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Hunters do not deal in frenzy. Hunters do not ever turn on their own. A Hunter does not simply lie down and cease to breathe, like a poisoned insect. I have been the intimate death of enough of them to know these facts to be inarguable. If it were no longer so—if they who had so tested me were now become as capricious as the rest of this mad world—then everything else I thought I knew had become equally indefinite, and every certainty well worth reconsidering. In which case…

…in which case, returning to
that place—
as I called it even when I lived there—was unavoidable. All that I had just experienced must surely signify
something
. I had to know what it was—and only those who had so long ago been my masters and companions, and later my spurned and murderous enemies, would be able to tell me. I was simply going to have to persuade them to do so without dying in the process.

And I knew I would have to go alone. I do not have so many friends that I can afford to waste any.

Here, circumstance was my ally. Lal had made me swear never to return to
that place
without her and her swordcane, but both of us had shortly after been swept up into separate employments. I had been deep in the north, just short of the Barrens, a long way from the dark woods and swift, cold rivers of my own country, as bodyguard for a wealthy merchant whose fear of assassination extended, justifiably, to very nearly his entire family; consequently I had not seen Lal for almost three years—rumor had her aboard a merchant coaster in the pirate-ridden Straits of Mashaq. As for the fox, who came and went as he chose, he was off on some devious enterprise of his own, which I would walk as far to ignore as he would to keep it from me. With luck my business would be over, for good or ill, before he sought my company again.

I have called it a monastery,
that place,
for lack of a better word; and in a literal sense the term is perfectly accurate. They do indeed have monks sworn to certain oaths and obediences, and there is a distant, unchanging hierarchy of masters whom my eleven-year-old runaway self had regarded as guests and companions of the gods, if not quite gods themselves. But the ecclesiastical aspect is the very least of what
that place
was. When it falls at last to ruin and abandon, as it someday will, that debris will still echo with secrets. For secrets, above everything, are the stock in trade of that silken, shadowed fortress where I spent nearly twenty years of my life. They peep from the cracks in the walls; they scuttle in the corners, and shelter in the whisper of the monks’ robes. In my time there, as I learned, there was literally nothing that kings sought to hide, that queens prayed to forget, or the wiliest of officials, church powers and businessmen worked to disguise, that was not known in
that place
.

I was a boy when I first came there, younger than my age in many ways. I left it—running once more—on the same night that I was finally offered entrance into that hierarchy: not as a monk, but as an initiate, a secret-sharer with a wearisome climb through the ranks ahead of me, but with a possibility of such eventual influence as no peasant-born child like me could have dreamt. Somehow I had judgment enough to turn the proposal down, and to fly for my life less than an hour after its making. The Hunters followed.

To return would be a long journey, and I was grateful to have had money enough for once to bargain for my good young mare, rather than the usual hairy, blunt-fanged
churfa;
you cannot imagine the pure restfulness of it, especially over such distance as I now contemplated. You do get used to a
churfa
’s stink and the pacing gait, I will admit, but never to the screaming. And I had no desire to announce my arrival earlier than I had to.

As for provisioning I needed no more than my bow, my flint and steel, a little dried meat, and the
trimoira
dagger, sharp as a winter breath, that I had removed from a lady who took rejection poorly. I am not especially adept with either points or edges, but I thought the dagger might come in useful at least for cooking. Neither Lal nor I travel heavily armed: my experience is that if you need a wagonload of weaponry to feel secure, you are likely doomed before your bespoke sword clears the scabbard. Good sense, steady nerves, and a healthy lack of pride will carry you a deal further.

