had to tell: the best ground-reader in the klan, going west with a sack and a spear-haft, on the boss's own word, to find food. Every part of it true. He had learned that much from the pale country—that the strongest lies are built entirely out of true things, the way the strongest walls are built out of stones that were already lying around.

It looked, from the hall, exactly like every leaving of his life—a runt slipping out at first light with no goodbyes—except for two things.

The first was that Nibz counted him out with her eyes open, sitting up against the wall with her stones already squared, watching him all the way across the hall the way you watch a number you are not sure will come back to the books. He gave her a nod. She gave him back the open hand, five fingers—the count she did not like the end of—and then, slowly, deliberately, folded it closed into a fist, which was a thing she had never done before, and which he carried with him the whole way west without ever being certain what she had meant by it: stop, or hold on, or I am keeping it shut for you till you're back.

The second thing was Brakka.

That had not been the plan, in as much as anything about the plan had been a plan. What Moggruk had needed from Brakka was a hat—and he had needed it from Brakka partly because Brakka's were the only hands in the hall that could make one, and partly because of what he had learned about his own. He had spent two evenings in a dry vault with a length of salvage-cloth and a green-crusted pin and a puddle's worth of reflection, assembling the start of fancy on his own body, and the lesson of those evenings was blunt: he knew exactly what fancy looked like, and exactly what he looked like, and he could close some of the gap with a straightened spine and a fall of cloth, but the making of things—the made part of the shape—was a craft, and it was not his. So he had gone to Brakka's corner three nights before, and crouched, and said, quietly, "Need a 'at. Big one. Fancy-like—best ya got in ya." And Brakka had looked at him a long moment with those patient making-hands lying still in his lap, and then nodded, and that had seemed to be the whole of the transaction.

The hat, delivered two days later, was a masterwork, and Moggruk had expected nothing less: boiled leather over a frame of bent withy, broad in the brim and high in the crown, stained dark with bog-iron water, stitched in a fine spiraling pattern that served no purpose except that Brakka's hands did not know how to stop before a thing was finished, and cocked at the front with a spray of heron feathers—heron, the old country's bird, which Moggruk noticed and said nothing about. It was the finest made thing the klan had ever owned. And when Moggruk reached for it, Brakka held it just out of reach, and looked at him, and said the only thing he said that whole week:

"Wot's it for?"

Which was how Moggruk learned the price. Not the hat—the hat was free. The seeing. Brakka had spent a winter listening to secondhand tellings of a country where mud was treasure and water rose up with folk inside it, told by a runt whose hands opened and closed on the air, and Brakka was a maker, and a maker cannot hear about the biggest made things in the world forever without needing to stand in front of one. He did not say any of that. He said wot's it for, and held the hat, and waited, and Moggruk looked at the patient hands and the waiting face and understood he was being offered a trade he had not asked for and could not afford to refuse—because the plan had a hole in it, and the hole was this: fancy does not walk alone.

He had been over it a hundred times behind his teeth. Every rank he had ever watched came wrapped in bodies—the hanged lord with his four knives and his chair-bearers, the tall one with his forty swimmers and his boat-children, even the hat on the ruin-shoulder with its shield-wall spread below it—and a lone wet creature presenting itself at a palace was not a lord, it was a beggar, and the pale country would complete a beggar as easily as it completed anything else. He needed at least one body behind him: a body that would not talk—could not be trapped into talking, because the whole edifice ran on words Moggruk alone had—would not startle, and could stand still for an hour with its hands quiet. There was exactly one creature in the world who fit that bill, and the creature was standing in front of him holding the hat hostage.

"Right den," Moggruk said. "Yer comin'. But da 'at's yers—you wear it."

