them all to sleep if we want. Right?” When Diverus didn’t answer, Soter grabbed him by the shoulders. “You would do anything for her, wouldn’t you?”
“Soter—”
“Yes, I would,” Diverus answered with no hesitation.
“You love her.” Diverus hesitated to respond and Soter shook his head. “It’s all right. We both do, don’t we? That’s the thing that draws us and the thing that’s divided you and me. Divided me inside myself.” To Orinda, he said, “You’re going to get away. You take Glaise, and Bois if you can find him, and get far away from here. We’ll perform, we’ll keep them riveted. They won’t even notice your departure, and after, if he can lull them to sleep, we’ll slip out and come after you, too.”
“But Leodora—” Diverus began.
“You don’t want her to be here right now,” Soter said. “She’s better off where she is, and you can go fetch her once we’ve escaped.”
“Soter, you can’t!” Orinda insisted.
“Can’t I? We’ve been here before, Orinda. Or rather, you have. Glaise has. What do you suppose those creatures will do to him this time to get you to tell them what they want to know? If we were to flee and leave you here, you would pay the price again. Worse even than before.”
She looked from him to Diverus with a sickened expression. “You’re insane, Soter.”
“Probably.” He grinned and it made him look the part. “Now, you have to do one last thing. You have to introduce us. Introduce us like there’s nothing wrong at all, and then take Glaise and go somewhere and hide. Go down below with Hamen’s folk. Hide out until they’ve gone or we come find you.”
She held her ground another moment, but finally acquiesced, pushing Glaise to turn him about and following him out the back of the booth.
Soter handed Diverus the mijwiz. “You like playing this double-pipe thing, don’t you?”
“I am partial to it.”
“Good. Good. Because tonight you’re playing for your life. Maybe all our lives.”
The principal problem was, the cell was utterly dry. The rough dirt floor had seen no water in a very long time. Near the prisoner, straw had been strewn about, not much of it but enough to absorb any and all moisture. Nowhere was there a container, a cup, even a slop bucket. The chain attached to her ankles allowed the prisoner to cross past the window as far as the opposite corner to relieve herself, and the noisome stink of the straw told Leodora that it hadn’t been changed in a long time. The small window prohibited the flow of enough air to overcome the smell.
“I need water,” Leodora explained.
The prisoner tried to communicate with her, babbling excitedly and incoherently for so long that Leodora thought the confinement had driven her insane. She had no experience of a place where the world didn’t transmute naturally and the language become comprehensible. Finally, the long-snouted woman seemed to realize that nothing she said was making any difference, and she stopped. She tilted her head and stared at Leodora as if seeing her for the first time; this caused the black beads of her wig to clack and chitter. She gave her head a small toss and the beads shook again. She had human eyes beneath her prominent animal brows but the shape of the face was more like that of the kitsune, except that it had a surface of iridescent scales shaped like those of the Ondiont snake. In the silence, Leodora pointed to herself and said, “Leodora,” then repeated it.
The prisoner placed her fingers on her chest and said, “Yemoja a Iunu.” Her snout twitched. She seemed to be trying to smile.
“All right,” Leodora replied. “Yemoja?” Then she pointed to the room, the door, out the small window. “Where?” she asked. “Where is this?”
The creature nodded in understanding. “Palipon,” she growled.
“Oh.” Leodora sank down then. Palipon: the prison isle. Its name, it seemed, transcended language barriers. It was the place where Gousier had sent the woman who’d tried to kidnap her when she was small. Nobody banished to Palipon was ever seen again. Nobody ever came back. Legend made it the original home of Death before Chilingana had called him forth by dreaming the spans. Whether or not that was true, she wasn’t about to be trapped here.
Standing again, she went to the window. The light was fading fast, though she could still make out the flat-roofed buildings. They stood on a rise on the far side of a deep gorge. The drop