NINE

THE AUTUMN SHOWER we rattle through leaves the window streaked with diagonal swipes of darker black, bordering swaths almost clear where the rain has washed away some of the collected soot. Now as the tracks curve around another switchback, I press my face against the cool glass and try to get a glimpse of the Saddle through the backbent plume of coal smoke that makes a contrail of soot behind the locomotive.

High, high above us, the twin mountains—Cutter and Chopper, what you might call the incisors of the God’s Teeth—soar up through the orange-tinged night clouds, but the gap between them, the pass called Khryl’s Saddle, is hidden behind a pall of smoke and rock dust. The sedan chair shifts slightly with the rocking of the railcar, and the steel on steel clicking of wheels over expansion joints has me drowsy as a baby, but I still wish I could see the Saddle.

I’ve been here before. Twice. Once as Caine—many, many years ago—trekking through the aspens from Jheled-Kaarn to Thorncleft, on my way to Seven Wells, the distant capital of Lipke . . . And once, only about five years ago, back when we still thought I might someday walk again, riding in a sedan chair not quite as nice as this one my best friend gave me. That time, I was with Shanna, and she took me way up Cutter Mountain to show me the tiny spring, high on the western slope above the pass—a little washtub-sized gap through which bubbled hundreds of years of rock-filtered snowmelt—that was the ultimate headwater of the Great Chambaygen.

But the image of Shanna walking beside my chair hurts too much to think about, and I force myself sideways into a different memory.

I can see the Saddle in my head as clearly as I ever saw it with my eyes: a place of beauty so intense it robs breath from the lungs, a broad spine of earth and rock buried in forests of aspen, stark snowbound teeth of stone rising sheer to either side. She stood next to me that morning, holding my hand, while we watched the sun climb out of the distant Lipkan plains. The white-capped peaks above us caught the first direct light and burst into silver flame. Down their slopes the rock shaded from yellow to orange to deep emberous red, which became a loamy brown where it brushed the tops of the shadowed aspens in the pass below.

I put my fist against my mouth through the kerchief, and cough. Like the four bearers of my sedan chair, I’ve got a kerchief tied across my face against the coal smoke and furnace smut. That cough might be lung damage from the fire last night, I guess. I kind of hope it is. I guess I’d really rather have roasted lungs than find out I’m coughing because of the damn air below Khryl’s Saddle.

Things change. Shit, I can see why she went nuts.

We wind upward. All around the railway, the eastern slope of the pass has become an open wound. The aspen forest has been chewed into gaping open-pit mines. Thick fogs of coal smoke and rock dust overhang every valley. Through the dark mist, I can see grimly threatening silhouettes of huge machines at work upon the land, belching smoke and flame as they chop and grind and scoop away the earth. It’s the ugliest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen; it makes my stomach hurt, and brings a bitter acid to my throat that probably isn’t just from the sulphur fumes. “Christ,” I mutter. “They’ve turned this place into Mordor.”

A warm hand squeezes my shoulder, and the voice of my best friend murmurs in my ear, “Beautiful, isn’t it? Magnificent.”

And somehow the sound of his voice opens my eyes to the rich red of the flame from the steam shovel’s smokestack, deeper and more pure than the sun’s—and more special, more beautiful, because it was made by the hand of men. The ruddy gleam it brings to the steel curve of the bucket’s sawteeth is no mere accident of nature, but is intentional, deliberate, the result of an act as expressive as the stroke of a painter’s brush. As far as the eye can see, men and women work side by side—even now, far into the night—shoulder to shoulder against the inanimate resistance of earth and stone, stamping this entire blank mountain, this random upcrumpling of the insensate earth, with the sigil of Man. Looked at through his eyes, it’s a triumph.

“Magnificent . . . Yeah, I guess it is,” I say slowly, turning to smile at my best friend. He always seems to do that—adjust my whole world with just a phrase, the touch of his hand. That’s why he’s my best friend.

That’s why he’s the best friend I’ve ever had.

“Yeah, Raithe,” I tell him. “I guess I just never looked at it that way before.”

Raithe takes my hand, and the glittering smile that sparks the corners of his winter-ice eyes tells me that everything is going to be all right.

2

AS THE TRAIN chugs to a stop at the Palatine Camp station, Raithe pulls an enormous clockworks chronometer from a pocket within his scarlet robes and ostentatiously snaps open the cover. “Eleven oh nine,” he announces with the kind of self-important snobbery that you can only get from being a kid in your twenties with the most accurate timepiece in town. “Six minutes late, but we’ve plenty of time left.”

He closes the cover, but he’s so obviously reluctant to put it away that I take pity on him, finally, and ask him about it.

“A gift,” he says with a distant, slightly grim smile that stays closed over his teeth. “From the Viceroy. He’s mad for punctuality.”

“Garrette.” The name is foul in my mouth; it’s all I can do not to spit on the floor. Raithe—sensitive as always—picks up on it instantly. “I thought you and he were friends, Caine. He said he knows you quite well.”

“Friends? I guess you could say he’s a certain kind of friend,” I admit. “He’s the kind of friend I’d like to stick in a pit filled to his lower lip with vomit, and toss buckets of shit at his head to see if I can make him duck.”

A couple of the chair bearers snort, and one laughs outright—then muffles it to snickering behind his hand when he sees that Raithe doesn’t get it. Raithe’s eyes go hooded, and his face tightens toward a painful grimace that’s probably supposed to be a smile: the look of a kid with no sense of humor, who’s not sure if he might be the butt of the joke but wants to look like he’s being a good sport about it, just in case. “What if he just moves to one side?” he offers lamely, trying to play along.

“Then I get a bigger bucket,” I tell him, smiling, and he finally feels pretty sure that it’s okay to laugh, so he does.

He’s so eager to be liked—from anybody else, it’d be pathetic, and annoying—but Raithe is such a great kid that I can forgive him anything. “The Viceroy is on our side in this, Caine,” he says seriously. “He’s the one who decided to bring you here, to see if we can save the elves from Pallas—”

“Don’t remind me,” I tell him. Something twists inside my guts. “I can do this, but only if I don’t think about it too much.”

Raithe’s lips stretch like he’s stuck a pencil in his mouth sideways, and his pale eyes gleam. “You still love her. Even after what she’s done—and what she will do, if we don’t stop her.”

