Koris shrugged. “Are any of us safe, Simon? But be sure that the women of Power take no unnecessary risks. What they guard within them is not lightly spent.” He had gone to the western window, his face turned into the light there, his eyes searching as if he willed to see more than the plain beyond the city. “So Gorm is dead.” The words came heavily.

Simon pulled off his boots and stretched out on the bed. He was weary to every aching bone in his body.

“I told you what I saw and only what I saw. There is life walled into the center keep of Sippar. I found it nowhere else, but then I did not search far.”

“Life? What sort of life?”

“Ask that of the Kolder, or perhaps the witches,” returned Simon drowsily. “Neither are as you and I, and maybe they reckon life differently.”

He was only half aware that the Captain had come away from the window, was standing over Simon so that his wide shoulders shut away the daylight.

“I am thinking, Simon Tregarth, that you are different too.” Again the words were heavy, without any ring. “And seeing Gorm, how do you reckon its life — or death?”

“As vile,” Simon mumbled. “But that shall also be judged in its own time,” and wondered at his choice of words even as he fell asleep.

He slept, awoke to eat hugely, and slept again. No one demanded his attention nor did he rouse to what was going on in the keep of Estcarp. He might have been an animal laying up rest beneath his hide as the bear lays up fat against hibernation. When he awoke thoroughly once again it was alertly, eagerly, with a freshness he had not felt for so long, since before Berlin. Berlin — what — where was Berlin? His memories were curiously overlaid nowadays with new scenes.

And the one which returned to haunt him the most was that of the room of that secluded house in Kars where threadbare tapestries patterned the walls and a woman looked at him with wonder in her eyes as her hand shaped a glowing symbol in the air between them.

Then there was that other moment when she stood sick at heart and curiously alone after she had made her sordid magic for Aldis, tarnishing her gift for the good of her cause.

Now as Simon lay tingling with life in every nerve and cell of him, the ache of his bruises, the strain of his hunger and his striving gone out of him, he moved his right hand up until it lay over his heart. But beneath it now he did not feel the warmth of his own flesh; rather did he cradle in memory something else, as a singing which was no song drew from him, into the other hand he had grasped, a substance he did not know he possessed.