"Done it?" Denisius's drink froze halfway to his mouth. "Done what?"

"Won a tiger-Namarri's heart like that -- well, her interest. He either would have paid her the money and bragged about wasting a season's earnings on one night of passion with a woman who thought he was a stupid joke, or else he would have made some idiot remark about her people and found himself nursing worse scars than mine. Never insult one of them. You'd be lucky to survive."

Denisius said nothing, feeling almost foolishly proud: apparently Vos thought him a charmer of werewolves and Namarri both. His manservant watched him closely as he sipped his drink. This trick Denisius had learned somewhat better than that of smoking rieldo, and in any event he enjoyed the stuff a good deal better, despite his sordid history with it. A question occurred to him. "How did she know I, erm, that is, that my body wanted her?" This was something he would dearly like to know about women, especially Carala. He sometimes couldn't tell whether she liked or merely tolerated him. Until the night she'd disappeared, to be fair, he had felt much the same way about her. But since he'd pledged the Emperor his service, that initial fondness had intensified.

Vos smirked, swirling the spirits and savoring their spiced aroma. "Well, milord, I could spin some tale about Namarri senses, how their eyes can read every inch of the human body, how their ears can hear your every heartbeat, how they can scent every mood you feel and even those your under-mind would hide from you." Denisius nodded. Vos stuck his chin out, indicating the lower half of his master's body. "But the fact is, you're hard as a lump of pig iron."

Denisius looked down. The telltale shape of his arousal, which had only barely diminished since Demelza had left, jutted through his breeches like the hilt of a comical dagger he had tried to smuggle into the Four Winds in his crotch. Shamefacedly he hunched over to cover himself . . . then his eyes met Vos's and they both burst out laughing, clinking their glasses together in a toast.

"To Namarri tigresses," Vos said.

"To pig iron," Denisius replied smartly, and they both collapsed in laughter again.

"You cool yourself off, milord. I'm going up to the balconies. Meet me up there when you're a little more, ah, flexible." Shaking his head, Vos downed the liquor and sauntered off, still laughing to himself as he made his way through the revelers.

Cooling off, Denisius decided, sounded like an excellent idea. After taking a few minutes to compose himself, he rose from his seat and gingerly made his way to one of the several bars where one could belly up and enjoy a drink and a chat with the barman, calling for cold water. His encounter with the tiger-dancer already seemed to have sunk into the riotous background of the Four Winds, forgotten or completely unobserved by everyone present, except of course for Deinisius himself.

That was simply the way the Four Winds was, from dusk to dawn, and all day and night on any festival day. It had begun life -- from what Denisius could tell, and that wasn't much, for the place seemed designed to bewilder the mind and eye and ear alike -- as a simple two story tavern, and over the years had accumulated more and more stories and wings, some of which were nothing more than pavilions stretched over what had once been city streets. The little stage where the tiger-dancer had enchanted Denisius was built into one of the older wings, not too far from the original tavern.

That old tavern was where he now took a deep draught of water, relishing its icy sting on his throat. The walls here were covered with a ramshackle collection of handbills new and antique, paintings and sketches from the amateurish to obscure masterpieces Denisius could hardly believe were languishing in a festhall on the Straits of Twilight. The ceiling was even more dazzling: painted black, fine lines of wire were strung from wall to wall in an overlapping series of arcs whose design appeared random at first, almost mad, but which upon closer examination proved to be an intricately designed network drawing in glittering metals the shape of the constellations that danced among the moons. From these nearly invisible strands dangled thousands of charms of copper and silver and gold, tiny curlicues and bewitching shapes of designs both unremarkable and surpassing strange.

Some of them resembled the charms that might dangle from a cursewright's hat, and indeed some of them were. Ammas Mourthia himself had donated a few over the years, (he was a devoted enthusiast of the Four Winds, as many Munazyri were, and enjoyed spending time here when he had the coin). But of course Denisius had no way of knowing that the man they sought was a not infrequent guest of the very festhall where they now found themselves.

Behind the bar, under a breathtaking painting of the great Battle of the Nocturne Gate, where the Sultan's janissaries had been expelled from Munazyr after a decade of occupation over a century ago, was this legend, written in a bold hand of flaking black paint: THE FOUR WINDS CALL TO ALL WORLDS. Vos had told him that the management of the Four Winds liked to huckster passersby in the street with wild stories of the festhall existing in many worlds beyond the Veil of Ravens, and that doorways to those worlds could be found in dark corners of the place, if one only spent enough time searching for them. Vos dismissed it as nothing but a colorful story to attract business. (Ammas, however, was not so skeptical.)

