he has sought to conceal from the eyes of men and even the ears of rumor. Little does he love me, but so long as I have my talisman... which I have lost. Lost! Oh, help me, Seeker, for I am in dire need!”
“Gladly would I, Lady, but I have never been a finder of lost objects,” the old man whispered.
“But this object is a terrible secret also,” she cried. “It is a powerful thing, and its loss must be even more a secret than its existence. And if you can find it, I may be able to enrich you beyond your dreams.”
“Not riches do I need,” said the Seeker quietly. “But I will help you in your need, for I am old and need useful work to do until I find my grave.”
The lady bowed her head into her hands for one heartbeat, then lifted her chin and said to the two, “You have my gratitude, do you succeed or fail, for there are few in these days who will succor the needful for that poor coin. And I am, or shall be again, powerful when my talisman is in its place.”
She stood abruptly, and her gray robe moved lightly about her. “I can be away from my place for only a short time. The simulacrum that I left cannot endure for long to deceive my watchers. And it is dangerous for me to attempt the deception more than once. Know you my father’s house?” she asked Kla-Noh, who nodded.
“Upon the seaward side there is a buttressed seawall, rooted in the deeps. The years have riven it and the creatures have worn it away into paths for their own uses. One who came from the sea”—and here she looked at them from the depths of purpose—“would find no guard and no watcher, for my father fears nothing from that direction. Each evening I walk there, to watch the darkness rise from the east. Then I am unwatched, for none can approach save through my father’s house.”
Kla-Noh coughed. “There are ways of watching that the watched cannot know.”
She smiled grimly. “When the watched are but normal men...or women...it is so. But I am the daughter of my father, and also the daughter of my mother. And my mother, o Seeker, is a secret that even you may find it difficult to winnow from the past. Oh, be sure, I know when I am overseen.”
“Then, by your leave, there will be intruders upon the paths of the creatures,” said the old man, “three evenings hence, lest by chance this day’s deception might have roused suspicions. Walk round about the edges of the terrace, and we will lie close under the edge, wherever is best concealed and easiest of access for my old limbs.”
The lady nodded slowly. “Often I speak with the empty sea and the sky,” she mused, “and should any see, they would not wonder at it.”
She took her leave, and the two Seekers stood beneath the arbor at the door and watched as she drifted away across the meadow as a wisp of smoke moves on the wind. Before she had gone many paces she was a shadow, and then she was not to be seen.
Kla-Noh lifted his brows. “That is a strange lady, my young friend,” he said. “There are secrets beyond secrets there. For I have heard before of the mysteries of the Lord Tro-Ven, and once I heard a breath of a rumor...the merest wisp of conjecture...concerning a powerful talisman that he brought from afar. Only that fact, and a name. The Cat with the Sapphire Eyes....”
* * * *
The ghost of a new moon hung dimly in the west on the evening of the tryst. Si-Lun made Kla-Noh comfortable amidships and, under a reefed sail, scudded quietly across the bay, cutting in toward shore beneath the curve of overhanging cliff long before he reached the house of Tro-Ven. The buttressed seawall bulked darkly in the waning light as the craft hove to in its shadow.
The way to the top was soon found, for, as the lady had said, the wall was greatly worn away and was nearly as easy to climb as a flight of steps, though the footing was uncertain. Near the top they found a spot in the lee of a thorny bush that had thrust its toes into the crevices and flung masses of golden bloom down the slope. The lip of the terrace was just above, and they waited in silence for the lady to come.
The Purple Waters grew darker as the light withdrew, but before darkness descended they heard the light tap of heels on stone and knew that their companion had come.
“Who now will answer me from the sea and the sky this night?” came her musing whisper. “Many nights have I cried to the wind without succor, but mayhap this time it will be different.”
“Aye, Lady, it will,” said Si-Lun softly. “We are here, beneath the golden flowers.”
“How fitting.” She laughed. “No man ever brought me flowers, but now flowers bring me two men to champion my cause.”
Kla-Noh sneezed irritably and said, “All very well, but they tickle my nose and drip pollen in my beard. Let us say what is to be said and have done.”
Instantly the lady was contrite. “My apologies, Seeker,” she said. “It ill befits one of your age and wisdom to crouch on a seawall in the night mist to listen to banter. I will begin by telling you my name, which is a secret to all but my father, my mother, and me. This to prove my trust, as well as to aid your endeavor. My mother (of whom I will tell you more) called me Li-Ah, and though my father willed that I be called otherwise, that is my name. In the tongue of my mother’s folk, it means Fruit of Truthfulness, and for this reason it angered my father past endurance. For if you know aught of him you know that truth is not his friend or his companion.
“You must know also that my mother is not of this place. Yet the way to her realm lies not across the Purple Waters, nor yet over the barren lands to the west. My father found it when he was about his journeyings, those voyages which he makes, not in a vessel of this world but in a powered crystal that bears him through the edges of here and into otherwhere. He found her realm, he saw her, and he desired her, for her beauty is marvelous and her wisdom wonderful.
“Yet not in all things is she wise, for, seeing Tro-Ven and finding him different from all that she knew, she chose to wed him, knowing him not as he was but as he wished to appear. And when he had learned what he could of the arts of her country and taken what he could of the riches of her father, and tired of her love, he chose to depart as he came, leaving her with an empty heart until I came.
“There was I born and there nurtured until I became a woman grown. My mother was my friend and my teacher, my guide and my benefactress, and she taught me all that she knew. Yet always she feared that one day my father might return and claim me as his child, to bear me away into this other world, so different from her own. So she tutored me in mysteries that only those of her own blood may know or practice, hoping that they would be useful to me, wherever I should be. And she placed within a talisman a part of herself to act as a focus for my powers and my arts, at need. And that talisman is the Cat with the Sapphire Eyes. Without it I can do much, but not, I fear, so much as my father. With it I can best him and thwart his purposes, when they mean me harm.”
Kla-Noh had listened in silence, but without surprise. “Somewhat of this I expected to hear,” he said. “But if your father came for you and brought you as his daughter to his home, why should he seek your harm?”
“Well asked, had he brought me as his daughter,” she said. “But he did not. He brought me as his talisman, even as the Cat is mine. He found that many of the arts learned in my mother’s realm were ineffective save when practiced by those of her blood. So he returned, hoping, expecting that a child of his had been born to her, and took me away, over her agony and my tears. But the law is the law, there as here, and a father disposes of his child as he will. So long,” she whispered grimly, “as the child will let him.”
“Ah,”
