Sythemeis gave that thief a look that said much without words but tempted though she was she chose not to argue. What good would it do to explain now that if he had tried to cross the wards the wizard had set he would have become the nine hundredth and ninety ninth set of finger bones in the collection of Antiachus the Mooncursed?

“Follow man,” she instructed the word ‘man’ laden with contempt. They climbed higher into the tower, the stairs lacking the larger than life rise of the dungeon. At intervals arched windows granted vistas of the palace gardens and the city beyond both illuminated with moonlight and winking with the cruder light of torches. They reached a great doorway and passed through. Inside a dozen guardsmen stood about a circular guard room, its floor tiled with alternating black and white wedges.

“Touch them not,” Sythemeis advised. The men were typical of the Emir’s guard, dressed in studded tunics with silk sashes over their shoulders and belted at the waist. High boots of woven leather gave their legs a rough and unhealthy aspect. None of the guards reacted to their presence as they all stared blind and bemused up at the waxing moon. Their eyes were monochrome and pearlescent like the nacre of a shellfish. One or two of them moaned softly as they passed.

“They looked upon the moon,” she told Amal as though that explained everything. There was an eagerness in her voice a yearning like a thirsty man at last in sight of a broad river.

“We must hurry, she swells,” she explained, reaching the stairs on the other side, atop the next flight they came to a door. It was of dark wood, inlaid with golden tracery and thumb sized gems which themself would have been worth a small fortune at the gem sellers and pawn brokers. A great lock was built into its center veins of gold and silver running away from it in a hateful imitation of the sun.

 

“No man has stepped beyond this door without a key,” Sythemis explained, reaching out and touching the wood with the palm of her hand. For the first time it was tentative and uncertain as she felt the grain of the wood beneath her smooth palm.

“A task for a master thief, one of three which are laid upon this tower,” she told Amal, turning to look at him, her dark eyes glittering in the moonlight.

“We must hurry,” she repeated, “if we are not gone when the bones return Antiachus from the depths, we shall wish for a death that will not come.”