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that day, the price of salt. Eduin learned how Saravio had been supporting himself. Although Saravio’s voice was quite ordinary, he had been earning a few coins here and there by singing to the sick. The freemate wife of the man who ran the White Feather Inn had a daughter who was dying of a wasting disease. The child could not sleep for the pain. There was nothing to be done, for they could not afford the fees charged by the city physicians, let alone the even more costly charges of the few leronyn willing to accept such work.
    “Was there nothing you could do for her?” Eduin asked. Surely Saravio, like every other laranzu, must have trained as a monitor. Perhaps he had even used those skills, albeit in an unusual way, to temporarily lessen Eduin’s compulsion spell.
    Saravio shook his head. “Naotalba did not wish it. I do not know her will for the child, the reason she surrendered her into the arms of Avarra, the Dark Lady. Yet in her mercy, Naotalba permitted me to ease her pain.”
    Naotalba? Eduin blinked, momentarily stunned. Of all the possible explanations for Saravio’s mysterious behavior, this one was the least expected.
    Like any other educated Darkovan, Eduin knew the legends of Naotalba, The Doomed One, the Bride of Zandru. She might have been human once, a sacrifice to the Lord of the Seven Frozen Hells. Her name was invoked as a curse and it was considered unlucky for an unmarried woman to dress as she did in midnight black, the color of a starless sky. In another, more hopeful version, so great was her beauty and her grief at leaving the world that Zandru allowed her to return for half the year, thus bringing spring and summer.
    Eduin had never paid any particular attention to any of the stories. They were all superstitious nonsense. What could a mythical demigoddess have to do with healing a sick child?
    “She came to me,” Saravio said, now closing his eyes and tilting his head back, rocking slightly with the memory. “She spoke to me. I saw the entire world laid out like a tapestry. It was to be mine, she promised, if I would faithfully do her bidding. I awoke the next morning with her kiss upon my brow.”
    One hand brushed the pale forehead. “I alone of all men was chosen to be her champion. I alone was given the mission of healing the pain of the world. I alone received her gift. I went to my Keeper with the news, for in those days I still believed there was hope for the Towers.”
    Eduin drew back unconsciously. He could imagine the reaction of Auster of Arilinn, or Hestral’s Keeper, Loryn Ardais, or even Varzil Ridenow, who now ruled at Neskaya, to such an announcement. Steadiness of mind was essential to matrix work, and no sane man claimed to commune with the gods.
    Why not? he thought. The scorpion-spirit of his dead father whispered its poison nightly into his own ears.
    Saravio opened his eyes, hands curling into fists. “Do you know what they said? They forbade me to use Naotalba’s gift! They cast me out! And why? Because of some idiotic rule about not messing with another man’s mind! As if the Bride of Zandru is bound by their petty tyranny!”
    Not messing—Eduin knew a moment of panic, for the most fundamental law of laran work was never to enter another’s thoughts unbidden. He had sworn it on his first day of training at Arilinn.
    And broken it, too, at the siege of Hestral Tower, he reminded himself.
    But was that so evil? He had lifted the siege and saved the Tower. It was only because of Varzil Ridenow’s relentless grudge that he had not been hailed as a hero and been made Keeper permanently. What Eduin had done would be doubly unlawful under Carolin’s Compact, which forbade any use of psychic force, or any weapon that killed without exposing its wielder to equal jeopardy, for that matter. Eduin thought the idea ridiculous. Men would always seize whatever power came within their grasp, even if they had to invoke some imaginary figure to justify it.
    And yet . .