"Yes, my lord, I swear it. I swear it."

"And none of you will ever lie to me again, or to anyone from Castle Spinweb, about the quality of your wool."

"It shall be as you say, my lord. Always."

Cray dropped his staff and gestured for his bundle of wool to come bouncing through the grain to him.

Then he shrugged off his knapsack and drew Regneniel from it. "Become a bird, O demon," he said, andhe tossed the mouse a few paces off. In moments, his feathered steed was ready for flight, and he mounted, and together they leaped into the sky. As they soared upward, Cray released the spell that made the grain stalks strong as steel, and when he looked back and down he could see the men on their feet, staring after him as he flew away.

He sighed.Poor fools, he thought. They had gotten more than they reckoned for on this day. Yet he had no feeling of triumph at the outcome. Rather, he wished they had not forced him to reveal himself, for he knew now that they would live in fear of him, always wondering if he might not change his mind someday and return for stronger vengeance. Now they would watch the skies, and every white bird would seem a signal of danger.Poor fools. He shook his head. "You were certainly right about these mortals, Regneniel. They were unpredictable indeed." He scanned the horizon but saw nothing between it and himself save fields and pastures and the winding ame-thyst river. "Do you know this Lord Olerat's Castle Vale, Regneniel?"

"There is a castle some distance up the river," replied the demon. "There is none closer. But I do not know its name."

"Let us fly there. I am curious to see it."

"As you wish."

High above the river, they cut a straight path across its lazily looping course. The land rolled below them, a human being or an animal visible now and then, even a peasant hut close by the river, and later a whole cluster of them, a village. They were just pass-ing over the village when Cray caught his first glimpse of the castle on the northern horizon. The sun was low to his left, an orange ball floating above the gentle hills, and the castle was a jagged silhouette against the deepening blue ahead. As they approached it, Cray realized it was as large as any mortal castle he had ever seen, its walls enclosing enough space to contain an entire town such as he had explored this day. It commanded the summit of a hill that, though low, was the loftiest in sight, and it sprawled from that summit down to the very base of the hill, its many-towered walls ringing that base like a crown. Such a castle had to be the seat of a powerful lord, and Cray wondered how the townspeople could have had the courage to defy him. Then, turning to look back the way they had come, he realized that the town lay far beyond the horizon, perhaps farther than a man on horseback could travel in half a month. By the standards he knew, that placed it on the periphery of even the most powerful lord's domain. He shook his head wryly. Riding a demon, he had begun to think of distance as a demon did, and any two places he could visit in a single day seemed close together.

The river deepened as it passed the castle, cutting a gorge that made that side unapproachable by ordinary mortals. In the red light of the lowering sun, the fast-flowing water sparkled, its purple color drowned in the ruddy light. And the castle itself sparkled, catching the sunset on dozens of crystalline windows set high in its towers. With so many different kinds of crystal plentiful hereabouts, Cray mused, it was only natural that a powerful-and therefore wealthy-lord would have very large pieces placed in his windows to keep out the weather while letting in the sunlight. Cray smiled at that, and he fingered his pouch, where the egg-sized amethyst nestled; perhaps he would bring some of that large crystal home someday, to make a window or two for Spinweb.

High above the castle they soared, circling its tow-ers, its courtyards, marking its perimeter in the sky.

Below, soldiers on the walls seemed toy figures, their pikes like knitting needles, their torches like firefly-glow. The sun sank below the western horizon, and the whole castle was outlined with torches, like a pattern of luminous beads upon the hill.

"We can stay no longer," said Regneniel. "My lady commanded me to bring you back for supper, andwe have only enough time for the return trip."

"Very well," said Cray. "I won't play the traveler here today. Another day, perhaps."

