Carefully rising, Frostpine touched the net, and hummed a snatch of music. Daja looked away as white fire rippled along the strands of the metal web, calling its many embedded spells to life. A soldier moaned; he'd looked at their canopy. A sailor reached out and yanked his chin, forcing him to take his eyes from it.

Quietly, oars barely splashing, they coasted to the mouth of the harbour. The chain, hidden far below in peace-time, was up.

Daja sighed with admiration. Calling the thing across the entrance a chain was misleading. It resembled a ladder: a pair of chains thirty feet apart formed the sides, and whole logs formed its rungs. The chains were fastened to metal collars on the logs, to keep the metal links out of the sea. The ends of the logs were sharp points. Any ship that tried to break the chain would ram itself. And even if a ship somehow broke one of the metal strands, the other would still hold the logs together.

"It's beautiful," she whispered. Brown eyes glowing, she looked around, at the mute granite of the Tombstone, and at the huge, solid Harbourmaster's Tower. From there her gaze moved to the broad stone wall that stretched from the Harbourmaster's Tower to Astrel Island, just like the walls that connected Astrel to the Arsenal, and those that connected the eastern harbour islands. "No wonder this is the safest anchorage on the Pebbled Sea."

"Nice and home-like," quipped a seaman in a whisper.

"Bows," came the sergeant's hushed command. The soldiers readied their crossbows, sliding bolts into the notches.

Daja watched the storm. Now she could see the thing was motionless, dead in the water. The lightning that flashed over its long front followed the same tracks, time after time, each ripple and jag the same. Any lingering fear she had that this was a real storm dried up.

As they drew close to the double chain, Daja shivered with awe. Each iron link was two inches thick, nearly a foot long, and inlaid with spell-letters in different metals, each of them a magical working to prevent rust, breakage, trickery or accident. In its way, it was every bit as complicated and thorough as the spell-net. This was magic of the oldest and strongest kind. If I study for years, she thought, will I have a tenth of the knowledge it took to create these things?

Frostpine rummaged in the pack. He drew out a bottle of oil, breaking the seal on the cork.

"We brought no boathooks," whispered the coxswain. "How do we pass under the inside chain?"

Daja looked back at her teacher. Frostpine held a finger to his lips, and signalled for the oarsmen to bring them up to the first length of metal. When they were just a few feet away, Frostpine closed his eyes, and smiled.

She wasn't sure that the seamen felt it, but she did: a thin shiver in the air. Someone gasped. The immense metal links that lay between them and the outer chain rose into the air: a yard, two yards. They ghosted under it, oars flat to their sides - no one dared look up to see if their canopy so much as touched it. Daja heard a clink of metal as the chain lowered itself gain.

Frostpine sighed. When she looked back, he was rubbing oil into his hands. Pointing to the outer chain, he made shooing motions at Daja - she was to get to work. Once she was within reach, Daja leaned forwards and grasped the first over-sized link. With a deep breath, she cleared her mind of questions and let her magic flow. Link by link she explored the metal between the Tombstone and the first log, hunting for any crack or speck of rust that would make it shatter if the enemy tried to ram it.

Her sensing reached as far as the first log. Glancing back at Frostpine, she nodded. His wrists and hands gleamed with the powerfully scented oil from his bottle. She'd seen him make it several days ago, for use on the metal fittings of the temple gates. A mixture of rosemary, rose geranium and cypress oils, it was steeped in protective spells. It cast a magical glow in her mind that warmed her and made her feel brave.

Frostpine went over the chain that she had just checked, rubbing oiled hands over every link. When they reached the first log, the oarsmen rowed them back to the inner chain. As they approached, it rose again, lowering itself once they were through. When it was back in place, Daja examined it with her own magic, and Frostpine followed her power with his. Once that section was done, the sailors rowed them around the first log, and brought them back to the inner chain, where they did it all again.

They were a third of the way across when someone poked her shoulder and pointed. Still within her own magic, Daja looked at the stalled mass of the illusion-storm. Two strange boxes bobbed in the water before it, one on a course that led straight to their boat, the other a thousand feet away, bound for the Harbourmaster's massive tower. They were wood, painted dead black. Something about them made Daja feel very nervous. There was a gleam of spell-letters written under that paint. She didn't like the way that every time she tried to give the nearest one a good look, her vision skittered off it like a raindrop on glass. And wasn't that a familiar sensation? One from an azigazi the day before, perhaps?

"Debris from what's on the other side?" suggested the coxswain.

"They go against the current," whispered a soldier. "Movin' right at us, too."

"Coming at the chain. That's what it wants." The sergeant's voice was barely audible.

"Daja," murmured Frostpine, "breathe in. Deep breath. Deep, deep breath. You're a bellows. Blow that thing away from us."

A bellows?

Well, if Frostpine said she could be it, then she would. Those boxes might be harmless, but she didn't think so.

She thought of the bellows in his forge. They were so easy to handle that even a child could pump up enough of a blaze to melt iron. She breathed in. Her lungs were that powerful, able to draw in air and force it out with the strength of the gale. Her ribs were the metal fittings. All around she felt the warmth of the forge. Open, open, open, she thought as heat flooded her veins. The magic was in her, the magic of the forge. It had taken her over while she worked on the chain, with Frostpine so strong behind her. It had taken her, and now she would work it like hot gold.