Mab's Fanfic Site

All's Fair

by Mab

Thank you to EE and Elaine for listening to me 'discuss' my writing process with them for one long year, and thanks also to Psychgirl for taking a quick look at the beta for some sections as well. This is the fourth story in my Regency Sentinel series - check out the Sentinel stories index page if you want to see more

When Blair was about ten, a travelling carnival visited, to much muttering from the townsfolk. Who knew what might happen to your purse in the midst of such a den of thieves? Naomi kept a tight hold upon her reticule, but she and her son still spent a happy day wandering amongst the cages and tents. There was a sad, mangy lion, bred in captivity (it died two towns further down the circuit, much to the fury of its owner). There were jugglers and two dwarf women who did fancy riding on shaggy little ponies, spinning upon the equine backs in a whirl of splits and handstands. There was a fire eater. But what Blair always remembered best was the wolf.

It was as sad and mangy as the lion, although not quite so far from home, having once roamed in a Scandinavian forest. Now it sat forlornly in its tiny cage, barely able to summon even a growl for its tormentors, unless the stick poked through its bars was particularly sharp. Blair stared in fascination, amusing and then irritating his mother. There was so much else to see, and Naomi was not immune to the beast's sad despair. Eventually, she pulled her son away, but when they went home, the wolf remained in Blair's thoughts. "The animals were very unhappy, weren't they, Mama?"

"Yes, love, yes they were." Naomi could think of nothing else to say. England at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was as cruel to animals as it was to most of its people, and Naomi was beginning to be weighted with cares she'd avoided for nearly a decade.

That night, Blair did something he hadn't done before. He crept out of the house as his mother slept and he ran through the cold stone streets to the carnival's encampment. It was midnight, but there were still some men and women awake in the tents and caravans, drinking ale and cheap spirits. Blair was small for his age, and very quiet, and he managed to make his way to the wolf's cage. It wasn't sleeping, although it lay still on the cage's filthy floor, its jaw resting upon its forelegs. It stared at him apathetically under half shut eyelids.

Blair stared back for a long time, and then moved by pity, decided that surely it couldn't be wrong to free the poor beast. He stealthily approached the cage door, which was locked with a padlock. The carnival owner had experienced trouble before – young drunks who fancied a wolf fight, rival showmen who weren't above a little sabotage. But at ten, Blair refused to believe that he couldn't do something and rattled uselessly at the door until he was forced to give up. The wolf had started growling by now, unsettled by this break in its bleak routine, and Blair had turned to crouch and whisper encouragement to it when some instinct made him turn his head.

He barely scrambled out from under the grip of a wizened, wiry man of some fifty years. Balked of his prey, the man gave up on silence. "Get back here, you hellspawn! Get back here, you little bastard!" he roared, while Blair sprinted with the fleetness of terror, barely avoiding tripping over a guy rope to a tent. His heart thumping, his breath struggling through his throat, Blair never gave up on his speed, and the man, satisfied that he had seen the child off, returned to grumble to his comrades and drink a little more brandy and water.

Blair made his way home through streets that were even less welcoming than they'd been when he left the warmth of his bed, and crept between his now cold sheets with Naomi never the wiser as to her son's activities. Blair decided that there was no need to enlighten her and cause her worry. The exploit passed into childish memory, not to be remembered or considered until many years later.

*

Dreams are a fine thing, if they are the dreams that you choose; a happy daydream; an aspiration, a hope. Most night time dreams are strange at best, the mind freed from the day's constraints; but still, only dreams.

When Jim started awake once again, anxious and confused, he was out of all patience with dreams, but they wouldn't leave him alone. He rolled to look towards Blair, who still slept on, although Jim saw the signs of fitful sleep in him as well. Blair was thirty-three now, had been so for only a few weeks, and so far had resisted any blasphemous jokes comparing his age and that of a certain other revered Jew in Christendom. Blair tossed restlessly, and spoke a few words. They weren't slurred. Jim heard them well enough, but they weren't in any language familiar to his waking ears.

Sentinel sight saw Blair clearly. There was a full moon outside, and enough of a gap in the curtains where Blair hadn't drawn them properly before they retired to bed. Blair's face was creased, and one bare arm lay outstretched across the coverlet, the fingers of Blair's hand twitching slightly. Jim laid his own hand lightly across Blair's and saw the exact moment when Blair and sleep parted ways.

Blair smiled. "Was I disturbing you?"

"No more than I disturbed myself."

"Ah." Blair moved into the circle of Jim's arm. "I hope that your dream was as interesting as mine. I was in deep conversation with a man painted and kilted like some ancient warrior." He sighed, partly for effect, and partly in genuine frustration. "Regrettably, the substance of our speech is entirely gone, although not the urgency of it."

And there it was: urgency. Always there was urgency to the dreams, a calling. Come; come now.

"And your dream?" Blair queried.

"I don't remember it that well." This was a bald-faced lie. "There was a temple," he finally admitted. "That temple."

Blair scrambled up on an elbow to stare down at Jim. "The one from before? From when Alicia... You're sure?" And then before Jim could say a word, Blair was out of bed and rooting about in his desk for the battered leather portfolio that held the most precious of his loose papers and notes.

"Save your search, Sandburg. Yes, it's the same temple. I'm sure of it."

Blair turned, naked and poised in question in the dark of the room. Eight years, Jim thought. Eight years, nearly nine, Jim had been able to see this. And for six of those years, Blair ought to have been dead and gone, left like a dog drowned in a ditch by that evil bitch, Alicia Bannister. Instead, Jim had worked a miracle and brought Blair back, and fear and confusion had made their home in him ever since, usually pushed to the attics of Jim's mind like unacceptable and shameful relatives. But ever, they crept downstairs and reminded Jim that something had happened that ought not to be possible. Was payment finally falling due? He had always wondered. He had never been a miracle-worker before, and there were plenty of dead in his past whom he would have brought back if he could.

"What does it all mean?" Blair asked it in honest frustration. Jim was a man content to leave some things unknown. Blair was of a different stripe.

"Damned if I know," Jim growled. "Come back to bed, I can see you goose-pimpling from here."

Blair climbed back in with alacrity, wriggling close to Jim, who was willing enough to warm him. Regrettably, now that Blair was awake, there would be questions and Jim hardly knew how to answer them.

"What did you see in your dream?"

"The temple. I was wandering within it." Looking for something, his breath harsh, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, knowing that something disastrous would happen if he didn't find Blair.

"And it disturbed you, this dream?"

"Would I be awake if it had not?" Jim replied.

"No wonder you were unscathed in battle. So fine at evasion as you are."

Blair meant it as a joke, a tease. It would never occur to him to question Jim's courage, but Jim was spending too much of his time silently wrestling with his fears not to feel goaded.

"You think me afraid, do you?" he said sourly, and Blair was left affronted and without the warm arms that had held him as Jim shifted and sat up in the bed.

"Well, I did not until now," Blair said, with more curiosity than tact.

"I'm frustrated, Sandburg." 'And nothing more' was left unsaid, as Jim suspected that he might protest too much. "I desire a restful night's sleep, and how can I have it when strange dreams torment us?"

Blair sat up on his heels. "Do you truly feel tormented?"

"You do not, I take it? You see it all as what – some jape from beyond? A charming adventure without the inconvenience of ever leaving your bed?"

Blair frowned. Jim's face was thunderous, and there was an edge to his voice which was seldom heard.

"Not so pleasant as that, but not a torment. More - a calling. An invitation."

"And where should we go, then?"

"Peru," Blair blurted out, and then rocked upon his haunches in astonishment.

"Hardly a day's pleasure jaunt," Jim said.

"Peru," Blair repeated, to himself as much as Jim. It was as if he was trying the shape of the word in his mouth. He looked at Jim, his face alight with awe. "But of course it must be Peru."

"Yes, of course it must be. For that's where our sweet friend Alicia had all her adventures and gained all her knowledge, is it not?" There were times when Jim thought that Alicia had brought her knowledge and her mysteries to them like a contagion. She was gone, had been gone years, but the infection lingered on in the memories of how Jim behaved in her presence – more like a wild animal than a human creature. And now it seemed, these dreams were of a piece; the next stage of disease had struck, and Blair was as caught up in the fever as Jim this time.

"Are we meant to go there?" Blair was uncertain, as well he might be. Peru was half a world away, by a sea journey of long weeks through dangerous waters. And South America was hardly known as the white men's grave for nothing.

"And why should we be meant to go anywhere?" Jim asked roughly. He had travelled to India and back, to Spain and Portugal. They had not been pleasure trips, and he had been little inclined to recount anything other than a very censored version of his travels to Blair, despite regular cajolements over the years.

"Because we share dreams, Jim."

"I can share many things with you, Sandburg. They don't require me to travel to a papist pest hole." He closed one hand around Blair's wrist which sat warm and strong within his grip, the pulse perhaps a little fast from Blair's excitement.

"If we travelled into the jungles, you would be safe from the papists at least." Blair leaned forward, bracing himself on Jim's grip until he could reach a hand to Jim's shoulder.

"Wild beasts and savages instead. And pestilence wherever we went. I will contain my anticipation."

Blair shook his head, thinking that that now was not the time to convince Jim. Indeed, he hardly knew that he was convinced himself. Jim's objections were all true; but Blair had never left England's soil, and there had ever been a flame in him that desired adventure. It had been expressed in risks, both great and small before now, and he couldn't deny that the dreams did indeed appear in the light of a great adventure. He kept that thought to himself and lay back in the bed.

"What is the time?" he asked.

"My watch is across the room lying flat upon your bureau. I don't see at angles whatever the light," Jim said dryly. "But it feels to be about four in the morning."

"Then there's still time for sleep."

"Sleep? And dreams?" Jim remained where he was, his back against the head-board, his head bowed.

Blair sighed. "If need be. If we don't attend to the message, then how will we tease out its meaning?"

Jim said nothing more, and lay down next to Blair. To say that he had no desire to know the meaning would sound petulant at best, and cowardly at worst. Instead, he stroked one hand over Blair's chest, from point to point of the nipples, across the soft field of hair. "Must we sleep?" he murmured. It was barely even manipulation. The heavy sweetness of desire was there in his gut between one moment and the next, and he lapped once or twice against the smooth skin of Blair's shoulder.

It was too dark for Blair to see the hunger that crossed Jim's face, but he was still too unsettled for sleep, and Jim's low voice, and the moist, quick caresses to his skin diverted the energy of thought to something more carnal.

"Candle?" But Jim's mouth stopped his. No tawny light on skin this time, then. Instead, there was warmth and the weight of two bodies together in the dark, and kisses and the brush of hands against skin. Jim made an impatient noise, and Blair found himself spread-eagled under his lover's body. Jim's arms held Blair's out and away; their fingers entwined.

"I can't touch you like this," Blair whispered

Jim's eyes were shut as he nuzzled one rough cheek against Blair's own bristled skin. "Yes, you can. You do. With every inch of skin. Do you feel it?"

Blair took a breath as best he could. Jim was heavy, his weight barely supported, but it was oddly exciting to them both that Jim controlled their lovemaking this way. Blair could never feel as Jim felt, but when Jim urged him on as he did now, Blair was almost convinced that he was as sensitised as his sentinel lover. Jim took what small leverage he had and thrust against Blair's skin, and then grinned as Blair made a quiet but quite desperate noise.

"I think you do feel it," Jim said, and inhaled, almost giddy on the scent that rose from their bodies.

"Move. Damn you, move." The tiniest beginning of struggle died in Blair as Jim shifted his weight just enough, tilted his hips more than just enough. "Oh..."

Jim released Blair's arms and hooked his arms across Blair's back and over his shoulders, releasing Blair from some of the press of his body in the process. "Satisfied?" he enquired. Jim had no need of sight in the dark; his other senses gave him all that he needed.

"Not yet, but I will be." Blair thrust in his turn, his lips dragging across Jim's skin. "Kiss me," he pleaded. "Kiss me." It was often the way with them in sex, that Blair had this need to kiss, to swallow the small sounds that Jim made in his own mouth, and Jim obliged as long as he could until after Blair had come. Then Jim tore himself away from that sweet, vulnerable mouth, and fastened his own mouth somewhere that could be hidden under clothing. He didn't mean to mark Blair in the rush to climax, but too often he did. Blair didn't mind. Not this time; not all the times in the past.

Blair dropped back to sleep almost immediately after. His sleep was peaceful. Not a dream disturbed it. Jim was still out of patience with dreams and remained awake until he heard the noise of his servants stirring. Then he rose and with one last touch to Blair's face, gathered his clothes and returned to his own room.

Blair spent a great deal of time buried amongst his books and papers the next few weeks, gathering courage to put a scholarly concept into action. The concept of concern was that of exploration and discovery. The practicalities of carrying out the idea made Blair feel queasy in a way that was part glorious anticipation and part terror. He must travel. More to the point, he wanted to travel. He always had, in a daydreaming sort of way, but now he was planning it for real.

Part of his plan was how to break the news to Jim. Jim made no secret of the fact that he was deeply unwilling to set one foot outside of England, and that the dreams were could go hang. Blair considered his possibilities: he might convince Jim to come with him willingly; he might convince Jim to come with him unwillingly - and even Blair quailed slightly at the thought of travelling with a sulky, bad-tempered Jim. Lastly, he could go without Jim, although his heart sank at the very idea. Even when safely successful, travel was a lengthy business. He might expect to be gone a year, easily. A year without Jim, a year in which Jim might suffer any kind of sentinel indisposition, without Blair's help. A year in which they would be far away from each other, at heart as well in body, because Blair couldn't imagine such a parting being without dispute or resentment on the part of them both. Better to have Jim at his side, where dispute and resentment could be dealt with.

Jim, however, remained obdurate; also, he remained restless of sleep, even as Blair's dreams lessened the more his determination strengthened to answer their call. Jim fought sleep in his bed so well that it took to ambushing him when it could. Blair knew that Jim was left bad-tempered when he spilled ink over his accounts-book. He knew how it had been spilled, that Jim had fallen asleep over his desk, his head propped in one hand. Jim recovered equanimity enough to joke about nodding off like some grandfather by the next day. "I'm in my forties, Sandburg. These things are only to be expected." The dream that Jim had wakened from – that remained secret. He had wandered the dank, stone corridors of that damnable temple until he found what he sought. Blair rested in some stone trough or channel, his face slack and peaceful, his eyes shut. He lay under inches of clear water, completely submerged, and Jim had awakened, crying out in horror, his body jerking as his arms flailed across his desk.

Jim didn't know if it was warning or prophecy, but he was damned if he would stand back and simply let it happen. He knew of Blair's intentions. When a man pored over maps and Spanish dictionaries, and sent and received letters between himself and his bankers, then the writing was on the wall for even the least discerning. But Jim refused to be the first to broach the subject: in part because he still wished that it not come to pass, however unlikely and cowardly that sentiment was; and in part because there was a petty, vindictive satisfaction in watching the uncertain looks that Blair sometimes sent his way, the obvious signs that Blair was screwing his courage to the sticking point.

Blair finally abandoned his uncertainties one pleasant afternoon, as they rode their horses over Jim's land.

"Jim, I plan to go to Peru."

The thud of the horse's hooves on the turf was quieter by far than the noise that Jim's heart made in his ears.

"I've gathered that. You've been busy with books and correspondence."

"I don't presume that you will come with me, but I am inviting you." Blair winced at how pompous that sounded, and said irritably, "You must know that I would want you to come with me. But I won't...I won't insist. It's a long journey."

"You've presumed so much with me for so long, why cavil at this, Sandburg?"

They had brought their animals to a halt, and Blair leaned forward to stroke his horse's neck, a move that calmed him rather than the horse. He knew that Jim would say yes. He told himself that he knew it, but nervous doubt still squirmed in his gut. "Don't toy with me. If you know my intention then you must have thought of what you would do if I went."

"Yes." Blair's head whipped around in indignation to request a fuller answer, but Jim forestalled any protest. "Yes, I will accompany you, because, yes, I have been considering what I must do."

Blair smiled brightly in relief. "Excellent. I knew you would." At Jim's raised eyebrow, Blair stuttered. "That, that is, not in any sense of presumption, but I..." Blair broke out in frustrated confusion. "Jim, how could I bear not to know? How could you?"

Jim urged his horse on again. There were a great many things he could stand not to know. How it felt to hold Veronica as she bled her life away with the pistol ball fired by a French spy in her gut. His father's opinion of the true relationship between himself and Blair – let that remain ever unknown. Whether Blair had truly been Jim's ever since that night by the stream. "There are instances where ignorance is bliss. Ask any cuckold."

That cut close to the bone for Jim, and confused Blair. What had betrayal to do with this? He rode as close as he might to Jim, and said, "We should go to London. It will be easier to make the rest of the arrangements and enquiries there."

Jim nodded. "Indeed. And there will be good-byes to make."

"Damn it, why bother if you will only point out the difficulties of the undertaking?" Blair said.

"There are times when people should keep difficulties in mind."

"It's a skill that you are all too handy at."

Jim shrugged. They had come out at the top of a small rise, and Jim stared out across his land. His land. His people to take care of, especially in the hard times that had come out of the end of the war. But Blair was his to take care of as well.

The shrug of Jim's broad shoulders caught Blair on the raw. He wanted Jim to be excited at the prospect of great things, because surely there were great things ahead. How could there not be, when your dreams spoke to you as Blair's had done?

"It will go well, Jim. I feel it. It's destiny."

Just what Jim needed; the reminder that powers and forces took an interest in the two of them, in Blair, that something outside of themselves shaped their lives.

"And you are so delighted to have a destiny."

"Why not? Or are such things not meant for Jewboy bastard whores?"

Jim's hands tightened on the reins. "Do not ever, ever, put such words in my mouth. And it would be better if they stayed out of your own." He wheeled his horse around, the beast smarting at the way that Jim sawed at its mouth. Then Jim turned to look back, as Blair lifted his head to the sky and yelled his frustrations to the sky. Blair's horse stirred restively at this noise, but Blair controlled it, as he eventually controlled his own voice. Then he urged his horse on to follow Jim's, his expression both sheepish and stubborn.

"I think I was bellowing at myself as much as anything. I'm sorry."

"I know."

"Jim, I have to go. And I need you with me."

Jim smiled at that. "I know that too." He was still distressed, though, that Blair had used such words to him. Jim knew that Blair had heard them too often in his life, but not from Jim. Never from him.

The two men rode on. Jim tried to improve his mood, and they fell into discussion about the best way to make the journey. Blair had thought to leave from England, travel to the United States, and from there take ship down the coast and around the Horn. Jim suggested that they might do better to take ship from Spain.

"You may as well get a head-start on improving your Spanish. You cannot expect everyone to write down their communications and then wait for you to look it up in your dictionary."

"As if your Spanish is good for much more than explaining that Wellington's army will pay for these chickens," Blair scoffed.

Jim grinned at this. "But I can say it, Sandburg, which is more than can be said for you. Your accent is appalling."

Blair was warmed by Jim's appeasement, like a fire on a cold day, and reciprocated it with all the good nature that he was capable of. Still, Jim's lack of enthusiasm for their venture uncomfortably reminded Blair of all the ways, great and small, in which Blair's presence had made Jim's life difficult. And Jim uncomfortably wondered why Blair's dreams had a tone almost of seduction to them, while his own were those of warning.

Plans for travel went forward in small increments, something like the rattle of stones presaging an avalanche. Joel was formally declared Jim's bailiff and steward. "I can think of no-one whom I trust better," Jim had told him. Joel was conscious of the honour and the trust, but he was also distressed at being left behind. But Jim needed someone that he could depend upon to take care of Ashford, and Joel and the rest of the small staff waved Jim and Blair good-bye soon enough.

In London, they traversed the labyrinths of finance and banking and travel arrangements. Blair was stubborn about paying as much of Jim's costs as he could get away with. They also had to face their respective families with their news. Blair had an easier time of it than Jim.

Indeed, Naomi's face had been aglow with pleasure. "My dear! Travel? Such a splendid idea, even if it will take you far from us for such a long time."

Blair had relaxed in the warmth of his mother's approval of the idea. Guilt lingered at how he was dragging Jim away from all that was dear and familiar to him, and in Naomi's dainty salon he could let his enthusiasm bubble up.

"It's a little frightening perhaps, Mama, but I am looking forward to it, to all of it, no matter how inconvenient or even dangerous."

Naomi was calm in the face of this reminder, and genuinely delighted for Blair. She could see the excitement and anticipation running within her son, and it warmed her in her turn. Naomi's husband was good man, a kindly man, but he was dull as dish-water, and there were times when Naomi wondered at Blair's satisfaction in his own domesticity with Jim. Listening to Blair rattle on about his plans sparked feelings that she had controlled out of obligation, and sublimated into intellectual exploration. Like her son, she could afford as many books as she wished, and she had patronised a fair number of indigent young musicians. Charles had no fondness for travel – but the continent was not so very far away.

"I promise to wave you off from the dockside with a good will. And if I cry a little, you will be too far away to see it and it will not signify."

"I will come back and tell you everything."

"Well, not absolutely everything. Surely Jim would wish to veto some matters."

Blair shook his head. "You are an impossible woman, Mama."

"Of course I am. Now come and hug me before you go."

Blair accepted this invitation, and caught his mother up in his arms. She was still slender, still beautiful, but he could see the march of time upon her face. "I promise I will take care of myself."

"Indeed you must. And bring Jim to see me before you leave."

Blair laughed. "Poor Jim. At least you'll treat him more kindly than his father and brother."

"I cannot say which of you is the greater madman!" William Ellison snapped out the words with the impatience he always had for things he couldn't control – his own body, the ways of the world, and his elder son in particular. "South America! A journey of weeks into countries ravaged by civil war and Spaniard misgovernment, when there are not savages laying in wait. And all so that Sandburg may play explorer – or so I surmise, since you are hardly communicative as to his reasons."

"Sandburg's reasons are of no matter to you, Father." Jim had stood by now. He could not stay sitting with his father spitting out this invective, regardless of the man's inability to rise from his own chair. It was a small advantage to Jim's morale.

"His reasons are of great matter to me when they mean that he must drag you with him. Your dependency upon him..." William halted. It griped his pride that any Ellison must be dependent upon the likes of Blair Sandburg, and Jim's clear loyalty and affection towards the man griped even more. William was dependent upon servants for the most basic of care. That didn't mean that he held any of them in liking. "He knows of it, and he still insists on an action that means you must risk harm to yourself, whether you stay or go."

"I doubt that Blair considers that I'm dependent on him."

"Oh, I am sure that it's quite the other way around."

William had never overcome his suspicion of Blair's motives for his friendship with Jim. So the man had some small resources of his own. Spending half of his time at Jim's home surely enabled economies which Sandburg might put to his own enjoyment. And William knew that his son might not move within Society the way that William once had, the way that Stephen and Louise did now, but he was in no doubt that Jim's friendship gave Blair Sandburg a prestige that he would never have otherwise.

Jim bit back any defence he might have made of his friend. His father would never believe it, and if he ever did he might turn his intellect, which was strong enough within the confines that William had chosen, to finding out why Blair and Jim were so close. William understood that the two of them shared one form of physical relationship, strange though it was. His understanding had thus far looked no further.

"Sandburg can go where he pleases," Jim said. "That's his business. If I choose to follow, that's my own."

"Rather than take the chance of descending into illness without him? I doubt that this business between you will protect either of you from the yellow fever or malaria. God knows that England sees its plagues, but it's a far more healthful land than where you plan to go."

"Nevertheless, I will go."

"Yes. Am I supposed to grateful for the courtesy of your information?"

"You may be grateful or not as you please," Jim replied heatedly. "I was never aware that you required more than courtesy of me, aside from obedience, of course. I regret that you will receive only the one."

"And little enough of that," William said waspishly.

At that sting, Jim was filled with a childish desire to fling the last of the truth at his father, to declare that Blair was his love and his lover and that Jim would follow him for far better reasons than selfish bodily need, whatever his misgivings were. He could imagine shock dulling the eagle sharpness of his father's face, the humiliation that an Ellison had birthed such a cuckoo in a nest of privilege and propriety. It would be his mother's fault, no doubt.

Jim had just restraint enough to keep his secret within his mouth, but no more tolerance for remaining in the presence of his father. "I see no point in turning over old arguments. I'll be gone soon enough. The end of the month most likely." He turned for the door.

"I might be dead before you return."

Jim halted sharply, his face twisted in embarrassment that William Ellison of all men should play that card. "Oh, for God's sake, Father!"

"It's a truth." Williams pale face was unapologetic in expression.

"And how would it change anything?" Guilt and anger made Jim cruel.

William accepted that his ploy was ineffective. His own pride would permit no more. He was no woman to moan, 'oh, think of your parent' and then reach for the smelling salts. "You have a harsh way of looking at things, my son."

"I know from where I learned it." Jim left, slamming the door behind him, and William was left to mull over the unsatisfactory nature of his dealings with his son. His grief over it he admitted to no-one for he barely admitted it to himself.

Jim made his way down the expensively carpeted stairway in a stew of righteous anger. He hadn't expected his father to greet the news with pleasure, but to bring out the same old suspicions of Blair - and that last effort... His father must die as all men had to die, and Jim told himself that it didn't matter if Jim was in South America or England when the inevitable finally came.

And now he owed Sally the same news that he owed his father. He had advised her that he would see her when he was finished with William, and Jim suspected, quite rightly, that she would be ready with food and tea, as if Jim was the small child that he once was. Even then, fruitcake had been an ineffective panacea.

He knocked at Sally's door and let himself in.

"And for what do we employ footmen, my dear?" Sally asked, a twinkle in her eye.

"I know where to find you without a lackey to show me the way," Jim said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. The room smelled of potpourri and wax, and the tea and sweet delicacies sitting on the little table.

Jim settled himself. His face was schooled, but Sally knew William and Jim well.

"You did not leave your father's corpse behind you?" she said, raising an eyebrow.

"No," Jim said morosely. "Although it was made clear to me that my news is likely to slay him."

This checked Sally's hand; the teapot tilted above the cup but not enough for anything to flow from the spout.

"You jest?" Her tone was uncertain though. She knew Jim well enough to know that turmoil hid behind that tense, restrained expression.

"Not at all. I intend to travel, and this will apparently break my father's heart."

Sally ignored the bitter sarcasm to dig for more information.

"Then you must be travelling a great distance."

"South America," Jim said, and looked directly at her, waiting for her reaction. He received one to satisfy him, as the teapot clattered noisily back down to its silver tray.

"South America!" Sally exclaimed. She could not have sounded more amazed if Jim had declared that he would fly to the moon.

"Peru to be precise," Jim said, sipping with unwonted care at the tea in its delicate cup.

"Peru!" Sally repeated, dazed by these foreign vistas. She recovered herself soon enough. "For what earthly reason would you travel to such a place? The continent, perhaps. But Peru!"

Jim shrugged, and Sally calmed enough to do a little reasoning.

"If you don't want to go then why go at all?" Then she answered her own question. "I take it that this is Blair's grand plan." Her face became troubled. "Could he not consider you in this matter?"

Jim's mouth tightened, and he placed the cup back down on the table between them. "Why? Is Sandburg to remain ever tied to nurse-maiding me? He's not my servant."

Sally's hands fluttered in deprecation. "Of course not. But such a distance and to such a place. When you both know that there is this – tie - between you." Stephen had made explanations to the family when Jim had recovered from his illness of 1814. It was a strange thing, that one human being could have such an influence on another, but the world was full of the unexpected. Sally wished only that nature might provide such a convenient mutuality in other matters.

"It's important to Sandburg."

"To do with his studies I suppose. And you have travelled before, when your 'condition' didn't trouble you."

Sally had visited Ashford on occasion, had even called upon them at Blair's house, and she liked Blair. He was an unlikely companion for Jim and betrayed his lack of breeding all too often, but nonetheless, Sally liked him. He was attentive and charming to her, even if he did tend to run on upon subjects that were beyond her. She enjoyed his assumption that she might care for something beyond tea and gossip.

Jim had no inclination to explain that they were crossing half the globe because of dreams, and turned to another topic. "I expect that Father will be in no good mood. A warning to you."

Sally smiled. "Bless you, my dear. If I let your father's moods distress me I'd have had no peace these thirty years. And since his accident he has little troubled me. Why call me in to discuss the business of the house, so long as all goes well?" She shared an ironic glance with Jim. He had been called to his father's presence all too often before he left home. "But it does distress me that you are always at loggerheads."

"Then you must have been distressed these thirty years and more."

"He's no longer young, my dear. And he knows that he made errors with you." It struck Jim that Sally was no longer young, either. But she, at least, made no effort to blackmail him with frailty.

"Perhaps I made errors with him, too. But he must needs throw his age in my face, along with Sandburg's presumed motives. I won't have it, Sally, I won't!" Jim stopped; his voice was too loud. He shouldn't let this anger him so much, but it was all of a piece with everything that was in the past. Jim never could be the acceptable son.

"He has never met Blair. And it's hard for him to accept that your closest intimate is – well, I am fond of Blair, but he is hardly a usual friend for someone of our degree."

"He's never asked to meet him. Just assumed from beginning to end that Sandburg seeks his own advantage."

"It's the way of the world, Jim. You know that." At the furious light that sparked in Jim's eyes, Sally said, "No, no. I didn't mean that Blair is not your good and loyal friend. But you know what people think."

"People think too much upon all the wrong subjects."

Sally fiddled with the ribbons of her dress. "How long do you think you will be away?"

"A year, most likely. At the least. It's a long voyage, and then Sandburg wishes to travel the interior of the country."

"So he has grown tired of travelling through his books and plans to see for himself at last."

"Something like that. And I will travel upon his coat-tails."

Sally rose and tugged at the bell-pull. "I will have the atlases fetched from the library, and you can show me where Blair's coat-tails will drag you. And you must write me letters."

Jim grinned. "There's every chance that I will come back before they reach you."

"That's as may be," Sally said. "And make sure that I can share them with my friends. There is such a glamour to a letter from foreign parts."

"I will do my best." The footman arrived, and Sally sent him forth on his errand to the library.

Stephen was as surprised by the news as his father and his cousin. However, he had endured bigger shocks of knowledge about his brother than the idea that he might travel to some alien land on the whim of Blair Sandburg, and so he offered Jim wine and snuff and sat the both of them down in his study.

"Sandburg has always been restless of mind, and now he must be restless of body. I suppose it's only a wonder that it hasn't come before now." Stephen smiled. "Although Rome or even Germany would surely have been a more pleasant destination."

"But he speaks no Italian or German," Jim said, and sipped his wine. It was more to his taste than the tea he'd drunk with Sally. His discussions with his father were never eased with the trivialities of refreshments, which was as well. Jim doubted he could swallow in such circumstances.

"Why South America, Jim?"

"You remember I spoke of that woman; Alicia Bannister."

Stephen winced. "I'm not likely to forget." Alicia Bannister; thief, would-be murderess. Associate of the Duke of Stavely, which had disturbed Stephen at least as much as all the rest.

"Blair obtained papers from her. They mention Peru, and matters relating to my senses."

"I see. But why now? It's three years since."