My mouth tastes of ashes. “It’s not that easy to stop loving someone, kid. I can do what we have to do. But I can’t make myself like it.”

He nods. “Let’s go see the Viceroy. The ritual must begin at midnight, and he wants you to be there.”

“That’s another thing I’m not gonna be able to like.”

My fingers dig into my numb thighs; I can feel a suggestion of pressure though the leather. With the bypass shut down by the inarguable laws of Overworld physics, I have the faintest ghosts of sensation in my legs—in fact, there’s a sudden, surprising pain, and when I release my thighs I find dark wet splotches on the leather of my pants, and the palms of my hands are sticky where I touched them. I lift my hands and scowl at them, trying to get a better look at the guck on my palms in the lamplight. “What the fuck is this?”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t piss myself—the partial regen on my spine left me with reasonably reliable sphincter control front and back, so long as the goddamn bypass isn’t fucking things up—and the guck smells kind of medicinal, like some kind of antibacterial creme. I offer my palms to Raithe. “What is this? Who put this shit on my legs? Some kinda goddamn practical joke, while I was asleep?”

Now pain starts to announce itself from other parts of my body as well: my arms, my back, down my ribs along one flank—a lot of pain, hot crackling pain like deep burns, the kind that feel like you’re still roasting inside. And with the pain, seeping in, comes some kind of primitive unreasoning horror . . . feels like somebody’s piling red-hot rocks onto my back while an ice-cold anaconda of slime crawls down my throat and curls up in my belly.

I twitch my hands, trying to flick the gunk off them, trying to keep from retching a few yards of that snot-covered snake back up—

And Raithe again rescues me with a touch and a calm word. “No, it’s all right, Caine. You have a few little burns, that’s all. Nothing serious. When you rescued M—that is, Tan’elKoth, remember? But they’ve been treated and they don’t even hurt anymore. Remember?”

“I, uh . . . yeah, okay, I remember.” I put a hand onto my forehead and squeeze my temples between fingertips and thumb. The pain fades as quickly as it rose.

All in my head, I guess.

“It’s weird . . . I can’t quite get shit straight in my mind,” I say slowly, a little thickly. It’s hard to make my lips work right. “It’s like I couldn’t really remember if the fire really happened, or if it was just a dream. I mean, sometimes it seems real, but just now, I couldn’t remember . . .”

“Oh, it was real,” Raithe says. “It’s all been recorded.” His voice has a strange edge to it—creepy, almost like lust—but at the same time he sounds a little smug, a little satisfied. Like he’s looking forward to something that’s gonna get him off in the worst way. I frown at him, but he ignores me.

He flicks his fingers at the bearers—four burly friars from the Thorncleft Embassy—and they hoist my chair onto their shoulders. Raithe opens the double door of the railcar, kicks the extensible stairs so that they unfold to the platform, and all six of us head down into Palatine.

Even now, close to midnight, Palatine is jumping. Two years ago, this place had been only the Palatine Camp, nothing but a cluster of tents and a couple of big-ass corrugated steel sheds—the central camp for the mines that spider out across the eastern approach of the pass. Now, it’s turned into an honest-to-shit boomtown, Old West style, with two hotels, a double strip of saloons and whorehouses, stores and stables; even the rail station has tripled in size. Rail spurs web the hills for miles around. Next to the station is a small clapboard building with a huge sign declaring it to be the offices of the Overworld Company newspaper, the Palatine Tribune.

I can just imagine tomorrow’s headline:

ROGUE GODDESS SLAIN BY CAINE
Returning Hero Helps Artans Save World

It makes me more than a little sick.

The streets blaze with hissing gaslights, painting the faces of the miners and the whores and the general townsfolk all with identically eerie green-white corpse pallor. My bearers slog across the main street, a churn of black mud and horseshit a stone’s throw wide; coal smoke and furnace smut coats my skin with greasy brown-black dust before we can get halfway to the hotel. The air tastes of brimstone.

Inside, Raithe leads us past a very old-movie-looking front desk, through a small, cramped saloon where a lonely bartender reads a copy of the Tribune, a real old-fashioned newspaper of bleached wood pulp and ink. He doesn’t even look up as we pass by. Through one more door is a private party room, with some crude but comfortable-looking sofas covered in leather, and a wooden dining table big enough to seat maybe six.

At the far end, behind a wide arc of papers scattered across the table, sits Vinson Garrette. He looks up as my bearers maneuver my chair through the doorway, and he nods toward Raithe with a grunt of welcome. “Excellent,” he says softly, then lifts his head and his voice toward me. “Thank you so much for coming, Hari. As you know, I don’t believe we could save this place from your wife without your help. We’ll go straight from here to the ritual, if it’s all right with you.”

I rub my face some more—I have that bad-dream dissociative thing going on again, where I can’t seem to make this make sense, although I’m sure it all hangs together in some way I can’t quite remember. “This feels kinda strange,” I say. “Being here. I don’t know why.”

“Of course you don’t,” Garrette says kindly. “I think we’ll be able to cut here, and pick up the recording again at the ritual.”

“What? Cut? Recording? What are you talking about?”

Garrette nods toward Raithe, and Raithe instructs the bearers to set me down at the foot of the table and wait outside. “Close the door,” he says shortly. “You do not want to hear what is said within this room.” The four friars touch fingertips to brows in the gesture of Obedience and file out. They shut the door.

Garrette’s lips thin to a horizontal slash beneath his long hooked nose, and he rises with the sinister gracelessness of a predatory wading bird. “Restraints, I believe, would be in order,” he says, moving around the table with his head cocked as though one eye scans the shallows for fish.

Raithe produces a couple of white plastic stripcuffs. “Sit still a moment, Caine.” Moving so slowly and deliberately that it doesn’t even occur to me to resist, he uses one to strap my left wrist to the arm of the sedan chair and pulls it tight.

“Hey, c’mon, Raithe,” I say, frowning. “Friends are friends, but even my wife doesn’t get to tie me up . . .” I try to make it sound like a joke, but some of that slime-snake feeling is crawling back down my throat. It’s pressing on my lungs now, making my breath come short. I’d like to laugh, but it might come out a kind of nervous bleat—then I’d know that I really am as frightened as I’m afraid I might be, and I’m nowhere near ready for that.

