Ammas knelt at his father's side. One hand cupped the nearly hairless dome of his skull; the other twisted helplessly in the linen sheets of his sickbed. For what felt like an eternity the question how danced on his lips, but his throat was too dry for speech of any kind, and soon he realized how didn't really matter. He had never actually seen his father die, after all, having fled the theatre before the Emperor's hounds could break through the box where Senrich had been kept. In the last twenty years he had never consciously sought out more details of what had transpired that night in Talinara, and when he did hear further accounts, none of them touched on what had happened to Senrich beyond the Emperor kicking the crate to the arena floor. The notion that it had been a sham execution never occurred to him, but it didn't surprise him now that he was confronted with its reality. No depravity was beyond Somilius Deyn III, especially where a traitor was concerned.

So Ammas asked the only possible question he could: "Why?" His voice was so hoarse he could barely understand it himself. Senrich stared at him as fixedly as he had since Ammas had entered the room, the corner of his mouth twitching. So old. He looked so old, far older than the seventy-odd years Ammas knew he could claim. The mutilated creature in that bed seemed to carry the weight of centuries. There were no bedsores, no marks of torture, and while he was fearsomely thin he did not look to be starving. Senrich's gaolers had kept him well, which was probably a sort of torture all on its own. "Why are they keeping you here, papa? Why?"

"Don't you know, Am?" Senrich whispered. "The Emperor can't rule without us. He has none of us left. No cursewrights. No astrologers. Some healers -- none for me, of course, wouldn't waste them on me, nothing to be done about me -- and one seer-magistrate lackey in the Palace."

He cackled, his diminished body moving strangely on the sheets, something unnatural about the way the nubs of his arms twitched as if he wanted to clap his hands together with the deliciousness of this little joke. Ammas swallowed hard, hating to see it, unable to look away from it.

"I thought you must have known. I thought that was why you came. I told her, I told Abbess Ketheri, I told her you were here, I told her I saw you when I walked abroad last night. And I did. At your old bedroom, just like always."

"'Walked?'" Ammas's heart, already stricken merely from the sight of Senrich, seemed to split in two at the growing signs of his madness. "Papa, you -- you can't -- "

But Senrich was laughing, the sound shrill and splintered. "I taught myself to do it. So I could go above now and then, when the Abbess and her sisters aren't around. Taught myself to walk on the wind, like the astrologers do." His voice took on a singsong quality, like a child at a nursery rhyme. "Stories from the sisters. I think they knew. Stories of the Hangman of the Harbor, like the ones you loved your mother to tell. If they knew the truth, yes, Am? If they only knew!" Senrich tilted his head back, laughing that shrieking laugh.

"Papa," Ammas whispered. "I -- I didn't know. I never knew. I -- I would have come sooner. Found you. I -- I -- " Ammas could not imagine what to say. He could not imagine what he might have done. Come to the Grand Curia by himself, haul Senrich out on his shoulder like a sack of meat? And then what? Bring him to Munazyr, find some silent Madrenite sister to take care of him? He didn't know. But anything would have been better than this, kept as a pet for the Emperor.

"You would have done nothing." The cracked, strained quality of Senrich's voice seemed to have lessened, and for a second he looked dimly like the severe but fair Overseer of the Curia he had once been. "You would have died if you had come here. I wouldn't have that." With a sigh he lay back on his pillows. "I did what I had to do, Am. So did you, I am sure."

"What you had to do?" Ammas had a terrible feeling he already knew what Senrich meant, but he didn't dare say it aloud. "What did you have to do, papa?"

"Serve the Emperor. Prove I was faithful. Prove I was no traitor. He had books brought to me, any books I wanted, from any of the Academies. Mysteries he needed unraveled, sicknesses he needed advice to treat. Always through intermediaries -- not Thray, not after -- well -- only in the earliest days. How many years ago, I do not know. Ammas, what year is it, anyway? The Madrenites don't tell me. Sometimes they bring me a cake on Yearsend, I suppose I ought have kept track. Might I have some water? My throat, so dry -- I don't talk so much these days."

A silver ewer of water stood on a bedside table, alongside a simple clay vessel. With shaking hands Ammas poured his father a mug full of water and held it to his shrunken lips, letting him sip until he gave a sigh of satisfaction. A thin trickle of water ran down Senrich's chin. Without thinking Ammas wiped it away on the sleeve of his robe. The look of gratitude in his father's eyes at this simple gesture pierced his belly far worse than had Silenio's blade.

"What I wouldn't give for some wine. Or a kossun stick, do you have any? No matter. The Emperor did come here himself, from time to time. In secret, of course, and only when he had some other business in the Curia. He would consult with me on matters of import. There was a group he wanted to arrange, something to take over some of the duties of the cursewrights -- 'witch-finders,' they were called, only a little simple magic to their names. Didn't want them too powerful, you see. That was one. And the Sultan. So many questions about His Most Holy and Eternal Majesty. Gods, how the Sultan terrifies him!" Senrich broke into jagged laughter, his eyes gleaming with delight at thought of Somilius Deyn in the grips of such fear. Slowly his laughter tapered off, Ammas watching him with an expression so sorrowful it verged into horror. "But that is my business, and I would hear yours, Ammas. What have you been doing all these years? You wear your cursewright garb, I see. You have found a way to practice?"

"Yes, papa," Ammas replied softly. "I hid from the Emperor for years. I wasn't able to practice for a long time, but I did what I could here and there. I -- I ran. Like a coward I ran."