"As everyone observes, travel to Peru is no small undertaking."

"It's a dangerous one, there's no denying."

"Ah well. If Sandburg and I never return, all the more for Thomas and Amelia."

Stephen glared at his brother, offended. "I am never sure if you restrain your tongue around Sandburg, or if he is simply more inclined to forgive your odd sense of humour."

"Something of both, I think." Jim tilted his glass towards his brother. "My apologies. Father threatened me with his impending death when I broke the news to him. Perhaps it turned my head to such thoughts."

"Impending death?" Stephen barked.

"Calm yourself, little brother. He's no more likely to die today than he was any other day. He merely pointed out that he was no longer young, and that South America is a goodly distance to return from for a funeral."

"Heaven avert." Stephen stirred uncomfortably in his chair. "We are none of us getting younger. Damn me, I've turned forty."

Jim turned gladly to a lighter subject. "You've kept more of your hair than I have. And Louise still looks admiringly upon you."

"As do I upon her. And you'd have more hair if you cropped it less brutally." Stephen paused. "The Sandburgs have done well by our family, I think, Jim. For all the difficulty of your intended travels."

"True enough," Jim replied.

Talk meandered into discussions of the journey, and the arrangements that Jim had made for his estate and his money. When Jim left, it was late. Stephen decided that he would visit his wife's room. Louise looked up at him from her little sofa beside the fire, and smiled sleepily.

"I was about to go to bed. I thought not to see you until the morning."

"And I thought you might wish to hear my news. Jim and Blair are to travel – to Peru if you please."

"Peru! Oh, that must surely be Blair's idea."

"Yes, it surely must, but my brother will travel with him."

"David and Jonathan," Louise murmured, low enough that Stephen did not hear her at first. When she repeated herself, he was hard put to control his face. Well, he thought dazedly, it was indeed a love surpassing that of women, but he didn't share that thought with Louise. There were things that decent women had no need to know.

Ships were many things. Necessary of course; how else would goods and people travel across the seas? Often beautiful in their way, sitting on the water like strange, gracious birds. Smelly; orderly when under the control of a competent captain; sadly vulnerable against the forces of nature, whether that force was a gale or the drag of barnacles against the hull. But one thing that ships weren't and never would be was spacious; and this gave Blair a severe qualm as he judged the tiny space of their cabin against all of Jim's stooped six feet in height.

Blair eyed one of the two narrow bunks, neatly edged above and below with cabinetry. "I have my doubts that I'll fit in there, let alone you."

"By ship standards it's commodious. And I travelled in far worse accommodation in the past." Jim shrugged. "If necessary, perhaps we can convince the ship's carpenter to put bolts in the wall, and I'll sling a hammock diagonally."

"All the better for me to walk into when I wake?"

Jim's hand lay on Blair's shoulder. "Think of it as an incentive to awaken more thoroughly in the mornings."

Blair grinned, and braced himself against the wall. They were only an hour out from port, aboard the brig 'Corazon de Maria', which despite the name was captained by a man with the unlikely name of Falloon. Falloon, half Irish and half Spanish, had begun his sailing career when British ships were blockading Spanish ports. King Carlos had seen something in Bonaparte, even if many of his subjects were less convinced, but the end result had been increased British trade in Spain's former South American colonies. Rumour increasingly suggested that Peru, Spain's last American belonging, was soon to be no colony at all, and both Blair and Jim hoped that they might not sail into civil war.

For now, there was only the little world of the ship, where they would live for some three months, depending on the winds and the weather.

"Shall we go up on deck? We'll be out of sight of land by now," Blair asked. "And the air will surely be fresher." Even here, in the doubtful best that the 'Corazon' had to offer, the air was redolent with scent that even Blair's completely ordinary sense of smell could identify, and not rejoice in.

Jim nodded, and gestured for Blair to precede him. The two of them made their way up the narrow steps, hands braced against the movement of the ship, and Blair nearly tripped as they made their way out on deck. Jim steadied him and they picked their way to the edge. Blair held onto rigging. Jim leaned upon the rail and bowed his head.

"I thought that I'd be the first to grow seasick," Blair said. His tone was light, but there was an edge of discomfort in his tone, and Blair tried to banish the feelings which underlay that discomfort. If he was to indulge a fit of guilt every time that Jim was inconvenienced in some way upon their travels then he thought that he might as well find himself a hair shirt and be done with it

Jim's eyes were shut and he was silent. Then, with an effort, he raised his head and smiled. "No-one ever said that life was what was expected."

"True words," Blair said. He stared out over the sea, the wind stirring his hair because Blair saw little point in wearing a hat to see it sail overboard never to be retrieved. Blair and Jim, and the ship which held them, were the one point of darker colour in an encompassing world of steely grey and green. The sea swelled and billowed all around them, the land already rapidly receding out of sight.

Blair thought it all magnificent, and not even the beginning of queasiness in his gut could take away the shining glory of the moment. But Blair's glory was Jim's despair. Years ago, as a young soldier Jim had travelled to India, and spent much of the journey awash with grog, bolstering his waning courage with the company of the other men. The huge, featureless expanse of the ocean had, quite simply, terrified him. Somehow, Jim had nearly forgotten that, forgotten his youthful disgust with himself and the bravado that had carried him through at the time. And now, his senses only seemed to magnify everything that had distressed him then. The sough of the waves, the whistle of the wind in the rigging, the flap of the sails – every physical thing that Jim could hear, could feel, could see reminded some small, shivering part of his soul that he was helpless in the midst of a watery wasteland.

"I'm going below," he said curtly, and hurried beneath the uncertain shelter of the ship's creaking deck. Blair watched him go in surprise, but wondered again if perhaps Jim was feeling unwell also. Determined to distract himself, Blair remained above, taking in the cool blast of the wind and watching the sailors with an interest that a disordered stomach couldn't completely quench. He entertained himself with notions of hierarchy among the sailors around him – those that were official and recognised with rank, and those that were less obvious, and determined by mysterious forces of charisma and experience. However, this game palled eventually, and his conscience pricked him at leaving Jim alone so long, and Blair made his way below decks also.

Jim sat curled on the bunk, a book in his hands; it was an atlas of South America, and the dim light of the cabin was hardly a barrier to Jim's sight. There was only so much that could be fitted into their personal luggage in the small space. Cards and dice were also stowed away where they might be reached.

Blair smiled. "I believe that the uncomfortable portion of our adventure has begun."

"Queasy, are you?"

"Just a touch," Blair admitted. He squatted by the edge of Jim's bunk. "And you?"

"The wind was cold." Jim shrugged. "You forget that this has no charm of novelty for me."

Within a day or so, any charms of novelty had gone overboard with the contents of Blair's stomach, and he lay miserable in his own bunk, pale and sweating, with Jim keeping morose and silent company with him much of the time. Jim's silence did not prevent him offering Blair such care as was possible, and Blair was too sick to want any more than the warmth of Jim's hand steadying his head as he took a sip of ale or water anyway.

Jim found some comfort (and much needed air) by going above deck at night. Somehow, the ocean around him didn't overwhelm him so much when he couldn't see it, but the strain of what even Jim had to admit to himself was continual fear told upon his temper. There were no explosions, but Jim folded in upon himself, stowing his speech and his energy as tightly away inside himself as he could, and almost welcoming it when his old enemy, the tendency to fall into trances, made its return for the first time in years.

Blair, at first distracted by his own frailties, noted these things but was not immediately concerned by them. But as his body grew used to the movement of the ship and Blair's usual health and enthusiasm returned, he was encouraged to take note once more of what was happening around him. What he saw happening to Jim worried him, and one evening he followed Jim out upon on his nightly sojourns in the dark.

Jim sat towards the stern, wrapped in a coat which was never truly dry, any more than most items on the ship ever were. Blair sat beside him, shivering in the chill.

Jim gave him one brief glance, then shut his eyes and concentrated upon the feel of the air in his lungs. "You should go below where it's warmer."

"Warm only by comparison," Blair replied. "Why can you not sleep?"

Jim's voice issued out of the dark. "How should I know?"

"Because it is you who are not sleeping," Blair said in tones of great reasonableness. He was grateful for the dark and the chill and the need to keep out of the way of any others who might come up on deck for the excuse to huddle close to Jim. He curled himself into a ball, his hands wrapped across his knees, the deck hard under his buttocks. "You must surely have some idea. Is it your senses?"

A shrug was his only reply.

"You sleep somewhat during the day, but that's hardly unusual when the sleep becomes disordered." Blair was almost speaking to himself, and Jim made no answer. He was not about to tell Blair that he feared the water about him the way a child feared the monster under the bed. He couldn't even pretend to himself that it was a rational fear, that of drowning or shipwreck. It was not.

"It's some peculiarity of the travel, Sandburg," Jim said at last. "I see no point in worrying about it."

"I do worry about it," Blair said. His throat was tense, and his hands gripped tightly enough to whiten his knuckles. He knew that Jim was evading the discussion, but he didn't know why, and his busy brain threw up reasons left and right why that might be.

Jim had no answers for him. "If I have become a night-owl, then so be it. Get back to bed and your own rest."

"It's hard to rest without you," Blair said, as low as he might. The habit of caution was with them always, but it was harder here, in this place surrounded by strangers, where there was little privacy. When they rested in their cabin Jim and Blair could both hear the noises of the ship, the sailors, the few other passengers. If they could hear, especially Blair, then they could be heard. Blair longed suddenly for the bedroom of the London house, with its solid bolt upon the door, and the big bed, where he might whisper in Jim's ear or talk aloud as he pleased. Or not talk, also as he pleased, but simply enjoy Jim's body spread out for him.

Blair was a warm bulk in the dark next to Jim. There were occasional lanterns on deck but the light they gave was feeble. Blair's yearning lust was a flare in the dark, something that Jim discerned as light or heat as much as scent, and Jim turned his head towards him, and leaned to whisper, "Go below."

"Only if you follow me," Blair murmured. He was filled with hope – hope that he and Jim might enjoy each other, after a gap caused by tiredness and illness, and hope that he might get more information out of a well-fucked Jim.

Both hopes were as transparent to Jim as a pane of glass, and he said aloud, in a voice of almost long suffering, "Can you doubt it?" Jim willed that the emptiness of fear in his gut be filled with the warmth of sex. It was a better solution than drunkenness, if not perhaps so very different in its workings.

The workings of sex in a small cramped cabin were immaterial to Blair, and a welcome distraction to Jim. Blair cursed as he saw that the lamp had gone out, but Jim cut short the complaints with a hand over Blair's mouth, even as he shut the door behind them.

"Our captain wouldn't appreciate that you left a lantern unattended, Sandburg." The rebuke was teasing, but genuine, and Blair shrugged in half-apology. He was too aware of Jim so close against him to care that much.

"And we don't need the light if we're to sleep, do we now?" Jim spoke on, hardly caring what he said while his hand held still to Blair's mouth. Blair shook his head. He might have enjoyed some light, but Jim's voice and Jim's hands held all his attention there in the dark. He put a hand upon the wood around him, and let it guide him down to the floor in that same dark, afraid that the pitching of the ship would see him fall. Jim followed him down, his hands reaching for Blair's clothes, and his mouth seeking Blair's.

All was done by touch, Jim straddling Blair as he sat on the floor, the small space silent except for the rustle of breath and discarded clothing. At home, either home, Blair delighted in lighting a candle, or drawing back curtains to let the moon illuminate whatever there was to see. They'd made love without light before, but in this strange place there was an added eroticism to blind exploration. Blair wished only for speech, but he couldn't trust himself not to misjudge and say something that would carry. When Jim carried Blair's finger to the cleft of his arse cheeks, knowing that Blair would understand, Blair's breath hitched in surprise and anticipation. Jim didn't often make the offer, and there were times when Blair drove himself near crazy with the wish to ask. But he asked as seldom as Jim offered, because he so often hoped for the gift freely given.

Jim knew the place of every item they had stowed away. He tore himself away from touching Blair long enough to find some concoction of beeswax and herbs that could be innocently explained, and pressed it into Blair's hands. Jim was all efficiency for a few moments while Blair's hands undid the lid and lifted out a sharp-sweet scented glob of cream. Jim's task was spread their empty clothes to cushion their knees, and to lean himself against the edge of the bunk, his head leaning against his hands. He shivered when Blair's finger pushed into him. "Make it last," Jim whispered.

Blair smiled. There were harder things to have asked of him than that, and he leaned his cheek against the warm, smooth skin of Jim's back while he played: slow, languorous touches; quick, jabbing movements that were still carefully judged; kisses against Jim's skin that tasted of sweat. Finally, kneeling beside Jim, Blair whispered in his turn, "Now you can have my cock. And I can make that last, too." His breath flowed across Jim's skin like wind over the sea, and Jim shivered, but said nothing, not when Blair entered him; not through all the long, slow fucking that Blair had promised. Jim shut his eyes in reflex. There was nothing to see, but the body demanded that there should be no distractions to sensation. Blair's hand searched across Jim's belly and groin, to find Jim already stroking himself. Blair nodded in satisfaction, and the only sound was breath, passing in and out of mouths that strained not to speak, not to moan. Jim was half bent across the bunk-side, and Blair had locked his hands upon Jim's shoulders, close to his neck, his cheek once again laid against Jim's skin.

"Do you need more?" Blair whispered. His own need seemed to him to bleed out in his sweat, through his hands and the skin of his whole body as well as his cock. He wanted to come - so much. Jim shook his head, and changed the stroke of his hand. He'd lingered long enough, and in that small, dark room, Blair could smell the scent of release at last, and with his face wracked with effort, took his own. They stayed pressed together, but eventually they had to move, despite the complaint of aching muscles and the discomfort of cooling flesh.

Blair's hands now pushed Jim into the bunk, and dragged blankets around him. "Sleep, for God's sake. And be prepared to explain yourself when you wake." Jim sighed, but made no promise. He listened as Blair took the one step that would cross the space between the bunks, and nestled under his own coverings.

Jim slept easily enough, heavily even, and Blair woke before he did, lying awake before dragging on his clothes once more. He found them with some trouble, and the droop of sleeves down to his knuckles confirmed that he had put Jim's shirt on instead of his own. With an irritated bite to his lip, Blair searched the puddles of cloth upon the floor and found by touch the shirt that was actually his. Once dressed in his own clothes, he quietly left the cabin, sparing a glance for Jim's bulk in the tiny bunk, just barely visible now. "Tired, dear one?" Blair shook his head. "And not by me, I suspect. More's the pity."

The weather passed as fine, and the ship's galley was a small haven of light in the dawn. The Corazon's cook was a man called Munoz, and he nodded at Blair as he heated a tiny kettle.

"Tea, senor?"

Blair nodded, said 'Thank you", and Munoz grinned. He found this English Jew pleasant enough, but even in the smallest phrases, Madre de Dios, his accent! Whenever he was twitted for his colonial phrasings, Munoz would remember this foreigner and be content.

Blair was joined by Senora Maria Falloon, who travelled with her husband as they had not been blessed by children. She also took tea, looking out contentedly around her as the ship ploughed through the waves. Her profile was strong and her skin well-tanned by years of travel. She was, as she had explained when Blair and Jim first boarded, of Mestizo descent.

"You are awake early."

Blair's Spanish was up to this challenge, and he smiled and nodded. "Indeed. I'm sleeping better now that my stomach is recovered."

"We are making good time." Senora Falloon grinned, unabashed by the gaps of missing teeth in her mouth. "Even if my husband would rebuke me for such a comment and say that I will draw bad luck. How do you say that in English?"

"Curse? Jinx?" Blair suggested.

"Zhinx," she said, the sound mushed by the lack of teeth as much as anything. "That is the word." She took a sip of the strong, black tea. "And when we reach home, what will you do then?"

"Decide whether we take ship around the Horn, or cross the isthmus, I suppose."

"You must cross Panama. It is much, much better. No-one sails the Horn who must not."

Blair smiled politely. He was inclined towards taking her advice anyway, but Senora Falloon's open curiosity about his plans irritated him. Quite clearly, she considered that his studies had addled his brains.

"I think that I will take some tea to Jim." At least, that was what Blair tried to say, although he sadly muddled his tenses. He sketched a small bow, which Senora Falloon also chose to be amused by. "By your leave, madam."

Blair made his careful way bearing the tin cup of tea back to the cabin. Jim was just stirring, and blinked at Blair in sleepy confusion.

"I have tea for you."

Jim sat up, bent into a bow in the small space. "Have you now?" He sipped at it, his mouth pursing at the bitterness.

"How are you this morning?" Blair asked, his voice overly hearty to Jim's ears.

"Well enough."

This was a clear enough lie that Blair's face fell. "Jim, I wish you might talk more openly to me. Even if you have no answers, and I have no answers...."

"Then we will be in as much ignorance as we ever were."

Blair's hands cut through the air, but they could not cut the bounds that Jim placed upon his tongue. "As you please. I'm going above. Perhaps I will find a spot out of the wind, and write."

The day was marked by quiet. The Corazon was blessed with good winds, and Blair read, and wrote, and played dice with some of the crew. Jim appeared to read, but more often caught himself falling in and out of trances, to be disturbed from them by a sailor's cry, and once or twice by Blair's voice or hand.

"They will think that you have the falling sickness if you continue like this."

Jim shrugged. "Let them."

The night was marked by yet more urgent passion, as Jim sought solace from the stress of the day. Blair nearly blooded his hand biting down upon it to keep silence, and Jim kissed the bite and then let himself be lost himself again in scent and touch. Eventually, Blair dragged bedding down and they slept jammed together on the tiny floor space.

This became the pattern of the next few days. Blair might have taken some comfort in the way that Jim reached him in the night if weren't for feeling that nearly anyone or anything might have done, so long as Jim had distraction.

Blair kept his journal still, and he kept up his entries, noting Jim's behaviours, and committing some of his worry to paper. Then one morning, awake once again before Jim, he had a thought.

Ripping some pages from his journal, Blair leaned his paper against the book itself and blessed the invention of pencils. Ink was darker, but pencil was so much easier, more portable, and less untidy. Definitely more tidy, so long as the user didn't slice his fingers sharpening the point.

He wrote for perhaps half an hour, as if in sleep his mind had been busily planning and was now simply dictating to his fingers. Once he had filled both sides of several small sheets of paper he folded them in four, and returned to the cabin where Jim still slept on, and gently slid the paper under Jim's pillow.

Jim woke eventually, cramped and with a dry mouth. Leaning up with an elbow on his lumpy cotton pillow, he heard the crackle of paper and investigated. Blair's hand-writing was a familiar sight, even if Jim seldom received letters from him because they were so seldom apart. But he had seen this scrawl on letters to others, and on the endless notes and journals which Blair wrote.

"My very dear Jim," the letter began. Jim shook his head. "This is a new method of mischief, Sandburg, I'll grant you that." Then he read on.

"It seems to me that I recognise this pattern, an irritating one, whereby I note that there is something amiss and you stare forbiddingly at the horizon and declare that all is well. And I can only say that you seem to gather strength from the cornucopia of horizon which has been availed by our travels. So I have decided that I will note down some few ideas which I have about what may be the problem. If you might perhaps sign your initials by the correct suppositions, or those that are the least outlandish, then I will be grateful, and you will be saved the distressing necessity of actually saying anything." 'Saying' was underlined three times.

"If it is your senses then you should describe the symptoms and let us work together. Even if we find no solution, at least my curiosity will be satisfied, which is no small matter, as you know, and there is always that old saying of a trouble shared is a trouble halved." There followed a selection of Blair's suggestions, which Jim skimmed over. He could see for himself that these suggestions were not the end of the letter, or even its meat.

"Of course, your concern may not be related to any question of your senses. But I would remind you that a trouble shared is still a trouble halved, unless it is I that am the trouble." Jim shook his head, unreasonably irritated but perversely enjoying the feeling nonetheless. Now that Blair was no longer distracted from observing Jim by puking and sweating , his first assumption was that he was the cause of the trouble. Jim felt wrong-footed as well as ashamed of his irrational fears. No wonder that the warmth of irritation was a comfort.

"If that is the case," the damnable letter continued, "then I beg that you explain yourself. Even if it is only to say that you regret your decision to come, and plan to turn for England at the first port that we reach. There have been hard lessons between us about keeping secrets before. You may as well learn from my example of what not to do."

It ended, "Your devoted friend, Blair Sandburg". Jim took a deep, long breath through his nose. It did nothing to calm him.

Jim flung on his clothes and stepped forth into the light of day upon a pale and apparently infinite ocean to have words with Blair. He found him, at work with a man repairing one of the sails, learning the techniques of a whip-stitch. Such work was never ending.

"Sandburg, I must speak with you."

Blair looked up, and nodded. "Of course." He turned to the sailor, a man called Chavez who had grey hair and a beak of a nose. "You will do better without me," he said with a grin. Chavez nodded, but chose not to reveal whether this nod was acceptance of Blair's departure or agreement that he was very bad with a needle.

Jim had refolded the letter, and fidgeted with it as he spoke in low tones.

"Has it ever occurred to you that you do not need to know every little detail about me?"

Blair made a dismissive gesture that belied the nervousness that fluttered in his chest. "I've considered it, but not in any serious manner."

"Consider it some more." Jim swallowed. How could Blair so soon jump to the conclusions that he had? "If I swear to you that you have nothing to be worried about, will you just let this be? I have no regrets about travelling with you. At least," honesty compelled a further explanation, "at least, no more regrets than I've already expressed."

Blair's lips pressed together. "Everything you say confirms that there is indeed some problem. So why will you not enlighten me?"

"And why must you enact the part of a tragedy hero over this?" Jim retorted.

"That was no intention of mine," Blair said, stung by the accusation. "It's just that..." He stared unseeingly out over the sea. "All the worst things between us happen when we are not in each other's confidence. And that makes me uneasy, and the next thing you observe is my turn as the next sensation of the theatrical stage." He grinned, but it was uncertain, too effortful in the upturn of his face.

"I've not been sweet-tempered, I'll grant. But..." Jim's voice lowered to a hiss. "For God's sake, at night I'd have thought you had reassurance enough that I had no intention of turning back."

Blair huffed out an exasperated sigh. "There are times when I forget that you're an honourable man. Have you never played the game of 'I will give you up soon, so therefore I shall have the full use of you while I may'?"

"No. I have not."

"Well, I have, and seen it played all too often."

"And you think that I...?" Jim could not hide his offense.

"No. Not seriously." Blair's hands rose placacatingly. "But I saw your distress, and between our miniscule cabin and the vastness of all this," Blair's hands waved out at the ocean all around them, "the enormity of everything that I've asked of you leapt on me like a rabid dog, as it does sometimes, and I couldn't bear that you would not confide in me."

Jim shut his eyes, and opened his mouth. "It's the ocean."

Blair narrowed his eyes. "What?"

"It's the ocean, Sandburg! I have a fear of it, a horror, like some school-room miss discovering a mouse under her skirts."

Jim's voice was raised and some of the men about the deck turned their heads. Distraction and amusement must be sought where they could be found, even when it was in the only barely comprehensible English language. The Medusa-like glare that they received from Jim encouraged them back to at least the semblance of inattention.

Blair's eyes grew very wide, before he ducked his head and frowned.

"I see. At least I think I do. I knew a man who couldn't bear spiders. He turned as white as a sheet if he discovered one, but he was neck-or-nothing on a horse." He shook his head. "Why in God's name should this have been such a secret?"

Jim put his head in his hands, all the better to look at the timbers of the deck, and not the water, or Blair's disappointed face. "And why must you have to know everything?"

Exasperation grew in Blair, of a size to match his previous anxiety. "I – Jim, I may have been indulging myself in ridiculous imaginings, and don't think that I didn't tell myself that, but for God's sake...could you not have simply said something?"

"And who laughed at your acquaintance with the fear of spiders?" Jim enquired.

"Many," Blair said bluntly. "But that implies that you think that I might treat you so, and I think that I have a right to take offence at that."

"And I should not take offence at your ridiculous imaginings?" Jim sat trammelled upon the deck. There was no study, or bedroom to escape to, no woods or streets to stride through until calm came to him. There was only the tiny wooden world of the ship, riding upon the source of all his terror and humiliation. The wind flapped the sails with a noise of gun shot; the rigging hummed as it slackened and tautened; and the ocean's noise became a swallowing roar.

"Jim. Jim!" Blair shook at Jim's shoulder. His face was creased in worry. "You were..." A couple of sailors were gathered around, their faces mixes of concern and interested curiosity. Blair stood and gestured at them, struggling for the Spanish words before repeating himself in English. "It's all right. He just takes these – turns, sometimes. He will be well."

Certainly, Jim was well enough to recognise that he had fallen into one of his trances once again, and he heaved himself up, and sluggishly made his way below, Blair trailing in his wake with a grim expression.

"I'm sorry," Blair said, as Jim bent himself into the angles that his bunk would allow.

"It's not your fault, Sandburg," Jim said tiredly.

"But perhaps it is," Blair said. "Always together, we've assumed that my presence helps with your senses in some way. But now – you fall into your trances with not a warning." He sat upon the floor, leaving his face and Jim's at the same level. "Which you hate, which is understandable because no man wishes that sort of vulnerability. But the trances imply that perhaps this is related to your senses in some way, and I'm supposed to assist you with those, surely."

The two of them stared across the small empty space between them.

"Why must you be supposed to help me?"

Blair's face creased in exasperation once again. "Because I'm your guide, Jim. That's what I'm for, if Al..." He broke off, not wishing to name Alicia, and began the explanation again. "If what I've read is correct. And it makes sense within our experience, Jim, you know that it does."

"Yes." Jim shut his eyes, still weary, and weighed down by these reminders of how they were being shepherded towards he knew not what fate. Alicia, the stream, the papers she had left with Blair – it seemed sometimes to Jim that they were merely the precursors to whatever they sailed towards; and here he was eaten up with exhaustion and fear and the journey barely started.

Blair saw the weariness, although he assumed it was the aftermath of the trance and the ongoing strain of Jim's irrational fear. Then his face brightened with a thought.

"The trances leave you vulnerable. Hence the idea of a guide – someone to guard your back and help keep you safe. But what if the trances are of use, Jim?"

"How do you mean?"

"You and I – we've assumed that the trances are a form of escape from an unbearable stimulation. Correct?"

Jim nodded.

"But what if..." Blair frowned, trying to put his thought into a shape of words. "When we meet something new, knowledge, experience, whatever, we have to grasp that new thing don't we? We have to understand it, or if it's a skill we must learn, we have to do it over and over again."

"So," Jim said, growing somewhat impatient.

"Perhaps the trances are not merely an escape, but a tool for your senses? A way to create understanding of their perception. Perhaps it's entirely right for you to fall into trances?"

"And how does understanding come out of my standing open-mouthed and drooling like a dolt?" Jim asked.

Blair's face turned downcast. "I don't know. But the idea..." He smiled. "Sometimes ideas just seem right. And no-one has ever declared me to be delusional..." He moved on his haunches to kiss Jim's brow, "...not even you, so perhaps there is something to be said for the intuition."

"Perhaps." Jim took Blair's hand within his. "But even if you're right..." His hand tightened around Blair's. "I'm not accustomed to this – to being afraid like this." Other fears he knew, had grown used to even, but this was beyond him.

Blair leaned closer until their head touched, braced gently against the ship's movement. "I know. I'm sorry." They stayed like that until Blair said, "If your trances are a means of understanding, then perhaps, perhaps we should encourage it." He swallowed. "Perhaps we should go back on deck and..." He hesitated, wanting Jim to make the last connection, and the choice that went with it.

"And I should stare at the ocean until my peculiar self understands it completely. Is that what you're suggesting, Sandburg?"

"Yes. Yes, I believe that it is."

"With you there to watch my back or jump in after me should I pitch overboard in my abstraction?"

"If need be."

"How good a swimmer are you?" Jim asked suspiciously.

Blair shrugged. "I can thrash about a bit."

To the surprise of them both, Jim started to laugh. Then he said, "Are you courageous or merely a fool?" But his hand stroked across Blair's cheek.

"You were the soldier. If you don't know then no man ever will, I suspect."

Jim shook his head, sobered now. "I know that there is no shortage of fools in the world." He sat up, his back hunched in the space of the bunk. "Come on, then. If I'm to face my terrors on the basis of your theory, then you'd better be there to explain me."

"What? Truly?" Blair exclaimed.

"Truly, Sandburg. There's no other plan to attempt, although I don't doubt that your fertile brain might surprise us both. Lead the way."

Blair took a breath and opened the door of their tiny cabin and walked up onto the deck with Jim close behind him. He looked around for what might be the best vantage point, and turned to ask Jim his opinion. Jim's face was pale and strained, and his hand gripped suddenly at Blair's arm hard enough to hurt.

"It's all right, it's all right," Blair murmured, his voice low and almost lost in the sounds of the deck. "I suppose that this is a good as any other place," he said and led Jim to a point at the starboard side.

Captain Falloon was at the helm. It was a pleasant day and most of the crew was above deck whether they had duties or not, and Senora Falloon watched as her husband's strange passengers made their way to the wooden rail. Blair noted the attention, but shrugged it off. The lack of privacy was unavoidable.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

Jim nodded. One hand was braced at the rail; the other held its clench on Blair's arm.

"Just look at it, Jim. Or listen, if you need to." Blair stared out at the sea himself, as if he might transfer all his own appreciation of its glories to the man by his side, and tried to be calm. Jim stared out, his eyes squinting against the light and wished that he might shield his thoughts as easily. His awareness of his surroundings ran out like a tide; after a minute or so, Blair said his name, to no answer.

The trance was a form of achievement but it presented Blair with a new conundrum. Jim was lost in the movement and sound of the water, of the surge of his mind and body's response to it all, but how much was enough? What might be too much? Some five minutes went by, and Blair found himself growing as present and aware as Jim was absent. He could not miss Senora Falloon's determined approach, but he didn't move, other than to turn his head and nod at her.

"Senora."

She stared at Jim, who still looked out to sea, his face empty, his body frozen in its place, his hands at their anchor points.

"Should he not be below?" she asked.

Blair shrugged. "I think this more healthful for him," he said.

"You are his doctor?" she enquired.

That idea made Blair laugh. "After a fashion, I suppose that I am."

The senora clucked her tongue in sympathy as she drew her own conclusions. Ellison, that stern man, must be seeking a cure for his indisposition in travel. And Blair Sandburg was his nursemaid. Certain things now made more sense to her. "You must tell someone if you need assistance."

"Yes." Blair nodded his head. "Many thanks."

Jim came back to himself like a swimmer surfacing from deep water, to find Blair examining his watch, and the two of them examined by the sailors around them.

"Twenty-eight minutes," Blair declared. "I spoke somewhat, but obviously not enough to disturb you until you were ready to pay attention."

Jim's hand was cramped where it had rested on the rail, and he took his other hand, which was warmer from its hold on Blair and tried to rub some of the ache out. He winced as he stretched his fingers wide.

"Did it work?" Blair's head tilted up in enquiry, curiosity and hope both in his face.