He loops the other stripcuff around my right wrist and chair arm and pulls that one tight as well. Now Garrette picks up a pile of small white cardstock rectangles from the table and consults the one on top. “All right,” he murmurs, nodding to himself. He looks at me. “I believe we’re ready to begin.”

I find myself compulsively testing the strength of the stripcuffs. “What the fuck is going on here?”

Garrette hefts the stack of cardstock. “I have some very specific instructions here, Hari, which I intend to follow as precisely as possible, as is my way. I confess that I don’t see the use of most of them, but I suppose it’s not really important that I should. The primary instruction is that I should make you comprehend your position fully and clearly.”

“You’re off to a goddamn running start.”

He exposes a mouthful of teeth that seem too big and square and white for his thin-boned face. “Your Excellency?”

Raithe opens a small knapsack that I don’t remember seeing him pick up. From inside it he pulls a shimmery wad of wire that he then shakes out into a net. With a dull shock, I realize it’s made of silver mesh, just like the one I used on Ma’elKoth at Victory Stadium, all those years ago. He says, “Do you know what this is, Caine?”

I shrug; it pulls my wrists tight against the cuffs, so I stop.

Raithe’s smile looks like the edge of a knife. “Do you know what I’m planning to use it for?”

“Should I care?”

Now it’s Raithe’s turn to shrug, and it’s his breath that’s coming a little short. He looks like a virgin getting his first glimpse of nipple.

With a matador flourish, he casts the net over my head.

The net splashes over me like a bucketful of ice water, a stunning shock that hits too fast to be cold or hot or anything other than a spastic convulsion of gasping. I go rigid, making ukh ukh guh noises, and the room blazes white like somebody lit a magnesium flare inside my head and now somebody else has more of those flares and he’s using them to light the napalm that’s spread down my legs and up my back and I’m on fire, all over, burning with fresh crackling agony and the thick reek of roasted flesh and the icy stab of alcohol sluiced over charred skin—

And the stranger who’s standing in front of me in the scarlet robes of a Monastic Ambassador, face like suede glued in patches to his skull, he’s got a light in his blue-white eyes that looks like it’s the reflection of the flames that gave me these burns.

“Who—” I force the words out through a snarl of pain. “Who are you?”

“Don’t you know me, Caine?” he says through teeth exposed by a predator’s smile. He leans toward me like he’s gonna take a bite out of my face, then he shoves a hand into my side, eagle-claw style, pinching the flesh through net and leather, scraping the tunic across the burned flesh beneath, making me shudder with fresh pain. His voice is low, and savage, and it smokes like his eyes.

“I’m your best friend.”

3

“REMEMBER . . . I REMEMBER—” My voice is as ragged as ripping cloth. “I remember waking up . . . on the train, and you . . . and you—”

“A Charm patterns the energy of your Shell. You don’t have to be conscious,” he says through that knife-edge grin. “Your mind, like your Shell, is a patterning of Flow. In the instant that I remove this net from you, the Charm pattern on your Shell will gather Flow, and you will love me as a son, and trust me as a father.”

“Why . . . have you . . . done this to me?”

“I believe I can answer that question,” Garrette says. He rounds the corner of the table and leans his butt against its edge, giving me one of those Compassionate Looks that Administrators practice in the mirror and save up to use on somebody they’re about to shitcan. “But before I do, I want you to understand something, on my part. I have never liked you, Michaelson. You are a disgrace to our entire caste—you have always pushed our company to serve your ends, instead of properly serving it; you are selfish, egotistical, and rude. You presume to set your own judgment above that of your betters. I know, too, that you dislike me, and always have. That being said, however, I would like to assure you that I take no joy in this task. This is not personal, Michaelson.”

The pain-sweat beaded on my forehead rolls into one eye, stinging, and for a second that tiny increase of agony nearly drives me over the edge. It’s all I can do not to howl like a wounded dog; instead I grit my teeth and pretend to smile. “You’re only . . . following orders, right?”

“I try to honorably acquit the duties that are assigned to me,” Garrette agrees stiffly. “Nothing personal, yes?”

“Fuck nothing personal . . . Everything’s personal.” I point my chin toward Raithe, at that dark hunger that fills his face as he watches my pain. I don’t know why, or where he gets it from, but I can see the hate rolling off him like heatshimmer off sun-baked asphalt. “Ask him. He knows. I can see it.”

Raithe’s gaze never wavers; he’s drinking me in like he’s a desert and I’m a storm. He says, “Get on with it.”

“Well, then. All right.” Garrette clears his throat and consults the top card again. “The first thing you need to know, Michaelson, is that we are going to kill your wife.”

I knew it was coming, but it still hits me like a kick in the balls. I keep smiling; what the fuck, why not? I can barely feel my balls anyway. “You’re gonna try.”

“Mmm, yes. And succeed. And you are going to help us.”

“And then you woke up.”

“You will be taken to the Cutter Mountain spring, and washed in its water. This will attract the attention of Pallas Ril. When she arrives, she will die.”

“She’s not that easy to kill.”

“You will, I believe, be surprised.”

He looks at me for a little bit, like he’s expecting an answer, but all I do is stare at the pulse throbbing alongside his windpipe, and show him my teeth.

He coughs delicately into his hand, then goes on. “You will also be interested to know that in dying, she will assume full culpability for the HRVP outbreak. The story is already planted: the outbreak was a terrorist action by Pallas Ril herself, intended to inflame public sentiment against the Overworld Company.”

“Bullshit. Nobody’s gonna believe that.”

“Of course they will. We have documents proving that she had a . . . prior relationship—a romantic entanglement, I believe it will be called, with one Administrator Kerry Voorhees—”

“The head of Biocontainment? But Voorhees is a woman—”

“And,” Garrette says with a professorial gleam, “a lesbian, yes. This was thought to be a particularly salient twist. Ms. Voorhees will be, shall we say, overcome with guilt? And her suicide note will contain a full confession that implicates Pallas Ril. Ms. Voorhees—with the collusion of some convenient ecoterrorist group which we will credibly create—also set the trap which nearly took the life of Tan’elKoth and yourself. Which you escaped in such a superlatively gripping fashion—I’ve seen the recording already. It will make arresting entertainment.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I tell him. “Why would—”

“It doesn’t have to make sense,” Garrette says clinically. “In fact, it’s better if it doesn’t make sense, especially if it is sufficiently dramatic—you should understand that as well as anyone, Hari. This way, dozens of conflicting theories will dominate the netshows for weeks, months, or even years. And some of those theories will be more reasonable, more probable—will make more sense—than the truth. This is the actual social purpose of conspiracy theories. If someone does happen to uncover the truth, the truth will be relegated to the ranks of the crank conspiracies, no more likely than any of the rest. The perfect camouflage.”

