The warm rain stopped and the runoff from the roof into the flooded courtyard slowed to single drips. In the distance, Ulanda could hear the drums for the la’cellini, the dance of thanks, that in the common cycles, took an hour or more for the temple dancers to complete. The dance was part of the K’sini festival for the start of the rainy season.

And the dream that had woken her? The beginning of the broken promise. Drums and winter ice, and a snow-covered patio, not this hot, airless now where there were no promises left.

Patyin was curled against her back, part of the heat. He stirred, then stretched. At his urging, the glowglobe at the side of the low bed floated up, brightening as it did. “Did you say something?” he asked. “Is it morning?”

He always asked her, never checked the net for the time. “No to both,” she said. “You haven’t been asleep long.”

“Then the dances haven’t finished. Good.” With a grunt, he reached to the opposite side of the bed, looking for something. The bottle of wine. Empty. He let it drop. “I told Gei we’d meet him on the jetty before the procession started.”

“If he’s still at the K’sini. Have you checked with him?”

He shrugged. “He’ll be there. Or we’ll be there and he won’t.”

Ulanda leaned against him, her hair falling over his chest in a dark shower. If she was hot, he was on fire, like a stick of incense burning, his skin scented with cedar. In Kalin, she thought, incense should be made of marsh grass and mud, not cedar.

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Rit woke being held, a slow waking as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Even with the feel of smooth skin under his hands, a deep lassitude stilled his mind, past wondering how the warm flesh nestled against him would taste.

Escort duty, he was on escort duty. On his way back to Endica. Had he arrived? Eunni?

But it wasn’t Eunni beside him.

A bag of tea for her birthday, the tea in his saddlebag. The Spine of the Serpent… something, he remembered something.

His mind resisted the memories, but they came regardless, the scents, the sounds. Pine and dust. Wood smoke. Horses screaming. But each of those could be from memories covering years and patched together as dreams tend to be. Dog Mountain and the old post road. The Xintan. Vinn. More screams, human screams.

Recent. Real. The sick feeling in his gut said real. The cramping twist sent bile to his throat and dragged him awake. One man, one death.

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Under her bare feet was a puzzle of grasses, ribbons of dark green velvet, spiky feathers of bronze that tickled her ankles, grasses like sea foam, the white seed heads hanging with the weight of the dew. Borders of taller grasses constrained the choice of pathway, forcing a decision of this way or that, but all ending against a tall cedar hedge.

The last time Possaltic had been here, this had been a formal garden of boxwood squares, the centers filled with roses, the brick pathways between them leading to a view of the ocean with terraced fields on the downslope.

As she pushed through the brown center of the cedar hedge, her robe caught on a branch, and she sat suddenly in a shower of dead leaves. Tucking her hands in was instinctive. Even hidden in the folds of the wide sleeves, they felt like weights pulling her down.

She was in a small enclosure framed by the hedge and a fence of woven willow canes, and at the far end, a hut of the same willow but an intricate weave where the fence was plainly woven, hand-width bundles of the twigs simply wrapped around sturdy supports.

A pavilion? A gardener’s shed, she decided. Shallow orange clay pots lined the fence, three deep, the spiky shoots of bulbs just showing above the rims. The winter-brown leaves in a pile to one side of the shed must have been pulled off the pots recently, the shoots still yellow. There was the smell of winter in of rotting leaves and the old flowers mixed in, all of them browned by snow and frost.

The Watic who came out of the shed wore a leather apron, pruning shears tucked into a loop on the belt.

“Priest, your attendants?” it said, a light tic-tic sound accenting the Ri. A haze of yellow lightened the dark brown of its chitin.

She blocked its attempt to reach for the net. Pincers scared with age were already tracing the torn silk of her robe to the branch the hem was caught on.

“Are in their beds asleep,” she said as it tugged the cloth free. “I had a desire to see the ocean.

It showed no resistance to the net block. “The way to South Bay, by the springs, by the bath house. A different path.”

She laughed, twirling around and around in her new freedom. “I like this one.” And sat again, dizzy. Her hair had come loose, a shower of crimped gold over her shoulders. She had bruised her elbow. No, grazed it. There were spots of blood on the cream silk of her sleeve.

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As the belly of the flitter slowly settled the last few meters to the surface, the pilot presented Yilli with the half hour long journey condensed into its last moments and seen as though the hull tiles had been transparent from the moment they had left the parent ship. The spreading out to invisibility of their escort vessels, the weight of the planet over them, the surface expanding hugely as they flew up into it, the upside-down lines of the canyons, the broad plains of amber and red streaked with black and dotted with spires of shadow cast by the tall mesas.

A sudden turn and the sky was sky again and they were the ones falling to meet the streams of dust rising between the scattered rocks on the surface. Mirrored in the dust was the energy signature of the hull, an arc with seven lines sheltered under it, the lines jumbled together as though they were joss sticks thrown before an altar. The signature of the first of the eight of the Spann Protectorate.

Quickened time slowed to normal as an answering wind swirled the dust signature into a whirlpool, the flitter at its epicenter, and then quickly settled to form another shape as though the dust was heavy as falling rain. Three nested half circles, each set off slightly from the others. An ancient form meaning Eye of the Ocean.

With a formal sign of closure,
Yilli cut the net communication link to the pilot. Her instructions said simply that a map of the ca

Once though the mouth of the cave, the light from outside faded, and as her eyes adjusted, she could see the soft glow of the web all around her, wrist-thick cords laid over and across each other, some strung from wall to wall. There was no order in their arrangement that she could see, although she knew there would be patterns, if only apparent to those who had laid them.

Night blown silk caught in the dew of morning. Journey over.

Translated into Pinnet from a Spann poem. A prayer, but most everything Spann was a prayer. The cave tunnel and growing number of cords reminded her more of the nest of a trapdoor spider.

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