Jim lifted his head from his close examination of his hands, and looked out over the sea, all the way to the horizon and waited. Where the rush of terror had been, now there was an odd emptiness. Jim felt strangely let down. The absence of fear was a fine thing. Surely there ought to be exultation at his success.

"I think that it did."

Blair supplied exultation enough for the both of them; it rose from him like perfume.

"That's amazing," he crowed, his face lit with sheer joy.

"No doubt," Jim said dryly. But he couldn't fail to be warmed by Blair's pleasure in the success, and by the gradual sense of relief that the vast expanse of water around them was simply – the ocean. Jim was far more aware of the curious looks of the men around him.

"Twenty-eight minutes, you said?"

Blair nodded, well aware that Jim's thoughts were travelling in the same direction as his gaze.

"Yes. Senora Falloon was concerned for you. She asked if I were your doctor."

Jim shook his head ruefully. "So I'm to be cast as an invalid once more."

"It's as good an explanation for our association as any."

"I must swallow my pride, must I?"

Blair grinned, still delighted with the success of his idea. "I think that you must." He lowered his voice. "But if it pains you too much, I suspect that we might arrange some soothing treatment or other."

Jim hastily placed his hands on the distraction of the wooden rail, which was nothing like Blair's warm skin, and stared out over the ocean, and its blue that was entirely different to the blue of Blair's eyes.

"Indeed," Jim said. Blue eyes looked into blue eyes, and each man understood the other perfectly. "There is always consolation to be found if one searches."

Many years later what Jim remembered best of their first journey together by ship was his fear, and his shame at it; and the following shame that he had given Blair pain in his efforts to deal by himself when there had, after all, been an answer.

What Blair remembered of that first journey was the storm. He remembered the anxious looks that Captain Falloon and his crew had turned towards the northern horizon at the bank of cloud that had looked, paradoxically, less black when they were in the thick of it than it had against the blue sky which it smothered. Under the clouds and its storm, the sky and the sea were merely grey, but an immense and disturbed grey that had stressed both ship and men to breaking point over three terrifying days.

Jim dealt with the storm as he had dealt with battle. Disaster might occur any moment, but there were things that must be done, and if there was nothing to be done, then there was a quiet place inside himself to wait. In such a storm, even for soft-handed, rich passengers there were things to do. Every man ( and Senora Falloon) took their turn on deck, wrestling with ropes and rigging and the soaking, flapping sails, holding this, releasing that, while Captain Falloon and his mate took their chances at the helm and shouted themselves hoarse giving desperate commands.

The Corazon lost two men overboard in the storm. Blair was nearly a third, practically thrown across the deck towards the open sea by a surge of water, already reliving the choking horror of water in his lungs. One of the crew caught, just, at the collar of his jacket, before Jim struggled his way across the deck to help drag Blair away from the edge. It had been dusk at that time, and even in the confusion Blair had remembered how Jim's grim, white face had filled all his sight in the growing shadows, and thought that perhaps his friend's fear of the ocean had not been so irrational after all.

There was barely any food during that time. Everything on board was damp and cold, with no comfort to be found anywhere afterwards except in the exhausted relief that it had been no worse than torn sails and a few snapped spars. The masts remained intact. If Captain Falloon could have physically embraced the Corazon, he would have.

Blair and Jim's belongings were as dank as everyone else's. On the evening of the third day, when it was clear that the worst was over, they huddled in their cabin. Jim had examined the cheerless space with a jaundiced eye, while Blair had shivered and discovered that the urge of chattering teeth was more powerful than a clenched jaw.

Jim had commanded, "Strip down to your breeches," and done the job himself despite Blair's pitiful look and fitful protests between the shudder of his jaws. Jim, however, had ruthlessly arranged them, himself sitting against the cabin wall against a layer of clothes, before he pulled Blair between his legs, Blair's back against his chest, and proceeded to create a rough cone of damp coats and blankets around them, with just their heads sticking out of the top. He'd hissed when he pulled Blair against him. "Jesus, Sandburg, you're like ice."

Blair had been tempted to retort that Jim was little better, but it was less trouble to lean against the man at his back and think nothing and say nothing. Their joints ached. There was not a creature aboard ship who did not ache. Their hands especially ached. Blair had a long, raw rope burn across his palm. Jim had lost most of a fingernail on his right hand. They sat and shivered together, Jim cupping Blair's hands between his like baby chicks, holding both their hands against Blair's heart. That was what Blair remembered the most of that first ship journey, even though it was barely mentioned in his journal or notes.

Both of them would remember, if memory was jogged by conversation or enquiry, how Jim had discovered who was responsible for the petty pilfering on board. He had caught the man in the act, and tracked stolen belongings to their hiding place. Jim had stood by, impassive, even approving, as the man was beaten by Captain Falloon. Order had to be kept, and as he had caught the man he felt it his responsibility to stand by and watch punishment meted out.

Blair, gentler natured, and also always uncomfortably aware of his occasional unscrupulous tendencies in the hard times, had withdrawn to their cabin. It was a single unpleasant incident, not of particular note. It was the first time that Jim overheard the Spanish word, 'brujo' used of him. Brujo. Witch.

Rumour spoke of fever in Panama. Rumour was a liar and took joy in exaggeration, but when it spoke of fever it was seldom proved completely in the wrong. For this reason, Jim was glad whenever their travel across the country took them out of towns and into what he hoped would be more healthful and less populous regions. Rumour also spoke of Bolivar and General Fabrega, and whether Panama would be under Colombia's aegis instead of Spain's, or even its own country, by year's end.

Jim and Blair had made their farewells to Captain and Senora Falloon, and disembarked from the Corazon which had looked shabby and small in the brilliant tropical light that sheened the harbour at Christobal. Blair had been dazzled – not by the literal quality of light, but by the heady awareness that he was not in England, but in a whole new world, the New World, surrounded by habits and voices that were far different from the ways and tones of England. He was prepared to be delighted by everything – the people, the language, the food, the exotic animals sold either as carcasses or pets in the market places. Not even the dysentery that delayed their departure from Christobal could completely deflate his enthusiasm.

The journey cross country was made as part of a mule train. Jim and Blair, as rich foreigners, had the luxury of a cart. Jim nearly came to blows with the teamster. He made no particular distinction between compassion and common-sense when it came to beasts; he believed that under-fed, over-taxed animals could not give of their best. The teamster and overseer of the group was not in agreement with him. It was difficult for Blair to calm Jim, when he was as offended by the animals' treatment as his friend. But he did his best.

"You can't beat him, Jim, any more than you could beat every hackney-driver in London who gave more care to his carriage than his horse."

"Words of wisdom don't remove the temptation, Sandburg," Jim answered, glad that there was barely a word of English amongst their travelling companions. It enabled some vent for his feelings without fearing the complication of giving offense.

"No, words of wisdom don't remove the temptation," Blair replied, with a side long look from under his lashes. It had been a long couple of weeks with little privacy. The tiny, dark cabin on the Corazon had attained a nearly sybaritic aura in memory.

The wry irritation of Blair's voice made Jim smile. "The hardships of travel are many."

But the compensations of travel were many too, especially for a man of an enthusiastic and enquiring nature, and Jim was prepared to enter into Blair's spirit of adventure, until the ship they took passage on at Panama City berthed at Callao – Lima's seaport.

"I didn't think that our voyage was that bad," Jim said, watching Blair grin as he stared at his booted feet planted on the docks of a Peruvian seaport and pat a wooden bollard with great satisfaction.

"No, no, of course it wasn't." Blair shrugged, which went oddly with the still blinding smile. "But..." He paused. "I know it's foolish when we still have a great way to go, when we're not even entirely sure where we must go, but still, we're here, we've made our way to Peru." Blair looked out over the wooden docks, his face bright even as the world dimmed quickly as the sun sank against the horizon. "We're in Peru. We've not been ship-wrecked, or drowned, or murdered for our coin and dropped off the side of a Panamanian mountain. We're here."

"Yes." Jim shrugged in his turn. "We're here."

"Who'd have thought," Blair said, sweating and sated, "that something so commonplace as a bed would be an aphrodisiac?"

Jim patted Blair's backside with an affectionately possessive palm. "Novelty, no doubt."

"Oh, no doubt." Blair kissed Jim's brow. "And of course, there is the knowledge of deprivation to come." His hand wandered across Jim's flank in its turn.

"A case of 'I must give you up soon, so I shall use you while I may'," Jim drily suggested.

Blair was confused for a moment before mild annoyance appeared on his face. "I think you would be a happier man with a less retentive memory." He left the bed but only to wipe at his body with a cloth wrung out in water, while Jim watched appreciatively. Blair returned to wash Jim down, his front firstly, before he gestured that Jim should turn over.

"Is your memory not retentive, then, professor?" There was an edge to Jim's voice, despite the pleasure of Blair's attentions. They would rise soon, and go out and make the acquaintance of a man who might help them - a scholar who knew of men who traded with the Indians in the east of the country.

"Yes, but I wish to remember my studies. And I can choose to dwell upon things other than a months gone-by quarrel." Blair swiped briskly at the tender skin behind Jim's knees. Too light a touch would be ticklish. "Such as the pleasure that there is now in being clean." The cloth was discarded upon the floor, and Blair laid himself next to Jim, who lay still on his belly with his arms cradling his head.

"I know you," Blair said. "You're fearful and therefore you are resentful and inclined to be irritable." His hand clasped the back of Jim's head and stroked the fine, short hair. "I'm not a fool. I know that there is real danger yet to be faced. But we're on the right road, Jim, don't you feel it?"

"But where does the road lead?"

"To the end of the dreams. To whatever will come." Blair sat. "I don't know where it leads, Jim. To know, we have to walk it."

"First, we had best walk the streets of Lima." Jim got out of bed, and pulled on a shirt. "Your bed looks used?"

Blair stretched out, one arm stroking unthinkingly across his chest. "I did everything but spill wine on it."

"The maids will thank you," Jim replied shortly; he did not always appreciate Blair's tendency to explain Jim's own emotions to him. "Get dressed, and I'll call for hot water and breakfast."

Blair nodded and emerged from under the netting across the bed in his turn before padding across the tiled floor of the sitting room between Jim's room and the one designated as his own.

Breakfast was pastries and coffee; the tastes were odd but not unpalatable and both Blair and Jim were enjoying fresh stuffs after yet another sea voyage, even a short one. The staff of the small hotel did their best in the unsettled times. It was bare months since de San Martin had declared Peru to be free of Spain from his dais in the Plaza Mayor. At least Jim and Blair were prepared to pay their way rather than expect 'contributions' to the grand causes of 'Independence!' or 'Spain!'.

The day was cloudy, but warm enough to two men accustomed to England, when they set off with the son of the hotel owner, Gabriel, as their guide. Gabriel was thin, and his voice was adolescently reedy, and he had better things to do, he considered, than to nurse-maid two mad foreigners. But they were paying coin to visit some frowsty old friar at San Marcos University, and Gabriel had uses for the coin which his father need not know of.

Eventually, they stood before an ornate frontage. "Your destination, sirs." Gabriel held out his hand, and received a sum of coin which decided him that there were some advantages to ushering mad foreigners here and there, before he made his departure with a scamper at odds with his previous dignity.

"I think that you were over-generous," Jim said drily.

"It wasn't so very much." Blair shrugged and stared up the tall, white-plastered building before them. "A protestant and a Jew, about to step across the threshold of a Catholic university. Do you think that there will be an earthquake?"

"There's only one way to find out, Sandburg." Jim drew off his hat with a flourish and gestured towards the entrance with it. "After you."

The ground remained unshaken, and they entered the building and made their enquiries and were conducted into the presence of Fray Angelo, who remained seated as they entered. He observed them with dark, limpid eyes that many a woman might have envied.

"Gentlemen."

All the proper gestures of courtesy were made, but the atmosphere was no more than civil. Jim recognised a type he'd known in Spain, not to mention an accent; a stiff-necked hidalgo clinging to his 'pure' Spanish pronunciations. This man would not have welcomed de San Martin and his army. His pale Dominican habit looked well bleached even in the light indoors, and the black hood only accentuated the sallow face of a man who had survived his encounters with fever at some cost.

Blair saw a man who was impervious to his best weapons of charm and enthusiasm, but he gallantly deployed them nonetheless.

"Sir, you were recommended to us as a scholar and explorer of considerable knowledge and experience."

"I have brought God's name to the heathen, yes, and sought knowledge to His glory. But that was when I was younger than I am now." Fray Angelo's dark, beautiful eyes examined these two men closely. He had seen many things when he was younger – the mountains; the jungles and their inhabitants and creatures. He preferred the settled life of the mind he now possessed at San Marcos.

Blair leaned forward in his chair, his hands steepled against his lips in unconscious imitation of an attitude of prayer. "For some five years now, I've studied South America and Peru in particular, and as part of my studies I found descriptions of a tribe of people. I want to find that tribe."

"For what purpose. Their wisdom? They will have none. And Spain took the gold many, many years ago."

"For my own sake. For curiosity."

"A passion, I see." Fray Angelo's gaze travelled from Blair to Jim, then back again. "You mean to find them in your own person, I presume, rather than merely find some reference in book or journal?"

"Yes, yes, I do."

"Then you had best describe this tribe that you seek."

Blair fumbled some papers out of his old portfolio. It was cracked and worn now; old enough that Blair could justify taking this small piece of home along with him. He found notes he had taken recollecting, as best he could, the man in his dreams, together with a rough sketch of the man's painted face.

"I'm no artist, I'm afraid. But I thought this would be more clear than attempting to describe the marks."

Fray Angelo politely forbore agreeing that Blair was no artist. "Is this the exact colour?" he asked of the red that covered the face, depicted in a mask that spread broadly across the eyes and cheekbones and narrowed to cover only the chin rather than the whole jaw.

"It was deeper. I had only pencil. An oil crayon, in a deeper red, might better represent it."

"For what it's worth," Fray Angelo said, "this paint is likely created from crushed insects rather than berry dye, for example. Which means more likely the lowland jungle. But then the kilt means that also. The low forest is warm enough for such simple attire. Congratulations, senores. We need search only half of the country's expanse."

Jim's lips tightened at this sarcasm. Blair, however, took hope from the 'we'. Fray Angelo's interest was engaged despite his disapproval. He stood, and went to an ornately carved cupboard and opened one of several doors to reveal a pile of scrolled papers; they were maps and he brought out two and laid them upon his mahogany desk, anchoring their corners with books.

"This as you see, is the interior of the country. Rivers," Fray Angelo's fingers traced the lines, "and missions." His finger stabbed here and there. "Too many of them Jesuit." He remembered that he spoke to heretics and sniffed. "Not that we are not all brothers in Christ." He resumed, his voice taking on the tone of a lecture. "You will see that the missions lie along the rivers. There is a reason for that." He laid a hand upon the expanse of parchment. "The land is there – but not many men have walked it. The vegetation is dense. There are great predators – the jaguar, the giant snakes. There are spiders whose bite will make a man's arm swell and rot alive before he dies raving." Fray Angelo pinned Blair with a hard stare of his eyes. "This is where you wish to satisfy your curiosity. Too many men have died there already, for far better reasons."

"I understand," Blair said. "But I have to do this." He turned back to look at Jim. "I have to." Blair held Jim's gaze, before Jim nodded, a small but important affirmation. "So, really, the only question is how I – how we do it."

"One tribe, one people in all that vast expanse of jungle. Forgive me, senor, but the politest thing I can say of you is that you dream very big dreams." Fray Angelo spoke the words carefully, worried that Blair would mangle his meaning as much as he mangled his own pronunciation.

This made Blair laugh in what Fray Angelo regarded as a highly immoderate way. "You could indeed say that," he said finally, when he had regained some control. Jim shook his head.

"Sandburg. This worthy brother has a point. It's a lot of land to search when we don't know where we're going."

"Perhaps we'll be given a sign, Jim."

Fray Angelo's eyes narrowed in disapproval at this levity.

"I will show you to the library. You may not remove any books or papers, but I can suggest a starting point, and I will advise the librarian how to assist you."

The library was a fine room, and Blair was wistful as he looked around him. So many books. He was under no illusions as to what he might find there. Five years of reading, of writing, of corresponding with a few fellow scholars in England, had made him well aware that the life of the mind was as subject to the flaws of humanity as anything else. Here would be errors, and biases, and downright lies, but also knowledge. He would simply have to do his best to discern which was which.

Two days of intensive reading and note-taking left him frustrated and irritable. Jim, a silent presence (and an occasionally resented one, because his Spanish was still better than Blair's) did his share of the work. There were as many notes in Jim's graceful script as there were in Blair's cramped spider scrawl. Blair pored over a large map of Peru's interior and sighed gustily.

"You're not giving up, Sandburg?" Jim's tone was as challenging as the words themselves.

"No, I am not. But..." Blair looked at the carefully drawn rivers, and the great expanse of land that lay between them. A few students and lecturers, curious at the presence of these foreigners, had approached them sometimes, told their own stories, passed on their own theories.

"A pity that we can't stick a pin in the map and say 'there, that's the place'." Jim's finger poked at a spot on the map, somewhere to the east and south of the mission of Iquitos.

Blair felt a strange stab of interest as he watched Jim's hand. Jim had handsome hands, as handsome as the rest of him, but still...

"Do that again," he said.

"Do what?"

"Just, just shut your eyes, and put your finger on the map."

Jim blinked at this instruction. "Sandburg..."

"Please. Try it."

Jim's eyebrows rose. "What price science?"

"Jim..." It was wheedling, plain and simple.

"Would you like me to stand and turn around three times?"

"If you think it would help."

With an exasperated grunt, Jim shut his eyes, waved his hand in a vague way above the map, and then plunged his index finger down. He opened his eyes to see where he was pointing, and Blair made an excited noise.

"The same place again."

"I'm sitting in my seat, I haven't moved. For all you know, this is a comfortable place for my hand to reach."

"Maybe," Blair said, but his face was stubborn. He stood up from his chair, and with a saucy grin, shut his eyes, turned three times and then, his eyes crinkled shut, laid his pointing finger down amidst the mess of papers and books at the desk. He opened them and smiled in pure, delighted relief.

"Will you look at that?" His index finger rested at a point to the south and east of Iquitos.

"It would seem that we should have practiced divining rather than study," Jim said.

Blair was very nearly doing a jig, so far as such a thing was possible when his finger was still firmly attached to the map. "We made this journey on a foundation of dreams. This method of discovery makes a twisted sort of sense."

He looked so pleased that Jim merely nodded. Blair was right on one level, although Jim thought that there was little sense in this situation, twisted or otherwise. But they must go somewhere. They had come so far and whatever Jim's misgivings, he had no more seriously ever contemplated turning back than Blair had. They had their destination now. They had more of their road to walk.

Peru was a country of climatic contrasts: dry, wet; temperate, extreme. And it seemed that Blair and Jim must see every possible permutation as they travelled from Lima, across mountain passes to the great jungles of the east, and the Amazonian basin.

As a country of extremes it sometimes made extreme demands. Jim did not cope well with the high mountain passes. Blair worried over him and fussed over him and was snarled at for it, and ignored the snarling as he always did. Some of it was sickness – Jim had heard old soldiers say that heights could take a man unawares. But there was more to it, something that reminded him in part of the bad days when Alicia prowled the estates and lands around Ashford, part of it almost like the sensation on the Corazon, something overwhelming.

They made camp one evening on their way back down into the low country. Jim was silent. Blair watched him even while he did his share of the work and indulged in jokes in a broken mixture of Spanish, English, and the tiny amount of Quechua they were learning from their travelling companions. Jim's colour had improved, but there was something in his face, in his expression, that still worried Blair.

"You feel better?"

"Somewhat." Jim leaned back against a bag, pulling a blanket around him. He wore a jacket in the evening cool, and the alpaca wool of the blanket scratched against his throat and hands. "I've been thinking."

There was a pause, as Blair waited for elucidation, but did not receive it. "And...?" he enquired.

"I was wondering – you've speculated sometimes on how I might have used the senses as a soldier - scouting, observation, so on."

Blair leaned in closer. Jim's voice was low, and it was easier to hear him that way. Besides, in all this travel, Jim was familiar, a piece of home in the midst of the grandeur and wildness and the determined marks of human activity.

"I think – I feel more exposed now, if that can make sense. I know that we're in a strange place, potentially a hostile one, and it's..." Jim paused again. "Everything is on alert. It's unsettling."

The observation that an unsettled Jim was an irritable Jim went unspoken between them, but a quirk of Blair's lips betrayed the thought. His attention and the serious look in his eyes meant that Blair received no greater punishment than a light cuff across one ear.

"Ow," he said, raising one hand in exaggerated concern to check the injury.

"You were never meant for the stage, Sandburg," Jim said. "I'd have thought that you would take this more seriously."

"I do. I do." Blair sighed, and patted once at Jim's knee. "But I could see the same thought passing through our heads and - well." His mind was turning over Jim's information. "Ashford and London – they were ever familiar to you. And when you first had the senses, I wonder how much your illnesses might have overshadowed any similar sensations. Like with the ocean, and your senses perhaps trying simply to know a new thing." He lowered his head so that all he saw were his drawn up legs with his arms about them, and the ground they sat upon, lit briefly by the flaring of the small fire.

"It makes me wonder," Jim said, "if it will be like this our entire journey. And what would be the effect if you were not with me."

"Does it make a difference then?"

It was Jim's turn to bow his head in thought. "Yes, I think so. I can see you, hear you..."

"Smell me," Blair interrupted ruefully.

Jim smiled. "Yes. And I could wish for the opportunity for more." His hand reached out to grip Blair's shoulder, not too long, no more than good friends should touch, even in these somewhat more demonstrative Latin lands. "You're like – I don't know. A marker, a gauge. There are no words for it. It's just there."

"But surely it's always been that way?"

Jim shrugged. "I suppose. But it's more obvious when everything about us is strange."

"More notes to add to my collection," Blair said.

"More theories, or simply an addition to the old ones?"

"The latter, I think." Blair stretched out his legs, and looked at the men around them – travellers, traders, a small group of people journeying together because it was safer, more comfortable to travel in company. Some spoke amongst themselves. One or two eyed the foreigners conducting conversation in their English tongue with curiosity or disapproval and Blair smiled or nodded as he thought might work the best.

The journeying wore on and the mountains were left behind. The jungles were traversed by boat. At Iquitos there were yet more introductions, more negotiations. Jim set himself the tasks of overseer and quartermaster, which was useful activity and a distraction as he learned to manage the new rawness of his awareness. Blair sorted goods and listened to the chatter around him, and grinned at Jim's veto of anything that he regarded as gimcrackery. Whether in England or Panama or Lima, and even in this small settlement amidst a jungle, there was always someone willing to sell useless trifles.

The first two days travelling by river were almost like a tour; rather than exploring the glories of the Alps, or the peculiarities of some French town, they stared at the river and its banks. It was greenery and water, just as they had first seen it on the approach to Iquitos, but there was a difference when Blair and Jim knew that they were heading into areas where the European hegemony was no more than a rumour at best.

Blair decided to put Jim's awareness, his senses, to the test, wondering if perhaps Jim's sensitivities reflected the newness of their surroundings. By that reasoning, the quicker that Jim acclimatised himself, the better. Blair's decision meant that Jim was deeply aware of their surroundings, and he put it to use without thinking, welcoming the activity, always suspicious of their surroundings. This meant that they had ample warning of animals coming to the river to drink, which Blair would watch through a spy-glass to exclamations of delight. Catching fish was simplified considerably. When they passed through the territory of a tribe known to Rosario who was hired as the chief guide of the party, it was Jim who spotted the Indians emerging from the jungle and putting out in a canoe to investigate their boat.

All of this honed Jim's awareness. It delighted and fascinated Blair. But it puzzled their companions in the boat, and caused some muttering and dubious looks.

By the fourth day out of Iquitos, downriver on a rickety boat, Jim was doing his own worrying and fussing over Blair. Blair's disregard that there might be anything to worry or fuss about was its own unconscious revenge for Jim's irritability in the mountains, and Jim quietly seethed as Blair leaned over the side of the boat to vomit once again.

"I'm all right, I'm all right. Just let me rinse my mouth."

Jim offered some water and exchanged glances with Rosario, blue European eyes meeting the brown of a Mestizo.

"Sandburg, I don't like this."

Blair, unappreciative of the unspoken communication between Jim and Rosario, twisted his mouth stubbornly.

"If you suggest that we should turn back for a little puking, I may be tempted to box your ears."

"What about a little fever? What about a little starvation since you don't seem to be keeping down food?"

"And how will turning back make any difference? Given that the nearest destination is Iquitos, renowned for the quality of its doctors?"

Rosario's mouth twitched at this. He had little English, but he recognised the tone of man who was convinced that he had made his point.

"You could rest more easily," Jim argued.

"I doubt it, not when I'm being carried forward in the arms of the river. With you to ensure that there's not an insect would dare touch me."

Jim took a long breath through his nose, his lips pressed together hard in exasperation.

"We will likely have to walk eventually, Sandburg. Which can hardly happen if you're too sick to stand."

Blair shrugged. Truth to tell, he was growing concerned himself. It was only a day or so since he'd begun to feel ill, but he knew the risks of sickness. It was one of the overriding fears of any white man in South America – of many a native as well. Peru, with all its amazing and fecund life, bred fever as enthusiastically as it bred monkeys and birds and plants.

But from the beginning of their river journey, Blair had felt the old calling that he remembered from the dreams in England. Not dreams themselves – they had done their work, had uprooted two Englishmen from their daily round. But Blair knew that they were going in the right direction now, just as a compass needle pointed to the north. He couldn't bear the idea of turning back, not when they were close to the beginning of answers, whatever the answers might be.

He was silent for too long, and Jim said sharply, "Sandburg?"

"I was thinking. That's all."

"It doesn't usually take all your energy."

Blair ignored this. "We have to go on. If I'm ill, I'm ill." He gestured towards the bow of the boat. "We're going the right way. Can't you feel it?"

Jim sighted down Blair's hand, as it pointed to that destiny that, back in England, Blair had promised led them on. For all his misgivings, all his anxieties, he felt that magnetic draw also, and understood Blair's reluctance to let anything stand in their way. He still remembered the uncertainties of his own dreams, and the sickly grief of the dream of Blair's face submerged beneath the surface of a trough of water. There was a recklessness in Jim when he remembered that dream now, amidst all the animal noise of the jungle and the breath of the trees and the river. If he must face those things that disconcerted and frightened him in far away England, then the sooner the better.

"Yes," he said. "I feel it."

Blair smiled in relief. There was a comfort that Jim felt the same thing that he did – proof that Blair wasn't driven entirely by wilfulness and delusion.

"We should go on. Even if I am sick, we should go on, Jim."

Jim nodded. "All right. We go on. Although if you die of some disgusting fever I will never forgive you, Sandburg."

"In which case I shall make your life a misery by haunting you."

Jim couldn't forbear one quick clasp of Blair's hand. "If you intend to frighten me, then you've failed."

Men might find themselves in a boat that was half ketch and half outrigger, on a river that geographers might argue was a tributary of the Ucuyali or the Yavari, for many reasons. Rosario knew this area well. He was a child of the mission at Iquitos, and he wandered back and forth between jungle and coast selling pelts, and animals, and insects and plants. He wondered no more over Jim and Blair's peculiarities than he wondered what happened to the curiosities he sold. If some man attached the top half of one of Rosario's monkeys, regrettably deceased, to the bottom half of a fish and sold it for a mermaid, then Rosario knew nothing of it, and wouldn't have cared if he did.

Rosario sometimes went on his journeys alone. He had men that he trusted other times to go with him – Ukaya and Imili. Pure Indian, they knew even more of the area than Rosario did. They permitted at least the possibility that they might know where Jim and Blair sought to go. A tribe was known to them, the Chopec, and its men favoured red face paint; but it was far from Iquitos, further than any white man had ever gone down river.

Hector – Hector was a stranger to all the group, but he had heard at the mission that there were foreigners putting a party together for exploration, and that they would pay well. Hector needed money. Tricked by a partner, he was trapped east of the mountains by his own pride as much as anything. He could work his way back to Lima easily enough, but unless he could arrive there with the money he had boasted he would have on his return, he would not show his face. Jim and Blair and their peculiarities bothered him exceedingly, as did everything about the jungle. The jungle had clearly been created by the devil, and Hector wished the missionaries good luck with it.

It had been bad luck that Hector was cheated by his partner, and bad luck that Iquitos was some hole in the wall place that couldn't offer the scope of opportunities that Hector considered he deserved. It was very bad luck that Hector was caught in a small boat with a Jew madman and an Englishman who might be something worse than a madman. When Hector saw Ukaya and Imili cast worried glances at Jim and his latest unnatural feat, it was good to look back at them, grimace, shrug – show some fellow feeling.

Jim, when he looked back on their adventures in South America, considered it bad luck that neither he nor Rosario had recognised that Hector was trouble until it was too late.

Their fifth day down the river, Blair began to have fits of uncontrollable shivering. He stayed lucid but he was exhausted and took in nothing but water and little enough of that. Malaria had taken enough Englishmen in India that Jim knew the look of it. Some men recovered from malaria. Some men did not. That thought was enough to make Jim's hands shake once. He pushed past his fear, to hide from it within that place he used to hide in during battle, the place that he put himself during the storm on the Corazon. There were things he could do. He could tend Blair; sponge the sweat off him; give him water; fan him and keep the insects off him. These things, Jim could do.

Blair lay in a restless torpor. He grew no worse but he grew no better. Day six he was still prone to shivering, and Rosario could feel the heat that rose off him without laying his hand closer than an inch to Blair's skin.

"You are not well."

Jim bit back insults and curses. That Blair was sick was too obvious to speak of. Therefore, Jim didn't speak of it, didn't want it spoken of. It was too close to speaking of the devil and then awaiting the inevitable whiff of brimstone.

Blair smiled; his eyes were glazed with fever. "No, I'm not well. But I want us to go on, Rosario." His face, however, turned to Jim, who looked at Rosario, and shrugged. It would take longer to travel upriver than it had to come down, and Blair was right. Iquitos offered no miracle cure. "Ask Ukaya how much longer before we find the Chopec lands."

Ukaya struggled with both his own Spanish and Blair's, but he recognised 'Chopec'. "Another day. Then you must leave the river." He kept his head turned out toward the water. If Blair was breathing out spirits of sickness, perhaps they might pass Ukaya by.

"Another day then, and we'll see."

Rosario nodded, first at Blair and then at Jim. He knew who pushed this expedition onwards. So long as Blair could state his preferences, they would go on, and Jim would acquiesce. So far as Rosario was concerned, the jungle was the jungle. The animals and the men here were no more a threat than they were anywhere else.

Blair's fever stayed high, despite all that Jim did to try to cool him. Later that day he had his first bout of delirium, and Jim was grateful that Spanish was all the common language that they had. Blair's ramblings were incoherent as often as not, but once he said, quite clearly, 'love it when you fuck me' and then began calling for Jim. Jim's quiet, urgent reassurances that he was there couldn't penetrate Blair's fevered state. Once he said something that Jim couldn't understand. Ukaya however lifted his head from his contemplation of the riverbank. "Ana?" he asked, that is, "What?" in one of the local dialects. But Blair said no more, and almost immediately dropped into a heavy sleep.