“But Pallas’ fans will never accept—”

Garrette waves all objections aside. “Pallas Ril has gone insane, don’t you see? The pressures of her enormous power have driven her over the edge into madness. It is a cultural tradition: Men of great power become gods; women of great power go insane and become destroyers—who must in turn be destroyed by the men who love them. The public is primed already to believe it; this has been a running theme of a certain type of popular entertainment for three hundred years.”

“Nobody’s gonna believe it,” I repeat, but I don’t sound so sure anymore.

He turns his palm upward, purses his lips, and sighs with a hint of mild melancholy: a man who’s seen it all, and is somewhat saddened by how ordinary it was. “Most people will believe any tale, no matter how silly, unlikely, or outrageous, so long as it agrees with stories they were told as children,” he says apologetically.

The sickening truth of this leaves an ugly wormwood taste in my mouth.

“And in the end, they will believe”—Garrette goes on slowly, with a kind of mincing, sadistic delicatezza, as though he can hurt me more by breaking it to me gently—“because you believe.”

I spend a second or two trying to swallow the clot of cold oat-meal that used to be my heart; before I can gag it back down into place, Garrette goes on. “I suppose,” he says with the salacious smile of someone about to share a bit of particularly juicy gossip, “you haven’t yet realized that you’re on-line.”

Another of those mag flares goes off inside my head, and the room begins to white out around the edges again. I did know—I must have known, somehow; I was monologuing without even thinking about it.

Shit, I still am.

“Don’t worry about your audience, Hari. You have no audience. I daresay the Studio has learned its lesson about allowing you a live forum.”

He lifts a black valise-sized case from behind the table he’s using as a desk. It has a couple of handles that look like they’re brass, or maybe gold-plated. He sets it on the table and turns it around so that a black glassy rectangle like a deskscreen faces me. “I don’t think you’re familiar with the device that this unit is based on,” he says. “The locals call it the Artan Mirror. It’s remarkably similar in concept to a palmpad, but it’s adapted to work on Flow instead of quantum electromagnetism. The point is that this particular unit is powered by a griffinstone; as long as the griffinstone remains, mm . . . charged, I suppose the word would be . . . this unit will record transmissions from your thoughtmitter. This is something of a refinement on the Long Form; since the recording takes place in a separate unit, we won’t have to worry about recovering your head after you are executed. In fact, this unit is magickally resonance-locked to a similar one back in Thorncleft, at the Railhead, so that, even though you are on freemod, a certain select group of Earthside—shall we say, auditors?—can follow these events in real time. Including, I believe, your former Patron, Leisureman Vilo.”

The flares in my skull get brighter, and their hissing pushes Garrette’s voice out to where it sounds thin, metallic, like he’s talking from very, very far away, with his head in an aluminum garbage can. “You may say and do whatever you wish; the appropriate material will be spliced with the security video of your rescue of Tan’elKoth—which will open the tale with a bang, as they say. Anything of which the Board doesn’t approve will be edited out of the final version.”

Edited . . .

The final version—

Garrette and Raithe both lean back, arms identically folded, while they watch me begin to understand. They’re gonna use me to bait out Shanna, so that I have to watch her die. They’ll make a recording.

And they’ll sell it.

Both of them disappear into the white blaze behind my eyes, and for a time there is nothing but rage.

4

“THAT MUST HAVE stung a bit, but your burns are feeling better now, aren’t they?” Raithe folds up the net and puts it back into the little purse it came from.

I nod. “Yeah, Raithe. Thanks.”

My best friend leans toward me and puts his warm hand on my arm, while with the other he cuts away the white plastic stripcuffs that bind my wrists to the arms of my chair. “Now, we wouldn’t want to talk about anything that’s happened in this room, would we? That would only upset you, and everybody else.”

“You’re right,” I tell him, nodding again. He’s really perceptive, that way; he seems to understand things about me even before I do.

“And you don’t even want to think about that. You’d better just think about the job you have to do; you should forget about everything said here, until I let you know it’s all right. I mean, all that thinking—that would only upset you, too. And we don’t want you to be upset, do we?”

“No, Raithe. We sure don’t want that,” I say, giving his shoulder a grateful squeeze with my now-freed hand. “Thanks, kid. You’re the best. I sure am lucky to have a friend like you—that’s the best luck I’ve ever had.”

A thin smile flickers through his ice-colored eyes.

“Luck? No. Not luck,” he says. “It was destiny.”

5

THE CRATER IS maybe a hundred yards across, a circular depression near the top of a hill only a quarter mile beyond the lights of Palatine. I’m thinking it might be an impact crater from something like a meteorite; I’m no geologist, but I don’t think these mountains are volcanic, and anyway, I don’t think a volcanic crater would be this regular—it’s shaped like a parabolic reflector.

Stars shine down on the barren crater. All the trees and bushes and grass and shit have been burned to twisted crusty bits of char, scorched down to the bare black dirt—and recently, too, maybe just this afternoon; the whole place still reeks of kerosene.

Down in the center of the bowl is some jointed steel scaffolding a few yards high, supporting two platforms, one under the other. On the lower platform is the guy who’s doing the ritual; he’s got an altar there, and some chickens and goats and other small cheap bits of living sacrifice: the opening acts. He’s naked, but sweating tonight—even in the midnight chill of the mountains—because on the ground underneath him is a broad pit of glowing coals where he tosses the animals once they’ve been cut and bled.

I can see the grimace on his face. He’s new at this, and I think the blood has him a little weirded out. He keeps on chanting, though; the kid has heart. I can barely hear his voice over the nervous clucks and frightened bleating from the animals; and what I hear I cannot understand. This chant is not exactly language—at least, not a human language.

Also beside him on the lower platform is another young man—about the same age—who is only now starting to stir and wake from a drugged sleep to find that he is naked, and that his hands and feet are bound with thin slicing twists of unbreakable wire.

