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Battlesow, the Goddess, that black warrior Ryter who’d been so skilled and so easy to drink with and who’d died with an arrow in his eye at some stupid battle in Gwarl . . . 
    He had made them killers, had led them to their kills—had forged of them a brotherhood as only war can forge it. It had been hard enough to leave them and to choose the solitary search for another art, another need. Now to choose again, to kill the one person who could give him what he needed in order to save their lives . . . 
    Dammit!
    
    
     he raged at the spirits of his ancestors, it isn’t fair!
    But the dry howl of the wind outside brought him only the suspicion of cosmic laughter.
    This might be my only chance!
    But he knew already he could not abandon his friends.
    He was still trying to make up his mind, to come to some conclusion, when the inn caught fire.
     
    “That scum-sucking smear of lizard dung!” The Wolf was coughing so badly he could barely get the words out; the pain of his cracked rib and his wounded shoulder gouged at him with every spasm of his smoke-clogged lungs. He could barely see, his eye and the empty left socket under its patch burning with the black billows of smoke that rolled up the narrow stairs from below. Starhawk’s arm was around him, dragging him; his wounds and exhaustion had left him weaker than he’d suspected. The heat was incredible.
    She yelled over the noise of shouts from below, “Who?”
    “That codless bastard of a Vorsal hoodoo, that’s . . . !” He broke off in another fit of coughing that ripped his lungs like a saw, and for a moment the hot light seemed to darken and the floor to sway. Then he felt the stab of his broken ribs as her arm tightened around him. Lit by a hellish storm of red glare and blackness, the stair plunged down before them like a coal chute to Hell. Memory flooded him and he grabbed at the newel-post. “The books!
     The Witches’ books!”
    “I have one set of saddlebags, I’ll go back for the other.”
    He could barely see through the burn of the smoke, but realized what the buckled leather straps were that he felt, draped around her shoulder.
    “Hang on. These stairs are a bastard.”
    He balked, groping for the saddlebag strap. The inn was wood and the wind bone-dry—he’d torched hundreds like it and knew exactly how fast they went up. Below them, all around them in furnace glare and darkness, the roar of the fire was a bass bellow over which unidentifiable screams and shouts floated like whirling flakes of ash.
    “Go back for ’em now! Dammit, they’re the only books of magic we’ve got—the only ones we’ve even heard of!” He braced himself against her determined shove, which wasn’t easy, considering it was only her shoulder which held him up. “This place’ll be a pyre by the time we get downstairs . . . ”
    “You stubborn old . . . ”
    “DO IT!” he roared. She stiffened, bristling like an affronted cheetah. But for eight years, when he had yelled at her, with a wooden training sword, to go after men twice her size who were waiting to attack her with clubs, she’d gone, and the training held true. She dumped him unceremoniously at the top of the stairs, threw the saddlebags at him, and strode back down the hall, the veils of smoke closing round her like a suffocating curtain.
    Downstairs he heard the roar of something collapsing. Heat heaved up around him, blinding him, sickening him. Below he could see stringers of fire racing along the boards of the common-room floor, tendrils of it crawling up onto the carved rails of the stair. The hair rose on his scalp with primal terror and he had to fight the urge not to throw himself down the stairs, not to stagger, crawl, anything . . . anything not to be trapped abovestairs and burned.
    But we can’t lose the books,
    
     he told himself feverishly. It’s only a dozen feet . . .  He clung to the saddlebags, his head swimming with suffocation and smoke, the