Hector queried this, but Ukaya said nothing until they found a mooring point, and only because Hector quietly badgered Ukaya, while Jim and Rosario, hip-deep in water, lifted Blair from the boat. "A spirit spoke, not him."

They gathered together around a small fire. It was smoky, but no-one saw that as a disadvantage as the smoke discouraged insects. Jim's eyes smarted sometimes but he was more interested in the progress of Blair's fever than he was in the tenderness of his eyes. Jim's awareness of the jungle was nothing compared to his awareness of Blair - the heat of his body, the thrum of his heart, the rhythm of his breath. Blair held his own – so far - but Jim still fretted over him.

Hector began a litany of complaints, which were not taken seriously by anyone – Rosario, Imili and Ukaya were all hardened to what Hector regarded as the terrible travails of the forest, and Jim was too wrapped in attention to Blair. Blair woke eventually, as the evening wore on, and smiled at Jim, surprised at his own lucid state, and to see everyone still seated at the fire, rather than lying down and trying to sleep. Jim, by then, was being hard put to keep his temper. Hector's avowal of the journey's hardships had turned to a declaration that the journey was cursed.

Rosario scoffed at this. "You're too much a city boy, Hector. Aside from Senor Sandburg's fever, it's been a good trip."

"Too good a trip," Hector declared with a breath-taking turn of illogic. "Always warned of trouble, always knowing what's about us? Where is he taking us then?" He pointed accusingly across the small fire at Blair, before his gaze turned to Jim.

"You've been paid. You've been paid well," Jim said. Beside him, Blair struggled up onto his elbow, which shook beneath his weight.

"And what use is money if I cannot spend it because I'm led to the Holy Mother knows what by a madman and a witch?" Hector looked to Imili and Ukaya for support. They said nothing, but Imili, unseen by anyone, made a gesture against sorcery behind his back. 'Brujo' was a word within his knowledge.

Rosario spat. "You're getting crazy yourself, Hector. Go to sleep and stop scaring my friends there." Rosario spoke in their own tongue to the two Indians. "He has jungle fever, Hector does. Pay him no mind."

Blair opened his mouth to speak, but in his tiredness he lost his Spanish. "Don't be a fool," he snapped in English, before Jim made a quieting gesture.

Jim stood. He was far and away the tallest man of the group and in the hazed, dim light of the fire, he looked to Hector like Lucifer before the fall, arrogant and handsome and duplicitous. Jim stalked the few steps and then crouched before Hector like some beast of prey, biding its time. "I'm not crazy," Jim said. "And I'm not a witch. But I am the wrong man to cross. You understand me?"

Hector nodded, as Jim stared into his face. "You've been paid. It's waiting for you back at the mission. You've seen the coin. Earn it. And keep your mouth shut."

Jim stood and turned to face Rosario, who nodded once, and then poked vigorously at the fire. "We should sleep," Rosario said.

Jim returned to his place by Blair, who had anxiously watched this small tableau. "I didn't expect this, of all things," Blair said quietly. Hector sat sullenly silent, but his eyes flashed in humiliation and anger even in the half-dark. There was the shriek of some beast in the night, and Hector started visibly. Imili, nervous after the exchange between Hector and Jim, laughed, which set Ukaya off as well.

Jim shook his head, suspecting (and correctly so) that the Indians' laughter would add salt to the wound to Hector's pride. "Rosario is right," he said to Blair. "We should sleep while we may."

Blair lay back with a deep, tired breath. "I can try. But I ache, Jim. Everywhere."

"All the more reason to rest as much as you can."

Blair shut his eyes. But it was a restless night for all the party, with the exception of the imperturbable Rosario.

There was one thing that Rosario was somewhat perturbed by; his tendency toward occasional sickening headaches, signalled by piercing lights behind his eyes which turned to piercing pain. He had paid the powerful men of two tribes (and one woman who claimed healing hands) to lift the curse. He had paid the priests of Iquitos to say masses for him. But still the headaches came – not often, but terrible in their effect when they did. Two days after the small confrontation with Hector, Rosario recognised the signs of an attack coming on, and made his explanations to Jim. Only to Jim, for Blair had gone deep into fever again, not something which surprised Jim. Malaria persisted like an unwelcome guest, a bad smell, like bad luck.

The boat was moored, and they were sorting gear, discussing with Ukaya and Imili how much farther inland from the river they would have to go. So far as Jim was concerned, this was planning only. He couldn't imagine Blair fit enough to trek through thick jungle over rough terrain. They were as near as the river could take them. Other plans would now have to be considered. He just wasn't yet sure what shape they would take.

"You must excuse me. I must rest. This will go soon enough." And with that, Rosario took his rest and lay very still. If Jim could have seen inside Rosario's skull, he might have seen something like to the flash and boom of cannon.

Ukaya, Imili and Hector wandered down to watch the water of the river, and the boat's gentle rocking upon it from its mooring. "Not a cursed journey, I see," Hector muttered. Ukaya and Imili fidgeted. They didn't care particularly what happened to Blair or Jim (or Hector for that matter) but Rosario was known and respected by them. Hector took some water and tramped back to Rosario and then flinched when he saw that Jim's head was up to see him come up the slope. Jim stared at him with dislike clear in the pale, foreign eyes, and Hector knew that Jim had heard his muttered words.

Hector offered the water to Rosario, who took it with the irritability of a usually stoic man in considerable pain. The day passed slowly. Jim fiddled with gear, in between caring for Blair, who remained lucid, but was weak and shivery, and occasionally talkative with the febrile energy that sometimes comes to the sick.

"I begin to think that our complaining friend is right."

Jim's gaze flicked to Hector, who was leaning disconsolately against a bag and slicing carefully at his nails with a small knife and wondering what the foreigners were saying.

"If you believe that he has any thoughts worth considering then you're sicker than I thought, Sandburg."

This poor joke won Jim a smile, before Blair shifted from one uncomfortable position to another. "It just seems so unfair. To be so close and to be slowed by sickness like this." Nearly a full week of sickness, wearing sickness, had left Blair without the surety he'd had earlier. How could he have been so sure of everything before, and be balked so close to his goal now?

"We don't know that we are close," Jim replied pessimistically. "And whether we are or not, if we are in the hands of your fate and destiny then we'll find what we're meant to find when we're meant to find it."

"Which I know well is Jamesian speak for 'be quiet and save your strength, Sandburg'."

It was Jim's turn to smile. "I am transparent before your understanding of me."

Blair's smile turned wistful. "I miss being able to hold you. And you holding me is not at all the same when you have my shoulders and Rosario has my feet and I'm being lugged hither and yon like a sack of potatoes."

"I don't think that you should be wetting yourself in the river when you are unwell."

"I know." Blair sighed. His skin was pale, and his eyes too big in his face. "God, I wish we could get on, Jim. I wish I wasn't sitting here invalid, sure that the world is doing things if I could only get up and join it." Blair was seldom ill. He had been a quiet sufferer, but not a patient one.

Jim scrubbed the fingers of one hand across his scalp. He would give much for a real bath with hot water. And a real bed, and proper nursing for Blair. Joel would be all business-like but gentle care. Jim remembered that well. "I know the feeling. There was a solution for me. There will be one for you too."

Blair nodded, before he looked at Jim from under his lashes, purely mischievous for one moment, despite his frustrations and his weakness. "For I have a destiny, you know," he mock-declaimed, one hand raising in an orator's gesture.

Jim rolled his eyes. "As you say."

Rosario might have heard this exchange, although no more than the tone of it would have reached his understanding. It was better to listen to than Hector's whining complaints at least. Rosario eventually slept – it was always the aftermath of the headache fit. When he awoke again, it was very late in the day, and another common aftermath of the headache fits was cramping at his guts. He rose and stumbled off, making a quick explanation when Jim looked at him with a query in his eyes. Partly out of consideration, and partly out of his own pride, he wandered as far as he could from the camp before necessity overtook him, and spent long, painful minutes in an ungainly squat. Finally, his body purged, Rosario stood and realised that the quick tropic twilight was nearly at an end and that it was perilously close to dark.

He made a guess at his direction and wasted several minutes before he acknowledged that he was making no progress. He would have to swallow his pride and shout for help. At least Ellison with his bat's ears would hear him and find him. Rosario could hear the river, and realised that he could smell it too. This was good; he need only go downstream and he would be back at the camp with a minimum of embarrassment. His ears caught the faint sound of someone at the camp calling his name and he took a deep breath to shout back when he tripped over a thick branch upon the ground. With a curse, he rose to his feet once more, and then froze, his skin cold, and every hair on his body rising, as the branch shifted sinuously against the back of his calves.

Not a branch.

Rosario shook off his stillness long enough to take a couple of fumbling steps in the growing dark and to shout once, and wholeheartedly, for help, before he put out his hands in terror and revulsion against the heavy weight swiftly entwining itself around him. He had time for one more horrified cry before the snake's heavy coils settled across his rib cage and reduced his breath to an agonised wheeze.

Jim heard the wheeze, because his hearing had spiralled in upon Rosario after that first cry. Without a word, he snatched up a machete and ran towards that frantic noise, leaving the rest of the party confused and frightened. Blair tried to stand; his legs wobbled more with feverish weakness than with fear and he knew he didn't have the strength to go after Jim.

"What are you waiting for?" he demanded of the others. "Something is wrong. Go help him!"

"None of us have his eyes," Hector protested, staring into the darkness; his own eyes very nearly showed white all the way round.

"Ukaya," Blair pleaded, choosing the man he thought most loyal to Rosario and least frightened.

"I will try," Ukaya said, "but I cannot go so fast." And with that, he stepped into the foliage, roughly following in Jim's trail. But it was dark. Very dark, even for a man accustomed to the jungle.

Jim ran through the jungle as if it were broad daylight and he had known the area always, but the vegetation was heavy and he reached Rosario too late. Rosario lay upon the ground, barely alive but mercifully insensible, his head already within the maw of a snake that was more than twenty feet long. With a cry of revulsion, Jim nigh trampled up the body of the beast before slashing at a point just below its head with his machete. The snake hissed in anger and heaved itself up to defend itself, while Jim desperately hacked at it, aware that if he was caught in its coils that he would suffer Rosario's fate.

It was dark, but Jim was aware of everything: the writhing shape of the animal he grappled with; its scent, both the one inherent to it and the stink of its blood; Rosario's body lying limp and broken on the ground. In the fight, Jim found himself trampling over Rosario – it was unavoidable, even though something in his gut twisted with disgust at the necessity, even in the thick of struggle. He had, somehow, his fingers clenched in the beast's upper jaw, with access to the area that might count as throat in an animal that wasn't one long coil, and he struck until his arm was sore and the snake's writhing movement grew weaker and erratic. Jim leaped back, crouched and watching, but instead his foe ignored him and twisted in agony like a worm partially trodden on, before with slow, hitching movement it crawled towards the river, abandoning the fight and the remains of its prey.

Jim took in a shuddering breath. He was slick and stinking with sweat and blood, and he was trembling all over. But he was not yet done with the night's travail. He bent and held his palm to Rosario's face. Some time in the midst of the fight, Rosario had died. There was no breath, no heartbeat, no companionable shrug or grin.

Jim looked around, and listened, tried not to smell anything, feeling to the depth of his body and soul how he was in an alien place. He had no idea how to deal with Rosario's body, but taking him back to the rest of the party seemed as good a place as any to begin. Jim wrestled Rosario into a rough carry over his shoulders, shuddering once at the sensation of the broken body, before he set on his way back to the camp. Ahead of him he could hear Ukaya, advancing with cautious care towards him. Beyond, he could hear the voices of the others. Blair was calling out his name, over and over, strained and breathless as Jim. "Jim...Jim...damn it, can you hear me?...Jim!"

He took a breath to try to answer, but he had none to spare, and it was easier to simply listen to Blair, to let Blair's voice lead him back. It seemed to Jim that he was alien to himself and a fit denizen for this place. How did an Englishman find himself here?

Ukaya appeared before him, and if Jim was alien to himself, it was nothing to how Ukaya perceived him – a tall, looming and frankly deformed figure in the dark. Ukaya made a small noise, and Jim tried to find some words in his desert-dry mouth. "It was a snake. It killed Rosario."

Ukaya, in a moment of superstitious terror, half-believed that Jim was saying that he was the snake. The man saw and scented as an animal did. He walked ahead of Jim to return to the others, almost backing before him in awe as they reached camp and its small, smoky fire. Jim's appearance in the dim light sent fear leaping in everyone who saw him – albeit for differing reasons. Hector shrieked as Jim collapsed to his knees and dropped Rosario's body. Rosario's face was discoloured and terrible. His eyelids drooped over eyes of which only the bloodshot whites were visible. Ukaya moved back out the light of the fire. Imili jumped to his feet even as Hector scrabbled back on his hands.

Only Blair stepped forward towards Jim. "What happened? Are you hurt?" he asked, and ran urgent hands across Jim's face and shoulders.

"It was a snake. It killed Rosario," Jim repeated dully.

Blair's hands shook as much as his voice. "Dear God. Jim, are you hurt?"

Jim shook his head, trying to regain some sense of self, of control. "I'm all right." This wasn't entirely true. His arms felt nearly wrenched out of their sockets, and he ached all over.

Hector stood now, and his face was as twisted and ugly in the firelight as Rosario's. "What did I say? What did I say? This journey is cursed. Snake? And now Rosario is dead and who will be next?"

"Nobody will be next," Blair snapped. "Hold your tongue!"

"You!" Hector demanded of Ukaya. "Did you see the snake?"

Ukaya shook his head, dumb. Imili stepped forward and knelt before Rosario's body, and fully shut the sagging eyelids.

"How do we even know there was a snake? Who knows what happened out there. All we saw was this one running into the dark like the devil was after him. Or beside him." Hector spat. "We go back."

Jim stood in his turn, Blair beside him. "No, we don't go back."

"And I say we do," Hector bellowed, half hysterical. He turned to Imili, gestured at Ukaya. "Do you want to stay with these – these witches? Bad luck, that's what this is. Do you want to end up like him?" He pointed at Rosario's body. "We go."

Blair put out a warding hand against Jim's chest, which heaved with sudden rage. Understanding that Jim had no reserves left of patience or prudence, Blair took a few steps towards Hector. He was still shocked himself by the events of the last few minutes, but he sought to calm the other man. "Hector, this is a terrible thing, but what would be the point of going back? We're nearly there." Blair looked at Imili. "That's so, isn't it? We're nearly there?"

Blair had few reserves left of his own and he stumbled. His hands reached out for the nearest support; Hector. But Hector flinched at the touch of Blair's hands; Blair was as much witch as the other – hadn't Ukaya said so, with his talk of spirits? The flinch turned to a back-handed blow of Hector's fist across Blair's face which sent him to the ground. With a roar Jim bounded forward. A small dart hissed across the fire to lodge in his neck and Jim had time for one blow of his own, a scientific and wholly satisfying jab to Hector's guts, before he swayed dizzily. He turned back, to Ukaya who still held his blowpipe in one hand. "What have you done?" he slurred, before he dropped to his knees, and was properly felled with a vicious kick from Hector which left Jim bent on the ground. He could barely move his arms despite the reflex demanded by nature. Most of his body was numb, except for the fire in his guts where Hector's kick landed.

Blair, still dazed with shock and pain, cried out in horror and reached for Jim. "No," he cried out, in English, all his Spanish gone. It was no defence to him now anyway, as Hector aimed a second kick which smacked into Blair's ribs. There would have been more, but Ukaya pulled Hector back.

"You said it. We go." Hector snarled, but Imili took Ukaya's lead and grabbed at Hector's other arm.

"They wanted the jungle. They're here, but Rosario is dead. We should go. You were right. Bad luck."

Hector stood between the two Indians, breathing hard. There were no more words left to any of them. A sudden spark of the wood on the fire cast a last dull light on the bulk of Rosario's corpse, and Hector nodded. Ukaya and Imili went to the mooring of the boat while Hector picked up what belongings he could as speedily as he could. Jim's need to order their goods earlier in the day made it easy enough for him. Much was packed and stowed, whether on the ground or already in the boat.

Blair watched in the dim light, not believing what he saw, even though he had heard and understood the conversation. He had placed Jim's head in his lap, and begged him to say something. Jim's breathing was shallow and when he tried to speak, he was barely understandable. He could still barely move.

"Ukaya!" Blair shouted. "Ukaya!"

"Shut up, shut up!" Hector bellowed back. "Silence!"

Blair swallowed. He had seen Ukaya bring down medium-sized prey with the darts, and was unsure if the poison on them was deadly in its own right or merely drugged an animal long enough for Ukaya to take it and kill it. Ukaya ate what he took. Blair stroked Jim's head in unthinking anxiety and care. The effects of the drug would pass. Surely they would pass.

Hector looked down in contempt, as a new suspicion entered his mind. Witches for sure, and what else? "Such tender friends," he said, and turned to go to the boat.

"Hector," Blair shouted after him. "Don't do this. It's madness. It's murder, Hector!" He gasped for breath, wincing at the pain in his ribs, and yelled in English, "God damn you!"

But there was no sound from any of the three men, only the sound of the boat being pushed out, and awkwardly guided up the river. Blair and Jim were alone, except for a dying fire and a cooling corpse. Blair shouted uselessly for a while – curses, imprecations. The anger turned to guilt, and sudden, miserable tears.

"I'm sorry," he said to Jim. "I'm sorry." If he hadn't been so determined to test Jim's senses in this new environment; if he hadn't been so determined to be here....He wiped miserably at his wet face and streaming nose. "I'm sorry," he whispered. Jim stirred. He'd heard all, understood all, and now, at last, he found some control of his body returning. He couldn't get up, but he rolled his body so that he no longer sat with his head in Blair's lap, but simply on the ground. From this angle he could at least see Blair's face, even if Blair couldn't see his. Feebly, he plucked at the sleeve of Blair's shirt, and attempted some words. Blessedly, he could speak again, if he concentrated.

"Blair, it's all right. Hush. Come here."

Blair stared at him and then dropped beside Jim like a puppet with its strings cut, and lay huddled against him, shivering with illness and shock. Jim looped an arm over Blair. It felt as great an effort as had fighting the snake. "Hush," he said again. There was nothing else to say.

The two men lay together, alone. On the boat, Imili had the idea that they should dispose of the witches' personal possessions. Who knew what influence might still lie in them. So much of the boat's contents went over the side. Clothes. Blair's old portfolio and those notes he brought with him went down to rest in the silt. But Hector kept Jim's watch; the case was silver.

Two men could remember completely different things about the same experience, about those few days, untimed and indefinable when they were lost and alone. What Jim remembered was the vast green pressure of the jungle, the way that he felt squeezed between the moistness of the earth and the cover of the trees, the way that the animal noises pierced him through his ears. He felt sick sometimes, the aftermath of the drug on Ukaya's dart. He saw a jaguar, often. The first time he yelled out loud, startling Blair as he scrambled to his feet and waved the knife that was their one weapon before him. But then it was gone. It came often, Jim thought; it stared down from a rise, draped itself over tree branches, but Blair never saw it. Jim took to looking for it, choosing their direction by the glint of yellow eyes and night-dark fur.

They abandoned Rosario's body. Jim said the Lord's Prayer over Rosario, the only prayer that he could think of that they might have shared, and then, bitter irony, they left him to the animals. Their belongings amounted to the clothes on their backs - simple breeches and shirts, their boots; and the knife and Rosario's round-brimmed leather hat.

"A blade and a hold-all, Sandburg. We're rich men," Jim had joked, sprinkling water from the upturned bowl of the hat onto Blair's heated skin before drinking what was left himself and fanning Blair's face with the brim.

What Blair remembered was the trembling weakness and the hot and cold of fever, the way that Jim's body was by turns a stifling, smothering presence or a desperately sought source of warmth. The jungle was a cloud, a mist, something that fooled the eye, that surrounded you and never ended, but led you on in the hope that the next few steps, the next few minutes would be different to all the ones that had gone before. He was thirsty all the time, but he had no inclination to drink except when Jim berated him and forced water down his throat.

They would rest at night, Blair sleeping fitfully and awaking from terrible fever dreams, only to see Jim, propped against a tree, trying to guard them both and not to sleep. Too often he failed at this. But no animal came near them, except for that jaguar that only Jim could see. They subsisted on fruit mainly, remembering what Ukaya and Imili had collected or pointed out. Jim gave thought to attempting to hunt, but hunting took time. It took resources that Jim didn't have – not the least of which was confidence that Blair would be all right if Jim left him, and wouldn't dazedly walk into trouble or simply have it find him where he sat or lay.

After a few days of slow, staggering wandering, Jim heard men ahead of them and had a choice to make. To go on and meet them, or to run or hide. The jaguar's sardonic face, peering from behind a tree, decided him. He was dizzy. He was hungry, and he thought that perhaps he had gone too deep when he watched over Blair, that he was caught within Blair's sickness even though he felt nothing in his own body that suggested illness. Only hunger and confusion, and a resignation that the men he could hear coming towards them would settle everything one way or another.

They came eventually, stepping through the trees, their faces bright with paint. Jim stood, the knife in his hand, but held low at his side. There were seven of them. Blair sat huddled on the ground beside him, uncaring in his exhaustion, but something made him raise his head. There was a man, their leader, kilted and long-haired like they all were, although unlike the others his hair was loose and not bound against the scalp with plaited headbands or held with combs. His face was painted carmine in the pattern that Blair had drawn on a piece of paper now rotting in the river silt. Blair stared at him, wishing that his face and stomach didn't feel so strange and that he had the energy to smile. "Incacha?" he asked and received a nod, measuring and suspicious, in return. Blair looked up at Jim, his head tilting on his neck with all the ease of a rusted door handle. "We did it," he said weakly, and then subsided, all energy gone once more.

Jim eyed the men about them. "Blair can't walk far," he said, which wasn't understood. But the circumstances were clear, and Incacha and his fellows took turns carrying Blair between them while Jim stumbled along behind, with those who carried no burden at his back to ensure that he kept up.

It was an awkward trek that took the rest of the daylight hours. Blair was lucid enough to understand the burden he represented and argued, with hand signs and a tone of voice that began with wheedling and ended with angry petulance, that he should be permitted to walk for at least some of the way, even though he still needed the support of a man either side of him. But he had exhausted his strength by the time they neared their destination, and was carried between Incacha and Jim, who had suffered deep irritation at Blair being handled by so many strangers, even apparently helpful ones. When there was a changeover he moved forward, despite his own tiredness. The man that Blair had named Incacha looked him up and down and nodded curtly. They carried Blair in a cradle of their arms, seating him in a living chair, and Jim's arms and hands rubbed and clasped with this man whom they had come so very many miles to find.

The village had moved from the place that Ukaya knew. In the way of some jungle peoples, the Chopec cut out clearings and built houses and tended gardens until the soil's fertility was gone, and then they moved on. The jungle covered over their traces soon enough. When Jim and Blair and their discoverers trooped out of the heavy canopy of trees they were watched in silence by a bevy of people; men, women, naked children. Several dogs lounged nearby under the eaves of the houses and lifted their heads at the strangers and then subsided.

Blair was carried to a thatched house, which was a surprising size to Jim's eyes. There, Blair was laid upon a platform raised perhaps a foot from the floor and spread with a mat that might have been made of some plant material.

"Jim?" Blair sounded confused. "Are we there?"

Jim sat gingerly upon the platform but it felt as if it would hold his weight. "Yes," he said quietly, "we're here." To what purpose they would have to wait and see.

Incacha stood to the side of the bed platform watching the two strangers. His wife, Chani, came forward and approached the platform to kneel beside Blair. Gently, she patted his shoulder and took his face between her hands, which were callused but barely felt on Blair's skin against the beard which he had sprouted. Jim had shaved Blair sometimes earlier when he was uncaring or too weak, but not recently.

"Hello," Blair said, smiling although he was still confused. Chani shook her head, and stared at him, not understanding, before she bustled away to consider her store of medicines. The marks of privation and illness were obvious in Blair and she considered her options, fingering pouches and gourds.

"This is the one?" she asked her husband. "Watched over by the dog spirit?"

Incacha nodded.

"Why them?" Chani asked, suddenly fierce. She had seen her husband suffer all these years because the spirits' companionship and help was denied him, and for these two strangers to have what he lacked wounded her.

Incacha put a hand on her shoulder. "The spirits at least chose these two. They escaped her after she swallowed them all whole. They are here now because of these strangers." He grinned. "Besides, that one," a jerk of his head indicated Blair, "is not so much of a stranger."

Chani took up some bark, come from up-river and traded for with other herbs. When steeped, it made a bitter brew that she thought might help Blair. "And what of the other?"

Incacha's face sobered. "Sentinels are not always bad luck. A powerful spirit has chosen him."

"A powerful spirit chose her, and look where that ended."

Jim watched them both through this conversation, which he understood not at all.

"Quechua?" he asked, although that would hardly help him as he had little of the tongue, but he had his doubts about even this small help. The rhythm of Incacha and Chani's speech was unfamiliar.

"Little," Incacha replied, his mouth stumbling over the word. Jim nodded, but his chagrin that they could barely communicate showed clearly on his face. But then, Jim's head lifted and he stared towards the doorway of the house. A boy had appeared there, barely even a stripling; he was perhaps thirteen or fourteen. No threat, but Jim stood nonetheless, feeling the hackles rise on the back of his neck.

Incacha hastily stepped between their line of sight.

"Spirits of power with those two, my father?" Anala was scornful. "Spirits of a spider monkey and a sloth perhaps." His voice cracked.

Incacha stepped forward, and the boy moved, to stand in the garden before the house.

"And have you learned so much about the spirits, then? Has your mother sent you to spy on us again?"

Anala was offended. "I'm no spy!" he protested.

Incacha shook his head. "You have little other value to her. Why not stay here?" he coaxed.

But Anala shook his head. "Why would I stay here?"

Incacha's tone sharpened. "Because we are your people. And you owe me a father's respect even if you are not my blood."

"Then surely I owe my mother more. By blood and by power. She will send me my animal spirit." It was said with youthful bravado.

"The spirits choose you. Your spirit is not hers to give, whatever she tells you."

But Anala was already running down the dirt path towards the forest, turning his head to call behind him, "Too old a story, my father. My mother has new stories for me." Then he was gone.

Incacha sighed, and turned back to the house, to find himself face to face with Jim, who stared after Anala with eyes like a burning sky. Sentinels were not always bad luck, Incacha told himself. But the remembrances of the good that sentinels could do for a tribe were blurred now amongst the Chopec, painted symbols that had lost their power. There were men of the tribe fathers with son's Anala's age, and neither father nor son had taken their walk, or had found the piece of their soul that the spirits gave.

Incacha gestured, and reluctantly, Jim turned back into the house, and returned to Blair's side. But Anala was in the thoughts of both men, as they watched Chani tend to Blair.

Once there was a great empire, the empire of the Incas, which like all empires understood the value of a show of power.

There was a young priest in this empire, who had dreams. His father had come from deep in the jungle, wandering and then enslaved and he had told his son of a holy place beloved of the spirits, where a spring flowed. His son told another priest of his dreams and that priest told another until the word came to a man who had the ear of the Emperor himself, great Pachacuti-Inca, and he gave orders. A road must be laid, and a temple built, to give honour to the spirits, to provide pilgrimage and solace for the people, and to give glory to Pachacuti and his loyal dignitaries.

There were three tribes that knew of the spring in the jungle. All their territories lay about it, in areas that overlapped and changed according to negotiation and small bursts of warfare. One tribe might dominate the use of the springs for a period, then another tribe. But even joined together, as they did, eventually and too late, the three tribes could not prevent what they saw as sacrilege. Incan soldiers guarded the workings. Slaves and indentured servants built a temple, a squat pyramid rising amongst the riot of jungle. Incan pilgrims came and honoured the spirits, who had been the spirits of the tribes alone until then.

Much to the resentment of the three tribes, the men and women who were sentinels still felt the calling to the springs, desecrated as they were. The Incan priests of the temple demanded tribute. In time, part of the tribute became the sentinel lore of the tribes. It was carved into the stone facings of the temple, illustrated on the walls of its interior. The word went out up and down the coast and the mountains. Those of you who are sentinels, or guides to sentinels – here, here is your place. And then the Spaniards came, with their horses and their guns and their smallpox and influenza and syphilis, and the three tribes had the springs to themselves once more.

Metal knives came down the river. So did disease and the three tribes dwindled. The survivors of epidemics merged with other groups and there were two tribes. When Incacha was a boy of twelve, the last survivors of the Siisha stumbled to the Chopec grounds, some of them still ill. The Chopec were lucky. Only about a quarter of the tribe died. Of the survivors, one was Atamalo of the Siisha, a sentinel. Atamalo's guide was amongst the dead and he suffered greatly, both in his body, and in his heart and spirit. Linaki, Incacha's teacher, went to the temple and sought help for Atamalo, and what he learned, he applied, even though he was not a true guide.

Incacha also learned. After Linaki's death he also went to the temple and let the voice of the spirits there fill him. He was still young, and still naively proud when another sentinel came to them, a foreign woman who stumbled through the jungle alternately wailing or stifled into silence by pain and confusion. Incacha comforted her and taught her, and watched in concern how Atamalo regarded her with both antipathy and lust. It seemed it was true that two sentinels did not easily share a territory.

The woman, Lisheeya, fell pregnant to Atamalo. Incacha had discovered them one day, too distracted to notice him. They had torn at each other's bodies in a way that not even the fiercest of animals did, and he still remembered Lisheeya's scream of anger when she realised that she carried a child. She had withdrawn from the tribe, and spent all her time at the temple. Incacha visited her there, unsure of her obsessive love of the place, unsure of how a child might grow amongst the stone and the overwhelming presence of the spirits. But none of this distressed Lisheeya. She seemed at home in the stone and the dark.

One day, Atamalo could not be found. No-one in the tribe ever did know what became of him – whether he had drowned or fallen or been killed by an animal. But Lisheeya, when told the news on one of Incacha's visits, had primmed her mouth up in a satisfaction which sent a shudder through Incacha. He went home, but fears stalked his dreams and waking thoughts. He sat before the fire and stared into its heart. He drank beer until his head swam, and on those sensations he flew near the spirits but not close enough. They were too far away. He could not reach, however desperately he stretched out his hand.

Foreboding draped Incacha, and again he took the journey to the temple. It was empty. It had never been empty before, never an echoing void. It had always been the place of the spirits, and they had whispered there if you knew how to listen for them. But now the only noise was the weak, barely audible mewling of an infant boy, abandoned in one of the chambers of the temple. Of Lisheeya there was no sign. Incacha gathered up the child, and gave it water, and chewing some cacao leaf, spat the tiniest amount of his saliva into the infant's mouth. It might kill, or it might keep the child alive until he could return it to the village and arrange for the women who had milk for their own children to share its feeding.