The balconies of the Four Winds ranged from a grand patio that circled the whole of the original tavern and was lined with dozens of tables and chairs for those who wished to eat and dine under the night sky to a precarious widow's walk perched at the structure's peak where a solitary pair of lovers might tryst. Vos had already scouted out one near the top, and it was onto this cool respite Denisius climbed after downing his water and tipping the barman a silver. Vos was leaning against the railing, musing over the cityscape spread around them. Denisius shivered, drawing closed his cloak and rubbing his hands against his shoulders. Autumn was more in the air in Munazyr than it had been in Talinara or Gallowsport, and a biting crispness sank into his skin as he padded into the night air. A fresh cloud of rieldo smoke drifted from Vos's mouth as his manservant waved him over. Denisius took a place beside him and gazed over the city as well, though he didn't join him in a smoke this time.

The balconies of the Four Winds afforded a spectacular view of Munazyr. From the low graceful domes of the Othillic Libraries; to the stony patchwork of the Doge's Villa, where the Sultan had once dwelt and which still sported the slender stylized statues of the Sultan's various incarnations; to the gold-litten loveliness of the New Temple of the Graces, the city's skyline had been immortalized in art and song. The natural features that defined the city's boundaries were no less impressive, from the gorgeous waters of Brightmoon Bay to the distant ebon wall of the Wicked Cliffs, where Porium and other lands of the Sultan began. Perhaps only Cavis Cove and Q'Sivaris itself could rival Munazyr for sheer visual grandeur.

Denisius and Vos gazed out wordlessly over this awesome sight in appreciative silence for several minutes. The younger Lord Marhollow found himself especially fixed on what he thought might be the city's temples, for he knew there would be many here which represented faiths beyond the Ninefold Vow. His gaze passed over the barely visible castrated stump of stonework which had been the old Temple of the Graces, and whose steeple had been deliberately pulled down as part of its deconsecration, without the slightest sense of foreboding that it would soon become a critical place in the course of his life.

Finally he said to Vos, "Should a man treat a werewolf as he treats a Namarri?"

Vos said nothing for a moment. "It might work, but I could hardly say for sure. I've hunted them, but I'm no expert on how they think."

"I know that. But you have more experience than I do. And I don't want to hurt her. Not unless she's really run mad and we don't have a choice."

Vos nodded, turning his gaze upward to the gleaming shape of the white moon Saya. The black moon Xai was heavily present tonight, and had nearly eclipsed his brighter sister in a half-circle. "Legends say they become more wolfish the longer they run in their shape. Who knows? All the ones I ever dealt with weren't interested in talking. That makes your princess as new an experience for me as she is for you."

"What do you guess, though?"

Again Vos took his time answering, his eyes reflecting the coal of his cigar. "I guess," he said at last, "that she hasn't gotten too much like a wolf, not in her mind. If she's here, that is. If she's actually made it to Munazyr all the way from the capital, that means she somehow secured passage with a caravan or just did it on her own. Either way, she maintained enough focus and will to stay on her chosen trail. If that trail led to a potential cure, then, no, I think the wolf in her is that strong. But milord, make no mistake," he would not continue until Denisius met his eyes, "she's changed at least once since then. She may have killed in that shape, either to protect herself or to find something to eat. She will be wilder and more dangerous than the Carala you knew. And not all of it will be from her sickness. Gods only know what she might have suffered on the road, a pretty young noblewoman traveling alone."

"She had her dagger."

"Would a princess who hardly ever left the Chalcedony Palace be able to stop me with a dagger if I took into my head I wanted her valuables? Or something even worse?"

Denisius shook his head, frowning and troubled.

"No. Nor you, milord, for you have at least eight inches on her, and more muscle in that body than you think. You must consider the possibility that we'll fail. She might have died somewhere on the long road between here and the capital. She might have given into the wolf entirely and now hunts in its shape as often as she can. It may be that no trace of her will ever be found."

"Like in Gallowsport," Denisius said resignedly. Vos nodded, frowning. The city that had for centuries been home to both the Malachite Throne's highest court and its greatest concentration of criminality had been their first stop, at Vos's urging, and it had been a complete waste of time.