“Greg?” he says, looking up at the young man who kneels before the altar. From fifty yards away, his voice comes faintly. “Greg, what’s going on? What are you doing? Why am I tied up?” He’s still more puzzled than he is frightened.

That’ll change.

He speaks in English. I’m sure that’s significant, but right now I can’t remember why.

Five tall oil torches blaze around the scaffolding, set on iron poles in a ring about midway between the crater’s rim and the pit of glowing coals. Between the poles is strung a network of thick wire cable, bare strands gleaming in the torchlight. The wire crosses from one pole to another, suspended above the barren, blackened earth, and then around the circumference of all five. From where I sit in my sedan chair, at the crater’s rim, the wire and the five torch holders that suspend it clearly form a specific design, scaffold at its center.

A pentagram.

Alone on the top platform, naked to the indifferent moon, lies the corpse of Berne. The wig that had covered his naked skull is gone; his chest and groin have been shaved. Intricate swirling designs spider across his bare dead flesh, painted stripes that shimmer like metal in the moonlight.

The guy on the lower platform cuts the throat of a squalling cat, turning its screech into a hacking parody of coughing out a furball—and tosses it, still alive, into the coals below. A couple of the friars who carried my chair here have to turn away; animal lovers, I guess.

All four of the secmen around me—the Artan Guard, I mean—face the crater, watching. Their faces are invisible behind their smoked face shields with the silver antimagick inlays—this reminds me with sharp discomfort of the Social Police. I can’t say exactly why this bothers me so much.

Something about the Social Police—that’s part of what I can’t seem to remember.

At my shoulder, Raithe stares down avidly into the crater, licking a thin sheen of sweat off his upper lip. Garrette, on my opposite flank, just looks impatient. He’s carrying Berne’s sword, Kosall, strapped across his back—probably so much magick bound up in the blade that it would fuck up the ritual if it were down in the crater. The scabbard harness looks ridiculous over his Artan Viceroy getup, and he keeps running his fingers along beneath its straps like it’s chafing him pretty badly.

Christ, I hope so.

Down in the crater: “Greg, don’t—what are you doing?” the tied-up kid asks. His eyes are so wide I can see the whites of them from here.

Many, many years ago, when I was first starting out in the business, I took a job doing collections for the Working Dead in Ankhana; the job turned a little ugly, and I got the chance to see a couple of my recently deceased accounts settle their debts by having their corpses put out to work. This does not look like any Animate spell I’ve ever seen, and I say so.

Garrette nods, and he consults his little stack of cards. “This is not, strictly speaking, a spell,” he says, in an odd tone that struggles uncomfortably to be clinical. He looks into my eyes briefly, then coughs into his hand and adjusts his cravat like a nervous victim of an ambush interview on the nets.

“The, ah, er, metals content of the rock in this crater acts rather like a Flow reflector,” he reads. “An, er, Outside Power is attracted by a combination of the chanting, the magickal resonances of the Flow field within the cable pentagram, and, of course, the, ah, er, emanations of pain and terror that young Prohovtsi elicits from his sacrificial subjects. When it—the Outside Power—comes close to feed, the crater acts to concentrate it, and to direct its concentrated energies at the focal point; that is, er, the young fellow doing the ritual. So Prohovtsi effects the transfer of consciousness—a, mmm, kiss of life, you might say, to the corpse of, ah, Saint Berne on the upper platform.”

“A demon . . .” I say slowly, weighing the word in my mouth, feeling its shape. “You’re going to feed my wife to a demon. I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

“Hush,” Raithe murmurs. “You’re interrupting his exposition.” He uses the English term with a small thin smile, as though he’s faintly pleased with himself for knowing it.

“Hmp,” Garrette grunts, reading ahead. “Interesting.”

Down in the crater, Greg Prohovtsi stabs the goat below the ribs, rakes his blade down to part hide and flesh all the way to its pelvic girdle, and tosses it into the coals. Its guts trail behind, looping across the platform, leaving a broad swath of bloody slime. It worries me a little that I know his name—where do I know him from? And the other guy, the kid tied up beside him on the platform, his voice sounds familiar—

Garrette looks up from his cards. “You might find this interesting, Michaelson. It says here that Outside Powers—demons, as you call them—aren’t actually strictly sentient. Like Chambaraya itself, they are really rather inchoate; merely, mm, ‘energy fields of roughly confluent tropisms, that acquire sentience and will only through interaction with a living nervous system.’ Mmm, quite a phrase, that. Berne’s corpse will thus be roughly analogous to Pallas Ril herself: an avatar of a greater power—a ‘focal node of consciousness,’ as it says here. The, er, demon, though, is power of an entirely different order, to which Pallas—Chambaraya, both of them—will be entirely blind.”

“Yeah,” I tell him heavily. “Interesting. Y’know what? You talk just like fucking Tan’elKoth.”

“Do I?” Garrette says with a little smile. He squares the notecards against his palm. “Well, well.”

Down on the platform, Prohovtsi chants louder as he drags the other guy toward the edge of the platform. “Greg, please . . .” the tied-up kid begs. He’s sobbing now, crying his guts out. “Please, Greg, Jesus Christ, you can’t do this! Greg, for God’s sake, we went through school together, through the Conservatory, Jesus Christ, you never would have passed Westerling—”

“Students,” I mutter. “They’re both magick students.”

Yeah, that’s it: that’s Nick Dvorak, out of Tan’elKoth’s Applied Magick seminar. The other guy, Greg Prohovtsi, was in the same class—the one I interrupted, just the other day, when I first found out about all this . . .

Is that significant? Why can’t I pull shit together in my head? Why do I have this feeling that I’m still forgetting something?

Prohovtsi doesn’t seem to hear Dvorak’s plea; his eyes are rolled backward, up into his head, and he keeps on chanting as he drags Dvorak right to the edge. I wince—this is a little cold-blooded, even for me. “Human sacrifice?” I ask.

Raithe nods clinically. “Student thaumaturges are ideal for these operations: their Shells are well developed, powerful enough to attract a greater Outside Power, but they don’t yet have the necessary skills to defend themselves.”

“Besides,” Garrette adds, “it’s great theater.”