I had no plan—no strategy at all. I mention this because Lal, to this day, remains obsessed with the notion that I invariably set off blindly into the unknown, improvising as I go, which is simply not true. But in this case, my reasoning ran, two decades of plotting and speculating and reasoning had brought me no closer to ridding myself of the Hunters, nor of
that place’s
lingering hold on me. Therefore I would see what proximity would do. My idea was to approach boldly and innocently, in the guise of a benighted traveler: a tall, brown woman whom I had not been in very many years. Not since Corcorua, really, not since the inn, the old Gaff and Slasher, and the wizard Lal always called
my friend
and I
the man who laughs,
who taught me the trick…not since that time had I again needed to be that woman. However altered or reduced
that place
might or might not be, it was still the dwelling of certain persons of great power and consequence. Soukyan the hunted would surely never get within two days’ ride of that wicked old house—but a stranger, lost and confused in strange country?

Originally I had been traveling south on the coast road, on my way to another chance of bodyguarding in Sai’surak, whose sole attraction was the prospect of a warm winter. When I became aware of the Hunters trailing me, I had turned west—just before Leishai, it was—and now, after our encounter, I went southwest on farmcart roads and goat paths, doing all I knew to avoid notice. I did not know the names of any of the hamlets through which I slipped between midnight and dawn; nor did I recognize any of the songs I heard ploughboys whistling behind their red oxen. Often I could have used the fox’s yappingly derisive company, or even one of Lal’s endless, tuneless chants from her homeland. Yet I stayed alert as I rode, nor ever slept straight through a night, but took my rest in fragments and splinters, for it was hard to believe that the disappearance of three Hunters at once would not have set the shadows in
that place
ringing like temple bells. I raided orchards and kitchen gardens at midnight, killed whatever I could cook over the small, smokeless fires that my sister taught me to make, slept in the saddle from time to time, and rode on.

When I judged the moon and stars to be just so—
the man who laughs’
directions could be maddeningly casual—I said the spell as I remembered it, and let the woman-guise drift down over me, like a cobweb, letting it happen slowly, so as not to bewilder or frighten my mare. In each pool or stream where we halted to drink, I glimpsed the brown face that was not my own more and more clearly, feeling her presence more and more in my body: an old friend come to call, shy with years at the first, but increasingly at ease to find herself welcome.
Hello, old friend.

Her name in the old days had been Nyatenari; it would not serve me now. I must choose another.

Aye, it was tedious journeying, that long road that I plodded back into the past. The further southwest I struck, the more my path was haunted, not by anxiety over my destination, but by steadily intensifying recollections of a boy running in darkness, his chest splitting with pain, his heart hammering with triumph and terror, weeping for his sister and listening for the dogs. I remembered too well.

As I also remembered—rising before me out of the dank mists, like a dark moon, invisible a moment earlier—the walls and spire of
that place,
with one light showing in the kitchen. Whatever the memory of that solitary light signified for me today, that running boy had never been as overpowered with joy to see anyone or anything. He had burst through the kitchen door, wet with tears, soaked through with sweat and a dead man’s blood, and the cook took him in.

As she hid him again twenty years later, when it was worth her life to do so. I have never forgotten her, either.

Far west of Leishai the country turns gradually boggy, especially as you near
that place.
There are marshes fed by underground springs, and there are even occasional patches of quicksand—not deep or wide enough yet to qualify as a dangerous mire, but larger than I remembered, here and there even interrupting the road. I found myself musing on the fact that my former masters and mentors had allowed this path to their dwelling to go so notably to ruin. I had to assume, for safety’s sake, that the change was one of deliberate policy, but I had other hopes I couldn’t ignore.

A mile or so from my goal I dismounted, caught up the mare’s reins, and walked on with her the rest of the way: not because I had any expectation of arriving unobserved, but because she had kept her end of the bargain faithfully, despite lately favoring her off hind leg somewhat. I intended to ride away as I had come; my life and death might very well hang upon her good health.

That place
always takes you by surprise. It appears abruptly between one bend in the road and another—not loomingly sky-filling, like the black castle in Fors na’Shachim, where the Queens live, nor as slyly terrifying as the Nameless Tower just west of Drakali, which is supposed to be empty and is not—but oddly elegant, even attractive, with its two simple wings, two soapbubble roofs, and single spire. I knew a house once that was not really a house, and ate things.
That place
is a little like that.