Incacha returned home. Anala was fed and cared for by the members of the tribe, not without complaint. There were some who thought that Incacha should have left the boy to die. Incacha could not believe that. If the child was meant to die, then Incacha wouldn't have found him still alive. The spirits had guided him, surely.

It was the last time. No matter how Incacha pushed himself, what disciplines he tried, how he threw himself into the haze of drunkenness, the spirits were not there. Lisheeya's belly might be empty of her child, but she had filled it with the spirits instead. They were gone with her, and the Chopec were left alone with the empty temple, sacred no longer.

The Chopec lands were lucky to have an abundance of springs which had the benefit of usually being safer to gather water from than the river. Jim had found one which had become the place where he and Blair went, in a progress that grew gradually faster as the journey – all of thirty minutes as measured by the time that Jim took to cover the distance alone – taxed Blair's strength less. It had become an accepted part of Blair's convalescence, although he gained flesh too slowly to suit his anxious lover.

"I can still see your ribs," Jim commented, stroking his hand along the corrugations of the bones in question.

Blair, who had been stretching as they sat together in the shade, rolled his eyes. "You always could see them when I did this."

"Not so much."

"I need more monkey stew. I shall speak to Chani."

Jim winced. They had both learned to consume exotic meats, but the first sight of the casual skinning and boning of a monkey, its dead eyes staring in apparent reproach, had taken the savour out of the meal.

"I had a strange dream last night," Blair said. "An ordinary dream, nothing mystical. I dreamed that Incacha and I were at a ball, at the Abingdons' house, and I was dressed as he does, with a kilt, and the red face paint, and he was in full evening dress, except that our hair was as usual. Incacha wore his flowing locks and mine was as tidy as if I were fresh from a barber. And we danced with the ladies present, and spoke with the assembled, and no-one made any remark." His words were inconsequential, his tone easy, but his gaze on Jim was thoughtful.

Jim was well aware of Blair's look, but he returned in a similar tone, "Are you sure the fever's not returning if your brain is indulging imaginings of that sort?"

"I am fit as a fiddle," Blair declared, which was not entirely true, but was certainly closer to truth than it had been on their arrival at the village.

"Presumably your dream marks your comfort with your new attire."

Blair looked down at his kilt and rough sandals. "My old things must be washed sometimes. As must yours."

Jim shrugged. He preferred his own clothes to the simplicity of the Chopec kilt, for all that he sometimes ended with wearing shirt and breeches past the point of comfort to either his skin or his nose.

"They might accept you better..." Blair began, but Jim placed a hand over his mouth.

"I think it more likely that I would only emphasise my differences." His touch was gentle but there was a frown on his face.

Blair peeled the hand away, huffing in irritation. But his mood changed; teasingly he licked at the tip of a finger. At Jim's narrow-eyed look he smiled with deceptive innocence. "I did say that I was feeling fit."

"That you did," Jim said, and leaned across the scant space separating them to kiss Blair, something that he found to be both an unutterable luxury and a fundamental need, especially recently. He needed confirmation from all his senses, touch and taste not the least, that Blair grew better, and he ignored Blair's occasional impatience with the neediness of his attentions.

"I take it that no-one is nearby," Blair said. They slept at night in Incacha's house, and Jim could not accept the lack of privacy, even though Incacha and Chani had disturbed his sleep with their own couplings in the night. It was another reason that he had encouraged Blair on the regular treks to the springs. He didn't care if all the village knew what they did there, so long as they were nowhere about to see or listen.

Blair was growing hard. It was something for both men to rejoice in, this evidence that Blair was recovering from fever and exhaustion, and Jim removed his hand only long enough to untuck Blair's kilt and pull the material away from the sturdy prick which already tented its folds.

Taking Jim's silence for the confirmation that it was, Blair squirmed that much closer and took more kisses, brushing his lips against the stubble of Jim's jaw. Even the sharpest knife could not be honed quite as sharp as a razor – and the Chopec had their own ways of cleanliness, but no soap.

"God, but I am glad to do this," Blair said between the kisses.

"Missed it, did you?"

Blair's groping hands tweaked at Jim's arse before returning to caresses more pleasurable to them both. "Not really, which horrifies me now. I had no appetite for food or water, let alone this." A broad smile appeared on his face. "And now I do."

"Yes," was all Jim's reply. He was determined to strip Blair's capacity for considered conversation away as speedily as he stripped away his own clothes. His breeches gone, he looked at Blair, who lay back on the ground now, his limbs sprawled.

Blair was entirely appreciative of the picture that Jim made. "Suck me?" he asked, anticipation thrilling sharply in his gut at the look on Jim's face. It was hungry, enthusiastic; determined. "Oh... oh yes." Blair shut his eyes the better to enjoy glorious sensation and floated lazily on the pleasure that Jim was so set on giving him. He indulged sometimes in speculation, both idle and serious, as to precisely how Jim's capacities affected his ability as a lover. Certainly, Jim had known almost from the start which touches inflamed Blair the most. This, now, was no time for thought. Jim worked him as if his life depended on it, until pleasure came to a peak which left Blair's heart pounding, and his face slack with bodily content.

Jim lay beside him. "What do you want?" Blair asked, grasping at the broad shoulders. "Should I suck you also?" Jim held him closely with one arm and with his free hand drew Blair's hand down to his prick.

"This." 'This', because Jim wanted to taste Blair's mouth again, and feel Blair's hand clasp at Jim's nape while the other hand stroked him in a rhythm that Blair learned years ago. So simple to have Blair touch him, simpler than dreams or the awkward efforts to communicate with the Chopec, simpler than the nights spent watching every twitch of Blair's skin, and every lengthier episode of restful sleep. So much simpler. Jim shuddered his way to the end of his climax and lay still, his face buried in Blair's hair, his hand resting on Blair's chest, all tension abruptly unstrung.

Blair's hand stroked gently across Jim's hair. They were both of them growing shaggier than they would have permitted in England. "Incacha told me that he believes me well enough to begin study."

As simply as that, tension returned. It was still necessary for Jim to touch Blair, but the peace had left it. "Excellent," Jim muttered. "You'll retire to a well-equipped library and discern all the secrets of the world before supper."

Blair made no comment upon this sarcasm other than the words, "It seems unlikely to be that simple." Then he took the bull by the horns and asked, "Is it Anala causing this uneasiness in you?"

Jim abandoned Blair to sit upright, his arms wrapped around his knees. His body might be naked, but his deeper thoughts were veiled. "It's been an uneasy time. Your illness, a strange place and people, and few of them welcoming."

Blair sighed at this blatant evasion. He was closer to Jim's discarded clothes than their owner, and he reached out and passed them on to Jim. "Here. We should return. Incacha said that Junai and Nalata would take you hunting."

"Incacha says many things. I wish I understood him so well as you."

"So do I. If you understood him then you'd be better able to speak to the rest of the village too." Jim's Chopec was shaping well for a man who'd spent only a matter of weeks amongst the tribe, but he lacked Blair's facility with the language. It had been a surprise to them both how quickly Blair had picked up speech and understanding, a gift of his dreams presumably. Blair's expression of surprise and - yes – disappointment when he realised that Jim didn't share this ability might have been comical if not for their shared chagrin.

"I lack your advantages," Jim said, standing to pull up his breeches.

"So I note. But why? You dreamed as I did. Although that is not precisely true, is it?"

"No man dreams the same as another."

Blair lost patience at this. Standing, he grabbed at Jim's wrist and glared at his lover. Jim's expression was remote, and he made no effort to remove Blair's hand.

"Damn it, Jim! I know that you would a hundred times rather be in England. But we're here, and it seems the height of folly to ignore what has led us here."

"If I ignored it, then we'd still be wandering the jungle."

"What?"

"I had enough daylight dreams while you were ill, Sandburg. When Incacha begins to teach you, ask him about the black jaguar. You never saw it?"

"No. But it's good that you saw it, if it led us to safety."

"If you say so."

Blair let go of Jim and ran his hands through his hair, a gesture of frustration and exasperation. "I hope that it is Anala's presence which creates this mood in you. At least then I can hope for some improvement when we return home."

"Something that can hardly come soon enough!" Jim snapped.

"Then let us go back and make a start on whatever is expected of us. The less time dallying here the better, surely."

They began their walk back, through the riot of jungle which Jim already knew well – in some ways at least. He might not know the names of what he saw, but increasingly he knew the meaning of what he sensed; so many subtle messages sent through the sound of an animal, the scent of a plant, the patter of leaves whether broad or narrow or fronded.

They both regretted their temper, but it was Blair who broke first, as it usually was.

"I'm sorry. I think that I am somewhat nervous."

Jim nodded. "So am I. Nervous and sorry." He offered a smile, apology for temper, and the surveillance that he continually made upon Blair. They might live in each others pockets in England but still, they went places without the other. Jim did not need to accompany Blair to his mother's, or on those occasional race-day excursions that Blair made out of enjoyment rather than necessity. This urge to always have Blair within sight and hearing was irksome to them both because there was no pleasure in it. Jim put a hand upon Blair's shoulder and Blair smiled, although uncertainly.

"They do rather give you the evil eye," Blair admitted. "It must be hard, and harder still when you have so little of the language." Blair had been treated with a wary civility which had amused him in part because it reminded him of the attitude he met when he first became a regular visitor at Ashford. But the Chopec – well, they didn't quite drag their children away from Jim's shadow, but it was close to it. Incacha and Chani had made gifts to encourage Junai and Nalata to take Jim with them. And as for Anala – Blair had seen shadowed glances and odd gestures when people thought that no-one was looking.

"No doubt when you've fulfilled the task set by destiny, they will hold you in awed respect, and I shall bask in the shadow of your protection."

Blair shook off Jim's hand. "Why do you do that? We've both been led here by something outside the realm of known nature, and you mock it." Why do you mock me? was what he wanted to ask.

"Because I don't trust it!"

"But you must needs follow me anyway. I suppose I should be flattered." But Blair didn't feel flattered, and he didn't sound it either. What he felt was frightened and unsure.

"Blair..." Jim pulled Blair into his arms, an embrace that for once in these last weeks was solely for Blair rather than himself, and they stood together, as entwined as the trees and vines around them.

"It will be all right." Blair said this with all the determination in him.

Jim regarded him gravely, his own scepticism clear in his face, before he nodded. "We had best return. You have studies awaiting you."

Jim had spent his time in the Chopec village looking around and observing, when he didn't spend his time observing Blair. If the village had been a regiment, he would have doubted its morale, and not simply because of the nervous, even angry looks that he received. Unable to communicate more than the most basic messages, Jim kept his thoughts to himself. The morale of the village was far less to him than Blair's slow recovery from illness, and the growing unease that clawed Jim in the guts and would not let him go. Blair suggested that it might be suspicion of another sentinel. Jim accepted that it might be so, but the idea distressed him, not least because his pride revolted at the thought that some stripling boy, who possessed far more arrogance and bravado than Jim would have dared to indulge at that age, might have such a strong effect on him. Caught beneath the weight of several worries, Jim concentrated on Blair, and on learning whatever he could of the language, even though only Incacha and Chani would speak with him.

If Jim observed, so did others. The Chopec hardly knew what to make of the strangers, strange-eyed and odd-looking, and reputedly bearing the spirits lost for so long that more than half the village had never known the rituals of their elders. The round of life continued, but long-time memories of the tribe were becoming lost because there was no meaning to them for so many. The loss grieved Incacha. He had not conducted a young warrior in vision search for far too many years.

Blair and Jim's relationship – and their professed lack of wives – caused some unkind amusement also. Chopec men took two wives if prowess or charisma enabled it, and that two men should choose to dwell always in the men's house – willingly – was far more of a wonder than sentinel senses or the return of the spirits.

Blair, no sentinel, but used to judging the mood of a group of people for his own protection if nothing else, also noted the suspicion and apathy. That Jim took the brunt of it distressed him, and made him the more determined to begin his 'work', whatever it might be.

"Well," Blair said to Incacha, "I'm here." He grinned, realising that 'here' contained shades of meaning. Here, sitting cross-legged inside Incacha's house; here, in the jungles of Peru, so very far away from all that he'd known before; here in a spirit of curiosity and willingness tinged with considerable but deeply buried anxiety.

"You are here," Incacha agreed. "As am I." He had watched over this man and the sentinel, spoken of commonplaces with him, but had waited for him to grow well before dealing with more serious matters. The Chopec had waited for many years. They could wait long enough for Blair to be able to walk without stumbling, or talk without falling asleep from the effort. Besides, Incacha had his own anxieties which had grown as he had spoken with Blair, and taught Jim his fumbling way through the Chopec speech.

"I've come a long way, Incacha, but I don't really know why."

"The spirits have led you here."

Blair's face mouth pursed, a gesture that stopped a smile that he thought might be rude. It said as clearly as words, 'I know that, but I don't know it means.'

"The world is bigger for me now," Incacha said. He had always thought the jungle to be vast, to be physical world enough for any man, and he was wasn't sure if he was grateful to the spirits for their vision of how small that vastness was. "I saw your great house, and the - gardens - of your land, when we walked together."

"Fields," Blair said, and then realised that he'd spoken in English. Chopec language had no such word, created as it was to describe a world of tree canopy and small clearings. "And you saw England? That's amazing."

"Your dog spirit carried me upon its back. The rivers here are great, but the waters between here and your home are greater."

"My dog spirit. You mean a wolf?"

"If that is its name." Incacha studied the man before him. Child-like almost with those big, unnaturally light eyes, but with the beginnings of lines about the eyes and forehead. A mature man, not so very much younger than Incacha himself, who was not yet forty. "Your world is bigger also, now?" he asked.

"You could say that." Blair gestured in open-handed curiosity and frustration. "Why is my world bigger? I know part of it, the dreams, what you call the spirits, but why?"

This distressed Incacha. These strangers had come, guided by spirits. Incacha remembered waking after he dreamed, happy tears streaking his face because he had thought never to feel the touch of the spirits again, even through the agency of another. The long emptiness had been filled, if only for a moment.

"They do not speak to you?"

"Not in words," Blair said with wry amusement. "Do they speak to you?"

"Sometimes. And sometimes they place their wishes in my thoughts."

"Such as a wish to travel to a strange place – to meet a new friend."

"So I hope," Incacha said drily.

They sat and looked at each other, and as the silence grew awkward, Blair asked, "Why do you think I'm here, Incacha?"

"It was my thought that you would return the spirits to my people. Now, it is only my hope."

Blair's face fell. "And the difference between a thought and a hope is what?"

"The difference is my understanding that you are as ignorant as a six-moon's child of the spirits. As ignorant as I am of your world and its great houses and fields," Incacha shaped the word carefully and distastefully, "and its so many people." He rubbed his hand over his face.

"I'm sorry," Blair said. "That I'm not what you expected, I mean."

"The Chopec have learned not to expect anything since we lost the spirits. Since she swallowed them."

Blair's face was blank with incomprehension. "How does anyone swallow spirits?"

Incacha shook his head. "I do not know. Perhaps because she is a sentinel, like your sentinel. Perhaps because she was with child, and the force of two sentinel souls gave her power. She is hungry, always hungry. Perhaps she swallowed them just because her belly was big enough and she could."

The two men looked at each other, before Blair sighed. "I don't understand. I have one of your spirits. Or it has me," he grinned uncomfortably, "I'm not sure which."

"And so does your sentinel." Enqueri – sentinel. Blair stored the word away in his memory.

"Yes, he told me. A black jaguar. But we haven't swallowed ours. At least, I hope not."

"Your spirits brought you here because she has returned, and they desire to be with their fellows." Incacha's face was taut as he looked at Blair, and realised that he still did not understand.

"This sentinel, this witch who swallowed your spirits. She took them away, then?"

More of Incacha's frustration and confusion passed across his face and Blair, looking at him, finally made the connection. 'Your spirits brought you here because she has returned.'. "No. Oh no. No, no, no, no."

Incacha nodded. "She is of your tribe."

Blair shot to his feet. "The hell she is! No part of me, or anyone else. God damn her." Blair's hands were clenched in fists, and he jerked his hands down in a gesture of horrified rage. "I don't believe it. God!"

Incacha stood and watched.

"You must think me very stupid not to realise. But the spirits didn't tell me about her. They just told me to come here. I – uh – I..." Blair halted, lost for words.

Incacha raised his hand, palm outward, and ducked his head; the Chopec version of a shrug. "I forget how many people there are outside of the Chopec. I know that they are there, but I do not see them. I thought that you knew who I spoke of."

"I do now." Blair sucked in a breath. He was pale, and his heart was pounding fit to make him sick. "Oh, my God. No wonder Jim has been in such a fit of the sullens. Where is she? How far away is she?"

"She lives in the temple that the Inca built. The Inca are gone from here, but the Chopec remain." There was grim satisfaction in Incacha's voice at that. "Perhaps half a day's walk from here."

Blair's head was in his hands. "It explains much. He has been..."

"I have guided sentinels before. They do not share a land easily."

"Oh, that I have seen. Not land nor anything else."

"You are enemies, then?"

Blair laughed shortly. "You might say that, yes. Really, I am a great fool to be surprised. We seem to have been meshed with each other for too long." He took a breath. "She killed me. Some would say that she merely stunned me, left me dazed, but I know better and so does Jim. She killed me."

"Ghosts wear their heads backwards. You are no ghost."

Blair shook his head, as if to shake the odd idea out of it. "Why do...? Never mind. Your spirits - that was when I first saw them. Jim brought me back, and I dreamed. Of a temple. I was a wolf and he was a jaguar, and it - I wrote it all down, and I've read it so many times and now I don't know if I remember the dream or just my words."

Incacha leapt upon this recollection. "You saw the temple? Did you enter?"

"No. Jim – the jaguar – wouldn't let me." He smiled nervously. "I was insensible, lying abed for a week without waking. And then I awoke."

"You did not enter the temple then. But you must enter it now."

"We'll go there?" Blair's mind took a turn into literalism and curiosity. "But if you could do that.... Why not simply throw her out? Why not kill her if she's done such harm to your people?"

Incacha stared in horror – partly at the suggestion, partly at the gulf of understanding between them. "Kill her!" he exclaimed in revulsion. "And what if the spirits rot trapped within her as she rots? What if she takes them with her wherever it is that your tribe goes in death? They would be gone forever!" His voice rose in anger. "She must live until the spirits are freed."

His next words shocked Blair.

"You will not tell your sentinel of this."

"Not tell him..." The events of 1819 rose in Blair's memory; the bitterness of fear and grief; Jim's face as he literally threw Blair aside in the headlong advance to confirm that Blair had concealed his involvement with Alicia Bannister, at Stavely's behest. "I can't promise that."

"You tell me that you have seen how sentinels are together. And you are enemies with this woman. How can we trust him? Whenever she dies, it must not be until you free the spirits."

Blair began pacing. "And how do I do that?" he snapped. He covered his face with a hand, seeking for calm within himself. "I will not lie to Jim about this, not in any manner. You don't understand!"

Incacha stood behind him, rigid with unhappiness in the dimness of the hut. "You risk all if you speak with him."

"I risk all if I don't," Blair retorted. "When do you think he will be back?"

"Not for some time. The better hunting is away from the village."

"I will explain to him. He's not a stupid man. If our welcome here depends on his leaving Alicia alone until the time is right, he will understand." Blair wheeled about and, without thinking, gripped Incacha's shoulders. "He will understand, I promise you."

Jim was not like Atamalo. He had a full guide rather than a teacher, but Incacha was too frightened not to use all the weapons he had. Besides, Jim and Blair were men, and even if they had chosen to be wifeless, to be, as Incacha saw it, wife to one another, he knew the connection between a male and female sentinel. He had never forgotten the coupling he glimpsed between Atamalo and the woman he knew as Lisheeya. They had loathed each other, but they made a child together nonetheless. Alicia was growing old by Chopec standards, but she might still be fertile. "If you trust him not to kill her, do you trust him with her in all other matters?"

He had made a true strike – it was clear in the way that Blair's face paled under its tan. "Yes," Blair replied. "Yes. He has withstood her before."

Incacha had his doubts that Blair was resolute in this claim. Blair had a few himself, but he would not admit that to anyone, not even himself. But one thing was bedrock – Blair's resolve that he would tell Jim who awaited them. Incacha considered, for a few moments, simply killing the two strangers. It would grieve him, as he had grown to like Blair. It would be a terrible breach of custom. It might well anger the spirits, if they regarded Jim and Blair as more than simply vessels.

Blair, aware of Incacha's tension, but not understanding its cause, released his grip, and waited, pleading silently for agreement. Finally, Incacha gestured his resignation. "If you say so." Blair smiled. He never did know his danger in that moment.

Anala indulged hopes for his future as any boy of fourteen might. He was already one of the most skilled hunters of the tribe, although his adolescent immodesty at this made him little liked. One day, Anala thought, he would show his people how they were wrong about him. He would show them all. He would have the biggest hut in the village, and Imi to wife, and he would travel upriver and bring back another wife because there was no other girl amongst the Chopec who pleased him. He would be sought for counsel and his opinions would be respected and no-one, no-one, would gesture to ward off bad luck when they thought he wasn't looking.

He would be kind to Incacha and Chani, of course. They had fostered him, taught him. Chani had told him stories. Incacha had taught him to make his first blow pipe and darts and how to make the poisons which would bring down an animal quickest. A jaguar's tooth would hang around Anala's neck. Not that he would seek to hunt it – that would be bad luck. But he might discover one menacing Imi and the other girls as they gathered fruit, and be forced to kill it in their defence. These had been all Anala's hopes and plans for the future.

Incacha had told him of the Sentinels' Temple, always within reach of Chopec settlement and yet so ignored, and once Anala had known of it he made a point of travelling to it periodically. Without the Inca's small army of attendants it was nearly buried under vegetation now. Saplings sprouted from cracks. Vines smothered it. Mosses grew upon the steps. But some of the stones, some of the carvings, were still visible, and Anala would caress these sometimes. This place was sacred to what he was, and that was a balm to a lonely boy.

The day came when Anala made one of his visits and realised that another person was there. He had scrambled up the steps and seen a width of stone moved, pushed ajar. He had readied his blow pipe and his spear. If some other tribe chose to trespass where they did not belong, he would deal with it.

There was a shadow of movement from within the doorway, a rush of strange scent, and a vision appeared, quite as startling to him as their first dreams were to Jim and Blair: a woman, taller than most of the Chopec, as tall as Incacha, pale and cold as the moon. He'd fallen to his knees, his head bowed, and trembled when she laughed.

"This makes a change." Her steps were light, but Anala felt the vibration of her footsteps through the stone beneath him. She loomed over him and her hand rested in his hair. "Look at me." He had done so. "I thought as much. Hair more the colour of the river water than the soil. And you smell familiar enough. Do you know who I am?"

The return of Anala's mother was as expected by the Chopec as much as the return of Atamalo, and Anala shook his head. An expression of displeasure crossed Alicia's face.

"Say hello to your mother."

He would have run from the spirit thief, but her hand tightened its grip. "They have nothing good to say about me, I see. Does Incacha still live?"

Anala nodded.

Alicia's grip remained tight in Anala's hair, but her free hand caressed his jaw with unlikely affection. "Then run home, my son, and tell him that I'm here. Let him come visit me – if he dares." She had let go of his hair then, and Anala had needed no further urging. He dashed down the steps and made his way back to the village, Alicia's eyes on him for so long as she could see him through the tangle of foliage.

Incacha returned with Anala the next day – to the satisfaction only of Alicia. Incacha, horrified that he had felt nothing, seen nothing, demanded the spirits' freedom of Alicia. She mocked and scorned him, suspecting that he would not harm her, increasingly sure of her ability to manipulate native 'superstition'. Incacha's humiliated, despairing departure twisted something in Anala. Power clearly did not lie with his adopted father. That was the beginning of it. Besides, he was curious. Alicia had brought someone with her, someone that she hid within the temple interior, and would not let Incacha see. Anala wanted to know who that someone was.

Both Blair and Incacha were incapable of considering finer mysteries of the spirits when Blair was straining at the leash to tell Jim of Alicia's presence. Blair took himself outside and sat on the ground outside Incacha's house, staring at the garden that was there, tended by Chani. He smiled at her, and waved. Chani looked at him and nodded back. The rough thatching that constituted the walls as well as the roof might block some sound, but not all, and she knew what was coming. She sighed as she considered her husband's situation, and pulled out a weed with vengeful enthusiasm. Their future in their tribe lay in the hands of foreigners, and Chani resented it, for all of Blair's charm, for all of Jim's respectful attention to her when they practiced the Chopec language together.

If this went well, if Incacha's alliance with these strangers gave them back the spirits, perhaps there might finally be a second wife in the house. Her husband was still vigorous and handsome. He deserved the prestige, and Chani had long effaced herself, made it plain that she would be kindly. Well, of course she would be kindly. The village praised her and Incacha for their care of Anala, to their faces at least, while gossiping that Chani's empty womb was yet more proof of the bad luck attached to sentinels. When Incacha came out also to lean against the walls with Blair, she smiled whole-heartedly. She had always regarded him as her luck. He looked back at her, unable to return her smile, but warmed nonetheless.

"Will you always send Jim away hunting when you teach me?" Blair asked.

"I will try. Sentinels have their business. You and I have ours."

"He's going to know about Alicia anyway."

"Lisheeya is not all. Have you ever chased the spirits – sought to step outside yourself?" Incacha lifted his face to the last remnants of afternoon sun in the clearing.

Blair considered this. "No, I don't believe that I have."

"You will be gone, and this will pain him if he is here."

"Gone, how?"

Incacha sighed. "Later."

They sat there a while. Chani brought beer and they drank it. Blair couldn't quite disguise that he found the taste strange, and Incacha grinned. "You will grow accustomed to it. To loosen the soul from the body is not always easy. Easier at first when you are drunk."

"How drunk?" Blair asked suspiciously.

Incacha's grin grew even broader. "Very drunk," he said, waving his gourd cup in the air.

"Excellent news," Blair muttered, and then stood. Jim was coming up the path that ran through the middle of the garden. "Jim! How was the hunting?"

Jim held a parcel wrapped in green leaves. "For you," he said to Chani, with a small bow of the head. "We caught a linioki," by which Jim meant a capybara. He had done his fair share, maybe more, of carrying the carcass back to the settlement, and he had washed before he brought his share of the meat.

"And were your senses useful?" Blair asked.

"Sometimes," was the evasive answer. Jim was aware of much, but interpreting it – that was difficult sometimes. Junai had been patient – Nalata not so much. "Incacha."

Incacha nodded at this greeting. "This hunting must be different to what you are accustomed to, Enqueri."

Jim smiled politely. He understood Incacha but was unsure as to his ability to frame a proper answer.

"Your guide has something he must tell you," Incacha said, ignoring the look of panicked reproach that Blair gave him.

"Yes, yes, but not here." Not in front of an audience. Blair grabbed hold of Jim's hand. "Come with me." There was a place at a nearby stream, where the Chopec took tiny dugouts out to fish.

"This news you have for me is important then, Sandburg?"

"Yes, unfortunately," Blair said grimly. His irritation at Incacha's interference was tempered by the knowledge that he could not have waited long to tell Jim the news. They stopped well up the stripped, muddy beach. Neither had any intention of being a crocodile's meal.

Blair scrubbed at his face with his hands, while Jim crouched, watching the play of the water's movement.

"We've spent a certain amount of time considering the nature of fate, have we not?" Blair began.

"I am not so much a philosopher as you are," Jim said. He felt oddly calm, even though he was sure that whatever Blair had to tell him was bad news.

"Did you ever give thought to this 'sorceress' who had stolen the spirits – what sort of woman she must be?"

Jim's head turned, so that he might examine Blair more closely. "Not especially." He was about to request that Blair simply get on with his explanations, but Blair forestalled his complaint with one blurted sentence.

"It's Alicia at the temple."

Blair's face was flushed and nervous. Jim's became simply blank before he stood carefully, and returned to his vigil upon the river water.

"Mrs Bannister, you say? Is it a play we've fallen into then?"

"She does seem to be rather a Nemesis."

"I will be better pleased if we are hers," Jim said grimly. Certain aspects of his own recent emotions were now clear to him. It was not his awareness of Anala's presence that had so disturbed him. In some ways the news pleased him. He would like to balk whatever plans Alicia had, on the simple principle that whatever she desired could be no good. Then Jim looked at Blair, who was watching him and fidgeting upon his feet. Thus far it seemed that it was Blair who was to thwart her, with Jim's part being to conduct Blair safely to a confrontation with his murderess. The prospect angered him, and it showed upon his face.

"Jim."

"What, Sandburg? You can hardly be surprised if I'm not delighted with your news."

"Well, neither am I, if it comes to that."

"We shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. She was ever a thief. Why not take from the Chopec as well as everyone else? At least she remains consistent. She steals from those who show her kindness."

Blair swallowed. "Incacha is worried....you and I, we know that sentinels together are..."

Jim came close to him then, indignation straightening his spine, lifting his chin. "Incacha is worried or you are worried?"

Blair shrugged, a slight, ashamed movement. "The both of us, I suppose. Incacha is adamant that she must not die until I've done - whatever it is that I'm supposed to do. And don't tell me that you wouldn't be tempted, Jim. Don't even try telling me that."

Tempted to kill her – well, why not, Jim thought. By the laws of England, she was at least twice a murderer. Blair, face down in the stream. Jane Crawford, left crumpled at the bottom of a flight of stairs because she had the misfortune to discover Alicia creeping where she ought not to have been. And that was only near Ashford. Jim doubted that those two deaths had been her first essays at the craft of slaughter.

The temptation to wring her neck was not the only temptation that worried Blair, and one look between them confirmed it, although it was hard to put either fear or reassurance into words. At least Jim's irritation and his constant, hungry need for Blair's touch and presence was explained.

"I will leave her alone. That's what you wish to hear, is it not, and Incacha as well, I presume. Since I don't doubt that you have already promised on my behalf."

Blair laughed. "I stand convicted. Incacha would have had me keep this from you." His face changed. The laughter had been no more than a nervous tic, an expulsion of the anxiety that returned full force. "I couldn't do that, Jim. I couldn't. If I must be a fool, then at least I will be a new sort of a fool rather than repeat old mistakes."

"You're no sort of a fool at all."

"I feel it sometimes. Today, talking with Incacha – I realised how strange all of this is." There were lines of strain etched into Blair's face. "Jim, I don't know if I can do this, how to do this. I mean...." He ran restless hands through his hair. "I do wish to do this. In a way, I'm proud to be chosen, well, perhaps not chosen, but to have the opportunity, but I...I'm not sure that I will do Incacha's teachings justice. How does one rescue spirits?"

"As best you may," Jim told him. Blair's expression of pride in his task distressed him. It reminded him too much of young men proud to be soldiers, without truly understanding what that entailed – although they all learned soon enough. He thought of the beast he had seen, of the dreams that had led them here. They would all learn soon enough, he supposed.

They had stood apart during all this conversation. Blair sighed, and Jim took the last couple of steps that would leave them touching, and placed an arm across Blair's shoulders. Something eased inside of him. But the easing didn't change the new sense within him. With knowledge came a crystallising of awareness, of things that his body had known but his mind had not. Neither Incacha nor Blair had said anything as to where this temple might be, where Alicia waited like a spider in the corner of a ceiling. But Jim knew that he could find her, could walk straight through the tangle of jungle to her door, as easily as walking across an English field to visit a neighbour of years' standing.

