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Graye grabbed my arm and dragged me around. His face was flushed.

“Then tell me where we are going,” he demanded.

With both hands, I took him by the collar of the leather vest he wore and smashed him back against the stone wall, jarring him brutally.

“I don’t like you!” I snapped. “I dragged you free of that stinking cell to help me find my brother. Perhaps another of my family who might be with him. But I don’t like you. Never touch me again!”

Graye’s eyes lit with inner flares and I waited for him to lash out at me. I would have welcomed it. But after a moment he looked down and the tension broke in both of us—mine more slowly than his. I released him with a half shove and turned to hurry onward, my anger fading under the flying spurs of time.

At each corner of the main keep there wound a set of narrow granite stairs that reached from the wine cellars to the roof. Few ever used those steps to move from floor to floor, preferring the magnificent bone and glass staircases in the center of the castle. It was mostly guards who took the danker stairwells, or children at play on the steps as if they were city walls to storm. Now, we followed one of those musty ways, four tough men with honed blades ready.

Diken Graye had wondered why we did not head for the stables, where saddle birds could be found that might allow us a chance at freedom. What he didn’t know was that not all the Emperor’s birds were kept in the stables. On the roof of the keep there were half a dozen at least—of a species known as sabrun. These are slender, thin-boned, sleek, and over short distances they can outpace any other saddle bird in the sky, even the swift and savage kryll. Their weight carrying capacity is limited, but then, critical messages from the Emperor do not generally weigh much in the physical sense.

When I had first heard of the sabrun messenger corps it put me in mind of the pony express on my own world. There were the same devil-may-care relay riders, and the way stations where exhausted mounts could be replaced with fresh. The major difference, other than the medium through which the messages were carried, was that the sabrun corps served only the purposes of the emperor.

I well recalled how, in childhood, I would wish that I had lived in the time of the pony express. It seemed I was about to have that experience after all. In a way. We were going to steal four of the sabrun. I thought they might be overlooked by the searchers who hunted us.

We reached the roof. Deep overhead, the sky was still raven-dark, though a thick mist curled around us that was tinted with the promise of morning. I had not realized how much time had passed while we were in the dungeons. In a few dhaurin the city’s life would stir and our chances of escape would lessen.

We started quickly forward through the clinging fog, feeling the cool wet of it spiderweb our skins, and in a dozen paces the outbuilding that housed the sabrun loomed ghost-like from its surroundings. There were no sentries here. Not on this side of the building. We found them in front of the gridded door that faced the outside wall of the keep. There were three guards and two bird riders. The latter were marked by the variety of hooks and straps that decorated their clothing—for fastening them to their mounts amid the wild currents of the air.

All five men were armed, but they didn’t look ready for a fight. Even if they had been told of the traitor Ruenn’s escape, they clearly didn’t expect him to come here. I sent Valyan and Kreeg around the back way to come up behind them, then stepped out from the corner and strolled casually in their direction. I still wore my monkish robes, and the men straightened their backs when they saw me. One dropped the rolled jitter grass that he was smoking and ground it out under a heel. Religion is a powerful thing.

I stopped a dozen feet from the men, just as they began to show agitation, and proclaimed in a loud voice: “The Lord God