Prohovtsi doesn’t stick the kid; he just steps over him and shoves him off the platform with his foot. Dvorak tumbles screaming into the pit of coals. It’s only about a ten-foot drop, not even enough to really stun him; it knocks the breath out of his lungs for a few seconds, but pretty soon he gets enough air to start screaming again. He rolls around in the coals, flopping and bucking and trying to throw himself out of the pit, but he doesn’t really have a chance, not with wrists and ankles tied together. He’s already so badly burned he’d die anyway, even if he could get out.

His skeletal muscles shut down pretty soon, leaving him helplessly twitching. His flesh goes loose and brown as he roasts, the subcutaneous fat boiling out through cracks in his skin, through the wire cuts on his wrists and ankles; the liquids in his abdominal cavity boil to a high enough pressure that his belly finally bursts.

Now Prohovtsi stiffens. Cords stand out in his neck, drawing down the corners of his mouth. Moving slowly, stiffly, kind of jerkily, like a marionette operated by a clumsy child, he begins to climb up to the upper platform to join Berne’s naked corpse.

I can’t quite shake this frown—it’s giving my forehead a cramp. Something’s been bugging me ever since I woke up on the train, and finally I decide to just go ahead and ask. “Y’know,” I say, casual, noncommittal, “this all feels a little weird to me. Ever have one of those dreams where you’re doing things and you just can’t remember why? I took a knock or two on the head—I don’t know, I could have a little concussion or something—and I can’t make things make sense. You think you can help me out?”

“Of course,” Raithe says. “That’s why I’m here. To put your mind at ease.”

“All right, good. Now, just let me go through this. So: Pallas did the HRVP thing herself, right?”

“Yes.”

“To embarrass the, ah, the Artans. Make them look bad, so they’ll have to stop digging up the mountains and shit like that, right?”

He nods. “Exactly.”

“Where do you come into this?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. The Monasteries. How does a Monastic Ambassador end up as an Overworld Company—” I avoid saying flunky; I don’t want to hurt his feelings. “—insider?”

He exchanges a brief glance with Garrette, who is frowning and coming a little closer. “Your company approached us directly, asking for our help,” Raithe says smoothly. “You’re aware of Monastic expertise in dealing with fractious gods—as you yourself must know, Jhantho the Founder fought in his brother Jereth Godslaughterer’s Revolt. The Monasteries were originally founded upon a principle of opposing the willful interfeence of deities in human affairs, since it is so often to the detriment of the race as a whole.”

He spreads his hands, and does his best to look wise and benign—not easy for a twenty-five-year-old with the face of a fanatic mujahedeen warrior, all leather skin and pale sun-bleached eyes. “We of the Monasteries are educated men, Caine. We are not swayed by the superstition of the masses. In the past, we might have resisted the Company, since it is so closely linked with the Aktiri—but not because we ever actually believed Aktiri to be demons. Demons—” He nods down into the bowl. Prohovtsi now lies on the upper platform, his naked limbs entangled with those of Berne’s corpse; he kisses its cold dead lips. “—are something quite different, indeed. And now, the Monasteries and the Company share a common goal, a common interest: to save humanity—and the world—from the depredation of an insane goddess.”

“Yeah, okay, I get it,” I say. “I guess I’m just having trouble remembering how you talked me into helping you.”

Garrette turns wide eyes upon Raithe. “You swore there was no way—”

My best friend stops him with a gesture like a bladehand chop to the throat, and smiles down on me. “I’m not sure what you mean, Caine,” he says neutrally.

I shrug. “It’s kind of embarrassing, really. Can you run down the logic for me, one more time? Why did I decide to help you kill my wife?”

“Logic?” Garrette bleats incredulously. “What logic? What choice do you have?”

“Well, y’know,” I say, spreading my hands, a little sheepish at being so obvious, “there’s always a choice—”

“This is ridiculous! Raithe, make him—”

That chopping bladehand becomes a warning finger pointed at Garrette’s eye; Raithe isn’t smiling anymore. He stares at me with chilly interest, as though I’m some kind of unusual and possibly dangerous bug. “It’s the only way to save the world,” he says.

“Save the world from what?”

“From Pallas Ril. From HRVP.”

“See, I can’t quite figure out what sense that makes.”

Raithe’s eyes seem to retreat into his face, and his voice becomes blankly cautious. “You can’t?”

“Well, it seems to me, if she’s threatening the whole world to stop the OC from mining,” I say reasonably, “all you have to do is stop mining and she’ll stop threatening. Doesn’t that make more sense?”

“Stop mining?” Garrette is so astonished he can barely even sputter. “Do you have any idea how much that would cost?”

“Shut up, you idiot!” Raithe snaps, but it’s too late.

“You’re telling me that I decided your profits are more important than Shanna’s life? Don’t you think that’s a little, mmm—” I say mildly, “—unlikely?”

For a long second or two, the only sounds are the distant lover’s moans from the platform in the crater, and the tiny snaps and zips from the Artan Guard—the look on Garrette’s face has them checking their weapons. “Uh—” His panicked eyes appeal to Raithe.

“No, no, no, that’s not it at all,” my best friend says smoothly. “She’s mad, Caine. Stopping these operations wouldn’t have any effect; she’s gone completely insane, remember?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t seem like a very good reason to kill her.”

For a moment, Raithe appears entirely at a loss; he looks at Garrette, Garrette looks at him, and neither of them says anything.

I put out a hand and touch Raithe’s arm. “Relax, kid. I’m not saying you did anything wrong. This just might be a little . . . hasty, don’t you think? Maybe I should try talking to her, first.”

“No—no, it’s too dangerous, Caine,” Raithe says firmly. “She’s too dangerous. She must be destroyed—now, while we still can. It’s the only way to be sure.”

“To be sure of what?”

“To be sure,” he says with thinly concealed impatience, as though he’s tired of explaining the obvious but doesn’t want to insult me, “that she never again threatens the Future of Humanity.”

The way he pronounces the capitals deepens my frown. “Okay, I get it. You’re saying that I agreed to help you kill her, because it was the only way to save the human race. Is that it?”

“Well . . . yes,” he says thinly, sounding a little uncertain, but he must like the way it came out, because he says it again; this time, as though he means it. “Yes. The Future of Humanity depends on you, Caine.”

And for a second or two I can feel it: I can feel all those lives piled onto my back. I can feel the weight of the future cracking my spine like the lower rim of a glacier, crumbling under the billion tons above.

