No one said anything more until we stopped on the road just outside Kahlia. The magus was as optimistic as ever. Pol seemed to take everything in stride, and Sophos didn’t know enough to be frightened. Only Ambiades was as nervous as a cat too close to a fire. Sophos had forgotten that he was keeping his distance from his idol, and he tried to chat with Ambiades as they unsaddled the horses, but Ambiades didn’t answer.

Pol kindled a fire in a traveler’s fire ring and cut up the chickens to cook. The fire ring was just a circle of stones mortared together. There was one every fifty yards or so on the roads outside large towns. They were built for the merchants who stopped their packtrains outside towns to camp. There were several packtrains camped near us that night, and smaller groups of travelers with just one wagon or no wagon at all. It was warm enough that a tent or a blanket roll would do. There were a few guards posted, but they weren’t watching for us.

We all slept, except Pol. The magus woke me before he woke the others and gave me careful directions how to get through town to the livery stable near the opposite gate.

“Bring the horses out there. Pol will be waiting for you. The rest of us will be up the road with the saddles.” He seemed as carefree as Sophos, but he didn’t have Sophos’s excuse.

“Do you have any idea how impossible this is?” I asked him.

He laughed. “I thought you said you could steal anything.” He gave me a shove on the shoulder and started me down the road.

“Things,” I hissed to myself as I walked, “don’t make noise.”

The moon was still up, and there was enough light to see the road in front of me. When I got close to the town walls, I could see by the light of lanterns burning by the gates. They were open. They probably hadn’t been closed for years, but there was a guard in the archway.

He was supposed to be watching for suspicious people—like me. I couldn’t think of a plausible excuse for coming into town at such an hour, so I avoided the problem altogether by circling away from the gate and climbing over the wall out of the guard’s sight. I dropped down into someone’s backyard, then worked my way between buildings until I found a wide street that I hoped was the one the magus had mentioned in his directions.

I hurried through absolutely empty intersections, listening at every corner for the footsteps of the watch, but I met no one. I was on the right street, and I found the livery stable and the inn next to it without trouble. Both were closed for the night of course. Wooden shutters were pulled over the windows of the inn, and the gates to the courtyard were closed. I listened again for the watch, and when I heard nothing, I pushed open one gate after lifting its post off the ground so that it wouldn’t scrape. The post fit into a gap between the flagstones so that the gate wouldn’t swing closed again.

When I peeped into the stable, I found the ostler asleep in his chair at one end. Good luck for me. Not only was he asleep, but I guessed by the empty bottle on his left that he was drunk as well. I collected five leading straps from a peg over his head and slipped down the row of stalls, looking into each one at a sleeping horse. I picked five that I thought were mares and woke them with a whisper. I clipped the straps to their halters, and then I opened all the stall doors, carefully so that there was no squeak, starting with the one farthest from the ostler. The horses lifted themselves to their feet. Puzzled at being disturbed at such an odd hour, they made small noises of inquiry, none loud enough to wake the ostler.

When all the stall doors were open, I went back to my chosen five and led the first one out. As I led her past the stall of my next choice, I leaned in to twitch the strap hanging from that mare’s halter. She obediently followed her stablemate out of the stall and down the row. The other horses came out in the same way. Soon all five were in a line, and the horses left in their stalls were leaning out of their stalls, wondering what they were missing.

I was at the door of the stable, looking out at the stone-flagged courtyard where the horses’ hooves were going to sound like the crack of doom. I looked back at the sleeping ostler. He would sleep through the noise only if he were very drunk indeed, and there was no way to know how much had been in the bottle when he started. There was an obvious solution, but I was a thief, not yet a murderer.

I sent a hasty prayer to the god of thieves that the horses would keep quiet and that the ostler was blind drunk; then I shuffled around until I had all five leading ropes in my hands and drew the horses out.

The silence was so profound that I turned back to make sure that the horses were following. It hadn’t occurred to me that the gods that I’d seen silent and unmoving in their temple might still be taking an interest in me. I almost bumped into the mare directly behind me. She threw up her head in surprise but didn’t make a noise. I stepped backward, and she followed. The iron shoes on her hooves struck the flagstones soundlessly. The other horses came as well. Afraid that I’d been struck deaf, I backed out of the courtyard. Behind my horses came the others from the stable. They slipped through the gates of the inn and disappeared like ghosts down different streets. When the ostler woke, he would have to search the entire town before he would know that five of his charges were missing.

At the town gate I found Pol standing over the body of a guard.

“Did you kill him?” My lips formed the words without speaking.

Pol shook his head. Like the ostler, the guard was asleep. Pol took four of the horses, two leading straps in each hand, and left me just one to lead up the grass beside the road, between two houses and then out across the fields. We reached the cover of some trees and found the other three waiting.

“Was there any trouble?” the magus asked, and the spell of silence burst with a pop.

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “no trouble.” Except that I’d discovered that I was eager to divest myself of the gods’ attention as quickly as possible.

Sophos took the leading strap from my hands and led my horse away to be saddled.

Pol asked me, “Are you all right?”

I nodded my head.

He took me by the elbow and felt my body shaking. “Are you sure?”

I nodded again. How could I explain that this was a perfectly normal reaction for someone who has had a careless prayer answered by the gods? The silence of the horses had been immeasurably more unnerving than the gods in their temple. Maybe because the stables had been part of my world and the temple had not. I don’t know. For the first time in a long while, Pol had to help me onto my horse.

We were only an hour away from Kahlia when a cold, damp breeze blew down my neck and I pulled up my horse to listen to the sound of the temple gong beating in the night.

“What’s that?” Ambiades asked when the others had also stopped.

Probably Aracthus, still doing his part, I thought. “The ostler woke up,” I said, and dug my heels into the horse underneath me.

By morning we had nearly covered the ground back to the mountain trail. The horses were exhausted, and our pursuers were so close that twice we’d seen them over our shoulders at straight places in the road. The ostler must have called out the town garrison without counting his horses first. We lost sight of the soldiers when we turned into the olive groves, but they remained close behind. As we twisted in the dark under the trees, we moved a little quicker than our pursuers, only because we knew where we were going and they did not.