“Well, you think about it,” Smit said, nodding at the rain, “the things that really make a city are about controlling nature, aren’t they? This here rain may not look like much, but Camnipol’s a big city. It all adds up. Right now, just looking at it, it’s like God upended a river on the place. All that water’s got to go somewhere.”

“The sea, the sea, the endless sea,” the apostate said, quoting a play they’d done two years before. “As all water finds the salt waves, so all men end in death.”

“Well sure,” Smit said, rubbing his chin, “but the important thing’s how it gets from here to there, isn’t it?”

The apostate smiled.

“Smit, my dear, I believe you’ve just committed metaphor.”

The actor blinked a false innocence.

“Did I? And here I thought we were talking about gutters.”

The apostate smiled. For fifteen years now, he had traveled the world with his little band of players. They had sung for kings and brutish mobs. He’d taught players from eight of the thirteen human races, and taken lovers from three. Master Kit, he’d been. Kitap rol Keshmet. It was a name he’d given himself even before that, when he had delivered himself into the world out of a womb of desert stone and madness. He’d played a thousand roles. And now, God help him, there was time for one more.

One last.

“Cary?” the apostate said. “A word?”

The long-haired woman nodded, slipped her needle into her sleeve, and laid the handful of beads carefully into a cupping fold of the gown’s cloth. It looked casual and unthinking, but not one bead would escape that little nest. The apostate nodded, smiling, and strolled toward the next shelter in the common yard, empty apart from a cold iron brazier and a stone bench. The brick paving was wet where the rain struck, the subtle red and green deepened and enriched until they seemed enameled. He sat on the little bench and Cary sat at his side.