And here was the part of the plan he was privately proudest of, the part built entirely out of paid-for evidence: the hat was wrong for him. He had learned it the hard way, twice over. In the old country the hat marked the boss—but he had stood under the stone cup and watched ten thousand bend to a bare head, and he had crouched on a ruin-wall and watched a hatted thing on a rubble-shoulder direct a battle it never once joined, and the two facts together had finally given up their grammar: in the pale country, the fancy went bare, and the hat went on the servants of the fancy—the signalers, the criers, the ones who spoke and gestured on power's behalf. A lord in a hat was a contradiction. A lord with a hatted attendant standing silent at his shoulder was a sentence the pale country already knew how to finish. So Brakka would wear the finest hat ever made in the grey country, and keep his hands visible and his mouth shut, and be completed into whatever a hatted silent hulk at a foreign lord's back ought to be—and Moggruk would go bare-headed into the middle of it, dressed in nothing but a straightened spine, a fall of grey cloth, and half a language, and let the country build the rest.

They went in by the south, the long way he knew, and the city did the thing the city always did to newcomers, which was happen to them. Brakka stopped four times in the first mile—at the aqueduct striding out of the hills on its stone legs, at a bridge, at the pale calm faces, a long, long stop, that one, maker reading makers, and Moggruk stood in the crossfire of the stone attention and waited him out—and each time his hands came up of their own accord and made small shapes in the air, measuring joints and loads and the way one course of stone sat into another, and each time he looked at Moggruk afterward with an expression that needed no completing in any language: you told me, an' I 'eard ya, an' I still didn't know. They walked the crown of the raised ways, upright, in the middle, and the city priced them and let them pass—polers glancing and settling, a fish-seller calling something cheerful—and at one crossing a gang of small ones ran shrieking past after a rat and parted around Brakka like water around a post, and one of them looked up at the hat—all the way up, mouth open—with an expression of frank delighted awe, and ran on. Brakka watched it go. The hat, Moggruk observed, sat a fraction higher after that.

And when they came at last round the flank of the two great facing halls—one pale going to sleep and the other dark, waking up—the ground opened ahead of them into the drowned square, and the stone cup stood up out of its own reflection, dusk falling, already beginning to fill: boats converging down every flooded lane, torch-lines catching along the upper rings one by one, the first long swell of the gathering roar rolling out across the water—Brakka sat down. On a wall. Like a creature whose legs had been needed elsewhere. He stayed down for the length of ten breaths, watching the biggest made thing in the world light itself, and Moggruk stood beside him and let him have all ten, because he remembered.

They found the herald where Moggruk had known they would find some kind of herald, because he had spent a month learning where that kind of creature kept itself: the forum, the third floor, the balcony side, where the carved talk lived—the one place in the whole city he had marked, in fright and in ink he did not own, never again, and which his business now lived in, which was the kind of joke the world told and did not laugh at. What he had not planned for was the herald finding them—but that was how it went, because a bare-headed orruk walking upright through the trading floor with a hatted giant at his shoulder was not a sight that waited to be noticed. The crowd's gabble dropped away in front of them like marsh lizards during the first freeze, and out of the hush came hurrying a thin pale figure in layered grey, chains of little tarnished plaques hung across its chest, hands already fluttering—and it planted itself in their path, drew itself up to its full unimpressive height, and delivered what was unmistakably a challenge, or a greeting, or a form of words that served as both:

and a great deal more, fussy and rapid and rising, out of which Moggruk caught the name-shape he had bet everything on hearing, Balfus, and one other word he knew, the audience-word, which he had traded a week's caution for at the fish-stalls against exactly this moment.