"My son is no coward," Senrich rasped. Again he sounded far more like his old self. "You lived. Your trade flourishes, somewhere. Where, Am? Where did you go?"

"Munazyr," Ammas said, the smile on his father's pale and shriveled face almost too much to bear. "I work out of an abandoned temple. The locals appreciate me, I think. The Argent Council tolerates me, uses me sometimes."

"And the city constabulary?" A sly gleam winked in Senrich's eye.

Ammas could not help the small smile he gave his father in return. This was an old point of contention between them. "Sometimes they put up with me, sometimes they despise me."

Senrich laughed that jagged cackle again. "Then you are a proper cursewright. I knew you would outsmart them, Am. I knew you wouldn't surrender to them." He sighed deeply, his narrow chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm. "I suppose you have no children. No time for it, I would think."

"No, papa," Ammas said. At that moment he would have given anything to answer that question differently. "But I have an apprentice. He's a good lad."

"Our name may die, but the trade will not. Good." Satisfaction in that cracked voice. However tiny a victory it might be over the Emperor, Senrich savored it.

Ammas's hand, stripped of the ebon mail glove, stroked over his father's head once more. His wish Senrich still had a hand to squeeze was like a physical ache. His father's eyes slipped closed, his breathing evening out, and for a time Ammas thought he had drifted off to sleep. Then those eyes snapped open, awake and alert, and fixed on Ammas's own.

"You heard no rumors of the Hangman, but you came anyway. Why did you come to this place if not for me?"

"Swiftfoot," Ammas answered quietly.

Senrich nodded. "Lord Andreth is finally out of control. I suspected so. He's the only one I've seen besides Ketheri in weeks -- months, maybe. The Madrenites hate him, but they fear him, too. With good reason."

"Andreth?" Ammas pounced on this. "The ritual wolf? The first one, I mean?"

Senrich shook his head. "No. Not the first one, but the first progeny of the ritual wolf. Just a bully from the Imperial cohorts drummed out of the military for murder and rape. The Emperor found a use for him, though. As he found a use for me." That jagged laughter rent the air again. "But the wolf's blood is strong in him, stronger than any, I think, and he has great power over the others of his kind. Why are you looking for the ritual wolf? They finally started spreading the wolf's blood, didn't they? Not just to Swiftfoot, either. You want to cure someone."

"The Emperor's youngest daughter," Ammas replied, watching his father's face closely. No surprise was evident in his withered features.

"Carala. Yes, I know of her."

"I -- I failed her at first, papa. So I swore myself to her. Pledged I would die in her service if I could not cure her." Upon admitting this betrayal, he could not meet Senrich's eyes.

But his father smiled. "Because she is an innocent."

"Yes."

"Then what else could you do?"

Ammas nodded, his relief upon hearing his father's approval a visible thing.

"Have any other of the Emperor's children been infected?"

"Her sister Sarai was threatened -- "

"Naturally." Senrich sank back onto his pillows with a sigh.

"Papa," Ammas said haltingly, "how do you know of this?"

"You already know, Ammas. Because I showed him how to do the ritual. The Emperor, that old priestess of the Graces -- the one from the Cathedral, Galena. Is she still alive? Not seen her in years, I don't think -- "

"The Emperor wanted you to create a ritual wolf?" Ammas asked, horrified into awe. "Why, for the gods' sake?"

"Why, to replace us, of course. The arcane brethren. To have a werewolf assassin, one he could control, one he could use as your own fellowship once used such creatures. An assassin to lead the Swiftfoot, to turn them from a simple band of cutthroats into something more powerful. And more devoted -- to him, to the Malachite Throne." Senrich chuckled, a dark and cynical sound quite different from the half-mad cackle Ammas had heard until now. "They found a different object of devotion, though. Now they are out of his control, and all his children will pay the price."

Ammas only half-heard most of this. Ever since he had realized this broken man beneath the Grand Curia was his father, he knew -- if hated to admit it to himself -- that Senrich must be the man Tacen had spoken of; the man from Gallowsport who knew all about the wolf's blood. Which meant Senrich was responsible for the ritual wolf at the heart of all of this; that his own father was as guilty for Carala's infection as her own father was.

"Papa -- why -- why would you do this? Why would you help him with something like that?" He could not restrain the outrage in his voice. Senrich did not flinch before it, though. Later Ammas would realize Senrich wanted his outrage.

"Because," his father whispered in a soft, failing voice, "because he told me, he told me again and again, the Emperor told me -- if I did it, then someday I would see you again." He smiled, showing what few yellowed teeth remained in his gums. "And here you are, Ammas. I see you again, I know you are alive, I know you are well."

Ammas bent to the bed, touching his forehead to his father's, clutching the back of Senrich's head. "Papa, I -- "

"It is all done, Ammas. You do what you must do, then flee from here."

"Who was the ritual performed upon? Do you know?"

"It was done in this very room. The Emperor was here. Oh, Ammas, the screams -- I wanted to stop it, I wanted to say no -- I wanted to -- "

"I know, papa. It's all right. I'll take care of it." Senrich gave a great shuddering sob, twisting in the bed, trying to embrace his son with arms that were long since torn from him. "Just tell me who it is, where I can find him."

Senrich whispered a name against the corner of his son's mouth.

Ammas drew back slowly, staring aghast at his father, completely unbelieving. He asked him to repeat the name. Senrich did so, willingly enough.

"That isn't possible," Ammas whispered.

"Yes," Senrich replied. "That is why it was done."

*