But—

I sigh, and shake my head, and my shoulders straighten, and then they twitch in a tiny involuntary shrug. “The Future of Humanity,” I say to Raithe apologetically, “is gonna have to fuck off.”

Together, in perfectly blank unison, Raithe and Garrette say, “What?”

“It’s too abstract,” I say uncomfortably. My hands turn over, supplicating comprehension, if not sympathy. “It’s . . . impersonal, y’know? The ‘generations yet unborn’ shit doesn’t swing any weight with me. I’m supposed to murder my wife for the sake of people I probably wouldn’t even like?”

“But—but—”

I wiggle a thumb at the Viceroy. “What if I save these people, and most of them turn out to be just like Garrette?” I say, and shudder. “Eeugh. Better we all die.”

“You can’t do this,” Raithe says.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying: I can’t do this. I won’t.”

“No—no, I mean you can’t—”

“Sure I can. Why can’t I?”

“Because—because . . .” He struggles with the words, as though he’s trying to find a way around something that he knows he shouldn’t say. “Because you promised,” he says finally. “You swore it to me, Caine.”

“Sorry,” I say simply, and mean it. “I hate to disappoint you, kid, but you’re gonna have to find a way to do it without me.”

Garrette snorts. “So much for your damned magick powers,” he says to Raithe.

“This is impossible,” Raithe says, his brow furrowed. He leans over me, staring fixedly, as though he can compel me with his bleached eyes. “I’m asking you, Caine. Me, Raithe. Do this for me.”

“Hey, kid, friend or not, you don’t really want to push me on this.”

Raithe’s mouth works speechlessly, then he simply shakes his head. “Amazing,” he says, sighing a surrender that seems to be inexplicably mixed with some sort of reluctant admiration. And now, as I look at him, I feel like I’m awakening from a dream—my burns are starting to howl, and some vague recollections of a conversation back in a hotel in Palatine begin to organize themselves behind my eyes.

My heart smokes, but I smile.

No reason to give them any more warning than I have already.

6

“THIS IS USELESS, Raithe,” Garrette says. “Now we do it my way.”

“Your way?” I ask him.

“Your cooperation,” Garrette says thinly, “would be appreciated, but it is not precisely necessary. We’ll simply tie you up and throw you into the stream. I’m sure your wife will arrive in time to save your life.”

Raithe looks grim. “Perhaps not directly in the stream, but on its bank. Should he drown before she arrives, she may not come at all. His value as bait is tied to his life; dead, he’s useless.”

“On the bank, then.” Garrette adjusts the straps of Kosall’s harness yet again and looks down into the crater impatiently. “What’s taking them so damned long? This harness is killing me.”

Dead, I’m useless?

The decision doesn’t even take a full second. I don’t mind dying. I’ve had a long time to get used to the idea. Coming up with a plan takes even less time.

It’s not that hard to make someone kill you.

I turn a gentle smile up toward Garrette. “Did you ever follow my Acting career, Vinse?” I ask in a friendly sort of way.

“I . . . am familiar with your work,” Garrette says stiffly, looking a bit puzzled. “Never a fan; I don’t care for violence.”

“Maybe you can answer a trivia question anyway. What do you say? A little Caine trivia, to pass the time while you’re waiting for your demon.”

“I hardly—”

“What,” I ask, finger lifted pedantically, “is the average lifespan of assholes who threaten Pallas Ril?”

“Are you threatening me?” Garrette says, taking a step closer to my right side. “You? The cripple? Are you mad? You can’t even stand up!”

“Okay, I admit it: trick question,” I tell him as I lean toward him, twisting to take his wrist with my left hand. Before he quite realizes how much trouble he’s in, I yank his wrist to straighten his elbow into an arm bar and pull him across me, levering his face down toward my lap, then I snake my left around his throat and grab hold of the strap of Kosall’s harness; the blade of my left wrist makes a judo choke across his larynx, levering against the pressure of my right elbow on the back of his shoulder. “Tell you one thing, though. You’re gonna lower the curve.”

The Artan Guards all yell things about stopping and letting him go and shit like that, and I hear a bunch of ratcheting clicks as they prime their assault rifles and point them at me. For one second I tense, expecting the world to vanish in a blaze of muzzle flashes and hammering slugs.

But instead Raithe shouts, “Stop! Don’t shoot!”

Garrette scrabbles at my legs with clawed fingers, but I don’t have much feeling there anyway. His throat works desperately against my choke; the back of his neck is bright red and he’s starting to convulse, and still the bastards aren’t shooting—

“Don’t you see it’s a trick?” Raithe says calmly. “It’s a complicated form of suicide: he wants you to shoot him.” He compresses his mouth like a disappointed schoolmaster. “We need Caine alive more than we do Garrette.”

He shrugs, and sighs. “Sorry, Vinse.”

Well, crap.

On the other hand, that’s no reason to let him live.

A friar says something that I don’t catch, and Raithe answers, “Certainly. But Caine must not be slain. You’re welcome to hurt him all you like.”

A burly arm comes over my shoulder; I tuck my chin and squeeze my arms against my sides to keep him from getting a choke on me like the one I’m using on Garrette; his forearm clamps across my face just below the cheekbone in a thoroughly professional neck crank that hurts like a sonofabitch and is gonna separate my cervical vertebrae if he doesn’t slack up. “Let him go,” he growls into my ear in Westerling, tightening the neck crank gradually, to give me plenty of time to think about what my life would be like if my arms were as dead as my legs are.

“Yeah, sure, what the fuck,” I grunt through the pain.

One sharp twist levers my wrist against Garrette’s throat hard enough to crack his voice box. I release him and he jerks backward, gagging on his own blood, and as he straightens I get both hands on Kosall’s hilt in the scabbard behind his shoulder.

The enchanted blade buzzes to unstoppable life.

It slices out through the scabbard, parting it like soft cheese, and deep into Garrette’s shoulder. He staggers away, spurting blood, clutching his throat, making sounds like khk . . . khk . . . khk. The friar at my back curses sharply when he sees the blade humming around toward his head; the arm that had clamped my face slips away. He must have dropped to the ground, because I don’t feel the blade meet any resistance as I wave it around behind my chair.

Garrette looks at me, blood jetting from the gaping wound in his shoulder, his voice strangled by his broken larynx, his eyes wide with horror. I shrug. “Nothing personal, Vinse.”