He let the stream finish. Then he did the thing he had rehearsed against the inside of his own skull for two days straight: he straightened his back the way the merchant had straightened when the claiming-phrase landed, looked down his nose at a creature slightly taller than himself—a trick he had studied upside down, from below, and practiced since—and laid out his line, slow, crooked, eight words wide, with the confidence of a lord for whom grammar is somebody else's job:

And he watched it happen. Watched the herald's eyes travel the shape of them—the bare head, held high; the silence where a beggar's gabble should have been; the hulk behind, hatted, hands folded and visible, feathers riding the crown of the finest made thing in the grey country—and watched the completing arrive in the pale face like water going through dry ground, priorities visibly rearranging themselves, no appointment losing, hand over hand, to foreign, lord, and above all to the last word, the golden word, the word that opened this city the way no claiming-phrase ever would. Corvyn Hollowtongue's fluttering hands came together. His spine bent into a bow of carefully calibrated depth—not deep, Moggruk marked, filing the exact angle for later, but real—and the fuss, when it resumed, had changed direction entirely: it was fussing for them now, a stream of solicitous protocol, gestures toward the stairs, and, twice, the audience-word, affirmed.

a small pained pause, the first honest thing the herald had said with its face all evening—

Moggruk did not catch the word. He caught the pause. He filed both, and inclined his head the way the tall one inclined his to the crowd—giving, not asking—and followed the herald toward the stair, with Brakka falling in behind him silent as load-bearing stone, and the roar of the far-off stone cup rolling in across the water at their backs like the whole pale country clearing its throat.

The stair went up and then, unexpectedly, along—out of the building's third floor through a covered gallery that ran above the water toward the neighbouring pile, and Moggruk walked it filing everything, because everything was new: the floor dry as old bone, the walls hung at intervals with cloth that had colour in it, little niches where lamps burned behind panes of scraped horn, and the sound of the trading-floor falling away behind them until the loudest things in the world were the herald's chains ticking against its chest and, somewhere ahead, growing, two voices.

Carved voices. Both of them. The long form, the balcony form, consonants set down like stones—but running fast, overlapping, snapping at each other's ends in a way he had never once heard the high talk do. Heat without hurry: two voices taking turns to be loud, the turns themselves orderly even as the words rode over each other at the seams, anger conducted entirely in whole finished stones. Moggruk understood before he understood anything else that he was hearing the fancy argue, and that this was a sound the pale country did not put on balconies.

Corvyn Hollowtongue understood it too. The herald's step shortened; the fluttering hands performed a small helpless ceremony of their own, smoothing the plaques; and at the head of the last stair, where the hall opened long and lamplit before them, the thin figure stopped, half-turned, torn visibly between the protocol of conducting visitors of quality and the protocol of what was audible through the arch—and settled on a delicate professional hovering at the door's edge, one hand raised to the visitors in a gesture of one moment, I beg you, waiting for a seam in the argument wide enough to announce into.

Which left Moggruk standing at the stair-head with a clear view down the length of the hall, and nothing to do but the thing he was for.

Two figures. The far one, half-turned toward the rail and the evening light, he knew at once and without surprise—knew the height, the stillness, the way the dark drape of cloth moved a half-beat behind the body like water following a poled boat: the tall one, Balfus, holding the middle of the room the way he held the middle of ten thousand, arms loose, unhurried even in argument, giving each of the other voice's surges a small tilted attention like a fisherman gauging a run. He filed him and moved on in the same heartbeat—because it was the other one.

The near figure was pacing. Rings catching the lamplight as its long hands carved the air, layer on layer of amber and old-wine cloth swinging with every turn, a voice that rode up and up and cracked like a whip at the sentence-ends—and at the top of a phrase it turned on its heel, and the light caught its face, and the face had a moustache on it, waxed, curled, magnificent, groomed within an inch of its life, above a chin tipped back to look down its nose at a taller creature—a trick Moggruk had once noted should not have been possible from underneath—and the floor of the evening opened quietly under him and let him fall through.

Dat one.