The great bird wheeled and started southward at high speed, and Cray clung close to its feathered back in the deepening dark. There was no moon to light the way, but a demon needed none, needed not even the stars to show its course, for it had senses other than human ones to guide it. On Cray's right, the last faint glow of the sun faded away, and above him the stars brightened till they were white and crisp and cold in the black sky. Below, the ground was invisible. Cray flew, somewhere in the middle of nothingness, with only the unimaginably distant stars overhead to show that there was a world outside his wind-buffeted self.

And then he shivered, and not just because the wind that whipped his flesh was chill with the loss of the sun. He shivered because, looking up at that vast array of pinpoint lights, he recognized not a single one.

He had watched the sky ten thousand nights from Spinweb's walls, and he knew the patterns of the stars as he knew the flowers in his mother's garden. But not these patterns, not these stars. Where was the Wain, the Hunter, the Lion? He could not even find the Northern Star, which should have stood high over his shoulder, about which all the rest swung.

Crystalline mountains. Rivers running with gemstone sand. Strange plants and animals. And now the sky itself transformed.

I am very far from home,he thought.Very far. And a piercing sense of loneliness assailed him, there in the unknown sky, a loneliness such as he had never known before.

He was glad when the demon bird swooped down toward their destination, toward the palace that glowed like a living jewel with its own internal radiance, glad to see those transparent walls draw near, and gladder still to see Aliza herself waiting by the open window, her pale face tilted up to watch him descend. Here at least was some refuge from the loneliness, a familiar place, a familiar voice, familiar cool dark eyes. He and his steed slipped smoothly past her and lighted with the gentlest of thumps on the crystalline floor.

Chapter 6.

"You've been gone a long time," Aliza said as Cray dismounted from his great white demon steed. As soon as his feet touched the floor, the bird began to dwindle, and in a moment it had regained the awk-ward, angular shape in which it normally served its mistress.

Cray bowed to her. "Forgive me for causing you worry, my lady. But Regneniel assured me we would be back in time for supper."

"Yes, yes, you are," Aliza said quickly. "I wasn't worried. I knew Regneniel would look after you. But ... I thought you would tire of the human realm a bit more quickly."

"It's a most interesting place," he said, smiling at her. "You should try exploring it sometime."

Her lips quirked, as if she were suppressing a smile in answer to his. "Precisely what I expected you to say." She gestured toward the bundle under his arm. "I see you brought something back with you." "A packet of wool for my mother. There's something of an adventure connected with it, if you'd like to hear."

"Somethinginteresting that happened to you in the human realm?"

"I think so."

"Why don't you tell me about it while we sup?" She pointed past him, and when he turned to look in that direction, he saw that the far end of the huge room now had a bit of furniture in it-a crystalline table set with a cold supper for two, flanked by a pair of famil-iar wooden chairs. "I thought we could sit over there," said Aliza, "out of the wind but still in full view of those stars you spoke of earlier."

"The stars. Ah, yes." He fell in step beside her as she walked toward the table. "I suppose you don't look at them very often."

"Not very often."

As they reached the table, the luminosity above and below them began to fade. At the same time, the table itself began to glow softly, radiating as much as a dozen candles, an eerie sort of illumination that left the plates as pools of shadow and the wine in crystalline goblets like hemispherical chunks of stained glass. The transparent walls of the palace seemed to vanish in the darkness, leaving the table and two human beings suspended in air, with only the star-strewn sky as their roof.

"If you really want to look at them," Aliza said, "there's no use in having so much light to drown them out."

He did not even have to lift his eyes to see them. But he was not looking at them now. He was looking at Aliza's face; lit from below, it had hollows he had not noticed before, and her dark eyes seemed deep set in the shadows above her cheekbones. He raised his glass. "To you, my lady Aliza, and to the marvelous worlds in which you live."

She stared at him, her expression puzzled. "What's that you're doing?"

"Making a toast, of course."

"What is a toast?"

He had to laugh. "I have more to tell you than I thought. Much more." He sipped from his goblet. "Ah, Maretian. I see Regneniel did fetch more."

