"It will probably prove unrelated to the business at hand, yet I should prefer to leave no avenue untried," mused Nysander. "And now let us lay our plans for tomorrow."
Dawn was only a few hours away when they'd finished, and Alec suddenly gave in to a cavernous yawn.
"Sorry," he said, yawning again.
Seregil grinned. "No wonder you're tired. You've been busy!"
Thero would be a lot better-looking if he'd smile more, Alec thought, surprised at the difference it made.
What must Seregil's face look like now, with Thero's mind behind it?
"I'm done in myself," Micum said. "If we're all in agreement on tomorrow's work, Alec and I had better go find our beds before the sun comes up."
"You're getting old," Seregil scoffed, following them upstairs. "Used to be we'd be up for two or three days before you'd begin to flag."
"By the Flame, you've got that right! Another few years and I'll be happy to spend my days in a sunny corner of Kari's garden spinning lies for the servants" children."
At the workroom door, Alec turned for a last look at Seregil in Thero's body. He couldn't imagine a more unlikely combination. Shaking his head, he said, "It's good to have you back—sort of."
"Sort of good or sort of back?" Seregil countered, managing a semblance of his familiar lopsided grin in spite of the beard.
"Sort of both," said Alec.
"And I sort of thank you, all of you, for your good work tonight on my behalf," Seregil said, clasping hands with them. "Things were beginning to look a bit grim in that cell. Between the four of us, we should be able to sort things out soon enough."
A crushing weariness settled over Seregil as he went back downstairs. Collapsing gratefully on Thero's clean, narrow bed, he hadn't the strength left to pull off his shoes.
It's the magic, he thought, drifting off to sleep. Damn stuff always wears me out.
Exhausted as he was, the night was not a peaceful one. Tossing restlessly, he fought his way through a
parade of uneasy dreams. At first they were only fragmented glimpses of the past few days-a distorted event, repetitious snippets of conversation, faces of no consequence looming again and again. Gradually, however, the images began to coalesce.
He was still in Thero's body, riding on horseback through the city. It was dark and he was lost. The street markers were gone, the lamps unlit on their hooks. Frustrated and a little frightened,he pushed on at a gallop.
His horse had no head; the reins passed over a smooth, glossy hump and disappeared somewhereunderneath the animal's chest.
I can't stop it anyway, he thought. Letting go of the reins, he clung to the saddlebow.
Flecked with sweat, the strange creature thundered for hours, carrying him down one unfamiliar street after another until an owl flew up beneath its feet. Startled, the horse reared and threw him,then disappeared into the surrounding darkness.
Looking up, he found himself at the gate of Red Tower Prison.
Enough! I'm getting my own body back right now! he thought angrily, floating up from the groundand soaring to the roof of the prison.
It felt wonderful to fly, and he circled the Tower a few times, savoring it. The ships in the harborwere all on fire, however, and this disturbed him greatly. Diving like a swallow, he darted in through a hole in the prison roof.
It was dark here, too. Stumbling through the blackness, he spied a glimmer of light ahead. It came through the grille of a cell door. The door was locked but the wood turned to red butterflies at his touch. Passing through their gentle resistance, he stepped into a fiery brightness and threw his arm up to shield his eyes.
His true body stood in the center of the room, naked except for the crawling mass of tiny,spider-shaped flames that encased it from the neck down.
They should be gone! he thought, repulsed by the sight.
His body raised a hand to its chest, saying with Thero's voice, "They're coming from here."
"I'll stop them."
Approaching cautiously, Seregil brushed at the flame creatures on the chest. They fell away at histouch, revealing a bright blue eye glaring hatefully from a bloody hole in the chest just over the breastbone. Recoiling, Seregil watched in mounting horror as the skin around the eye began to twitch and stretch. The flame creatures crumpled and fell away and he could see the writhing motions beneath the skin of his body's chest and belly, as if something hideous was clawing its way out from inside.
Tears of blood streamed down from the unnatural eye but his face—Thero's now—smiled calmly.Still smiling, Thero leapt at him, arms outstretched as if to embrace him. With a strangled cry, Seregil fell backward through the red butterflies—
He sat up with a gasp. Pulling free of the tangled sheets, he went to the hearth and poked up a fire bright enough to light the room. His clothes were soaked through with cold, sour sweat. Stripping them off, he looked down at the pale, angular body he inhabited. Little wonder he was dreaming of his own!
The details of the nightmare were already skittering away, but he recalled the image of the eye with a shudder.
Tossing a few more logs on the fire, he climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up to his nose.
As he drifted back to sleep it occurred to him that this was the first time in weeks that he'd dreamed at all.
Late-morning light was streaming in at the open window when he opened his eyes again. Lying quietly for a moment, he discovered that he'd forgotten most of the nightmare. His second sleep had been filled with dreams of a lascivious nature quite unlike his usual fare and he'd awakened to find Thero's body in an uncomfortable state of arousal. Cold water soon put a stop to that. He pulled on a clean robe and went up the tower stairs two at a time.
"Good morning!" Nysander smiled at him over a cup of morning tea, a familiar, reassuring sight. "Are you feeling more at—dear me, you appear to have slept badly."
"I did," Seregil admitted. "I had some nightmare about going after my body. It had that eye in the chest, where the scar is. It was all sort of familiar, in a way, like I'd dreamed it before."
"How unpleasant. Do you recall any more of it than that?"
"Not really. Something about flying, I think, and fire— I don't know. Later on there were other, different images. Is it possible for me to have Thero's dreams?"
"A mental link through his body? I should not think so. Why?"
Seregil rubbed his eyelids and yawned. "Oh, nothing. First night in a new body and all that. Just between you and me, though, a few days in the Street of Lights wouldn't do Thero any harm."
"He seems to be celibate by nature."
Seregil chuckled cryptically. "By practice, perhaps, but not by nature!"
They kept to Nysander's tower all day, avoiding anyone perceptive enough to detect a change in «Thero» — not an easy task in a house full of wizards.
Wethis appeared to notice nothing amiss, and Seregil noted with amusement the guarded dislike that lurked behind the young servant's deferential mask as he went about his daily duties in Thero's room.
At midday Nysander went out to attend to some business elsewhere in the House. Seregil was poking restlessly around the workroom when a sharp rap sounded at the tower door. It was House etiquette to open the door to all callers, so Seregil had no choice but to answer. Peering out, he found Ylinestra
waiting impatiently in the corridor.