He did not move. That was the whole of his craft arriving at once, unbidden, the way Brakka's hands measured stone: every muscle he owned simply stopped, mid-breath, in the shadow of the stair-head, while behind his teeth the file tore itself open and dealt the whole night out in front of him—the snare-pole, the slow spin, the little shine at throat and wrists, Latrar. Skitrottar!, the arms crossed against their own hanging weight; the horn on its silver chain and the three clean calls; and everything, everything, that had come up the wide road two hours before dawn because of the creature now pacing a bright room forty feet away, complaining with its rings on. Wutzgut had died over this one. Drub had died over this one; Grotnab; the count that did not get longer; the best klan in the grey country made meat in a night and retrieved like a dropped tool—and the tool stood there in the lamplight, whole, dry, right way up, groomed, arguing, by every sign Moggruk could read, about furniture, or money, or whatever it was the fancy argued about, with the fretful energy of a creature to whom nothing very bad had ever happened and certainly not recently.

Väringar, the herald had said, on the stair, with the pained pause. The word arrived like a delayed echo and clicked into its slot.

He had known, distantly, that the fancy from the trap had lived; he had watched it cut down and carried off with ceremony. He had never once, in all the planning, thought to ask where it lived—because the pale country was vast and the fancy were surely many, and what were the odds. Da odds, he thought, cold and slow, watching the rings flash, is dat fancy's a small country at da top. Everybody knows everybody. File dat. File it deep. And then the harder thing, arriving on the heels of the first the way the second big one had arrived behind the first on the wide road—the exposure count, run cold, the way he priced everything. Dark, that night. Torchlit. The fancy upside down, furious, surrounded by a hundred orruk faces of which his had been one, small, at the back, for the length of one short spend of words at the boss's shoulder. 'E never looked at me. Dey don't none of 'em ever look at me. It held. It was even, possibly, true. He set his weight on it the way you set your weight on first ice, and made himself breathe, and turned the watching outward again—because the argument was still happening, and the argument was now the most important weather in the world, and he could not understand one word of it, and he read it anyway, the way he had read every fight he'd ever profited from: by the grammar underneath.

the moustached one was saying, at pace.

the tall one said.

The tall one turned from the rail as he said it—easy, arms opening a fraction, the room's whole light seeming to reorganize itself around the gesture—and even at volume, even in anger's neighbourhood, Moggruk watched the play of it and understood he was seeing the same craft that stilled ten thousand: the timing, the given-away turn, the wide-open front. It was not that the tall one did not fight. It was that he fought the way the forty swam—no splash.

The moustached one went white around the jaw—whiter—and his voice dropped into a register Moggruk knew from a snare-pole: cold, carved, each word set down separate and ringing.

"Ditt Passio." And here the tall one's lightness thinned—not vanished; thinned, the way ice thins, so the dark water underneath showed through for just a moment.

a breath; the lightness reassembled itself, and somehow that was worse—

Silence, of a particular ringing kind. The moustached one stood with his rings stilled, visibly assembling a reply of sufficient magnificence—and into that seam, with the reflexes of a creature whose entire function was the finding of such seams, stepped Corvyn Hollowtongue, two knocks and a smooth full-volume announcement already flowing:

and the herald's pause here was, Moggruk would later come to understand, the finest piece of stagecraft in the whole pale country's service, a held beat worthy of the stone cup itself—"—Spektakl."

The word landed in the room like a torch in dry reeds.

The tall one came around from the rail entire, argument falling from him the way water falls from a rising swimmer—and across the length of the hall, past the moustached one's stiff and rejected magnificence, his gaze found Moggruk: the bare-headed grey-green stranger standing very straight in travel-worn wrappings, and behind him the silent hulk with folded hands, crowned by Brakka's hat—the finest thing the grey country had in it to give, and not, by the standards of the room they now stood in, the same thing as fine—heron feathers riding high above it all, the whole rig standing up like the flag of a country nobody in the room had ever heard of.

Moggruk watched the completing begin—the pale eyes doing what all their eyes did, taking the shape and building the best thing the shape could be—and he watched something else arrive alongside it, something he had not seen on one of their faces before and would spend a long time learning to price: appetite. The tall one's face lit not with the fond settling of the old bather, nor the fluster of the merchant, but with the forward-leaning delight of a creature being handed a new thing in a country that had not handed it a new thing in longer than it knew.