"Yes. Yes it did." Her eyes strayed from his face and focused on something beyond his shoulder. She waved sharply, and when Cray turned to look in that direction, he saw the faint light of the table glinting from Regneniel's retreating form.

"Where does your demon go when you dismiss it?" he asked. "Out to Ice or to some hidey-hole here in the palace?"

Aliza shrugged. "Does it matter? It comes when I call; that's the only important thing. Now ... You were going to tell me what a toast was."

* * * Over the years, the ruined castle had gradually been rebuilt, though by human rather than demon workers. It had not regained its former grandeur in the process; its towers were stubby now and far less numerous, its courtyard-facing rooms were walled as much by wood as by stone, its keep rose only two stories, and those shallower than once they were. But the loose debris was gone, most of the chambers had roofs, and if some of the stairways were still crumbled, why, they led nowhere important anyway.

One addition had been made to the structure, never planned by its former master: copper. Every layer of new mortar had copper strands embedded in it, every window opening was rimmed with copper ribbon, ev-ery doorway, every crenelation of the battlements was outlined in copper. If the stone could all suddenly become invisible, the shape of the castle would remain in ruddy copper lines.

A few of the workers that had labored on the castle still lived in it, or their children, or their brothers, their sisters. They came from the nearest village, ten days' journey away; they came to serve the sorcerer Everand in exchange for his protection of their village. In exchange for his promise not to kill them all with a wave of his hand. They stayed in simply furnished quarters to one side of the courtyard; they had made all of the furnishings themselves. Everand lived in the keep, at the heart of the castle, and save for a few crystalline gewgaws, the furnishings of his quarters were no better than theirs.

To the keep came Regneniel. Its journey, which would have taken a month on horseback, required only moments by way of Ice.

Everand was sitting at his worktable, drawing copper wire. When he saw the demon at his window, he put the tongs aside and stood up. "What news?"

The demon bowed low before him. "The visitor wished to explore some of the human realm near her palace, and she commanded me to fly with him while she remained behind. Shortly after full dark we returned, and now the two of them are supping together."

"Supping together," muttered Everand. Then he struck the table so hard with one fist that all the apparatus upon it jumped. "I won't have it!" he shouted. "What right does this Cray Ormoru have to interrupt her studies?" He pointed a finger at the demon. "If he doesnot leave tomorrow morning, you will remind her, gently but firmly, that she has work to attend to. My yearly examination is coming up, and I expect a certain amount of progress from her, and every moment that she wastes with this, thisvisitor is a moment that would otherwise have helped her to achieve the level of competence that I expect!" He clutched the edge of the table with white-knuckled fingers. "She'll tire of him, of course. It's just the novelty of another mortal. At least she didn't go off exploring with him! She knows her purpose. But this Cray Ormoru and his stupid mirror! I thought she was safe from all outside influences." He clasped his hands behind his back and, turning away from the demon, paced out the length of the room once, twice.

Then he stopped at the far end of the table and picked up a length of copper rod as big around as his wrist. He rolled it between his palms. "Perhaps I'm making too much of this. Perhaps it's really nothing at all. A day or two-what difference will they make in the long run? One visitor, one curious young man ...

Very well; I remember being young and curious. And at-tracted by a pretty girl. But he'll tire of her.

She's cold as an Ice demon, cold as you are, Regneniel. He'll tire of her." He waved one hand at the demon. "Go back now, I have work to do."

"I don't understand why you're so reluctant to use your power in front of ordinary mortals," Aliza said, sipping from her second goblet of wine. "You could have avoided all that unpleasantness if you had done a few tricks at the very beginning. Then they would never have suspected you of being a tax gatherer." Cray nodded. "You're quite right. They would have bowed and scraped and cringed before the great sorcerer. They would have given me anything I wanted, out of fear. But I don't much care for inspiring fear. I suppose I'm just not comfortable being a master. Which makes me a rather unusual sort of sorcerer, doesn't it?"

