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as he put a hand under her arm. Dizziness came and went in a long hot gray wave. She didn't want him to think her weak, so she didn't cling to him as she wanted to, seeking the familiar comfort of his warmth. She breathed a couple of times, hard, then said, "I'm fine. What the hell is it?" "I was hoping you might be able to tell me." "You're joking!"

The wizard glanced at the carcass-the short bulldog muzzle, the projecting chisel teeth, the body a lumpy ball of fat from which four thick-scaled, ropy legs projected-and made a small shrug. "You've identified many creatures in our world-the mammoths, the bison, the horrible-birds, and even the dooic-as analogous to those things that lived in your own universe long ago. I hoped you would have some lore concerning this."

Gil looked down at it again. Something in the shape of the flat ears, of the fat, naked cone of the tail-something about the smell of it-repelled her, not with alienness, but with a vile sense of the half familiar. She touched the spidery hands at the ends of the stalky brown limbs. It had claws like razors. What the hell did it remind her of?

Ingold pried open the bloody jaws. "There," he said softly. "Look." On the outsides of the gums, upper and lower, were dark, purplish, collapsed sacs of skin; Gil shook her head, uncomprehending. "How do you feel?" "Okay. A little light-headed."

He felt her hands again and her wrists, shifting his fingers a little to read the different depths of pulse. For all his unobvious strength, he had the gentlest touch of anyone she had ever known.

Then he looked back down at the creature. "It's a thing of the cold," he said at last. "Down from the north, perhaps? Look at the fur and the way the body fat is distributed. I've never encountered an arctic animal with poison sacs-never a mammal with them at all, in fact."

He shook his head, turning the hook-taloned fingers this way and that, touching the flat, fleshy ears. "I've put a general spell against poisons on you, which should neutralize the effects, but let me know at once if you feel in the least bit dizzy or short of breath."

Gil nodded, feeling both slightly dizzy and short of breath, but nothing she hadn't felt after bad training sessions with the Guards of Gae, especially toward the end of winter when rations were slim. That was something else, in the five years since the fall of Darwath, that she'd gotten used to.

Leaving her on the marble bench, with its carvings of pheasants and peafowl and flowers that had not blossomed here in ten summers, Ingold bundled the horrible kill into one of the hempen sacks he habitually carried, and hung the thing from the branch of a sycamore dying at the edge of the slunch, wreathed in such spells as would keep rats and carrion feeders at bay until they could collect it on their outward

journey.

Coming back to her, he sat on the bench at her side and folded her in his arms. She rested her head on his shoulder for a time, breathing in the rough pungence of his robes and the scent of the flesh beneath, wanting only to stay there in his arms, unhurried, forever.

It seemed to her sometimes, despite the forty years difference in their ages, that this was all she had ever wanted.

"Can you go on?" he asked at length. Carefully, he kissed the unswollen side of her mouth. "We can wait a little."

"Let's go." She sat up, putting aside the comfort of his strength with regret. There was time for that later. She wanted nothing more now than to find what they had come to Penambra to find and get the hell out of town.

"Maia only saw the Cylinder once." Ingold scrambled nimbly ahead of her through the gotch-eyed doorway of the colonnade and up over a vast rubble heap of charred beams, shattered roof tiles, pulped woodwork, and broken stone welded together by a hardened soak of ruined plaster. Mustard colored lichen crusted it, and a black tangle of all-devouring vines in which patches of slunch grew like dirty mattresses dropped from the sky. The broken statue of a female saint regarded them sadly from the mess: Gil automatically identified her by the boat, the rose, and the empty cradle as St. Thyella of Ilfers.

"Maia was always a scholar, and he knew that people were using fire as