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the shifting candlelight made the seethe-gator move. “Only promise them the voyage of a lifetime.”
    “Well,” Beko said, picking up his mug and drinking more wine. “I'm more intrigued than ever.”
    Nomi caught him staring at her when she looked up.
    “This needs to be kept quiet, Beko. I mean it.”
    “I'm sure.” He smiled. “But as captain, I think I deserve something to spur me on. Don't you?”
    “Something . . . ?” Not for the first time, Nomi felt uncomfortable in Beko's presence. He was a big man, intimidating when he wanted to be, yet gentle and caring when the mood took him. A man of contradictions; a lover of poetry who slept in an armory.
    “Tell me where we're going, Nomi.”
    “That's your price?”
    “I won't breathe a word.”
    Nomi relaxed back into the chair. “We're going to the Great Divide.”
    The soldier's face did not change, but his eyes grew dark.
    “The voyage of voyages, Beko! Perhaps the one to end them all.”
    “What's down there?”
    She looked away. “We don't know yet.”
    “You're lying.”
    “I don't lie, Beko. We don't know what's down there. That's why we're going.”
    He stood and walked behind her, a heavy shadow in the shady basement. In the tavern above them a piece of furniture scraped across the floor. Someone muttered, and somebody else laughed. “Opening time soon,” Beko said. “More drinking in the day, singing in the evening and fighting in the night. More wine dripping between the floorboards. More puking drunks.”
    “We could be drinking around a campfire two nights from now.”
    “I'll come, of course,” Beko said. “I made up my mind when I showed you my trial table.”
    “You did?”
    “I saw the excitement in your eyes. You don't hide much.”
    She sighed with relief, but said, “You haven't even asked about pay.”
    Beko turned. He was holding a round stone, and he drew the blade of a short knife across its surface. “I know that Ventgorian fruit has made you rich. Come back this evening and I'll give you a price.”
    Nomi nodded, and jumped when something thudded onto the floor above them.
    Beko rolled his eyes. “Dragging out last night's drunks to make room for tonight's.”
    “Yes. Very homely.” Nomi went to the door and opened it to the smell of vomit.
    “Nomi,” Beko said.
    She turned around, looking back into the cavern of a room.
    “Thank you for asking me.”
    “Who else would I go to?” Then she shut the door, climbed the steps to the street and went to find a runner.

 
     
    Chapter 2
     
    RAMUS SAT JUST inside the library entrance, holding his head and hissing as the pain receded. His vision and hearing throbbed with each heartbeat, but the nausea was passing.
    Not now, he thought. Not while I need all my wits about me. He grasped the rolled parchment pages in his left hand, and they too seemed to pulse with each beat of his heart.
    It had started as a headache three years ago, one that lasted four days and seemed to reach out to every nerve in his body, drowning him in a pain he had never imagined before. He had thrashed and cried in his bed, unable to move or go for help. Even back then, Nomi was the only person who ever paid him a visit, and then not frequently, but she had been away on her second voyage to Ventgoria. He had suffered alone, and recovered without telling anyone what had happened. One of those things, he had thought at the time. A sickness in the air, or bad food from one of the street vendors. Looking back, he now considered it the period of impregnation, because every time an attack came he had visions: strange, obscure, sometimes disturbing, other times quite mundane.
    Ramus stood, resting his right hand against the wall for support. He gasped in a few deep breaths, trying to clear his head, and smelled the unmistakable must of age. This library was his home away from home. He stood still for a few moments, feeling the last of the pain drift away, and then he reached for the library's inner