Storm Season

"Why not return to the Capital with me?" the Commissioner said expansively. "A new talent! My wife would be so pleased."

Lalo smiled back, his vision expanding in images of marble columns and pavements of porphyry that far outshone the face-lifted splendors of Prince Kittycat's hall. Would Gilla like to live in a palace?

"But we need not waste the few weeks I have to spend here-"

Lalo's skin chilled as Lord Raximander went on.

"A picture of me, for instance-you could do that here in the palace as a small demonstration of your skill."

Before Raximander had finished, Lalo was shaking his head. "Someone must have misinformed you-I never do portraits!"

Some of the others, attention attracted by the raised voices, had drifted toward the mural again. Zanderei was watching with a faint smile.

Coricidius motioned towards the wall with a bony finger. "Who poses for all your pictures, then?"

Lalo twitched like a nervous horse, trying to find an answer that would not alienate them... Anything but the truth, which was that a sorcerer's spell had enabled-nay, compelled him, to portray the true nature of his sitters' souls. After a few disastrous attempts to paint Sanctuary's wealthy, Lalo had learned to choose his models from those among the poor who were still uncorrupted.

"My lord, that one was done from imagination," he said truthfully, for the Ilsig King had been inspired by his memories of fleeing through the Maze just ahead of local bullies when he was a boy. He did not tell them that he had got the Hell Hound Quag to boast of his feats on campaign while he posed for the figure of the Rankan Emperor.

One of the eunuch pages scurried towards them and Coricidius bent to hear his message. Released from his gaze, Lalo stepped backward with a sigh.

"You are too sensitive, Master Limner," Zan-derei said softly. "You must learn to accept what each day brings. In these times, ideals are an expensive luxury."

"Do you want a portrait too?" Lalo asked bitterly.

"Oh, I would not be worth the trouble-" Zan-derei smiled. "Besides, I know how I appear to the world."

Cymbals crashed, and as Lalo's startled pulse began to slow he realized that the other end of the room was flaring with the colored silks of the dancing girls. He should have expected it, having watched them rehearse almost every afternoon while he worked on the paintings here.

Such a commotion, he thought, for a few strangers who will make notes on Sanctuary as most artists make portraits-recording only the surface of reality and then will be gone.

Happily abandoning their conversations, the Commissioners let the purple-clad pages usher them to couches below the dais on which the Prince was already enthroned. The dancers, chosen from among the more talented of Kadakithis' lesser concubines, moved sinuously through the ornate topography of their dance, pausing only from time to time to detach a veil.

Trembling with reaction, Lalo drifted towards the row of pillars that supported the vaulted and domed ceiling. Someone had left a goblet on the marble bench, nearly full. Lalo took a long swallow, then made himself put it down again. His heart was pounding as loudly as the drums.

Why am I so afraid? he wondered, and then wondered how he could be anything else, in a town where footpads dogged your steps by day, and if you heard a scream after dark you ran not to help but to bar your door. It must be better in the Capital... there must be somewhere Gilla and I could live in safety.

He lifted the goblet once more, but the wine tasted sour and he set it back half-full. Coricidius would not care if he left the celebration now that he had exhibited both the pictures and their creator. Lalo wanted to go home.

He got to his feet and stepped around the pillar, then halted, startled as something in front of him seemed to move. After a moment he laughed, realizing that it was only his reflection in the polished marble that faced the wall. Dimly he could see the glitter of embroidery on his festival jerkin, and the sheen on his full breeches, but they could not disguise the stoop of his narrow shoulders or the way his belly had begun to round. Even the thi

Lalo worked his way around the outside of the Presence Hall to the side door. The corridor seemed quiet after the clamor of music and the wine-fueled babble of conversation, and the government offices that occupied the spaces between the Hall and the outside of the Palace were empty and dark. As he had expected, the side-door leading to the courtyard was bolted tight. With a sigh he went the other way, passed through the Hall of Justice that fronted the Palace as quickly as he could, and out through one of the great double doors that led onto the porch and broad stair.

Torches had been fixed in the pillars at the top and bottom of the stair, and their fitful light gleamed on the armour of the guards who stood at attention on each of the four wide steps, and glowed on the purple pe

Lalo paused for a moment, noting the effect. Then he saw that the first guard was Quag, nodded, and received in answer the flicker of an eyelid in the wooden patience of the Hell-Hound's face.

Lalo's sandals crunched on grit as he crossed the flagstones of the i

One of Honald's many nephews was on duty in the guardbox set into the massive archway of the Palace Gate. Tonight the double doors were opened wide, and Lalo passed through unquestioned, though he remembered a time when all he owned would not have been enough to bribe the Gatekeeper to let him enter here. He felt dizzy, although he had hardly had any wine.

Why can't I be satisfied with what I have? he wondered. What is wrong with me?

He crossed the expanse of Vashanka's Square more quickly, heading diagonally towards the West Gate and the Governor's Walk. For a moment the east wind brought him the rank, fuggy smell of the Zoo Gardens, then it shifted and he felt on his face the cool breath of the sea.

He halted just outside the Gate and with a sigh reversed his cloak so that its dull i

A waxing moon was already brightening the heavens, and the rooftops of the city made a jagged silhouette against the stars. Not since he was a boy, slipping from his pallet behind his father's workbench to join his friends' adventur-ing, had Lalo seen Sanctuary at this hour with sober eyes. Just now, with all its sordidness obscured by shadow, it seemed to him to be possessed of a kind of haphazard but enduring integrity.

His feet had carried him almost to Shadow Lane without his attention when they encountered something soft. He leaped awkwardly aside to avoid stepping into the contents of a honeypot which someone had emptied into the street to stink and steam, until the rain washed it into the city's underground maze of sewers and it was carried off by the tide. He had been into those tu