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him to his death. If he minds his own business he is safe. I won’t use a feminine trick.”) But the guard had already left his post, and Gwennis’ silent indifference to him had provoked his curiosity; he came swiftly toward her, saying, “Ha—caught you without that knife you wear all the time, huh? Now you’ll see what it’s like really to be a woman. Who knows, you might even like it better. Here, come here and let me show you a thing or two …” He reached for the girl, roughly pulled her against him, spun her around, one hand covering her mouth to stifle a cry … his words broke off in a strangled gasp. Lori’s long knife, thrown with deadly accuracy, went straight into his throat. A moment later Lori herself bent over him, delivering a swift, fatal death-stroke to the great vein below his ear. Kindra and Camilla dragged him into the shadow of the wall, out of sight of any chance passerby; Gwennis scrambled up, fastidiously wiping her mouth as if she could wipe away the guard’s rude touch. Kindra rummaged at the dead man’s belt, found his keys and began to try them one by one in the heavy lock. Locked on the outside, not within. Less against invaders than against the escape of one of his women … The lock was stiff; it seemed to Rohana, quaking in the quiet street, that it creaked loudly enough to alarm the whole town, but after a moment it gave and the door swung noiselessly inward. The band of Amazons crowded inside, shrinking against the inner wall, pushing the door closed.
    They stood in a quiet and deserted garden. Here in the Drylands little grew unless it was planted, except thornbush; but Jalak, tyrant of Shainsa, had spared no expense to create an oasis for himself and his pampered women and favorites. A multitude of fountains splashed, tall trees towered overhead, and flowers grew in lush profusion, with a sweet, damp, rank smell. On silent feet, guided by the sketch Rohana had made after the rapport with Melora, the women threaded their way along the bricked pathway, and paused in the shadow of a grove of blackfruit trees.
    “Leeanne,” Kindra whispered.
    As the slender, sexless figure moved away toward, Rohana knew, the chamber where Melora’s twelve-year-old daughter slept with her nurse, Rohana found herself wondering incongruously how a neutered Amazon thought of herself. Not as a woman, surely. A man? Some indefinable third thing? She dismissed the thought impatiently. What nonsense to be thinking about now!
    They moved toward the unguarded garden door; a moment later they were actually inside. Rohana, moving now from memory of her rapport with Melora, began to move directly toward the guarded room where Jalak slept.
    Was Melora awake, alert for them, expecting them? All this afternoon she had resisted the temptation to reach out for telepathic contact with her cousin, but now she yielded; reached for rapport, more easily as the long-neglected skill came back.
    — Melora, Melora! And suddenly, in a half-forgotten sensation of blending and merging, she was Melora, she…
    … She lay silent, facing the wall, every muscle tense and alert, willing herself to relax, be patient, wait. … In her body the heavy child kicked sharply, and she thought, with weary patience, You are so strong and lusty, little son, and, Avarra pity me, I have not even the heart to wish you more like to die It is not your fault but your ill fortune that you are Jalak’s son. …
    Will it truly be tonight? And the guards … how, how? The memory that had been with her, night and day, for ten years now of her foster-brother Valentine, broken, writhing, his fingers cut from his living body, covered in blood, after atrocities too many and too dreadful to think about. … Oh, Evanda and Avarra, Aldones, Lord of Light, not Rohana, too…
    No! I must not remember that now! I must be strong. …
    Painstakingly, muscle-by-muscle, she forced herself to relax.
    Jalak slept now, deeply: the first, sated sleep of the night.