My strongest impulse was to enter by the half-hidden kitchen door, as I had first come there, and later left; and I probably would have done so, had I imagined that my childhood friend and savior the cook might still be behind it. But I knew better, and could only pray that she had suffered no punishment for aiding me. When I stabled the mare I saw several other horses in residence, so I knew
that place
was not yet abandoned; then I walked around to the great double front door—which has no lock, and needs none—and pulled the bell rope.

Standing once again on that stone threshold, I was prey to a chill loneliness that made me wish I had listened to Lal’s fiercely urgent warnings. What had I imagined accomplishing on my own? What exactly did I
want
to accomplish, with or without assistance? To strike at the Hunters, or at the Hunters’ masters, when I had no idea how many of either there might be, but a very good idea of the damage that even one Hunter could wreak on a human body? To pull down
that place
against the wishes of the great figures its masters could call on to extend a finger and crush me, if they could not be bothered to do it themselves? Oh, I heard Lal in that moment, as clearly as ever I have.

I assumed that I had been intently observed on my road for at least this day, and was being watched now, but I had already determined to behave like any traveler innocently requesting shelter from a house of humble clerics. I rang a second time, stepped back and called out loudly, “Good fathers, I have lost my way and seek lodging for the night—can you oblige me?” The bell woke no echoes, nor could I hear it sounding anywhere within, but I knew where it rang, and who heard it, and I knew who would be most likely to answer the door, as long a time as it had been. I even knocked once or twice, loudly and pointlessly, just because he always hated that.

As I had expected, it was Brother Laska who opened to me. Brother Laska had been doddering through my youth; he was doddering and palsied now, hanging onto the great door to stand erect, seemingly barely capable of speaking a coherent sentence of challenge or welcome. Nevertheless, he remained as ominous and chillingly senile a figure as I remembered, and I would have wagered whatever I possessed that he continued in
that place’s
highest council, glowering and hiccupping as ever before. I greeted him as a stranger, giving him the name I had decided upon—Jalsa—and saying “Father, I am a woman alone and unprotected, with my horse spent and night coming on. I beseech refuge and asylum therefore.” Then I held my breath, strangely assured that if Brother Laska did not know me in my woman’s guise, nobody would.

Nor did he; but merely blinked his yellow-crusted eyes, muttered something indistinguishable from the chronic whine in his chest, and turned, leaving the door open, to totter up the stairs and deliver my message. Seeing no reason to wait outside in the growing dark, I walked into the house behind him, where I stood very still indeed, looking around.

Nothing, and too much, had changed. As far as I could judge, not a single item in the grand entrance hall had been moved or replaced, cleaned or repaired. As a back-country peasant child I had never ceased to marvel at the style and furnishing of the great house that had given me such safe haven: it was only now—grown, traveled and far more questioning—that I noted the worn weariness of chairs and benches, carpets and curtains and such ornamentation as there was. The stone elegance of the exterior was matched nowhere within: what was not dark oak was heavy cast iron or dull brass. No one would ever have taken that dusty, lifeless mansion for a fortress of silence, a stronghold of secrets.

The man who came down to meet me I had once known as the young Brother Caldrea, firm overseer of those even younger, like me; but by his bearing and his confident air I realized immediately that he had clearly been promoted. And there is only one rank above “Brother” in
that place
.

He was as lean as I remembered, and rather slight, not yet fifty, with thinning blond hair, a well-cut blond beard, eyes of an oddly opaque gray, and pale skin drawn notably tight over strong jaw and cheekbones. He wore a robe no different from Brother Laska’s robe, except for a very small golden pin in the shape of a circle up near his throat. He raised an eyebrow at the sight of my bow, but addressed me genially enough, saying, “Madame Jalsa, you are safe here with us for the night. I myself will show you to your room.”