"Nå," said the Lord Balthus, to the room, to the evening, to the world at large, in the voice that filled stone cups, "nå, nå."

And the moustached one turned too—irritation still on him like weather, the interrupted reply still loaded behind his teeth—and his gaze crossed the archway, crossed Moggruk, crossed the bare grey-green face of the smallest creature in the room——and moved on, finding nothing there worth the looking, exactly as every gaze of Moggruk's whole life had always done, and for the first time in the whole of that life, the runt of the Gutscrape stood in the crossfire of being beneath notice and felt it settle over him like armor.

Corvyn Hollowtongue conducted them the length of the hall at a processional pace that gave Moggruk time to price the room—the rail open to the evening and the water-glitter beyond, the racked lamps, the moustached one withdrawn to one side wearing his interrupted argument like a garment nobody would take from him—and delivered them at last before the tall one with a bow of very much greater depth than the one at the stairs, and a stream of presenting-protocol in the carved tongue, at the end of which everyone in the room was plainly waiting for Moggruk to speak.

He had built the pitch in the vault, over two days, out of every word he owned. He straightened his spine, set his eyes on the tall one's—level, unhurried, the way you look at deep water you intend to cross—and began.

and here the first gap, held open on purpose, a door for the country to walk through—

The tall one raised one long hand, gently, and the room's whole air moved with it.

"You are very far from home, my lord," said Balthus Solarian, lord of the half-drowned city—in Common. Fluent, unhurried, barely accented Common, the broken trade-tongue of the bogs made suddenly whole and musical in a pale throat, and the floor dropped out of Moggruk for the second time in an hour. 'E knows. 'E's 'eard orruk-talk before, 'e knows exactly wot I am, it's done, it woz always gonna be done— and his face held, held the way the wall of a dam holds, nothing moving on it while everything behind it moved—and the tall one smiled, wide and warm and entirely without teeth in it, and kept going.

"And you have troubled yourself to learn our Hearthtongue—badly, if my lord will forgive me, and I find I am touched." He pressed the long hand flat to his own wrapped chest, precisely where a name went. "No guest has paid this house that courtesy in—" the smallest hesitation, a held note—"some while. But I have a little of my lord's own tongue, from my travelling days, and a proposition deserves a language it can stand up straight in. Shall we?" And he gestured, host-wide, at the space between them, as though laying a table.

'E don't know, Moggruk understood, the relief arriving with its own cold edge, because look how close the two things lived: 'e sees a far lord wot learned three words of his talk on da boat over. 'E built me a boat. Moggruk inclined his head—giving, not asking—and spent one heartbeat rebuilding the pitch in the tongue he had spoken all his life and never once expected to need here, and began again.

"Yer bowl," he said. "Da stone cup. I seen it full. Ten fousand froats, an' da water dancin', an' da forty—" he let his hands rise, just a little, the way they had risen at a fire that laughed at him—"I seen it, boss, an' I'll tell ya straight: I can't make dat. Nobody can't make dat but you. But I'll tell ya somefin' else I seen—I seen ya frow away a whole run o' good eel jus' to make more noise, 'cause ya got so much Spektakl dis city can't hardly hold it. Well. I got somewhere dat can hold da spare. A bowl standin' empty on dis same river, cut big, cut old, an' nuffin in it but dust an' a toll-boss too small for it. An' my folk—" he set the next words down one at a time, stones in a row—"my folk don't dance. My folk fight. Proper scraps, boss. All comers, winner stands. Put dat in da old bowl, make it a—" he reached, and took the golden word, and spent it—"a Spektakl. Yer city's got shows enough to drown a river in. Give me da spare of it. Dat's da 'ole of it, boss. Dat's wot I come for."

Silence—but a working silence, the kind Moggruk knew from watching a line get read. The tall one had gone very still, and the stillness deepened as the pitch went on, and at the words the old bowl something crossed the lamplit face that Moggruk filed at once and could not name: the look of a creature reaching for a thing on a high shelf of itself.