Aliza shrugged. "Power and mastery-are they not the same thing?"

"Not necessarily. One can use power to help others rather than to dominate them. If I had completed my training as a knight, I would have had a certain amount of power-not just skill, but authority as well-and I would have been expected to use it in the service of my lord, in promoting his justice and defending his honor." He looked into his goblet, into the deep red of its contents. "Of course, I didn't delude myself on that score. I knew there were nobles as greedy and selfish as any sorcerer, who used their knights to oppress common folk and to make war for unjust gain. I had seen much of the world in my mother's webs, and I had few illusions. Still, I felt that if I searched long enough I could find an honest lord to serve, a decent and just master whose purposes would never shame me. I think I found such a one in my travels; I trained for a winter at his castle. Perhaps I would have joined his household permanently if sorcery had not called me back. Perhaps." He looked up at her. "You see, I had no objections at all to serving rather than com-manding. It just turned out not to suit my purposes." He took a swallow of wine. "Those were good days, in my youth. I didn't appreciate them enough at the time."

"I can't imagine living as an ordinary mortal," Aliza said.

"Few sorcerers can, I think."

"Without any power at all. Having to scrape at the earth for food, or barter things made by my own hands." She frowned. "I remember, on our way to that town I told you of, with my mother, we passed fields of grain, and people were working there, bent over. The men had their shirts off, and they were sweating. It was a warm day, but I wasn't sweating, and I remember thinking how hard they must be work-ing to sweat like that."

"Oh, yes," said Cray, "sorcery has its advantages-there is no doubt about that."

"What was it like," she wondered, "training to be a knight?"

"Sweaty." He smiled at her. "Have you ever seen a knight?"

"Yes. Once. Out there." She pointed to the dark-ness that lay beyond the transparent wall. "It was a long time ago. I hadn't raised the mountains yet, and there was still forest all around the palace, no sand at all." She glanced sidelong at Cray. "Yes, hard as that may be to believe, there was forest here at one time, so close that if I opened a window I could put my hand out and touch the leaves on the trees." She gazed out into the night again. "The palace was much smaller then, but its uppermost rooms were already above the treetops. He must have seen them from the hills. Regneniel called my attention to him; even then, I didn't spend much time in this part of the palace. When I saw him he was crashing through the trees on his horse, hacking at the downhanging branches, as if he were angry with them-there wasn't any path, of course. He came right up to the wall and he stared at it for a long time, and then he rode all the way around the building, apparently looking for an entrance. When he didn't find one, he began to bang on the wall with his lance. It made a terrible racket. Terrible. He spent most of the day doing that, on one wall after another, and then he built a fire right outside and stayed awake the whole night, staring, just staring. In the morning he tried the lance again, but eventually he got tired of that and went away. I was glad to see him go, too. Aside from the noise, I thought he might do some damage to my walls." Shelooked back at Cray. "That was before I realized how strong they were. Or perhaps I should say, that waswhen I realized how strong they were."

"How did you know he was a knight if you'd never seen one before?"

"I didn't at the time. He was just a very large man on a very large horse, and he carried a lance and a shield and wore a suit of steel plate. Later my grandfa-ther told me what such people were called." Her eyes slid downward from Cray's face to his arms and shoulders. "I suppose you have to be very strong to wear all that steel. Somehow you don't quite look like you could manage it."

He chuckled softly. "It was a long time ago, my lady. And I never did get to wearing plate. Just chain.

That was heavy enough, believe me. I told you it was sweaty work to be a knight." He cupped his goblet in his two hands-his second goblet of wine, but he had hardly touched it. He wanted to stay awake this eve-ning. "But tell me: you watched him for so long, didn't he ever try to communicate with you? To shout, or perhaps to write messages in the dirt or some such?"

She shook her head. "He couldn't see me. I was looking out at him through a mirrored interior wall. You saw the kind. I can see out through it, but no one can see in."

"You didn't have any desire to find out what he wanted?"