Jim was brought up as a gentleman to be punctilious about certain things. Unlike some men of his class and circumstances, who believed any man a fool who refused to extend his resources until he was barely one step ahead of the bailiffs, Jim paid his debts and met his obligations. School boy, young soldier, young officer, landowner – Jim accepted that he must make fair exchange in return for services rendered.

It was this belief that kept him from exploding into irritation and fury as Blair's tuition in the ways of the spirits began. To Jim's eyes, the ways of the spirits looked suspiciously like the ways of drunkenness. He would come back from hunts, from fishing expeditions, from treks with Chani for medicinal herbs, and find Blair on the rough platform that passed as a Chopec bed, asleep or half asleep, reeking of beer and occasionally foully sick.

He had tried asking Chani about it, to express his doubts and concern to someone. He granted that Incacha's wife was not perhaps the most promising confidant. Kindly as ever, she did not take offence, but she made it plain that she had faith in her husband's methods. Jim could not question Blair, would not question Incacha, especially as he suspected that Chani had passed on his fumbling questions to her husband, and had no one else amongst the Chopec that he trusted enough to approach. He and Junai had developed a rough camaraderie, but no more than that. Within the village sentinels were Incacha's business, and Incacha's business often seemed to be that of bad fortune. For all that, Junai was impressed sometimes by the big foreigner. He had once seen other foreigners, Spanish priests and their guides, from a healthy distance, and he remembered them as awkward and afraid. Jim was neither of those things, for all that his mouth stumbled over Chopec words to occasionally hilarious effect.

Anala would regularly wander the village, and this irritated Jim all the more. He knew the direction the boy often came from, knew the scent that sat upon his skin. Incacha permitted Alicia's spy to wander the village, and yet periodically banished Jim from Blair's presence.

"Anala will tell her everything," he complained to Incacha one evening, watching the shadows grow upon the village in the speedy tropic twilight, hardly a twilight at all as two Englishmen knew it.

"What he tells her does not matter. I worry more what she tells him." Incacha sighed. "This is his home. She may dwell in the stone with the spirits, but he cannot, not always. She promises him his spirit, and the second soul that it will gift to him but she cannot give it. Or will not. That, at least, I would see if he had it. One day he will realise her promises are empty, and he will return home to his people."

Blair sat close to the fire, sipping at a gourd of some tisane which Chani had made. "The village is frightened of him. Not so much as Jim, maybe, but they're still suspicious."

Incacha poked at the fire with a green stick. "He hurts at that. It is true. But he is also arrogant, and too young to know sense, especially around the girls." Incacha shook his head. "This does not help him," he admitted ruefully, like any parent with an awkward child. He smiled at Jim. "You show Junai how a sentinel should be, and he tells the others. This is good. We need less fear."

Jim nodded at this. It was something, he supposed, that the Chopec might grow less suspicious of him. There was chatter at another fire, laughter. Incacha left the two of them by his hearth-fire, and went to join the other group, to stand at the edge and watch and listen to his people's voices, to hear Chani lift her voice in an old song.

Jim was glad of the peace. Blair sat still by the fire, tired and oddly exalted within himself. Today was the first time that he had gone within – without – he hardly knew which it was, without the aid of the manioc beer and he felt both pleased and frightened by the experience.

"I thought you studied with Incacha today," Jim asked. He had noted that Blair did not stink of the beer.

"Yes, I studied." Blair put out a hand. "Sit down with me. There's no need to stand there like a sentry at his post."

Jim obeyed, settling before the fire with his knees drawn up, a pose which did not last long as Blair insinuated his head into Jim's lap.

"Good evening," he said, staring up into his lover's face.

"Good evening," Jim returned with a hint of a smile, shifting slightly to make them both more comfortable.

"You don't ask me much about what I do with Incacha."

Jim stroked gently at the unruly hair so easily within his reach. "No. Do I need to?"

"I suppose not. Although it's not all a matter of seeking the spirits. We've talked of sentinels, too. And guides." Blair shut his eyes, as Jim's fingers gently combed through his hair.

"You must miss pen and paper."

Blair spared a thought for the leather portfolio gone with Hector. "Sometimes. I think that we shock Incacha on occasion – with how ignorant we are, I mean."

"We manage well enough."

"Yes, we do, but by good luck rather than good management. Not so many sentinels have a guide like me, apparently."

"Then many sentinels are most unfortunate," Jim said, and meant it.

"I was wondering," Blair said, monitoring Jim's body – the tension of gut against Blair's face, the feel of the hand touching his head, "if you might feel more comfortable revisiting some ideas now that you know that they come from a source other than Alicia." The originals of many of the papers, Blair's bounty from Alicia in 1819, lay at Ashford, carefully stored in the desk in Blair's room.

"Why?" One short word of suspicious inquiry.

"You're very dependent upon me, Jim."

"I've grown used to it."

They remained where they were, but there was little relaxation in either of them.

"What if I'd died of the fever? Or if we return to England and I fall off my horse and break my neck? It distresses me to think of you ill, an invalid."

"Do you resent it then? That I - depend - upon you?"

"Perhaps I ought to, but I do not. Not so long as I know that you love me, also." Blair bit his lip. Tiredness, the memories of what he had seen this afternoon, made him careless, made his own dependencies too obvious.

"And have I given you reason to doubt that?" Jim's other hand came to rest, curled on Blair's chest.

"No, but I consider - everything. Everything, Jim, and I cannot help but wonder at how we fit together and why."

"Isn't it enough to know that we do?"

Blair considered his answer, but the habit of frankness with Jim was too hard to break. Even when Jim wouldn't answer with words, there was always some reaction. "It ought to be, but I can't help it. Wondering, I mean."

Jim sighed. "You would not be you, otherwise, I suppose." He examined Blair, whose brain was still so busy, but whose body was laid out upon his lap like some Italian pieta. "If it's not the beer that makes you so lazy tonight, then what is it?"

"Dreams," Blair replied. "Just dreams." He paused a moment. Jim said nothing, made no demur or denial. "I keep seeing a forest, huge, like this all around us, but so silent. No sound. Not a bird, not a creature anywhere, except for occasional glimpses of a wolf and a jaguar. So I wander. There's a narrow defile, and I know that I have to pass that – to go where I need to, and there's a spotted jaguar always present, on guard. It's leashed, and starved looking, but it won't let me pass. So I spend all the time walking the jungle looking for another way around, but there just isn't one. I swear, Jim, I ought to have blisters on my feet, I walk so far."

"And so you require my lap as a pillow." Amusement now on Jim's part, if muted.

"You make a comfortable pillow."

Jim started, a tiny movement, but one that Blair could hardly fail to notice. "What is it?" He sat up, as Jim pointed off to the side of the fire, where the jungle around them joined the night. Two greenish points of light glowed – the reflection of firelight off cat's eyes. Not so long ago Blair might have known a quick jolt to his chest, a moment's startled reflection to decide if what he saw was flesh or spirit. Now he simply smiled and stood to take a few steps before he sat cross-legged in the dirt. The beast stalked forward and extended its head to sniff at Blair's face, for all the world like a friendly tabby in the stables at Ashford. It stared past Blair for a moment, to Jim, and then it was gone.

"Absolutely extraordinary," Blair said, deeply pleased and satisfied. He turned his head. "Isn't that just..." Blair's hands waved, expressing feelings for which he had no words.

Jim sat still, very still. "It seems you have someone's blessing."

Blair knew that tone of suppressed distress and scrambled back, to sit astride Jim's lap. "Why are you afraid?" he asked, hands framing Jim's face. "There's no need. You were right. It was a blessing."

"It was a great cat sniffing your face, Sandburg."

"Your cat."

"Not mine, I think. I consider myself in the nature of a borrowed carriage. I've brought it to its home. That's well and good."

Blair frowned. "There are times that I could box your ears."

Jim leaned his head forward, forehead resting against Blair's bare shoulder, as he breathed in Blair's scent, felt his warmth. "They're available if you must," he mumbled.

"I will refrain. For now. But Jim, will you think of what I said? About learning to depend on me not quite so much?"

"Is that the spirits' will, is it?"

Blair huffed out a breath, exasperated, but recognising the source of Jim's recalcitrance. "I have no intention of leaving you. Ever. But surely a soldier recognises the importance of having more than one strategy. More than one defence. For your own protection."

Jim shrugged. "When you've finished with Incacha's teachings, no doubt I will be available to receive yours." And with that, Blair had to be satisfied.

Jim wasn't satisfied at all. To his eyes, the benediction was an act of ownership, the green glare in his direction a reminder that he still had Blair only by the grace and action of these spirits. He didn't doubt that any longer. He'd always wondered what price might be exacted for Blair's recovery from Alicia's assault and now he watched Blair seeking whatever it was the spirits wanted him to find and worried as to where Blair's quest might lead. Jim was willing to pay his debts, but he would not be beggared.

The spirits wanted reparation from Alicia did they? Then Jim was willing to act as their bailiff, if it might protect Blair. He would not sit in the village, or uselessly wander the jungle like a child dismissed from a mother's lying-in lest he hear or see something disturbing. Jim didn't know what good he could do, but he knew where to find Alicia. It was time to investigate what the she-spider was doing while Blair wandered his jungle of the mind. Tomorrow, Jim thought, grasping his hands that more firmly around Blair. Tomorrow.

"There, my poppet. There." Alicia nodded her approval as her guide placed the cut fruit in her mouth and chewed without dribbling juice down her front. 'Poppet' had become the most common mode of address. The girl had been named Jane in London, Mariah in Panama, but she had no real name, any more than Alicia did. They were themselves, two interlocked pieces.

"Stones?" the girl asked plaintively.

"Later, sweeting. You must have your bath first. And your medicine."

Poppet's face fell. She made no comment but she didn't have to. The bath was frightening, the medicine bitter and disgusting, but since Alicia was her entire world she made no complaint. The world was what it was, and even in her simpleton state, poppet remembered a time far worse than this. She made no complaint, not even a grunt.

Alicia held out her hand and poppet rose, skinny and gangling, freckles dabbled against her pale skin. Her hair held red tones among the brown, which fascinated Anala. Alicia permitted his fascination - usually. "Come along, then." It was dim in this room, which was lit only by faint shafts of light directed through slits in the rock. Alicia had cleared vegetation to enable that light, had sent Anala scrambling over what was closer to a hill than a building to find other shafts. There were places beneath them that were black as night, although Alicia knew them well. She'd known them years before, before Anala was even an itch, a tide of nausea, a weight in her womb. She didn't need light. Touch, hearing, scent; all of those did well enough once you had explored somewhere thoroughly enough.

The two women walked slowly through stone hallways, along stone floors where Alicia's eyes could see tiny flakes of faded powder where the paint of centuries old pictures had worn from the walls. They entered the room they sought, and poppet whimpered. The baths made her tired, made her frightened.

"No nonsense," Alicia said firmly. "Here." A gourd lay on the floor, heavy with liquid. Leaves of the steeped herbs lay settled in the bottom. "Drink it up, there's a good girl." Poppet grimaced, but obediently swallowed, until there was just a bitter swamp of stringy fronds left at the bottom. "Good girl," Alicia crooned, and helped poppet into the stone trough. The girl shuddered at the touch of the water, cold and somehow oily, but she lay back, her head resting upon a stone which just kept her face above the water. "That's it." Alicia bent to kiss poppet's brow. "Sleep and dream. And after you can have your stones to play with." She smiled lovingly. "You make lovely patterns, I know. Sweet dreams." Gradually, poppet fell into a still, staring trance, unmoving except for the occasional blinking of her eyes.

Alicia sat for a few minutes, staring around her, her hands tracing the groove of carving in the trough. This would work. It had to, the idea had begun to obsess her, and Alicia was well-accustomed to believing that what she wanted would come to be, that what she knew, was fact. But poppet would dream for hours yet. Alicia sighed. Sometimes the temptation was so strong, to take away the stone and push poppet's head under the water, and wait for either the miracle or the disaster. But not yet. Power was coming – she could feel it, but not quite yet.

She loved this place, which had spoken to her as nothing else ever had, but even Alicia needed fresh air. She rose and walked out, her feet a nearly silent pad upon the stones, to stand in the small plaza two thirds of the way up the temple.

"You're late," she complained to her son. Anala walked up the steep steps, two fish in one hand, and some fruit in a canvas bag which Alicia had given him in the other.

"I'm sorry, my mother."

"So you should be." Alicia poked at the small fire which was sheltered by a fallen block of masonry. "Have you no leaves for that then?" she asked.

"In the bag," Anala said, fumbling for them.

"Get on with it then." Anala quickly gutted the fish, wrapped them in the leaves and placed them at the side of the fire.

Alicia stretched, and then stopped, and stared in the direction of the Chopec village. She laughed. "I think that we will have a visitor today," she said.

"Who, my mother?" Anala looked at her warily. Alicia had an uncertain temper, and it was growing worse. She would croon at him like a mother with a six months babe and then scream like an eagle, with no warning. She would smile upon his efforts to speak with poppet, even suggest that while poppet was her guide that she might be his too, and then shove him aside, insisting that poppet was hers and no others.

"Jim. Enqueri. That name for him but not for you or I. Why do you think that is, my son?"

"I am young, still," Anala answered carefully. His mother fascinated him; sitting here with her was an experience not unlike stalking a great cat. Perhaps his spirit quest would be like this, he thought. He hadn't come to the fullness of his senses yet, although he could feel it sometimes, like a seedling nearly ready to burst out of its case.

"I was never Enqueri, either. That was for your father."

Anala nodded. "Will you be safe, my mother?"

"I will be, my son, because you will watch for me. Although I am not altogether defenceless." She smiled, gently lascivious, and Anala shifted uncomfortably. Incacha had taught him much about the control of his senses, pointing at the sky and explaining that just as the moon did not always throw out his full light, but chose to wax and wane, that Anala's senses could do the same. Anala had practised all those things willingly when he was younger. It was difficult sometimes, however, to not give in to distraction, especially given Alicia's frank amusement when she saw Anala caught between taboo and his awareness of his mother's body.

"I could kill them for you." It wasn't the first time that Anala had made this offer. He must be blooded as a warrior before he could become a man.

"I know that you could. I could kill them for myself, if I wished. I've done it once."

Anala screwed up his face in disbelief. Alicia was fortunately in a mood to be amused by this. "Truly. I have a sword waiting for me at home – a great knife," she explained. She stood, and waved her knife, metal and highly coveted by her son, before her in the air. "Blair is brave enough but no fighter." She lunged, waving her knife before her with ruthless enthusiasm.

Anala could believe well enough that Blair was no threat. He was languid in the aftermath of his illness, ridiculously hairy to Chopec sensibilities and he smiled too much. The other one – if Anala could kill him, take the warrior part of his soul, then that would be a coup indeed.

Alicia spun about, the knife flashing dangerously close to Anala's face. He did not flinch although a small shiver ran across his skin. When he had first seen his mother, she had seemed to him like a waterfall – full of force, but cool and purposeful. Now, for all the feline power of her movement, she was like a monkey drunk on fermented fruits. The temple was changing her. Poppet was not the only one who drank strange concoctions.

"I will kill them for you, if you ask it."

Alicia bent low. "I know that you would. Would you kill Incacha for me?" At Anala's frozen expression, Alicia laughed, merry as a child. "I thought not. No matter, my son. I do not require that you kill anyone."

"Why not?" Anala asked, covering shock with a show of petulance.

"Because I tell you so," was the reply. In truth, Alicia hardly knew why. Blair was amusing, it was true, and Jim was a kindred spirit in a way that dull-witted Atamalo could never have been. But she knew that they were here to stop her, which was ridiculous. How could they stop her without her death, which she knew that Incacha had forbidden. Why would they stop her? What could they understand of the mysteries that she had begun to perceive?

Incacha understood a little, for all that he was no sentinel. There were instructions Alicia had discovered, patterns buried under paint, grooves carved into the rock so shallowly that it needed a sentinel's sight and touch to discern them. The echoes of the rock itself spoke to her, but whenever she entertained the thought of disposing of Incacha, of sending Anala to follow Jim and Blair on their travel to springs with a killing poison on his dart, the echoes overwhelmed her. She could not think at all thus overwhelmed, and so she learned not to think those particular thoughts. She had a guide to heal, to make into her equal, her fit companion. It was coming soon, she knew it.

But before her reward, her gift came to her, there was to be Jim. Her mouth curled up in a smile, which only broadened as she saw Anala avert his face.

Jim rose early. Incacha and Chani slept solidly, their sleep encouraged by the beer that had been handed around among the tribe members the night before. Extricating himself from Blair's embrace gave Jim a few nervous moments, but all was done without disturbance, and he passed through the hut entrance into a dim, noisy dawn. Animals soon knew better than to be too close to the village, but there were still the cries of birds nearby, and Jim's ears heard a fair distance into the jungle, to the voices of the last of the night creatures settling into their rest as the day creatures became active.

He had grabbed his breeches and shirt. The kilt was good enough - necessary sometimes - but he felt distaste at the idea of approaching Alicia in native dress and half naked. It wasn't an idea he voiced in his mind, but he shrank at the sense of vulnerability. Dressed, he set out, as the grey of the dawn jungle became the vibrant green of early morning. It was so like that waking dream and nightmare at Ashford - the clear sense of direction, the need to be in a certain place. And yet so unlike, surrounded as he was by the great canopy of forest and the raucous life within it. It was a long trek to the temple and when it came into sight he stopped, gaping. It was so exactly like his years-ago dream, the dream where he'd stopped the wolf that was Blair from exploring any further; a great mound of stone and vegetation. At the bottom were two squat stone carvings of snarling jaguars, and perched upon one of them was the black jaguar, sleek and supercilious.

"And a good day to you too," Jim remarked sourly. The creature blinked its eyes in a lazy manner and was gone. Jim lowered his head, eyes seeing his feet half covered in the humus and debris of the jungle floor, and remembered the feel of Blair's skin. Then he lifted his head to stare up the steps of the temple. He could smell her, and Anala. She was singing, some lilting English ballad, and then she stopped for a moment. "Please, come up, Jim. I've been waiting half the day for you, after all."

It seemed a very long climb to Jim until he rose gradually over the rim of the plaza to see Alicia. Anala stood to one side of her. She stood to greet him, having made her preparations; a gourd of bitter juice which she doubted he would accept sat by the fire along with some of the cooked fish, and Alicia had given considerable thought to her own appearance. A wrap of cloth brought with her adorned her body, and over her closely braided hair she wore a head-dress, fashioned from the feathers of birds her son had brought to her. The message was clear - she was queen and priestess of this place. Jim, determinedly wearing his shabby English clothes, was the supplicant here, although he might not be unfavoured.

And Jim, even though he loathed Alicia, couldn't deny the glamour of her barbaric splendour. He inclined his head. "Mrs Bannister."

"So formal, Jim. And you and I old friends."

Jim's hands clenched in irritation, and sudden, unacknowledged fear. What was he doing here, in this place, alone with his enemies? There was nothing stopping Alicia's brat from killing him, puffing some poisoned dart across the space. But he stood still, and watched.

"If we were to insist upon informality, I might address you as murdering bitch, and that would get us off to a bad beginning."

Alicia's smile shifted not a jot, but her eyes reflected her inner fury. "You and Anala are two of a kind, Jim. He wonders why I will not let him kill you, and you wonder why Incacha will not let you kill me."

"I know Incacha's reasons well enough. I cannot say the same of yours."

Alicia swayed towards him like some exotic bird upon a branch, wary and ready for flight.

"You see no reason why I shouldn't spare you, Jim? I have never thought you dull-witted."

"I'm not. Nor am I impressed. Save your tricks for those young enough and foolish enough to be dazzled." Jim's gaze flicked to Anala, standing there impotent in his annoyance that he understood not a word.

"What may I do for you, dearheart?"

"Why did you come here, Alicia?"

Alicia turned, dismissing Anala to go and watch poppet, before she sank gracefully to sit upon a piece of masonry, gracious as if she were offering tea in some elegant salon.

"Why should I not?"

It was a great irony, perhaps, that Jim sought answers from Alicia for things that he could not express to Incacha and felt too awkward to ask of Blair. He could not keep resentment or fear out of his tone, and he knew that it distressed Blair. Resentment and fear before Alicia might be humiliating, but they were of a piece with all their interactions.

"It's hardly a picnic excursion."

Alicia smiled, and gestured at the fire. "It could be," she remarked.

"I think not."

"As you wish." Alicia sat and watched Jim for a few moments. She noted his appearance, chosen for a purpose, as was hers; his restrained contempt; and as always the shared fascination between them. They had so little in common, but the one thing that they shared - how rare. How binding, for all their antipathy. "I came here in search of a miracle, Jim. I have hopes of it, and when I have it I will leave again."

"A miracle?" Jim's brows rose in honest surprise and curiosity.

"Indeed." Alicia was lost in abstraction for a moment, and Jim noted the look, that of a woman lost within herself rather than lost in the outside world.

"Who would create a miracle for you?"

Alicia's chin jerked at this insult. "I will create it for myself."

"Become a god, have you?"

Alicia stood, and with quick steps walked to a wall of stone, cracked by time and the roots of plants, criss-crossed with the shadows of the carvings set into it. "There's power here, Jim. And we all need power to achieve goals. It's a sad world for the powerless, the ones without influence. Not that you would know such a thing."

"There's achieving power, and there's stealing it."

Alicia laughed outright at that. "Inheritance enabled you to keep your own hands clean. That's all. Did you steal the power that brought you here?"

"I didn't ask for it, or seek it. I suspect something different in your case."

Alicia ran her fingers across the stone, aware that Jim had stood also and watched with close attention.

"This place - it sings, Jim. Don't you hear it?"

"No. No, I don't."

"Then you've blocked your ears."

"Incacha believes that you've swallowed the spirits of this place. Blocked the ears of others, if you will."

Another laugh. "The more fool he, then. If he could not keep hold of what was here, then maybe there was a reason for that."

"The way there was a reason that the people around Ashford could not keep hold of their heirlooms and coins?"

Alicia flew across the stone pavement to grasp at Jim's wrist. He barely flinched. "But this is mine! Could be yours if you chose. This place is devoted to what you and I are! Why should we not take what's ours? Why not?"

“Because it's not ours. I was driven here, Alicia, to bring the thing that rides me home. Are you so certain that the same doesn't apply to you?”

Alicia's angry denial was plain upon her face. “I'm not anyone's toy. That lesson I learned long ago.”

Jim withdrew his hand, frustrated by how they were so much at cross-purposes, and discomfited by the realisation that some things had not changed at all. Whatever sense and affection might decree, physical attraction still lurked beneath like an itch under the skin. It was possible to ignore the itch, but it irked Jim, teased at his awareness.

“What is your miracle, Alicia?” Perhaps there might be some middle way, some accommodation like that of 1819, anything, Jim thought, that might keep Blair away from her.

“Come with me and see.”

Alicia led him into the temple. It was dim inside, and barely cooler than the humid air outside. They travelled into the depths of the building to the chamber where Alicia had left poppet. Anala squatted beside the trough where she lay, looking up in startlement when he saw who his mother had brought to this place. He opened his mouth to protest but she waved a hand in dismissal.

“Peace, my son. He is a sentinel too. Shouldn't he learn?”

She drew Jim over to the trough. “Here. This is the miracle I seek.”

Jim looked down at poppet.

“Who is she?”

“No-one of value to the greater world. An idiot girl. But she's a guide, Jim, true and soothing, just like your Blair. I found her years ago, nearly tripped over her when she flew to me, escaping some village clods who were chasing her, throwing stones at her. I had no need, no desire for a guide then, but still. One does not waste resources. I arranged for her care, and when I needed her, she was there.” Alicia bent, and stroked one finger across poppet's cheek.

There was no sign of awareness, much to Jim's concern. The girl lay there, her face barely out the water, almost like...almost like Blair, in the dream that Jim had in England; only Blair's face had been beneath the water, dead-like and calm. He drew back, oppressed by the great weight of stone about them. He backed away a few feet more, uncaring of how he might look to either Alicia or Anala.

“Do you feel it then?” Alicia enquired. “I told you that this place possessed power and this is the heart of it.” She drew her head-dress off and placed it beside the trough, irked by the weight of her pretensions rather than memory or presences.

Jim stared around him. It seemed to him almost that he could hear the voices that Alicia claimed, except that he heard no song, unless it was an echo of a dirge. His hand reached out to touch a decorative pillar, and he realised that the carving, ancient but still sharply etched was of an orgy – men and women, men and men, women and women, copulating in banded stripes across and around the square-cut stone.

Alicia smiled and crossed the floor on cat-light feet to lay one hand between his shoulder blades. “We could, you know. It was one of the purposes of this place. Your guide would forgive you, and mine would hardly care.” There was grief in her tone. It surprised them both, and Alicia chose to cover her confusion with a more obvious caress down the sweep of Jim's back. Why not, she thought. Why not? They had always lusted after each other – but expediency and ill-health had obstructed them. Neither of those applied now. This was no place for expediency or caution. This was her own place, this temple of sentinels, and surely she should choose its rites. "They don't know. They will never understand what it's like for you or me."

Jim turned sharply, a shiver running up his back even as he moved. Anger; surprise. A speculation that, however briefly, acknowledged a truth in her words. All of those were clear in his face, before disgust overtook them all. He pushed past her, past the staring Anala, his arm knocking painfully against the side of the doorway in his rush to escape. He charged down the narrow, dark stairway to exit into the damp, heavy air of the plaza, where he inhaled with great, gulping intakes of breath.

He was a fool. There was no reasoning with Alicia, and it seemed perilously likely that there was little reasoning with himself when he was near her. Whatever emotion he felt with her, it was always extreme. Lust, anger, a driving frustration that their minds exercised such completely different understandings of the world. He felt a terrible, pitying revulsion at the thought of some idiot girl as Alicia's guide, not knowing which of the two he pitied more. Without a second glance behind him he descended the steps and made his way into the jungle, heading back towards the Chopec village and the reckoning that would await him at Blair and Incacha's hands. He might protest as much as he liked that nothing had happened. It shamed him in a way that nothing had happened, that he'd been unable to effect any useful action, unless it was the gathering of a little intelligence. Alicia always left him in irritated confusion. This time was no different.

Alicia watched Jim leave, sentinel-sighted eyes following his movement, before she returned to the chamber of the pools. Petulantly dismissing her son, she sat and waited until poppet awoke. She helped the girl out and dried her, pressing the odd kiss upon the skinny body as she did so, and delivered her, exhausted and wide-eyed, out to the fresher air of the plaza. Poppet gazed up at the sky and the trees as if they were entirely new things to her, and then sat and made patterns upon the stone floor with her pebbles and broken bits of rock. Long trails, spirals, small pyramids. She made them all with equal fascination and it seemed to a hopeful Alicia that poppet's eyes truly looked inwards rather than staring in dull confusion.

When Incacha realised that Jim was gone, alone, with no information of his intent to Blair or anyone else in the village, his face darkened with anger and fear.

"We will follow him," he snapped.

"Where to?" Blair asked, in a spirit of contrariness. He was anxious and angry on his own account, but he resented Incacha's immediate assumption that Jim was engaged in actions dangerous to anyone other than himself.

"You know where." Incacha gathered up his blow-pipe, the grass sandals that he sometimes wore, a precious knife. "He has gone to her."

Blair struggled into his breeches and his boots, and looked up at this. "Not to her necessarily. To the temple, maybe, but that's not the same thing."

"It is now. She and the temple are the same." Incacha frowned. "You know all this. You dream, so you know it. And you know that there is nowhere else that he would go without you, but to her." Spitting was not a symbolic gesture amongst the Chopec but Incacha did it anyway. His mouth was foul with distress, and if Blair winced, then Incacha neither knew nor cared why.

"If it's so dangerous that he's there, then why haven't I had a vision?" Blair enquired sarcastically.

"Can we not think for ourselves? And the spirits have their own concerns. They do not send you a vision for every itch and swallowed insect."

"How far is it to go?"

"A day's good journey there and back."

Blair scrubbed his hands through his hair, which grew more unruly by the day. "Then you'd best the lead the way."

Incacha nodded. He wished that he might offer some encouragement to Blair, but his mind was far too full of the disasters that had come to his people. He clasped hands with Chani, who had stoically tended to the garden while very attentively listening to the conversation, and then Blair and Incacha set off. It was a hard journey for Blair. He was basically healthy once again, but the walks to the springs with Jim hardly constituted being in any sort of training. Weary, but game, he followed Incacha along ways that barely merited the name, so tangled and confused were they, telling himself that he was worrying about nothing, hoping that he would not have to face Alicia and steeling himself for it all the same. After all, Blair told himself, the whole point of this was to deal with Alicia; but he admitted in his heart that he had always foolishly hoped for some mystic, distanced confrontation that avoided any physical meeting. As for Jim – Blair told himself that they were on a wild goose chase and sincerely wished it to be true.

Jim, some two hours ahead of them perhaps, was not so far from the temple when they met, fulfilling Blair's hope to avoid Alicia, at least. There was nothing else auspicious about the meeting. Incacha was stern to cover his anxiety. He had set a hard pace and as a result Blair was very tired, as well as anxious himself. Jim still seethed with the ambivalent, ambiguous feelings that Alicia always stirred in him. The sight of Incacha and Blair seeking him out like a strayed dog angered him all the more, even though he'd half expected it. He stood before them, tall and cold as he could be – and that was considerably so – and inclined his head, mockingly courteous.

"Gentlemen. No need to distress yourselves. There was neither swiving nor murder." Jim made no attempt to try to speak in Chopec. Blair's relieved face and quick shake of the head told Incacha all that was most urgent. "It seems I've exceeded the expectations of you both." This was addressed to both Incacha and Blair in the interest of equity but aimed at Blair. "My apologies." Then he shouldered his way past the pair of them, ignoring Incacha's sharp look and Blair's wounded expression. Blair watched as Jim walked away and then shook his head, like a man reaching a decision and set off in pursuit once more. "Jim! Wait. Stop, damn it!"

This close to the temple, Incacha hesitated only a moment. Blair was best left to deal with his offended sentinel, and Anala had been absent from the village for too many days. He set off for his goal, leaving Blair to seek his.

Blair's goal was not easy to achieve, even when its beginning was such a small thing as convincing Jim to turn and speak to him. However, he put on a burst of speed and reached out for Jim, his hand stroking down Jim's back in unaware imitation of Alicia's touch not so long ago. Jim flinched and whirled around, as Blair nearly barged into him. Jim reached out reflexively to support and steady Blair but then released him. They stared at each other a moment.

"What did you think you were doing?" Blair snapped.

Jim replied, wilfully oblivious, "I believe I was stopping you from falling over your feet."

"Don't. Don't play games with me. Why did you come here?"

"May I not see for myself? Or must everything be filtered through the explanations of those wiser than I?"

