The Hidden City

government—some leftover from that coup-attempt, most likely.’
    ‘I will wring his identity from them before I kill them,’ Liatris declared.
    Sarabian winced at the word ‘wring’.
    ‘We are near, Divine Aphrael.’ Xanetia’s voice seemed at once a long way away and very close. ‘Methinks I do smell water.’
    The dark, narrow street they followed opened out into some kind of square a hundred feet further on.
    ‘Let’s catch them all, Liatris,’ Elysoun urged her sister empress. ‘You might be able to beat one or two names out of Chacole and Torellia, but if we can catch the assassins in the actual attempt, we’ll be able to sweep the palace compound clean. If we don’t, our husband’s going to have to go through the rest of his life with a drawn rapier.’
    ‘Hark!’ Xanetia whispered in that other city. ‘I do hear the sound of running water.’ Danae concentrated very hard. It was exhausting to keep things separate.
    ‘I really hate to have to put it this way, Liatris,’ Sarabian said regretfully, ‘but I forbid you to kill either Chacole or Torellia. We’ll deal with them after their assassins try to kill me.’
    ‘As my husband commands,’ Liatris responded automatically.
    ‘What I want you to do is to protect Elysoun and Gahennas,’ he continued. ‘Gahennas is probably in the greater danger right now. Elysoun’s still useful to the people involved in this, but Gahennas knows more than they want her to. I’m sure they’ll try to kill her, so let’s get her out of the Women’s Palace tonight.’
    ‘It is beneath the street, Divine One,’ Xanetia said. ‘Methinks there is some volume of water passing under our feet.’
    ‘Truly,’ the Child Goddess replied. ‘Let’s follow the sound back to its source. There has to be some way to get to the water here in the outer city.’
    ‘How did you become involved in this, Elysoun?’ Liatris was asking.
    Elysoun shrugged. ‘I have more freedom of movement than the rest of you,’ she replied. ‘Chacole needed somebody she trusted to carry messages out of the Women’s Palace. I pretended to fall in with her plan. It wasn’t too hard to deceive Chacole. She is a Cynesgan, after all.’
    ‘It is here, Divine One,’ Xanetia whispered, laying her hand on a large iron plate set into the cobblestones. ‘Thou canst feel the urgent rush of water through the very iron.’
    ‘I’ll take your word for it, Anarae,’ Aphrael replied, cringing back from the notion of touching iron. ‘How do they get it open?’
    ‘These rings do suggest that the plate can be lifted.’
    ‘Let’s go back and get the others. I think this might be the weakness Bevier was looking for.’
    Danae yawned. Everything seemed to be under control, so she curled up in her chair, nestled Mmrr in her arms, and promptly fell asleep.
    ‘Couldn’t you have just—well—?’ Talen wiggled his fingers.
    ‘It’s iron, Talen,’ Flute said with exaggerated patience She shuddered. ‘I can’t bear the touch of iron.
    ‘So? What’s that got to do with it?’
    Bevier looked intently at her. ‘Bhelliom suffers from the same affliction,’ he observed.
    ‘Yes. So what?’
    ‘That would suggest a certain kinship.’
    ‘Your grasp of the obvious is positively dazzling, Bevier.’
    ‘Behave yourself,’ Sparhawk chided.
    ‘What’s so unpleasant about iron?’ Talen asked. ‘It’s cold, it’s hard, you can pound it into various shapes, and it gets rusty.’
    ‘That’s a nice scholarly description. Do you know what a lodestone is?’
    ‘It’s a piece of iron ore that sticks to other iron, isn’t it? I seem to remember Platime talking about something called magnetism once.’
    ‘And you actually listened? Amazing.’
    ‘That’s why Bhelliom had to congeal itself into a sapphire!’ Bevier exclaimed. ‘It’s the magnetism of iron, isn’t it? Bhelliom can’t bear it—and neither can you, isn’t that so?’
    ‘Please, Bevier,’ Aphrael said weakly. ‘Just thinking about it makes my flesh crawl. Right now we don’t want to talk about iron. We want to talk about water. There’s a stream or river of some kind running under the streets here in the outer city, and it’s flowing in the direction of the inner wall. There’s a large iron plate set in the middle of the street not far from here, and you can hear the water running beneath it. I think that’s the weakness you were looking for. The water’s running through a tunnel of some kind, and that