"The amphitheatre," Balthus said, quietly. "The Kragmoot." And then, more quietly still, half to the rail and the darkening water: "I stood on the floor of it, once. Before the war. I sang a single verse, just to hear what the old Thrindok cutting did with a voice, and it—" the sentence went somewhere the lamps did not reach, and came back smaller. "Well. It's a great pity, is what it is. A bowl that fine, standing so silent, all this while."

Thrindok. Moggruk caught the shape of it and held on, wrong and all—thin rock, his ear made of it, and filed it that way on purpose, because a wrong shape held tight beats a right one you can't keep.

The room waited. Even the moustached one waited. And then the tall frame straightened, and the music came back all at once like torches relit, and Lord Balthus turned from the rail with his arms opening wide enough to gather the whole evening in.

"Yes." The word filled the hall the way it filled stone cups. "Yes, my lord of the grey water, a thousand times—do you know what you are proposing? A tournament. The old amphitheatre lit again, and Strömshal shall stand with you in it." One long finger rose, and the warmth in the voice acquired, without losing one degree of warmth, an edge of contract. "With you, my lord—not behind you. Here is my price, and I say it plainly because I like you: the companies and champions of Strömshal shall have a place at every games your bowl ever holds. Every tournament, an invitation, standing, first and automatic, as long as the water runs. My city put on the finest shows on this river for a very great while. She will not be left off the bill of a revival she sponsored. Grant me that, and you shall have my hand, my seal, and my letter to every warden and toll-post between here and the falls."

"Done," said Moggruk, who had walked in prepared to give away considerably more, and kept that off his face too.

"Done!" Balthus struck his hands together, one clap, sharp as a starting-signal, and the whole room seemed to jump forward a beat—Corvyn already moving, already producing from some recess a writing-board, a pot, and the makings of the letter. "Then it wants only names. Yours first, my lord—your full style, as it should read. A grand tournament wants a grand founder on the page."

And there—there, of all places, on the flattest ground of the whole crossing—Moggruk went through the ice.

"Moggruk," he said, and it came out true and bare, and he heard, in the enormous silence after it, how much page was left over. Style. Title. The thing a foreign lord had and a runt did not, the one word of fancy no vault-rehearsal had built, because the plan had needed cloth and words and a hat and he had never once thought to need a name—and behind his teeth the file dealt out everything it held and all of it was wrong: runt—no; watcher—worse, a watcher was the thing in the seats, the thing that paid, not the thing that stood on the page—"Moggruk..." Balthus prompted, gently, pen poised, head tilted, with the patient forward lean of a country waiting to finish a sentence.

"...of da grey water," Moggruk said, because it was the only true ground left standing, and truth had underlaid every wall of this gambit so far.

"Moggruk, Lord of the Greywater," Balthus pronounced, complete, delighted, already writing, and the title settled over Moggruk like a garment cut for somebody else—his own bog handed back to him gilded, a name that was his and was not, wearing him rather than the reverse—and he stood very straight inside it and said nothing, and filed, for later, in the deepest drawer: dat's 'ow dey do it. Dey don't take nuffin from ya. Dey give ya somefin, an' den yer deirs.

