As he called the names, the statues he indicated moved—indeed, the whole tier on which they stood moved until all three tiers of statues had moved the figures he named to the correct position over the great talismanic symbol that guarded the green door at the end of the chamber. Recently, there had appeared another door, exactly opposite the green door—a small red door with a grille. He knew what lay there, but he went out of his way not to go too close to it. And set in the floor by Prudentia’s plinth was a bronze disc with silver letters and a small lever. Gabriel had designed it himself. He hoped never to use it.

“Pisces,” he said.

Immediately under the lowest tier of statues there was a band. The band looked like bronze, and on it were repoussed—apparently—and engraved and decorated in gold and silver and enamel a set of thirteen zodiacal symbols. This band also rotated, although it did so in the opposite direction to the statues.

Clear golden sunlight fell through the great carved crystal that was the dome above them, and it struck the fish of pisces and coalesced into a golden beam.

The great green door opened. Beyond it was a sparkling grate, as if someone had built a portcullis of white-hot iron. Through its grid came a green radiance that suffused the casting chamber and yet was somehow defined by the golden light of the dome.

He grinned in satisfaction and snapped his fingers. Every moth in the great inn fell to the floor, dead.

Sarah laughed. “Now that’s a trick,” she said. “How about mice?”

Her son, just four months old, looked at her with goobering love and tried to find her nipple with his mouth.

Gabriel laughed. “As I was saying, the magister who now styles himself Thorn, once known as Richard Plangere, led an army of the Wild against Lissen Carak. He enlisted all the usual allies: Western boglins, stone trolls, some Golden Bears of the mountain tribes and some disaffected irks from the Lakes; wyverns and wardens. All of the Wild that’s easy to seduce, he took for his own. He also managed to sway the Sossag of the Great House, those who live in the Squash Country north of the inland sea.”

“And they killed Hector! God’s curse on them.” Sarah’s hate for Hector’s killer was as bright as her hair.

The Red Knight looked at the young woman and shook his head. “I can’t join you in the curse, sweeting. They have Thorn as a houseguest, now. They left him, you know. And—” He looked at the Drover. “The Sossag and the Huran would see us as the murdering savages who stole their land.”

“A thousand years ago!” Bad Tom spat.