I opened my shirt and showed them my chest. "Do you remember what grew here when you sent me away, Father?"
He remembered.
"It will never grow back. The Schwartzes cured me, as I told you. If they could manage that, don't you think they could teach me other things as well?"
Saranna's hand brushed down my chest, like the dream I had lived through a hundred nights on the Singer ship.
"Let's go," I said.
They led me up the stairs and ramps and corridors that would take us to the postern gate. They left me in the window well over the palace door, where, if I could have seen, I would have scanned the courtyard before the postern gate in the palace walls. As it was I could see shapes, dimly; though torches were only bright sparks of light, I could see the flames dance.
There was so much dead rock around that I was hampered, but I soon found the voice of the rock. Much was new; the soil, unlike the sand, had too much life in it. It was a barrier, not a channel. But at last I found the voice of the living rock. I explained my purpose, I asked for help, and the rock complied.
I couldn't really see it happen. I could only hear the grinding of dead stones as the earth heaved under them and cast them from their piles onto the ground. There were shouts as the men from the postern gate ran to the breach in the wall. The earth kept heaving, and some were thrown to the ground. Others foolishly ran too close to where the walls were dancing, where great blocks of stone toppled from their place and crashed into the earth.
I lowered myself from the window and walked the other way, toward the water gate. Saranna and Father and four soldiers leading seven horses waited in the shelter of a wall.
"What did you do?" Father asked, in awe. "It was like an earthquake."
"It was an earthquake," I said. "Just a little one. Big ones take a committee." Then I strode toward the gate. In the gathering light of predawn I could see again, though things were blurry, and with relief I noticed that the gate was unguarded-- the soldiers had run off to the breach in the wall.
Unguarded, and so we passed through, Father and Saranna first, and then the soldiers. Which is why I was last and still unarmed when Dinte emerged from the shadows.
I saw the glint of torchlight reflected in steel. "How unequal we are," I said. "A mark of your courage."
"I wanted to have no doubt of the outcome," he said.
"Then you should have picked a different target," I answered. It was a simple thing to make sweat and oil seep out of his hands, so the hilt became slippery.
He trembled; he couldn't hold the sword; it slipped out of his hand, and he looked at it there on the ground, horror in his eyes. He tried to pick it up. It slid again from his fingers. He rubbed his palms frantically on his tunic, leaving dark stains. Did he think he could dry his hands that easily? He tried again to pick up the sword, this time with both hands. He cradled it, then tried to lunge at me; I easily slapped it out of his hands. And this time it was I who picked it up.
It would have been pure justice if I killed him, but he was screaming for help and he was my father's son, so I merely slit his throat from ear to ear and left him silent and bleeding on the ground. He'd regenerate and recover, as I had from the same wound more than a year ago. But at least he'd know that next time when he came for me, held have to bring some friends.
I passed through the gate, still holding the sword, and mounted the horse they held for me. I said nothing of my reason for delay. If Father had heard Dinte's voice, if he guessed what had happened inside the gate, he said nothing about it.
We rode north all day, and at night came to a military outpost that had once guarded Mueller's northern frontier in the old days, when Epson had been powerful and Mueller a peaceful farming Family with some strange breeding practices. The outpost was run down, but a quick count made me estimate three hundred or more horses, which meant there'd be as many men