What Balthus wrote on, Moggruk saw plainly, because Moggruk saw everything plainly, and it was a bone. A long pale femur, old and dry, laid on the writing-board like the finest vellum, and the tall one wrote upon it not with the pen Corvyn had brought—the pen he held, elegantly, and did not use—but with the talon of his own forefinger, scratch by fine deliberate scratch, the way a creature signs what it is into what it makes. When the scratching was done, he drew from a stand at his elbow a slim rod the colour of old blood, and held its tip to the nearest lamp-flame until it began to weep, and let three fat drops fall dark and glistening onto the bone's dry face—and here Moggruk's stomach did something private and complicated, because to his eye it looked for all the world like the bone had been made to bleed, three slow red drops welling up out of dead marrow at a lord's own command, and no creature in that room but him seemed to find it strange at all. Then Balthus turned his hand, and there on it, plain now that Moggruk knew to look, sat a ring the like of which he had not seen anywhere else in this whole ruined and glowing country—worked gold running through with a paler silver-white, both metals bright and whole and utterly untouched, without one fleck of the rust and rot that sat on every other made thing he had priced since the day he left the bog—and Balthus pressed it, once, firm, into the cooling red, and lifted it away, and held the whole of the bone up to the lamplight and admired it as a man admires good paper well sealed. "My letter," he said, warmly, "and my seal upon it. Every checkpoint on the water knows this mark. Show it, and every gate between here and the falls will open itself."

Moggruk received the bone with both hands and a bow of exactly the depth Corvyn had given at the stairs—and behind him, in one slow grave motion, Brakka bowed too, to precisely the same degree, hat and feathers describing a solemn arc through the lamplight, and the whole room glowed at the foreign courtliness of it, and only Moggruk knew he was watching the best measuring-eye in the grey country simply copying a thing it had seen once, to the finger-width, because that was what Brakka's eyes were for.

"And now—" Balthus turned, and the turn had the same easy given-away grace as every turn before it, and landed on the moustached one like a torch landing on a bill of announcements—"the mission wants a mouth. Contracts, wardens, toll-posts, the courtesies of the road—my lord of the Greywater has valor and vision and three words of Hearthtongue, and he shall have better: he shall have family. Cousin." The word bloomed. "You have stood in this hall an hour demanding an office worthy of your blood. Here it stands. Emissary of Strömshal to the grand tournament of the Kragmoot—witness, translator, and voice of this house upon the road. You wanted the thing itself, Haldane. See it done."

The silence that followed was the finest spectacle of the evening, and Moggruk watched every heartbeat of it from behind a perfectly still face: the moustached one opening his mouth to refuse—and finding the refusal seized in the trap of his own hour's argument, because to decline the first real office ever laid in his hands was to confess, in front of witnesses, that he had only ever wanted the size of its shadow—and the jaw working, and the rings stilling, and the magnificent moustache drawing itself up over the wreckage like a standard over a lost field.

"I shall require," said Haldane Engvarings, with enormous cold dignity, "a proper mount. And attendants enough that I am not made to arrive at a foreign court looking like a drover."

"You shall have both, and my own tailor besides," said Balthus, beaming, and it was done.

They settled the rest standing: a day for the lord of the Greywater to gather his retinue—"Of course, of course, a lord travels attended"—and the meeting after at the south gate, where the causeway road left the stone country Moggruk had called home for three seasons; and then Corvyn was conducting them out, down the lamplit gallery, past the niches and the coloured cloth, and the last Moggruk saw of the audience hall was the tall one back at the rail with his arms spread wide upon it, looking out over his drowned and glittering city like a creature at the prow of something, and the moustached one behind him, already complaining, in the carved tongue, at length, to a back that had stopped listening—my translator, Moggruk thought, with the particular sensation of a trapper watching his own snare close on his own foot, da one face in da 'ole kingdom wot's got cause to know mine, an' 'e's comin' wiv us.

Outside, the night had come up full, and the stone cup was roaring away across the water, its torch-lines doubled in the black flood the way they had been the very first time Moggruk ever saw them, a lifetime and one plan ago. Brakka walked beside him down the wide dark stair with the hat riding high and proud on him, and Moggruk carried the bone loose across both palms the whole way down, not trusting it to any sack, watching the dark red seal catch what little light there was and give it back like a wet thing. Neither of them said anything at all until the water-gate, where the last of the palace lamps fell away behind them and the ordinary dark of the drowned city closed back over—and there Brakka stopped, and looked back once at the lit pile of the hall they'd left, and delivered his entire opinion of the evening in the two words he'd been carrying, plainly, since the writing-board:

"Good bone."