Guess I'm getting old and slow. Course, he was a lot faster than a man his size should be. He leaned back, caught my foot, and threw me across the room. Two imperials got me up and started dragging me. I went with the satisfaction of seeing the big man limp.

I tried a few more tricks, just to slow things up. They did little more than get me knocked around. The imperials strapped me down in a high-backed wooden chair in a room where Whisper had set up to practice her magicks. I saw nothing especially villainous. That only made the anticipation worse.

They got two or three good screams out of me and were working themselves up to get unpleasant when the tableau suddenly broke up. The imperials ripped me out of the chair, hustled me toward my cell. I was too foggy to wonder.

Till, in the hallway a few yards short of that cell, we encountered the Lady.

Yes. So. My message had gotten through. I'd thought the brief touch I'd made a response in wishful thinking at the time. But here she was.

The imperials ran. Is she that terrible to her own people?

Whisper stood her ground.

Whatever passed between them did so unspoken. Whisper helped me to my feet, pushed me into the cell. Her face was stone but her eyes were asmoulder.

"Curses. Foiled again," I croaked, and fell onto my cot.

It was plain daylight when the door closed. It was night when I wakened and she was standing over me, wearing her guise of beauty. She said, "I warned you."

"Yes." I tried to sit up. I had aches everywhere, both from maltreatment and from pushing an old body beyond its limits before my capture.

"Stay. I would not have come had my own interests not demanded it."

"I would not have called otherwise."

"Again you do me a favor."

"Only in the interest of self-preservation."

"You may, as they say, have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Whisper lost many men today. To what?"

"I don't know. Goblin and One-Eye…" I shut up.

Damn groggy head. Damn sympathetic voice. Said too much already.

"It wasn't them. They haven't the skill to raise anything like that. I saw the bodies." "I don't know, then."

"I believe you. Even so… I've seen wounds like those before. I'll show you before we leave for the Tower." Was there ever any doubt about that? "When you make your examination, reflect on the fact that the last time men died in such fashion my husband ruled the world."

None of this added up. But I was not worried about it. I was worried about my own future.

"He has begun to move already. Long before I expected. Will he never lie quietly and let me get on with my work?"