The Hidden City

there’s an emergency. If things were really desperate, I could fly us there.’
    Sephrenia shuddered. ‘It’s not that desperate, Aphrael.’
    Xanetia gave her Styric sister a puzzled look.
    ‘It makes her queasy,’ Aphrael explained.
    ‘No, Aphrael,’ Sephrenia corrected, ‘not queasy—terrified . It’s a horrible experience, Xanetia. She’s done it to me about five times in the past three hundred years. I’m an absolute wreck for weeks afterward.’
    ‘I keep telling you not to look down, Sephrenia,’ Aphrael told her. ‘If you’d just look at the clouds instead of down at the ground, it wouldn’t bother you so much.’
    ‘I can’t help myself, Aphrael,’ Sephrenia told her.
    ‘Is it truly so disturbing, sister mine?’ Xanetia asked.
    ‘You couldn’t even begin to imagine it, Xanetia. You skim along with nothing but about five thousand feet of empty air between you and the ground. It’s awful!’
    ‘We’ll do it the other way,’ Aphrael assured her.
    ‘I’ll start composing a prayer of thanksgiving immediately.’
    ‘We’ll stay the night in Dirgis,’ Aphrael told them, ‘and then tomorrow morning we’ll run down to Natayos. Sephrenia and I’ll stay out in the woods, Xanetia, and you can go into town and have a look around. If Mother’s really being held there, we should be able to bring this little crisis to an end in short order. Once Sparhawk knows exactly where she is, he’ll fall on Scarpa and his father like a vengeful mountain. Natayos won’t even be a ruin any more when he’s done. it’ll just be a big hole in the ground.’
    ‘He actually saw them,’ Talen reported. ‘He described them too well to have been making it up.’ The young thief had just returned from his foray into the seamier parts of Beresa.
    ‘What sort of fellow was he?’ Sparhawk asked. ‘This is too important for us to be taken in by random gossip.’
    ‘He’s a Dacite,’ Talen replied, ‘a guttersnipe from Jura. His pollitics go about as far as his purse. His main reason for joining Scarpa’s army in the first place was his enthusiasm for the idea of taking part in the looting of Matherion. We’re not talking about a man with high ideals here. When he got to Natayos and found out that there might be actual fighting involved, he started to lose interest. Anyway, I found him in one of the shabbiest taverns I’ve ever seen, and he was roaring drunk. Believe me, From, he was in no condition to lie to me. I told him that I was thinking of joining Scarpa’s army, and he turned all fatherly on me—”Don’ even skink about it, boy. It’s tur’ble there”—that sort of thing. He said that Scarpa’s a raving lunatic with delusions of invincibility who thinks he can just blow on the Atans and make them go away. He said he’d just about decided to desert anyway, and then Scarpa came back to Natayos—along with Krager, Elron and Baron Parok. They had the Queen and Alcan with them, and Zalasta met them at the gate. The Dacite happened to be nearby, so he could hear what they were saying. Evidently, Zalasta’s still got a few good manners, so he wasn’t very happy about the way Scarpa had been treating his prisoners. The two of them had an argument about it, and Zalasta tied his son into a very complicated knot with magic. I guess Scarpa was squirming around like a wont on a hot rock for a while. Then Zalasta took the ladies to a large house that had been fixed up for them. From what my deserter said, the house comes fairly close to being luxurious—if you discount the bars on the windows.’
    ‘He could have been coached,’ Sparhawk fretted. ‘Maybe he wasn’t as drunk as he appeared to be.’
    ‘Believe me, From, he was drunk,’ Talen assured him. ‘I cut a purse on my way to that tavern—just to keep in practice—so I had plenty of money. I poured enough strong drink into him to stun a regiment.’
    ‘I think he’s right, From,’ Stragen said. ‘There are just too many details for this to be a contrived story.’
    ‘And if this deserter had been sent to spin cobwebs for our benefit, why would he waste time and effort entertaining a young pickpocket?’ Talen added. ‘None of us look the way we did the last time Zalasta saw us, and I doubt that even he could have guessed how Sephrenia and Xanetia put their heads together to modify us.’
    ‘I still think we should hold off,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Aphrael’s going to put Xanetia into Natayos in a day or so, and Xanetia