"Hewanted to come in, I knew that well enough. And when he couldn't find a door, he was willing to smash his way in. I didn't want to meet someone like that. I didn't know what he would do when he found me."

Cray leaned back in his chair. "Well, this is a mysterious-looking place and therefore attractive. A man passing by could easily believe that it might con-tain ... anything. Silver. Gold. A beautiful maiden." He smiled at her. "And he would be right on that score."

Without an answering smile, Aliza said, "If he had broken through my walls, I would have retreated into Ice. I already knew how to open fractures for myself by then. I would have led him into one and let it close on him. And there he would have been, crushed flat in Ice forever. His reward for disturbing my privacy."

"I'm glad you've changed your attitude toward strang-ers since then," Cray murmured.

She set her goblet down and lightly fingered its stem and foot. "Soon after he went away, I learned to bring that special sand up from deep within the earth, and to cast the spell that floats in the air above it.

My grandfather had Regneniel clear the trees and undergrowth from all around the palace, and I spread the sand thick and far. No one pounded on my walls after that. No one bothered me."

"Until I came."

She nodded. "Even the Ice demons, when they come by, only look in for a time and then move on.

Since that day, that man with the lance, you are the only one who has ... petitioned to enter. You say you trained for a time to be a knight. Perhaps if you had become one, you would have arrived at my walls in Ice with a lance instead of a bell."

"You mustn't judge all knights by that one. Perhaps he had heard stories of the great magical jewel grow-ing in the middle of the forest. Perhaps he thought cold steel would break its enchantment and he would find something wonderful inside-I heard similar tales when I was training, though I always tookthem to be nonsense. They usually involved caves, or hollow trees, or holes under rocks, or even enchanted cottages in the depths of faraway forests, all of them entrances to netherworlds of treasure.

Bold men sought out those entrances and brought away as much gold as they could carry, and sometimes an enchanted princess as well, just to make the adventure complete. Mortals are full of such tales; they tell them in winter, sitting near a blazing hearth. But I never met a man who claimed to have had such an adventure. Those were always someone else, somewhere else; they had names, but no one had ever met them. And here the man came, his winters full of such stories, and he saw his opportunity to listen some cold night to a tale of himself. I'd guess the temptation to at least investigate this place was very strong."

"He was a brave man," Aliza remarked, "to chance death by sorcery. I recall thinking that at the time.

Brave. And very foolish."

"I have seen men that brave and that foolish," Cray replied. "Sorcerers are widely scattered, and aloof.

Only their nearest neighbors understand their power, and sometimes not even they. The vast majority of ordinary mortals know nothing of sorcery but what they tell each other in these winter tales. Real sorcery is as remote to them as the stars. I trained among such folk, and I know there are some of them who fear only mortal weapons, the lance, the sword, the arrow. In the stories, these weapons and a man's cleverness are always enough to overcome sorcery."

Aliza shook her head slowly. "Perhaps you should have enlightened them."

"Not I. I was a simple squire, and my task was to listen and learn, not to instruct."

Her cool dark eyes narrowed. "You found posing as an ordinary mortal to be ... interesting."

"I wasn't posing, my lady. I was an ordinary mortal. For that winter, at least. And yes, it was very interest-ing. I learned things that no sorcerer ever learns. Perhaps some of them would seem pointless to you, but I've found them useful."

"In your sorcery?"

"In my life."

She cocked her head to one side, her expression uncertain. "What sorts of things?"

"Camaraderie. Cooperation. And, I hope, some mea-sure of understanding of other mortals."

She shrugged. "Things that are only important if other mortals happen to impinge upon your life."

"Sometimes they impinge, my lady, whether we ask for them or not. Your knight, for example."

"Or you," she said.

He inclined his head in acknowledgment of that. "It is always good to know how to deal with a thing effectively before being confronted with it. Who knows how many more times mortals may enter your life?"

"They won't enter if I don't want them to."