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corner of his eye, close to the bed. The girl? As he tried to twist his neck to look, the pain turned his bowels to water and left his dry mouth in a hiss. He closed his eyes until it passed.
    “I must go to work,” a low voice said, a woman’s.
    “Very well.” It was the bearded man. “But be back after the middle hour—this fellow will need someone to watch over him, and I have appointments to keep.” No answer but the sound of a door closing softly.
    “Look at me,” the man’s voice said sharply.
    Rol obeyed him. The man filled his vision again. The colors swirled in his eyes, like oil on water.
    “You are Ardisan’s kin—I would know that countenance anywhere. Perhaps it made Rowen turn her blade aside. She senses these things too. Hold still.”
    Something hot and moist was pressed against his sternum. A tingling spread from it, a warmth that invaded Rol’s head and made him dizzy as if he were inhaling smoke.
    “Well, you’ll live, which proves my point. The Blood runs in you—but how true, I wonder?” Here the man raised a vial of scarlet liquid in the candlelight and studied it intently. Seeing Rol’s bleary puzzlement, he smiled, his silver fangs catching the light in turn. “Call it payment, if you will. If it’s as pure as I think, it’ll keep us in bread and oil for many a day.”
    “Psellos?” Rol croaked.
    The man bowed. “Indeed. Ardisan is dead at last, I take it. Well, he was a worthy fellow in his time, but he was a fool to bury himself out in the middle of nowhere as he did. We conceal ourselves more easily the more cattle we have around us.”
    He leaned close over Rol as though recording his features. “Yes—I see your mother in you.” He glanced back at the door. “She was a beauty too.”
    “You knew my mother!”
    “In a manner of speaking.”
    “How? How could—” Rol tried to raise an arm but failed. “Why am I bound?” he demanded.
    “One must be cautious. You could be anything—a doppelganger out of Kull knocking on my door.” And he gestured with one long-fingered hand to a shelf near the ceiling. It was lined with jars, and in each floated a face, a severed head in which the eyes glared brightly. One blinked, and its mouth opened in a soundless snarl, making Rol flinch.
    “But I can loose you now, I think. Don’t try to sit up—you must allow the poultice to do its work.” He began untying the knots that held Rol to the bed. “They came for him in the end, did they, the local cattle?”
    “They burned our home. And Morin and Ayd they killed too.”
    Psellos looked up at that. “I would not worry overmuch about golems, useful though they are. Your grandfather had a way with them, it’s true. My talents lie elsewhere.”
    The poultice felt as though it were sinking through Rol’s chest, dragging his ribs down to meet his backbone. He grimaced. “Talents? I understand none of this. What did they kill him for—why did they hate us so? How are we different?”
    Psellos’s strange eyes went dark. “That’s for another time, I think, when your guts have stopped leaking out of your belly. Rest for now—and do not try to rise or even raise your head. Do not touch the poultice.”
    “I’m thirsty.”
    “You cannot drink, not yet.”
    “Why did she attack me—that girl?”
    Psellos threw back his head and laughed. As he did, Rol could have sworn that for a moment a sharp, finger-thin tongue whipped out from between his lips. It was black.
    “Ask her, if you dare. But if she had meant you to be dead, you can be sure you would be, blood of Orr or no. Sleep now, my bonny boy, and be thankful I came home when I did.”
    He snapped his fingers with a
crack,
and Rol slept.
     
    Movement on his chest woke him, something warm and heavy slithering there. Frozen by fear, he felt the thing crawl off him, plump onto the bed, and then land with a slap on the floor. His shaking hand felt the place where the girl had stabbed him. It was covered in some manner of