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reveal the world on his threshold. Good and evil walked hand in hand, not to be separated. Perun was opposed, always, by Azal. The two gods had entered into Time together; one could not exist without the other. So the priests taught before the Holy Flame in every temple in Bassania.
    The two women took the child to his room together. Shaski reached up and held each of their hands, walking through the door, claiming them both. They indulged him too much, Rustem thought. But this was not a night to dwell upon that.
    He stood alone in the front room of his own small house amid the burning of lamps and the firelight and he thought about fate and the chance moments that shaped a man's life, and about Sarantium.

CHAPTER II
    Pardos had never liked his hands. The fingers were too short, stubby, broad. They didn't
look
like a mosaicist's hands, though they showed the same network of cuts and scratches all the others" did. He'd had a great deal of time to think about this and other things on the long road in wind and rain as autumn steadily turned to winter. Martinian's fingers, or Crispin's, or Pardos's best friend Couvry's-
those
were the right shape. They were large and long, appearing deft and capable. Pardos thought his own hands were like a farmhand's, a labourer's, someone in a trade where dexterity hardly mattered. It bothered him, sometimes.
    But he
was
a mosaicist, wasn't he? Had finished his apprenticeship with two celebrated masters of the craft and had been formally admitted to the guild in Varena. He had his papers in his purse now, his name was entered on the rolls back home. So appearance wasn't really important, after all. His short, thick fingers were nimble enough to do what needed to be done. The eye and the mind mattered, Crispin used to say before he went away; the hands could learn to do what they were told.
    It seemed to be true. They
were
doing what needed to be done here, though Pardos would never have dreamt that his first labours as a fully-fledged mosaicist would be expended in the remote, bitterly cold wilderness of Sauradia.
    He would never have even dreamt, in fact, of
being
this far away from home, and on his own. He had not been the sort of young man who imagined adventures in distant places. He was pious, careful, prone to worry, not at all impulsive.
    But he
had
left Varena-his home, all he knew of Jad's created world- almost immediately after the murders in the sanctuary, and that was about as impulsive an action as could be imagined.
    It hadn't felt as though he was being reckless, it seemed rather as if there was no real choice in the matter, and Pardos had wondered why the others couldn't understand that. When pressed by his friends, and by Martinian and his concerned, kind-hearted "wife, Pardos had only said, over and over, that he could not stay in a place where such things were done. When they told him, in tones of cynicism or sadness, that such things happened everywhere, Pardos replied-very simply-that he hadn't
seen
them everywhere, only in the sanctuary expanded to house the bones of King Hildric outside Varena.
    The consecration of that sanctuary had been the most wonderful day of his life, at first. He and the other former apprentices, newly elevated to the guild, had been sitting with Martinian and his wife and with Crispin's white-haired mother in places of honour for the ceremony. All the mighty of the Antae kingdom were there, and many of the most illustrious Rhodians, including representatives of the High Patriarch himself, had come to Varena along the muddy roads from Rhodias. Queen Gisel, veiled and clad in the pure white of mourning, had been sitting so near that Pardos could almost have spoken to her.
    Except that it hadn't been the queen. It had been a woman pretending to be her, a lady-in-waiting. That woman had died in the sanctuary, and so had the queen's giant, silent guard, chopped down by a sword that should never have been in a holy place. Then the swordsman-Agila,