Blair's face, his hands, everything about him declared his confusion. "What are you talking about?"

Jim hardly knew himself, right now. His wish to protect Blair was bound up with his anger that Blair never wished to be protected. The hand on his back, so terribly reminiscent of Alicia's touch, had put before him a truth that had hovered in Jim's mind before but never been allowed to settle – that Blair, for all his experience, imagination, enthusiasm and care, could never fully share in what physical sensation felt like for Jim – in sex, or in anything else. There was a part of Jim that could happily kill Alicia for that. And in turn, Jim could never know what drove Blair on to explore his dreams, to willingly accept the messages of the spirits.

"You always want to know!" Jim burst out. "Well, so do I. It may be well enough for you to sit in the dirt with Incacha and drink yourself stupid, but why not see for ourselves what she is about. Reconnaissance, not fucking, whatever you thought!" Shame at the urges that Alicia had roused made Jim reckless in his judgement of Blair and Incacha.

"And if it was so simple as that, why not simply tell us? Sneaking off like a thief in the night! What were we supposed to think?"

"You might have trusted me," Jim shouted back. "And don't tell me that you did! I saw your face."

"I told Incacha that he was worrying for no reason. But you can hardly blame him if he did, Jim. What possessed you - as if I don't know." The snideness was a mistake, and Blair knew it, but, tired and irritable, he was fast reaching a point of not caring.

"I saw your face," Jim repeated, his voice tight with anger. "Don't attempt to convince me that you spent your journey defending me to Incacha. I won't believe it."

"Believe what you wish," Blair declared, aware that the argument was spiralling into nonsense, and barely concerned. He stomped past Jim, knowing that he could hardly follow the trail that Incacha had taken, knowing that he must be lost within no more than a few minutes. What did it matter? Blair had a sentinel who knew his way well enough close at hand, and he chose to exercise his pique by giving Jim a view of his own departing back.

A few minutes was all it took to be thoroughly lost, but Blair continued his way, muttering under his breath, until Jim appeared in front of him, breathing heavily with a mix of ire and exertion.

"You're going the wrong way, Sandburg," was all that Jim said.

"Am I?" Blair enquired. And then, more miserably he said, "Damn it, Jim."

Jim sat heavily upon the trunk of a fallen tree. "Damn what? Me? Alicia? The wide world and any spirits passing in it?"

"All of them, I think." Blair swallowed. "Jim. I did try to tell Incacha...."

"Convincing yourself, were you?" But before Blair could protest, Jim held up his hand. "I know. But I...I wanted to see for myself, Blair. And you are at a disadvantage with her, you know it. And I didn't want you talking with her. I hate her anywhere near you."

"That sensation is entirely reciprocated. I'm not precisely delighted at the thought of her anywhere near you." Blair took a few steps to stand closer to Jim. "So. Reconnaissance. What did you discover?"

Jim chuckled bitterly. "It seems so little, but perhaps it's much. Who knows what's important in this matter? But I saw the black jaguar at the temple, for what it's worth, and it seemed complaisant enough."

"Was it? I twitted Incacha with the lack of thunderbolts in my dreams, but he was disinclined to listen."

"In anything to do with Alicia, I suppose I cannot blame him."

Blair sat beside Jim on his fallen arboreal bench. "Where is he?"

Jim lifted his head and listened; hearing had always been the skill that he dealt with and used most easily. "He's gone on ahead to the temple himself. No doubt he thinks himself immune to Mrs Bannister's evil influence."

"But why?"

"Anala's there. That's my guess. And perhaps he wants to see for himself also. She's mad. Not lost the way she was in London, that business with Stavely, but still." Jim shivered. "All of this business, Blair, she sees it as a tool. There's no respect, no fear..."

Blair remained silent, encouraging, although it distressed him that Jim still saw the spirits as something to fear. Familiarity and Incacha's insistent teachings had given the spirits, his dreams, the awareness of the wolf and the panther, a weird normality. They simply were what they were, and nothing to be afraid of. But respected – yes. "A tool for what?" he asked.

"She's found herself a guide."

Blair started. "Who would guide her?" he exclaimed, and then felt vague shame at the question, especially when he saw how troubled Jim was.

"She's a simpleton – the guide - and Alicia thinks to heal her."

"But how?"

"Through baths, apparently. Your spirits seem to have some affinity with water. Certainly they were efficacious enough in a case of drowning." So easy to say the word for death by water; so hard for each of them to remember; the smothering sensation of water where there should be air, or a limp body weighted down by waterlogged clothes.

"But then why me? You were the one who brought me back, why am I the one who has the dreams – well, more dreams anyway, why am I the one that Incacha's teaching?"

Jim placed one hand across the back of Blair's head. The hair was lank, but despite that still curling wildly under Jim's hands. Blair's skin was warm and the curve of his skull fitted neatly in Jim's palm. "I expect they like you better. I promise you," he declared with wry honesty, "I take no offense in it."

“Well, I like you better,” Blair said, happy to sit after the long trek and the short scene of anger between them. “Should we follow Incacha, do you think?”

“He would have asked us if he wanted us. I have no doubt that he could have found us if he wished.”

“We followed you,” Blair protested. Jim gave him a speaking look and Blair fought embarrassment with the aid of a defiant stare.

“He might be well-served if we did follow,” Jim said.

“But,” Blair protested, “you say that Alicia is mad. She at least has a reason to not harm you, however much I might dislike her reason. There is no such reason for Incacha.”

Jim leaned in close, rested his head against Blair's, his breath warm against Blair's skin. Blair shivered. His hand rested upon Jim's thigh, and they sat there, troubled in mind but more than willing to take the simple comfort of touch.

Jim took a breath, trying to separate thought from the mix of confused feeling. “She has no fear, but she ought to. There's anger in that place, and grief. She is completely convinced she rules – the temple, herself - but I'm not so sure.”

“And so you think Incacha safe enough. You make me ashamed. I was so afraid that it was this strange draw that you and Alicia have to one another…” Jim was silent and Blair looked in his face. “It is still there, though, isn't it?”

“Nothing happened, “ Jim said roughly. “Nothing ever will happen. I know what she is, what I am. What you and I are.”

“What we are.” Blair leaned harder into Jim, shifted his hand from Jim's leg to a solid clasp around Jim's waist. “And what's that? Have you ever wondered at us being all in all to each other? It's not so common between anyone, especially not amongst men like us. Stavely's circle…” Blair paused, considering both the past and the present. “There was enduring love there, sometimes, but not fidelity, nor any expectation of it. Without the ties of marriage or children or inheritance, why bother? I never looked for such a thing, with man or woman. But if I thought that you and Alicia… I could kill you both.” He laughed, softly; bitterly amused. “Not that I would. But the temptation would be strong.”

“Some things simply are.” Jim kissed him then, open-mouthed, sweet. Blair's hands settled upon the nape of Jim's neck, his fingers spread between boundaries of hair and skin and unabashedly possessive. "Such as the strength of your grip, Sandburg."

Blair's hands stayed where they were as he savoured the contact. "As you say." One hand slid down to rest gently in the small of Jim's back. There was a carving Blair had never seen at the temple, depicting just such a touch. Then he laughed, shaking his head.

"Tell me the joke," Jim said. "I could do with some laughter."

Blair's smile became rueful. "I doubt you'll comprehend my amusement. Alicia mad. Incacha so sure that you were under her influence." Jim remained silent at that. "I've been so frustrated, Jim." One hand, resting now on Blair's lap, clenched in emphasis. "So worried that I'm not learning fast enough, that I'm not ready, that Incacha and Alicia have a better judgement of everything and what was I supposed to do against that? And all this reminds me that they are neither of them infallible." He paused again, thought sorting through his mind. "You spoke of Alicia using water to heal her guide. Tell me about it."

Jim told him what little he had seen – the skinny girl in her dark basin, Alicia's attention and obsession.

Blair frowned. "There is a Chopec belief that Incacha told me of, which amounts to the English habit of saying, 'speak of the devil'." He shivered, recalling words, not even sure if it was he who recalled them, or something else. 'I came to wisdom in the embrace of water, little guide.' Contemptuous words, but what if Alicia had invoked something? What had she inadvertently begun with one vicious taunt?

Jim watched the progress of Blair's thoughts in his face, if not the content, and felt a sudden sinking in his gut.

"Could we not, should we not deal with this now?," Blair asked. "We're here, close to the temple, all three of us, and if we're to believe in the spirits, in their guidance, then why not now?"

Jim had another moment of fellow-feeling with Alicia. He was no-one's pawn. He had come here, for his own reasons, however confused, and now it seemed that he had precipitated the very thing he wanted to avoid – a direct confrontation between Blair and Alicia.

At Jim's stricken look, something stern came into Blair's face. "You want this over and done with. You know you do. So let's go on to the temple, let's deal with her."

"Very well then." Jim stood. "It's true it would be a pity to waste the journey."

Blair smiled with nervous brilliance, and then gazed about at the impenetrable forest surrounding them. "Lead on then. I suspect that if I must find my way alone that I'd be old and grey before I reached the temple."

"Come on." Moved by he knew not what impulse, Jim took Blair's hand, as if they were two children walking alone. Blair, afire with impulsive determination, said nothing, but accepted the grip and let Jim find their way.

Incacha was troubled – hardly a new emotion. Anala was of an age where a generation ago he would have been preparing for his initiation - but without the spirits, a young man's training had become a listless, meaningless ritual. Incacha had hoped that once the first novelty was gone that Anala would give up the temple and his mother's influence. He had been mistaken, but Incacha was ready neither to shun nor kill his adopted son, the only judgements the Chopec had against those who transgressed custom and law.

The temple was growing back into the land around it; that was how Incacha perceived it, and not a moment too soon so far as he was concerned. The base of the temple had been built over some of the springs, but there were others to the east of the temple, overshadowed by the sloping bulk of the stone, and it was to these that Incacha made his way, picking a path through the trees and the vines. But before he made his way, he stood at the base of the temple and uttered the whooping noise that the Chopec made in greeting and enquiry when outside of the village and in the tangle of jungle. 'Here I am,' it said. 'Where are you?' And then, in quiet tones, he said, "I will wait by the springs, my son. Meet me there if you wish."

Both sentinel inhabitants of the temple had heard Incacha's cry and it unsettled them both. Alicia had no love for her son, but she had no wish to see his discipleship return to the Chopec either, and she wondered at Incacha's appearance when Jim had just left. Anala, torn by the conflicted wants of an adolescent, both hated and loved Incacha for his appearance, for his interference in what was the business of sentinels, not the business of impotent shamans. But still, he made his way to the springs, stealthily, wishing to impress. Indeed, Incacha didn't hear him, but Incacha also expected such a display and showed no surprise when his son tapped his shoulder with his blowpipe before darting to Incacha's left.

"No wonder you hunt so well," Incacha said. He crouched by the edge of the spring, a small pool only about five feet across. Shadowed by trees and a steep bank, the water looked dark, dark as the eyes of a Chopec, dark as the earth from which it bubbled, dark as the empty spaces in Incacha's heart without the presence of his tribe's spirits.

"Why are you here?" Anala challenged.

"Why not?" Incacha said placidly; more placidly than he felt. "This is a sacred place for all, not just for sentinels. Besides, we haven't seen you for many days."

"I am learning from my mother." More challenge.

"Good. Will you share what you have learned?"

"What we know is for sentinels alone."

Incacha shrugged, hiding anger and grief. "Then perhaps you shared your knowledge with Enqueri?"

Anala briefly pursed his lips – a Chopec gesture of exasperation or contempt. "No."

"I thought not." Incacha looked into the depths of the spring. "You know that we must take back the spirits."

"We. You mean you and the strangers."

Incacha stood. "We might include you, my son. Your mother has power, but she's like the anacondas. They swallow whatever they find and abandon their children to make their own way. Chani has been a true mother to you. She begged milk from the nursing women of the village for you when you were a baby. She chewed food for you. She and I brought you up to be a man, not a snake."

Anala hugged bravado around himself. He knew Alicia was dangerous, but he wasn't ready to give up the self-esteem he found with her yet – the sense that he was special rather than strange, the heady power of being more than the child marked by bad luck - even if he did hurt Incacha and Chani in the process. It wasn't that he meant them harm.

"The anaconda is strong and feared, my father."

Incacha crossed the ground between them to grab Anala by the shoulders. "But it's not a man!" he remonstrated. "It doesn't care for the tribe or the spirits. It dreams of nothing but filling its belly. I hope to avoid the great snakes, but if I find one eating one of the tribe then of course I must fight it."

"But you haven't fought it! You need strangers to do that." Anala wrenched himself back, one foot sliding on the muddy ground. Incacha caught at his arm to steady him, but Anala only pulled away again.

"I will take what help I can to free the spirits. I cannot touch them but this place is angry. Can't you feel it, if your mother teaches you so well?" Incacha's voice rose in frustration and despair.

"Perhaps the spirits don't care. They must live somewhere. Why not inside my mother?"

The Chopec could hardly be said to have a concept of blasphemy, but this off-hand judgement shocked Incacha beyond words.

"She must be stopped. And I do not wish to see you between her and anyone's anger. Not the spirits', not the strangers', not mine." But Anala had turned his back and was running back to the temple. Incacha was no sentinel to read the signs of distress in the boy's scent or heartbeat, and could only shout after his son. "Anala!" Anala didn't stop, didn't answer.

Blair and Jim made their way through the jungle. Blair noted Jim's grimness of expression and the sweaty grip of their hands, while Jim led their way through the trees with the determination of a man surviving a forced march. When they reached the base of the temple they stopped, and Blair stared up, awestruck. He'd never seen this place before with his physical sight, but it was all of it wonderfully familiar to him.

"My God," he breathed. "It's amazing, Jim. Utterly amazing."

Jim stared too, trying to share Blair's wonder, and perhaps take some comfort from it. Blair was no naive child. If he saw something marvellous here, then perhaps Jim ought to as well. But Jim could only think of the mad woman within the temple, and her idiot guide and her sullen son. Enemies all so far as he was concerned, however he might pity them to some degree. He had pitied the men he'd cut to pieces on battlefields – but he had still wielded sword and gun, given the order for artillery fire. He gripped Blair's hand that much more tightly. He'd also seen men he cared for march into battle; none of them so precious as Blair.

"There's no gunfire, you know," Blair said with uncanny understanding, watching Jim's face again instead of the great mound of stone that lay before them.

"A knife or poison dart works as well."

Blair detached his hand gently. "Even by your standards you are hardly cheerful. I refuse to believe that we've come so far to meet such mundane ends before we've even tried." He turned his head to call out. "Incacha? Incacha!"

"That way," Jim said, pointing.

"Well, then. Let us go and see what he thinks of my grand plan." Blair grinned, nervously rocking back on his heels. "Come on." They scrambled their way across the ground at the base of the temple.

Incacha remained by the spring, distressed within himself and surprised by the presence of Jim and Blair. He stood at their approach.

"This is a gathering place of sentinels once again, I see," he remarked with some acerbity.

Jim understood that much at least, and his chin lifted. "Yes," was easy enough in Chopec, although nowhere near as much as he wanted to say.

Blair stepped forward, his heart thumping, his hands sweaty; no picture of an assured mystic in the slightest. "Incacha, I think that we should try – whatever we have to try. We're here, all three of us against the three in the temple. Why not?"

"Three in the temple?" Incacha asked sharply, and once again Jim explained what he had seen, what Alicia had told him. Incacha's fists clenched at this new information – in anger and frustration that Anala had indeed kept sentinel secrets from him as much as anything.

"They dream," he said, looking up at the temple's bulk, and then at Blair. "So do you. And if you haven't found the spirits yet, then perhaps the sacred waters will carry you to them."

Blair nodded, comforted by Incacha's agreement. "Why not?"

"Why not indeed."

"To be sure," Jim said. "Let us wander up there and invite Mrs Bannister to accommodate us. We likely have enough people for a dance figure. Perhaps the spirits might join us."

Blair, strung tight with excited tension, spun around. "Stop it! We have to try something, and I don't need your sarcasm now." More quietly, more anxiously, Blair demanded, "What's wrong?"

Jim turned away.

"What's wrong, Jim?"

Jim addressed his question to Incacha. "The sacred waters – the basins?"

Incacha nodded. "The springs lie at the depths of the temple. Once there were many people here to do the work, to carry the waters to the basins."

"Blair. I had a dream. You lay in one of those troughs, and you were dead."

"When? When did you dream that?"

"In England. Before we ever came here." England, so very far away, with its tamed countryside and its birdcalls so different from what rang out here and now.

Blair took a breath, while Incacha watched the two of them, irritated that once again Jim chose to interfere. Alicia took too much interest in the power of the temple, Jim not enough.

"Dreams - even vision dreams – aren't necessarily literal in truth. I might have joked but I haven't truly walked my feet off in vision quests."

Jim's jaw was clenched in irritation and - yes – fear.

"So you are merely taking a bath in my dream, then?" He wanted to beg, would have been more than happy to turn away and leave the Chopec and Alicia to their strange feud. But this was why they were here, was it not? And no twist or turn would prevent it.

"It will be all right," Blair assured him. "It will be." It had to be. Blair couldn't believe that after so much effort and so long a journey that they couldn't have a fighting chance. He grinned. A strange fight indeed.

Incacha observed the turn of emotion in the sentinel and his guide and knew who had won. "We will watch over him," he told Jim, and received a rigid nod, before Jim averted his face and its over-bright eyes. There were people in need here, Jim reminded himself. Incacha and the sadness in him, the apathy of the Chopec; these things needed curing, and it seemed that Blair must be the instrument of it.

"If this is the time, then let us go." Incacha gestured, but before they stepped forward, Jim turned to him, struggling for words.

"Anala," he said, before placing one hand on Blair's shoulder, possessive and protective both. "I can't promise not to hurt him." It came out mangled to Incacha, but the meaning was clear.

"As you will, Enqueri." It was Incacha's turn to avert his face. "I have tried to warn him. But he is young, and he thinks his hurts are the only hurts."

Blair couldn't bear it. He stepped forward and placed his own hand upon Incacha's shoulder and then, seeing the stoically endured misery, wrapped his teacher in a short, hard hug, which Incacha returned briefly before disengaging himself to look Blair in the face. "Go and deal with her. I will deal with him if I must."

Blair nodded. "Who knows what will happen? Shall we find out?" He turned to make his way to the entrance, still anxious but also exhilarated. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends," he remarked. Jim made no comment but his look was exasperated and amused all at once. "What?" Blair said. "It was a fine production at Drury Lane that I saw. The old theatre."

"Should you not be purifying your thoughts or some such, Sandburg?" Jim asked, sardonic in his tones but thinking back to tales of holy men in India.

Blair chuckled, nervous and entertained. "If the spirits wanted someone pure of thought they chose entirely the wrong dreamer." They had reached the steps that led to the plaza and Blair had to caress the rough stones, had to run his fingers over the open stone mouths of the bas relief jaguars. The plaza, when they reached it, was empty. There was no trace of anyone else besides the three men who stood and looked suspiciously about.

Jim shook his head. "They're within. They're waiting, I'm sure."

Incacha nodded in agreement. Blair hooked an arm around Jim's neck, and pulled his head down for a kiss. "For luck, Jim. Luck to us all."

Fury had begun to stir in Alicia, and frantic planning. With Jim and Blair and Incacha outside, the echoes within the temple seemed to thrum in her head, confusing her, trying to deafen her. But whatever Alicia's confusion, of one thing she was sure. Her old associates would come and try to stop her. She didn't know how, nor did she care, but she would accept no check to her plans. She would deal with them, using whatever tools she might have. First however, she must keep poppet safe.

The temple had never truly been finished. Over the years, priests and servants and courtiers had all indulged their plans for the greater glory of the spirits and the empire and themselves, and the interior of the temple was riddled with mazes and rooms and secret passageways, some of them blackly dark without the flickering light of a torch, others lit with the dimness of daylight funnelled and reflected through narrow channels of rock.

Alicia felt Jim's approach, just as he could feel her if he chose, and she could hear Blair with him – the pattern of footfall of two men was different to that of one, even without hearing Blair call out Incacha's name at the foot of the temple. She had half-expected this – and yet in one way never expected it, sure in her ownership of all that was around her. Of one thing she was certain – Blair and Jim were hers to deal with and this she made quite clear to Anala.

"You will take Incacha, my son, and no-one else."

Anala stared at her. "Take, my mother?"

"He is not to interfere."

Anala swallowed. "You said that I need not kill him." Anala might exercise dreams of becoming an admired warrior but his father was a strong man and not someone to be easily overcome by a stripling boy; even assuming the boy might be willing to do such a thing.

"I don't require his death." Alicia stared into his face with a commanding air. "If you can find a way to control him without killing him, well enough." Anala was too stricken to ask how he might do such a thing. It was like sliding in mud at the top of a slope and finding yourself toppling down. "They'll go to the room of the basins. Take the secret ways. I'll make sure that Enqueri is no concern to you, and you will deal with Incacha, and then you will wait for me. You will wait for me, you understand."

It would be symbolic, Alicia assured herself. She would deal with her old friends and prove her rights here. But first, she had to hide poppet. She gathered the girl up from where she sat, wide-eyed and unsettled by the mood of the others around her. "There now, my darling, come with me," Alicia crooned, taking poppet's arm with a steel-grip. When poppet saw where she was being led, she whimpered and struggled. She especially hated the dark depths of the temple, hated the way that Alicia would use her there as a focus against trances while the sentinel investigated all the secrets, large and small of her domain. Alicia gritted her teeth, and dragged more roughly at poppet. "The leaves!" she snapped to Anala, who scrabbled forward with a woven grass basket. Alicia picked out some shreds of plant, and forced her anxious guide onwards.

"Hush now, just a little sleep, hiding from the bad man, and then all will be well, all will be well. One day you'll understand. You will understand." The two of them made their way to a small niche in the bowels of the temple and Alicia forced poppet to lie down curled in her dark hiding place and chew at the leaves. "Sleep," Alicia cooed, smoothing poppet's hair with her hand. "There." The girl would sleep, her breath slow and shallow. No noises to lead a rival sentinel to her, no nervous or panicked actions to distract her own sentinel. Jim would have no reason to seek in this part of the temple. Poppet would rest here, safe and sound until Alicia came to find her.

One day, one day soon, the power in this place would heal poppet, give Alicia a companion who was both worthy and useful. That certainty was given to Alicia by the paintings and carvings in this place, by the tug and flow of sensation that she felt between her and poppet. One day. Soon. And no half-naked Indian too frightened or superstitious to kill her, nor a stubborn man who'd had the luxury of choosing his hardships out of pride, and certainly not some pretty fool who satisfied his curiosity like a dog gnawing a mouldering bone, would stop her.

Incacha led the way to the room of the basins. It was long and low, and the walls with their patterns of carvings seemed almost to ripple like the water in the basins.

"Alicia's guide was in this one." Jim indicated the trough. The whole room smelled still of Alicia, of Anala, of that idiot girl, which set Jim on edge even more than he was already. He hated the necessity of Blair's scent mingling here with the scents of the enemy.

Incacha eyed the basins with distaste. The Chopec washed, but they had no concept of a bath. The river was no safe place to immerse yourself, and a spring of clear drinking water was not to be polluted with the dirt of the body. But this was still a place of power, and if Blair needed its power then Incacha was resigned. Certainly, Blair was enthused by his presence in this place, gazing around with unabashed interest, and doing his best to ignore Incacha and Jim's shared distaste.

"I wish I had more time," Blair muttered. "God, what I would give for pencil and paper." He spared a moment to regret the lack of writing materials, and then turned to the stone basins. There were four of them, spread out at regular intervals through the room. "Does it matter which?" he asked.

Incacha put up his hand in a non-committal gesture. "I don't know all the secrets of this place," he said with small bitterness. "Take your pick. In this matter I know only a little more than you." He sighed, and then grinned, unwillingly amused. "If we had planned better, we might have brought you some beer."

Blair grinned back. "I will have to do my best without." He sobered. "I will do my best, Incacha." A pause. "I suppose this one will do as well as any other." Blair approached one of the basins. No idiot girl rested in any of the four troughs, filled by Alicia as her first task when she came. The water looked thick, almost oily. Blair considered his options and stripped to his breeches. Then, with Jim and Incacha's stares heavy upon him, Blair got into the chosen basin and lay down, shivering briefly at the cold touch of the water. Unlike the trough where poppet lay, there was no stone placed within to support the head. Blair lay back and realised that it was possible that if he lost concentration or was surprised that he could sink beneath the surface and his hands clutched convulsively at the stone edges as he hurriedly pulled himself up. He stared shame-facedly at Incacha, and ignored Jim's tight-lipped silence. "I've been swimming since then," he said to Jim, almost a retort, even though Jim had said nothing. Taking a deep breath, and trying not to feel fraudulent and foolish, Blair lay back again, holding his body so that his face remained above the surface.

The water tickled about the skin of his face, and was cool against his skin. He goose-pimpled and then shut his eyes, trying to slow his breathing. He remembered how it felt in his visions sometimes, that sensation that was both the falling and flying of a leap, and the tearing of something loose from within him. He grew calmer gradually, less self-conscious, less nervous of the water. But for all that, he knew that he was not yet where he needed to be.

Incacha and Jim observed this, two men on watch in their different ways in the gloom of the chamber. Jim spent much time at the door, chasing down the scents of Anala and especially Alicia, listening for the sound of footfall or speech. The twists and turns of the halls and chambers blocked sound, fooled Jim's ears. He thought that he might know where to find Alicia, but Anala's whereabouts remained a mystery to him. He wanted to hunt them down. He wanted to stay close to Blair, ready to raise him if he fell beneath the surface of the water. When Incacha placed a hand on his shoulder, Jim didn't jerk or flinch, but the muscle beneath Incacha's hand hardened in startled tension.

"Wait outside," Incacha commanded.

"No." Instant denial.

Incacha's lips thinned. "You distract him. You are too restless and he cannot leave you. Keep watch outside."

"Jim." Blair's voice, and Jim approached the basin, staring down at Blair, lying in the dark water with his hair spread out like river weed around his head. Blair stared past Jim, up at the ceiling, his pupils dark and wide; not leaping, not tearing loose, instead feeling the pull of a drifting motion. Except that he was still anchored. Blair's voice was soft, deep, as if he lay in their bed after sex. "Kiss me, and then let go of me. Incacha will watch me." He smiled then and met Jim's eyes.

Jim leaned down and kissed Blair. "I never do know how to let you go."

"Then go find her if you want activity. Bring her back as witness if you wish." Blair stirred, setting up ripples in the trough that lapped and spilled against the sides. "Nearly there..." he murmured. Jim turned hastily away, distressed and chagrined. Part of him wished very mightily to never let Blair go at all. He wasn't even sure of how he should do such a thing, but he guessed that it might help if he tried to ignore Blair's breath, Blair's presence. He left the room, going only so far as a fork in the passageway. He knew that Incacha would watch Blair, but it was still hard. He leaned against the rough stone and tried to think of other things – such as Alicia's whereabouts within the temple.

Left behind, Incacha looked down at Blair. "Use the power of your animal spirit. It will take you where you need to be," he said softly. Then he sat cross-legged beside Blair and began to sing, a quiet chant that seemed to soak into the walls of the room. Blair's eyes shut. His breathing slowed, and then slowed again, until there were long gaps between his breaths. Then Blair slipped beneath the water. Incacha did not interfere, simply watched. No bubbles of air disturbed the water. After a long, long interval, Blair's head rose, just enough for his lips to break water and take a breath. Then he sank back beneath the water.

When Linaki and then Incacha sought the power of the spirits, they sought knowledge of sentinels, and of how to help them. They did not seek knowledge of the temple itself. Alicia sought for every scrap of knowledge that she could, fascinated, and determined that she would always have the advantage. And the temple and the spirits had given way before her, yielded up their secrets. The spirits had sung within her, so loudly, until she had to quiet them. How could she think with such a noise dinning in her head? Now, they cried again in the temple, louder now that Blair and Jim and Incacha were there. She pressed her hands against her ears but she still heard them; she wrestled wildly within herself to beat the voices back. With a growl, finally, Alicia could hear herself think again, and could hear the heartbeats of her adversaries.

"Good day to you, Jim," she said softly.

Above her, still in the passage, Jim stiffened, his hearing seeking out the location of her voice. "Mrs Bannister."

Alicia smiled. "Always so punctilious, Jim. And when we know each other so well. Come and chat with me?"

Jim began moving down the passageways, following the sound of Alicia's voice, keeping in mind that she was still distant from Blair, lying vulnerable in the cold water of the basins.

"Why are you here, Jim? What do you hope to gain from stirring these waters?"

Jim said nothing. As he walked, his route darkened. Wherever Alicia lay in wait for him, she had no light with her. Jim was forced to slow his pace, to feel his way through halls and rooms, led on by the siren call of a hated voice.

"What game is this, Alicia?" he asked, his voice loud and hoarse in the dark.

Alicia laughed, a ripple of false, gentle laughter that hurt her head. Her head had ached so much these last few days. "Not a game, dear heart. Strategy."

"A trap, then," Jim said grimly.

"Not a trap, not for the worthy."

More steps in the dark. "Games, Alicia."

"Blair rests in the water, does he not? Aren't you afraid for him, Jim?" Jim's hand clenched hard into a fist, pressed roughly against rock.

"Why should I be afraid of him doing no more than you permit for your guide?"

"Because my guide and I will both carry the power away with us. But you won't take what this place offers, will you? And then what will poor Blair do?"

"Blair will do what he always does."

Alicia laughed more genuinely, mocking and cruel. "Oh, I see. He is more captain than you are, Captain Ellison. No great surprise, I dare say." Then her voice hissed out, channelled by shapes in the rock to whisper nearly in Jim's ear, "You're close. Do you know how close you are?"

Jim nearly took one more step forward, looking to hush that snake's voice, and then something, instinct, made him stop. There was a change in the air, an alteration in the nature of the silence around him, and cautiously, Jim felt in front of him with his foot, to find empty air. He knelt. There was a gap in the passage before him, a shaft that dropped nearly twenty feet down, although Jim had no way to measure that other than an ugly fall in the dark.

Reaching out his hand, Jim realised that the gap was only a couple of feet wide – no trouble to leap. But how easy to have dropped, to have been left injured and abandoned at the bottom.

"You don't play fairly – but then I knew that, already," he spoke into the darkness.

"Rejoice, Jim. You've been proved worthy - a true sentinel."

Jim was already over, and suspicious as to what other surprises might await him. And as Alicia led him on, Anala, in the levels above them, sat in a niche that lay behind a false wall, where he had crept as soon as his own hearing had confirmed that Jim followed his mother. Anala had to ready both his blow pipe and his courage. "All will be ours, my son," Alicia had whispered to him. Anala grasped that hope – that the spirits would bless him if he helped his mother. She held them. They would do her bidding. But the poison on his dart was weak. There were some things that he wasn't ready to do yet.

Alicia cared nothing for the concerns of her son. She waited. When she knew that Jim was nearly on her, nearly to her hiding place in the pitch black, she reached her hands, with their long, clever, sensitive fingers, into a tiny niche, pushed small blocks of stone, altered the balance of carefully hinged slabs and was through.

