Blood of the Fold

She shuffled woodenly into the Prelate's office, on her way to the Prelate's bed The candle had guttered and gone out, so she lit another on the desk still stacked with waiting reports. Phoebe worked hard at seeing to it that it stayed that way. What was Phoebe going to think when she found out that she wasn't really the Prelate's administrator? That she had been appointed by a quite unremarkable Sistei: of little note?

Tomorrow, she would have to apologize to Warren. This wasn't his fault. She shouldn't take it out on him.

Just before she went through the door to the outer office, she stopped in her tracks.

Her diaphanous shield was shredded. She looked back at the desk. No new reports had been added to the piles.

Someone had been snooping around.

CHAPTER 26

Sheets of rain raked the deck of the ship. The barefoot men crouched, tense and ready, their bulging muscles glistening in the faint yellow lamplight as they watched the distance close, and then, with a sudden burst of effort, they leapt into the darkness. After they landed, they sprang up to catch the lead-weighted fists at the ends of light heaving lines lofted across die murky chasm after them. Hand over hand, the men hauled across the heavy docking lines attached to the heaving lines.

Moving with swift efficiency, they looped the wrist-thick dock lines around the massive pilings, planted their feet, and bent their backs against the drag, using the pilings for purchase. Wet wood creaked and groaned as the lines took up the tension. The rows of men straining against the burden gave ground until they brought the slow but seemingly inexorable headway of the Lady Sefa to a halt. Grunting in unison, they began taking back the ground they had yielded, and the ship slowly drew toward the rain-slicked pier as men aboard dropped bundled rope fenders over the side to protect the hull.

Sister Ulicia, bunched together with Sisters Tovi, Cecilia, Armina, Nicci, and Merissa under a tarp drumming in the pelting rain, watched as Captain Blake paced the deck, angrily shouting orders at men running to see them carried out. He hadn't wanted to bring the Lady Sefa into the narrow wharf in such weadier, to say nothing of the dark, but instead to anchor in the harbor and bring the women ashore in the longboat. Ulicia was in no mood to be drenched as they were rowed a half mile to shore, and had summarily dismissed his pleas about having to launch all the boats to tow die ship in with the sweeps. One glare had cut off his reiteration of the dangers, and sent him tight-lipped to the task.

The captain snatched his sodden hat from his head as he stopped before them. "We'll have you ashore shortly, ladies."

"It didn't appear as difficult as you made it out to be, Captain," Ulicia said.

He wrung his hat. "We got her in. Though why you'd want to come way down the coast to Grafan Harbor is beyond me. Getting back to Tanimura over land from this forsaken army outpost is not going to be the ease it would have been had you let us take you straight there by sea."

He left unsaid that it would have had them off his ship days sooner, which was undoubtedly the reason he had offered, with effusive graciousness, to take them straight back to Tanimura as they had originally wanted. Ulicia would have liked nothing better, but she had had no choice in the matter. She had done as she was ordered.

She peered up, beyond the wharf, to where she knew he waited. Her companions' eyes, too, stared into the same darkness.

The hills overlooking the harbor were visible only in the crackling flashes of lightning, appearing suddenly out of the void, and except when the lightning sporadi cally revealed the lay of the high ground, the feeble glow of lights coming from the massive stone fortress hunkered high on a distant hill appeared to be floating in the inky sky. Only in the brief illumination could she see the bleak, rain-slicked: stone walls.

Jagang was there.

Being before him in the dream was one thing — she could eventually wake — bui being before him in the flesh was quite another. There would be no waking, now. She clutched the link tighter to herself. For Jagang, there was going to be no waking either. Her true Master would have him, and make him pay.

"Looks like you're expected."

Ulicia snatched herself from her thoughts and redirected her attention to the captain. "What?"

He pointed with his hat. "That coach must be for you ladies; there sure enough isn't anyone else about but all those soldiers."

Staring off into the gloom, she finally saw the black coach, with its team of six huge geldings, waiting on the road at the top of the wall above the wharf. Its door stood open. Uficia had to remind herself to let the breath go from her lungs.

It would be over soon. Jagang would pay. They had only to see it through.