"It's a last test, Jim," she called as the heavy slab swung shut behind her. "Catch me before I catch them."

Jim lunged forward to where she had been. What need did he have of sight? Sound, scent, the traces of her heat still hanging in the air made a trail easy to find, and with a shout of anguished frustration his hands smacked flat and stingingly against the unmoving wall. Attuned as he was, he could hear her even behind the wall, hear her moving, and in horror realised that she must surely be going back to find Blair and Incacha. He could try to follow her, or he could retrace his steps, and he stood in desperate indecision. He could run most of the way back, having passed his route with enough attention to know the worst, and he turned, only to see the jaguar behind him, its lips pulled back from its teeth. Jim accepted the warning, before turning back to the wall to shut his eyes (needless in the dark but habitual) and inhale. His hand traced the last tiny remnants of warmth, his nose followed the trail of Alicia's touch upon the stone, as distracted as a hound hunting the scent. Above him, a foot above his head, was a small opening, and he wasted precious moments guessing the sequence of touch before the slab swung open for him also.

Jim's shoulders knocked against the side of the narrow space he found himself in. Alicia was ahead of him, and like Jim, forced to scuttle slightly sideways like a crab in the claustrophobic confines. Jim nearly tripped before he realised that much of the hidden space was steps, and forced himself to listen to Alicia, to scent for her, to open up his body and unleash an odd awareness that wasn't sight but the next best thing to it.

It was the dream, he realised. Wandering stone halls, travelling empty spaces to find Blair at the end, still and lifeless under the water. Jim drove himself harder, but he couldn't quite gain on Alicia's lead. The narrow space and the sideways pace it enforced took away any advantage of Jim's longer legs, and for all his awareness, all his willingness to use his senses, he had never travelled this route before. Alicia knew it well. It was, despite its awkwardness, far more direct than the broader passageways that had led Jim to the secret door.

Incacha was watching over Blair. Jim reminded himself of that, as his shirt pulled between his skin and stone in places where the passage narrowed. Incacha was watching over Blair.

Incacha was sinking to the ground in the chambers above, his body and mind dulled by the poison on Anala's dart. Incacha opened his mouth to try to warn his son against Alicia but all that came out was slurred babble. Anala bound his father's wrists with a rope of dried vines, and told himself that this would be an end of it; his father would know that he had lost and would leave Alicia be; Alicia would let Incacha go when her victory was proved. He told himself those things but found them difficult to believe.

Incacha sank his head back with a thump to the floor. It occurred to him that however this ended, that Chani would end up grieving, either for the loss of her husband or for the folly of her son.

There was water above Blair. He was deep, so very deep; afraid, he thrashed towards the surface. He saw clearly, as if looking up into a clear sky rather than a pool. The light was clear, even though the weight on his chest was heavy, burning, and his head grew light. He was faint with lack of air, and his eyes blurred so that the ripples above him almost looked like a great eye. And then he broke the surface, and struggled to the grassy edge of the pool and lay half in, half out of the water, dragging air into his lungs.

It was quiet where he was, a silent night time jungle lit by a perpetual full moon. So much he had seen before. But as Blair struggled, dripping, out of the pool, he saw something that was new. He was within a narrow defile. Small plants grew in the rocks up and down the walls, greening the space, and whispered and rustled in the wind. Behind Blair was the spring he had emerged from, and in front of him was a girl, European, skinny, her brown hair having more than a tinge of red, seated cross-legged in front of a rough mud wall that blocked a cave entrance.

The girl was naked. No shift, not so much a ribbon to tie back the long, coarse hair, or sandals to walk the jungle. Blair looked down at himself and was relieved that he still wore his breeches at least. There was a weight in his pocket, and curious, Blair reached within to draw out Jim's lost silver-cased watch. He shook his head, but he smiled and clasped his fingers lovingly around the watch before he replaced it in his pocket and approached the girl. She looked up at Blair but said nothing.

Blair sat down before her, cross-legged like her. "Good day to you." She said nothing, but her face creased in a small frown.

"We haven't been introduced. I'm Blair."

"Good day to you," she said, like a child repeating a lesson by rote, but she said nothing else.

Blair looked around him, at the dimly lit land and the silent jungle. "This is a strange place to find ourselves in, is it not?"

The girl shrugged, as if to say that this place was no stranger than any other.

"Do you receive many visitors?" As if this was some London drawing room or country parlour – but Blair could think of nothing else to say.

"Visitors?"

"People who come to talk, to visit, to make friends."

"Friends!" For a moment it wasn't the girl's young, light voice, but Alicia's tones, literally Alicia's voice, full of scorn. Blair stared at the girl, his heart thumping, before he schooled the startled fear out of his expression.

"You have no friends then?"

The girl shook her head.

"Is not Alicia your friend?"

The girl paused in thought, her fingers passing over the spiral of stones laid out in front of her, a quiet circling, round and round.

"We will be one. But I promised Her to wait."

"Her? Alicia?"

The girl rocked back and forth. "No names. She and I, and one."

"What are you waiting for?"

"For Her to come and meet me here. And then we will break down the wall and we will be one."

Blair stood, and approached the wall, rough and daubed, framed with timber. It looked, more than anything, like the walls of a hundred mean houses built around a hundred mean courts of London. Blair had known such places well; the sound and stench of humanity crowded together in noise and dirt, the lack of peace and the lack of anything that those of Society might regard as morals. Missionaries might as well travel to the rookeries of London as to the huts of Africa.

Blair touched the wall, and his hand remained pressed against it in stunned surprise as a shock of sensation jolted his body. Words, foul words, angry words, 'bitch' and 'trull' and 'cunt', the pain of a blow, deep-seated misery, and a simmering rage, passed through him – from the wall itself. There was the smell of blood in the plaster; urine-soaked straw from filthy rooms held the mix together. And from the space behind the wall came a despairing noise, unearthly, made of the voices of too many creatures to count. The cry was resentful, and somehow astonished, although the misery that passed through Blair was accepting and unsurprised.

Blair reeled back. He might not be in his physical body, but he felt sick to his stomach.

"No names," the girl said. "She says that. They can find you with names," she advised sagely, imparting, apparently, the wisdom of the ages.

Blair knelt beside the girl. "So you have no name? And neither does she?"

The girl nodded. "That way you're free."

"That way you're empty!" Blair retorted. Blair had used aliases in his younger days, especially when travelling, but he had still always been himself, had friends and acquaintances who had known him by name, had been proud to be the Blair Sandburg who was Naomi's son, and Jim's lover. Kneeling by the girl, in the jungle where the silence was even more pronounced after the pained noises he'd just heard, Blair tried to imagine how he might see or understand himself without the anchor of identity that was his name. He supposed it might be possible to be himself, but he couldn't help but be horrified by Alicia's willing abandonment of a name, and especially by her refusal to name her guide.

"Are you free, then?" he asked the girl.

She frowned. "Free?"

"Are you free because you don't have a name?"

"I don't know," the girl said petulantly. "Let me be. I have to wait for Her."

"So you can be one." Blair sat beside her and examined her face; it was angular and pale. The girl stared at him, confused and anxious.

"The noises make me sad," she confided.

"Which noises?" Blair asked quietly. "The noises in the wall or the noises behind the wall?"

"All of them." A forlorn sigh huffed out of her skinny body.

"I can understand that." Experimentally, Blair took her hand in his. She looked startled but made no effort to withdraw it. Blair wondered how many people in her life had touched her gently. "I think that I know how we could stop the noises. If we break the wall, that might do it."

A stubborn shake of the girl's head. "She said that I have to wait for Her."

Blair's voice turned softly coaxing. "But you're right. The noises are sad. They sadden you, and they sadden me too. Wouldn't it be a good thing to change that?"

Her face became uncertain. "They whisper to me. In my head."

Blair's heart lifted. "They do? The spirits? What do they say?"

"The same thing that you do. That if I break the wall, the sad noises will stop. But I promised! I promised that I'd wait." She shivered. "Besides, it hurts to touch the wall." It wasn't only Alicia's power that dammed the spirits in their prison, not only Alicia's memories of harsh words and blows and the stench of squalid rooms.

"I know." Blair looked back at the barrier behind them and wondered what might lie in that blocked off space of the rock face. "But I think that I must do it anyway."

He stood, searching the ground for a good sized stick, anything that he could use with more force than his hands. He found something satisfactory, solid and club-like in his grip, and marched up to that ugly, evil wall and took the hardest swing that he could at it. His hands stung, and again he felt that jolt of unhappy sensation, but he kept swinging. The noise from within began again, even more raging and harsh. Blair could see small chips appearing in the plaster, could see cracks spreading, but it was all on the surface. He was readying himself for another swing, braced for another surge of misery, when the girl approached him, placing desperate hands on his shoulders.

"You mustn't," she cried. "You mustn't. She'll be so angry."

"I'll deal with that when I must." A wave of frustration tightened Blair's throat. "If she wants to be one with you, then she won't be so very angry with you. Or is it just that you'll be one with her? Subsumed. God." He shook off the girl's grip, and she wrapped her arms around herself. Past the first observation, Blair had barely noticed that she was naked – it was of a piece with all the strangeness here, but the gesture reminded him of her vulnerabilities. Jim had described an idiot to Blair and Incacha, and even here in this incorporeal place, there was no evidence of understanding stronger than that of a small child's.

"She looks after me! She lets me sit in the sun! She took me away from the bad people!" Passionate weeping shook the girl. Tears ran down her face, but Blair shook his head. He could pity this confused child, but he wouldn't be stopped.

"There are beings trapped here. Maybe not like you or I, but they still feel and they still suffer, and if we leave them here then we are the bad people. Do you understand?"

There was silence from behind the wall, and a wet-sounding, choked sobbing from the girl. Then, slowly, unwillingly, she nodded her head. "All right, then."

Blair took another swing, clubbing away, despite the pain of the blows that he laid down, despite the sounds of misery ringing in his ears. Blow upon tedious blow, until he stepped back to consider his progress. In the temple room his body lay still and tranquil within the basin, remaining under the water. His head occasionally rose to take tiny sips of air, and his heart beat oh, so very slowly. But where Blair's consciousness was, his chest heaved, and his heartbeat drummed in his chest with exertion and excitement. There were new cracks appearing in the wall, spreading out like fractures in the ice of a frozen pond. Blair stared, fascinated, but also anxious. There had been so much despair and anger in the voices behind the wall. How much restraint might they exercise when they were finally free? Would they be gracious, grateful? Or would they burst forth like the wild beasts whose forms they took and savage anyone in their way? Almost without thinking, Blair stepped back and put his arms around the girl. She too watched the cracks grow, the wall begin to fall away, with equal fascination and even more anxiety.

It all gave way like a dam burst, if a dam could hold back a lake of flame. Something, a vast mass, with the noise of an inferno and the shape of too many beasts to count, flowed like a river in spate, passing over the man and the girl that stood before it, setting their bodies alight but not consuming them. It was glorious, amazing. There was a terrible joy in the fire, but fire, however sacred, was too much for simple humanity to bear. Blair, exalted and terrified at the same time, turned for the pool of water, dragging the girl with him in faltering, stumbling progress, and leapt for the coolness of the spring.

Jim followed Alicia with all the considerable focus he possessed – she was all his attention, if not all his thought – but for Alicia's part, Jim was fast becoming irrelevant. She had been so sure, so sure, that she held the mastery here, but there was a terrible, draining sensation in her that forced her on. Jim ran crab-wise after her, his breath noisy in her ears, the sweat of his exertion ripe in her nostrils, but he was of no account. Instead she was focused on what was ahead, on Blair, dear, sweet, curious Blair, who was completely unaware of her, who was deep in a trance in her room, in her place of power. She'd imagined him there before, but only with her, Blair listening patiently and humbly while Alicia revealed the secrets that she chose. How dare he! Vindictive fury filled her. They would pay, pay for angering her, pay for trying to thwart her, pay for frightening her like this.

The two of them in that narrow space, man and woman, pursuer and pursued, scrambled on, spider-like through a web, until, very nearly at Alicia's goal of another hidden door, the temple groaned and shuddered in tremor. The tremor wasn't large, but it was enough to check Jim's progress for a moment, while his heart rose into his throat, and the dust of ground-together stone trickled briefly down upon his face.

Alicia was oblivious to the earthquake or the noise or dust. She was aware only of a terrible feeling of ripping somewhere inside, the end of pressure and restraint, like the sensation of her child rushing forth from her years ago. But unlike with her child, Alicia was not willing to let this burden go, and she shrieked like a harpy eagle balked of prey, clutching and clawing at her breasts and belly before she continued on her pell-mell way forward, Jim close on her heels.

The doorway was balanced to open from within the hidden passage and Alicia burst out of it into the chamber of the basins, very nearly as afire as the spirits who had just made their escape. She tore across the room, unaware of the startled stare of her son or of Incacha's effortful attempt to focus his eyes, to glare down at the interloper lying in the basin below her. Blair lay peacefully beneath the surface of the water, still drifting between the spirit realm and more material planes. Alicia snarled as dangerously as any jaguar and stooped to deal punishment, her hands outstretched, her lips drawn back from her teeth. In her fury, she never noticed Jim's own silent dash across the room.

Jim swung his arm and fisted hand to strike his forearm across Alicia's throat with a ferocious strength that sent Alicia flying backwards. Her hands had reached the water, had not quite grasped Blair's throat. As she was propelled backwards her arms flailed through the air, cast-off water droplets describing a jewelled, sparkling arc that could only have been seen by sentinel sight, and was noticed by none of them. Alicia was too concerned with her dying. Jim was too focussed on Blair, still and unmoving beneath the water stirred by Alicia's hands. Anala was stricken in watching his mother fall back to land broken on the ground like a poisoned monkey fallen from a tree. Incacha watched his son – but he couldn't move, couldn't even speak to offer comfort and advice. He could only shut his eyes to ease the dizziness caused by the drugs, and listen to the song of the stones and know that Blair had succeeded.

Blair's success was nothing to Jim. He stared down, as Alicia had done, filled with a different horror to the woman who lay dead behind him. Blair was beneath the surface of the water – unmoving, unaware. Jim waited for a long, long moment for Blair to stir, to rise out of the water and gasp for breath but all was stillness. There was no breath. There was no heartbeat, and Jim found himself breathless and soundless also. No curse, no wail. He stood frozen in front of his nightmare, his bitter vision, and finally had sound forced from him; it was a guttural grunt, the sound that a man makes as a knife jabs under his ribs. Jim turned his head to look down at Anala, who stood beside him, the metal knife that Anala had taken from Alicia's body red with Jim's blood. Then Jim dropped to his knees beside the basin, almost grateful that his sight was greying, that there was an odd roaring in his ears, before he toppled onto the floor.

Jim opened his eyes to a sight that was familiar to Blair – a jungle lit in preternaturally clear moonlight. Jim hadn't visited this place so often but he remembered it well enough. He had been a jaguar, six years ago, and he had hunted and found his prey. Then, however, he had known immediately where to hunt. Now, Jim whirled around in distraction, looking for any sign of Blair.

When he saw the figure standing before him, his face cleared, became young with joy, and he stepped forward, his hands outstretched. They were grasped, and that was the point where Jim realised his mistake. He had thought the figure in front of him was Blair - a Blair dressed in the Chopec kilt, with long braided hair and a painted face like Incacha's. But it wasn't Blair - Blair had never possessed the implacable, joyful calm of this being.

Jim lunged back in a wild struggle, but the false Blair held Jim's wrists, and gave way against Jim about as much as one of the great trees in the forest might.

"Let me go! Damn you, let me go! Let me go find him!" he begged, but there was no answer. Instead, the false Blair, the spirit Blair, dropped into a cross-legged sit upon the ground, perforce taking Jim with him to land on his knees upon the dirt. Jim began to weep. "Why won't you let me go find him?" he shouted.

"Because if I let you go, you'll be lost, and that would be a poor reward for our Blair, I think." It even sounded like Blair, and resentful fury rose to choke Jim, even as he futilely tried once again to loosen the grip around his wrists.

"Le me go find him," Jim demanded. His face was still twisted. Tears ran the course of his face and dripped from his jaw to spot his breeches.

"Stubborn fool. You could have made this easier. I could have helped more - but you don't listen and you always think the worst. Listen now."

It was hard for Jim to listen over the distressed noises of his own body, but after a moment or so, he heard it, a dull thud as if someone had struck a single blow on the skin of a drum some distance away.

"So?" he said scornfully.

"He is nearly back. If you run into the jungle you'll only lose yourself. You'll die and that will grieve him."

"I'm dead already. Alicia's brat saw to that."

Amusement played on the spirit's face. "Death has its place. There must be balance, and endings balance beginnings. But sometimes we can place a finger on the scale." It leaned forward, so like Blair that Jim's heart ached. "Sometimes there is an extra ace hidden for when it's needed. Listen again."

Jim waited, long enough to count to ten, and then there was another dull, single thud.

"I'm glad that you aren't like her. You hold too tight even when it's not your plan. Now; listen to me, instead of him. Make your peace with your father."

"Why?" Jim muttered, straining to hear that slowly-paced drumbeat again. 'He is nearly back', the spirit claimed, and if that was true then the noise that Jim heard was Blair's heartbeat – slow, but all around him.

"Because you'll regret if you don't, and death will have no balance. Because your father is like you – another stubborn man who doesn't listen."

"And if I don't?"

The spirit shook its head, like an indulgent parent gently reproving a child. "We don't require it. It's not commerce, not adding up the columns of a ledger and taking the profit of one entry to pay the losses of another. You will still have Blair." Jim's face plainly showed his relief, and the spirit leaned forward and kissed his mouth. "Fool. But a loving one when given the chance. Make peace with your father, if you wish, while you still can."

Jim shrugged. This being could instruct him as much as it wished, but Jim was disinclined to listen with the marks of his appalled, mistaken grief still on his face. The noise that was Blair's heartbeat sounded again. He looked down at his wrists where the spirit held him. The grip of hands became the twining of vines, both Jim's body and the spirit's, impossible to see where one began and the other ended. And then the vines grew fur, and the spirit leaned forward and up, pressing its forehead to Jim's and where there had been two men instead there was a single black jaguar.

"Go on, then," called a voice in Jim's head. He looked down at himself, at the broad paws he stood upon. "Can't you hear him, scent him? Your beloved and mine, this way, go on." Jim began to run, because, yes, he could hear him, he could scent him. Blair. He ran, powerful muscles driving him forward, not slowing when he saw the wolf in front of him. Instead, he ran faster, running towards it just as it ran towards him, and they leapt for each other together. There was no impact, just a burst of light, and a burning pain in Jim's heart.

Jim lay on the floor beside the great basin, with Anala standing over him full of passionately confused grief and rage and a desolate sense of failure. He had failed Alicia, failed his own hopes, failed Incacha and Chani. Still caught between boyhood and manhood and unable to see clearly with the judgement of either state, it seemed that he had failed everything, and Anala's glance turned to the man lying still beneath the water. He lifted the knife to strike, and then flinched back, crying out in fear as a great dog, a wolf, a creature that Anala had never seen before, leapt out of the water below him. Anala fell backwards, the knife flying from his hands to land on the stone with a harsh shriek that curdled his gut. He scrambled backwards, one hand held out in fear to ward off the spirit beast until, with a snarl, it fastened its jaws around his arm. Anala screamed and reflexively jerked his arm away, even though that hurt even more.

Then the animal was gone. Anala's arm was whole to his physical sight, but it was numb now, hanging uselessly in his lap as he backed even further away from the basin to prop himself against the wall. He stared, as Blair's hand rose and groped for the side of the trough.

All was silence in the room, except for the harsh pant of Anala's breath. Incacha lay still and bound, awake despite the drugs that still ran in his blood, his cheek pressed to the stones. He couldn't see his son, had only heard his cry, and guessed that the spirits had taken some form of revenge. He could see as Blair rose from the water, though. Incacha shut his eyes. Drugged and ill with it as he was, he knew the look of a man spirit-ridden.

Blair stood, struggling out of the heavy drag of the water like an exhausted swimmer, although his heart bubbled with the exultation of the freed spirits. They sounded a warning to Blair, but its gravity was muted by the glory of freedom, and Blair was nearly as drunk on that glory as they were. His head was turned towards Incacha at first, and when he saw Incacha tied with the vine ropes Blair frowned. If Incacha were bound...he turned his head, and looked down, and the glory within Blair died like a snuffed candle.

"Jim?" Jim lay curled upon the floor in a puddle of blood, dark and viscous looking as the water of the basins in the dim light of the room. Heat, deeper and darker than the flames of his vision, lit up in Blair's gut; but the beginnings of rage were overwhelmed by the fear that breathed corpse-cold on Blair's skin.

"What have you done?" Blair enquired, not knowing of whom he asked the question – the spirits, Anala, Jim, himself. He nearly tumbled over the side of the basin to land on his hands and knees beside Jim; the blood on the floor stained Blair's clothes and hands more brightly than it had the stone. "Oh God," Blair began to chant, his hands scrabbling urgently under Jim's shirt to find the stab wound, "oh God, oh God." Jim was still, and Blair's slippery hands couldn't find a pulse. Blair's chant became, "No," repeated under his breath, which hitched with effort as he pulled Jim up into his arms. "Incacha?" he called, his voice shaky with panic. The boy crouched in the corner, Blair ignored. He would keep.

Rage boiled inside of him again. "No!" he declared; no denial of harsh fact, but a claim of debt to the walls of the temple. A memory then, only shortly behind him – Incacha's voice in his head, quiet, firm. 'Use the power of your animal spirit'. With a sob, Blair bent his head, kissed his lover's lax mouth, and then, suddenly calmer, leaned his forehead to Jim's .

Incacha could no longer see Blair or Jim, blocked from his view as they were by the basin. He couldn't see his son, who stared at his first sight of the spirits' true power. Blue flame outlined the two men, Blair as still as Jim, until finally it died away. Jim grunted and choked and then took in deep, gasping breaths while Blair rocked him, for Blair's comfort as much as Jim's, and soothed him with quiet, murmured nonsense. Jim's hand groped at his side; the wound still pained him. Blair laid him down, and pulled the shirt back once more.

"Hush," he commanded. "It's not pretty, but it looks..." he paused and swallowed, "...it looks better than it did. Rest, love." He stroked his hand across Jim's forehead, smoothing shaggy hair away lest it irritate Jim's skin, while Jim looked up at him, blinking in confusion and not at all sure that he wasn't still dreaming. Blair then stood, stepping over the worst of the pool of blood to pick up the knife. Ignoring Anala, Blair instead walked to Incacha and cut the vine bindings, and rubbed gently at his teacher's arms. Incacha opened his mouth, but found his voice not yet at his command.

Sure of Jim's safety, a glimmer of the earlier glory shone in Blair's heart. "Do you feel it?" he asked. Incacha couldn't yet speak but his mouth twitched in the beginning of a smile.

Blair rose. He wanted very much to take Jim somewhere else, out of this room at least, but he wasn't done here yet. He approached Anala, who still sat upon the floor, cradling his useless arm, and listening. He could hear footsteps.

Blair crouched before the boy, and stared at him. Anala tried to return the stare and then averted his eyes in shame. "I was young and stupid once," Blair said. "Time always heals the one. Ensure that it heals the other, also." His head jerked back towards Incacha. "You'll have help, after all."

Alicia's body lay nearby. Blair stayed where he was, before Anala, but he turned his head to look at the dead woman, and he sighed. There was blood on his hands in more ways than one, Blair thought, even if Jim was the one who had struck the blow. The spirits had brought them here, yes, but Blair had accepted the calling like an invitation to the most glittering soiree, the most select intellectual salon, and this was the inevitable ending of it. He had feared Alicia, but he'd pitied her also, although there was someone he pitied even more, someone whose steps had become more and more sure as she left the darkness of her hiding place and made her way with eyes accustomed to the dull light of the temple's interior.

Blair and Anala both looked towards the doorway, where the girl, poppet no longer, stood, swaying with the effects of the drugs Alicia had forced on her, and the power that had awakened her. With faltering steps, she entered the room and made her way directly to Alicia's body, and knelt beside it. There was silence, and then she began to keen, her voice rising and falling, before she lifted Alicia's body in her arms, a visual echo of Blair's earlier grasp of Jim. She began to cry, like any grieving woman, and then spoke; in perfect Chopec. Anala stared in shock, but Blair was unsurprised. He looked across the room to Jim, who raised his brows in tired, ironic surprise at the girl's words and at her speech.

"What will I do? What will I do?" Then the girl dissolved in sobs once more, rocking back and forth with the dead woman still in her arms.

Blair stood, and crossed the few feet of stone to lay a hand on the girl's shoulder. She turned a tear-wet face to him, and looked up at him with an adult's grief. "I don't know what you should do," Blair answered honestly. "But perhaps..." he paused, wondering if he was being presumptuous, but unable to stop. "Perhaps you might think of choosing a name."

And then he crossed the floor once more to return to Jim, sitting on the floor beside his living sentinel to take his hand, and feel Jim grip his hand in return.

In the year of Our Lord, 1833, there were many things to exercise the attention of the world; that is, the world as defined by the Ton, of course, for what other world was there? England had abolished slavery in its colonies, a decision which occasioned a small celebration amongst those who cared for Joel. Wilberforce died just three days after that Parliamentary event, his great victory; Viscount Exmouth died also, and the actor Edmund Kean.

The polite world also speculated, carefully picking the company where it chose to do so, about the news that his grace, the Duke of Stavely, was upon his deathbed. The Duke of Stavely was not quite so, but his doctors had made his future clear to him, and his grace was not a man to let business sit unattended. There were a few people he wished to see, and he awaited their arrivals on the dates he set for them with the surety of a man who had issued royal commands. His grace could afford his assurance – he had always been a good judge of character.

Now, he waited in his bedroom, regally swathed in a dressing gown in his favourite green, but cold despite the glory of silk and the fire that roared in the grate against the late autumn chill. His hands were still elegant, but the robe and a very beautiful coverlet disguised the thickness of his legs, heavy with dropsy rather than fat. God knew that he ate very little these days. A finely worked pair of duelling pistols lay in their box on the table beside him. His grace had always appreciated the combination of art and craftsmanship.

The footman announced his guest. "Mr Sandburg, your grace."

Stavely gestured with a languid hand as Blair entered. "My dear. How pleasant to see you."

"Your grace." Blair's hair was beginning to show strands of silver among the dark brown. This was no surprise to either men. Blair was in his mid-forties, very nearly the age that Stavely had been when they first made each other's acquaintance. Blair knew that Stavely was ill, but it took a moment to wipe the shock from his face. Against all the proof that the world could offer as to mortality, a part of Blair had believed that this man would live forever.

"Yes, yes, I am a haggard old crow. Come and sit beside me, if you can bear the fire. I find it cold, but I know that I'm alone in that."

Blair smiled, and accepted the invitation, despite the considerable heat. Then he gazed at the Duke, aware after a few moment's silence that he was staring. The Duke made no remark, but only stared back with a lazy smile.

"Nothing to say? Then let me begin with how well you look."

"I wish that I might pay you the same compliment," Blair answered.

"That would be a useless lie and we both of us abominate those. Still in a state of married bliss with your soldier? What an example you two are to a naughty world."

Blair grinned at the idea that he and Jim might be an example to anyone. "Indeed, your grace." Calmer after the first shock, he examined the Duke, the signs of age and illness, the extravagant vanity of his clothes, even in this extremity; and let his grace lead the conversation as he wished. Stavely had ever been a man for mastery; even in his submission to his physical passions, his grace had still demanded that matters be entirely to his own requirements.

"I've brought you here to say good-bye, Blair, which I doubt will surprise you."

"Perhaps a little. It's many years since we last met. I can hardly count your attendance at my lecture – that was no more than a glance or two, and you were gone by the time I had the chance to seek you out."

Stavely grinned – an expression which touched his sickly, vulpine face with a touch of the urchin. "I could hear too many whispers about me. I had no desire to mar your grand triumph so I removed myself before you could do anything foolish such as shake my hand in public." He shook his head. "You were ever sadly lacking in decorum, love. That affectionate nature of yours."

"I think that you underestimate the affection in your own nature, your grace."

Stavely laughed at that, and then winced, his face turning pale. Blair rose, concerned, but Stavely waved him back into his seat. "You are too kind, Blair, and I mean that quite literally. But I was always well disposed to those who pleased me. So I shall tell you that I greatly enjoyed your book."

Blair's face turned pink, not entirely because of the heat of the fire. "Your grace is too kind, also," he replied.

"It was rather a sensation in its way, and as for the novelty of knowing that I had nurtured a true scholar... I was quite overcome."

"I doubt that, somehow," Blair said dryly.

"That idiot heir of mine will no doubt sell off my library – I doubt he's read anything in his life but the notices in The Gazette, but no matter. I'm sure that your book will go to those who will appreciate it."

Blair smiled again at this. The Duke was no scholar but he was a man of considerable understanding, and Blair valued the praise.

"I trust that its publication caused Captain Ellison no qualms. If I might be permitted to read between the lines, you seemed very – enamoured – of the sentinel you described. A paragon of a man."

Blair shook his head in mock despair at this teasing. "I believe that I must let you in upon a secret, your grace. Many of the qualities of that sentinel were based upon a man well-known to me, and I can assure you, my book caused him no qualms at all."

Stavely's eyes were bright with amusement. "You astound me, sir. Are you claiming to have misled the Royal Society?"

"Not at all. Every quality I described was genuine and measured, but may have been ascribed to another individual – for the preservation of the privacy of all."

"I see." His grace took a breath – not as deep as he would have liked. Blair's face again became concerned, and Stavely shook his head. "Don't hang over me. I have servants and physicians enough for that." He extended his hand. "I think I must require you to take your leave of me, Blair. I tire rather easily these days." There was heavy-lidded innuendo in his face.

"Except of mischief-making, I suspect." Blair stood, and his gaze went to the box upon the table. Not seeking permission, he opened it and looked at the contents, before his gaze returned to the Duke, heavy with interrogation and regret.

"A fine brace of pistols, your grace."

"Yes, indeed. I schooled several fools with those in my youth. They are in excellent condition still, and beautifully made. Such things always gave me pleasure."

Blair gently shut the box lid, his mind turned to years long past. "So I recall."

He made his bow, and then stepped close to the autocratic old man enfolded in his splendour, and took his face between his hands and lowered himself to kiss Stavely's brow.

"Safe journey, my dear."

Stavely's eyes were shut, but his voice was as controlled and mocking as ever. "Thank you for the benediction; and never doubt that a safe journey is entirely my intention."

Tears pricked at Blair's eyelids. For a moment, it seemed to him that he caressed the face of another lover entirely, and he hurriedly thrust such a thought away.

Stavely continued. "Go back to your soldier, and think kindly of me now and again."

"Yes, I shall do both of those things." And Blair took his leave, and went back to his house, and his study stuffed with papers and letters and books; back home to Jim, who asked no questions, but poured Blair a glass of wine and gently ruffled his hair.

Finis

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