For a moment, we’re at a standoff. Everyone stays back; the Artan Guards have their rifles leveled, but they don’t want to shoot me, and nobody is willing to get within reach of Kosall.

And I sure as hell can’t go anywhere.

Garrette teeters on the crater’s rim. He’s still standing, but his knees tremble, going rubbery—he doesn’t have long to live. Nobody but me pays any attention to him at all.

“Caine, put the sword down,” Raithe orders, and he must be enforcing that order with some kind of power; invisible fingers pluck at my will. “Put it down,” he repeats, and my hand loosens. His eyes reflect starfire, and he steps closer. “That’s it. Drop the sword.”

“One more step—” I tell him, raising the blade. It’s covered with some kind of unfamiliar design: runes painted in silver. “—and I’ll drop it right down your fucking throat.”

The runes on the blade seem to take the fire out of his eyes, and he retreats.

What the fuck do I do now?

Before I can decide—

Like a maggot crawling from the mouth of a dead man, Berne’s corpse climbs over the lip of the crater.

7

THE CORPSE RISES: a slow unfolding like cereus opening toward the stars. Painted designs like Celtic knots of metal spiral across its naked flesh and catch the moonlight in golden shimmers. The stitching that closes its belly where my knife had opened him up looks like a steel zipper; lacking the wig that had topped it when it was on display, the crown of its head is all exposed bone, skin fixed to skull with aluminum staples around the vanished hairline. In the center of the top of its skull is the jagged gap where my little leafblade went in—no reason to patch it on a dead man—and within I can see something glassy and black, as though the preservative gas turned what’s left of Berne’s brain to obsidian. When it finally lifts its head, its dead eyes quest blankly, fastening on nothing, wheeling with the generalized slow threat of a snapping turtle waving open jaws through water impenetrable with murk.

Somehow it holds us, all of us, even the secmen: we can only watch, breathless. Down on the platform, Prohovtsi lies motionless: unconscious or dead, no way to tell from here. The corpse of Berne stretches out its arms, fingers waving like the tentacles of anemones clutching at half-sensed prey.

Garrette, dying, twists away from it, spraying blood from the deep gash that opens his shoulder. Blood splashes the corpse’s face, and a dark meaty tongue darts out, lizardlike, to lap it away. Something in the taste brings light into its eyes.

I don’t even see its hand move—somehow, instantly, it has Garrette by the unwounded shoulder in an unbreakable grip. Garrette’s grunting turns to a long splintery hkkkkkkkk—which I can only guess is his attempt to scream—as it pulls him into a lover’s embrace. The demon-ridden corpse latches onto Garrette’s face with teeth opened to a jaw-cracking yawn, covering the Viceroy’s mouth with its own: a rapist doing CPR.

Demons feed on pure Flow, but the only kind they like is Flow tuned to the specific frequencies of anguish, terror, and despair by the Shell of a living creature. Usually, they lurk around in their incorporeal way, kind of like vultures, circling and waiting for something to suffer, unable to do much more than nudge a depressive’s Shell toward a darker mood, that kind of thing. The chance to actually inflict pain and death—which goes along with inhabiting a physical form—must be quite a treat.

The demon that animates Berne looks like it’s having a good time, anyway: the corpse has a hard-on like a raw bratwurst the size of my forearm.

Garrette is screaming into the corpse’s open mouth.

The corpse’s free hand shreds Garrette’s clothing, stripping him naked while he still lives—then keeps on clawing at him, ripping away jagged scraps of flesh, tearing into his belly to yank whole handfuls of muscle out of his guts. Garrette’s bowels let go, flooding their intertwined legs with shit, but the corpse doesn’t seem to notice. It drives its hand through the Viceroy’s ravaged abdominal wall, blood gushing over its forearm as the fingers go in, and then the wrist, and then it slides the arm in like a penis, reaching up toward Garrette’s heart.

And somehow I know what it’s doing. I know I’m right.

Cardiac massage.

It’s manually pumping Garrette’s heart, to keep the brain alive, to keep it sending out those frequencies of pain and terror and despair. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to Garrette—the inconceivable intensity of such violation—and I sure as hell never want to find out.

Finally Garrette’s struggles fade into nerveless spastic twitching, and the demon casts his body down into the crater, one-handed: a kid tossing away a licked-clean popsicle stick. Berne’s corpse stretches like a sleepy cat, and its eyes now fix upon me with impersonal malice.

From its open mouth comes a mineral clacking like rocks knocking together. The clacking stops for a moment as the dead chest fills with air—lacking the breathing reflex, it hadn’t inhaled before trying to speak. Now the clacking returns, gets faster and faster, becoming a stutter, gradually developing into a dry, inhumanly passionless voice. “You havvvve my sworrrrd.”

It’s not Berne. It’s not him inside that body at all—I can keep telling myself that, but the look in its eyes and the sound of its voice sucks at my strength in a way that Raithe’s commands could not. I can’t even hold Kosall up anymore, and when Raithe steps close, one hand taking the pommel and the other levering between my forearms to twist my wrists in a very efficient aikido-style disarm, I don’t even try to resist.

The demon turns to Raithe. “It waszzz dyinnnnng.” It must be talking about Garrette. “I hungerrrr. Not-t-t-t a violationnnnn?”

Raithe shrugs, and mumbles what sounds like the Westerling version of Waste not, want not. He goes fearlessly to face the demon, reverses Kosall, and offers the hilt to its dead hand. “You understand your task?”

Idiot fucking moron motherfucking idiot—!

I could have killed myself with the fucking sword. I could have swung it at my own head—

But I didn’t think of it in time.

The corpse takes Kosall by the hilt—and its blade does not buzz, without the grip of a living hand to trigger its enchantment. The demon lifts it, examining the gleam of moonlight along its edge and the liquid shimmer of the runes painted on the blade from quillons to razor point. “Pallasss Rilllll,” the demon clicks, and some abstract image of remembered lust around its eyes makes me wonder if there might not be some of Berne in there after all. And suddenly, without transition, the demon’s right in front of me. Its eyes glitter like marbles—which I guess they might be—and from its throat comes a slow, low groan like an old, tired lover on the verge of a blood-spurting orgasm.

It says, “Heyyy, Cainnne.”

Déjà vu claws at my throat, twists my guts toward vomiting.

This isn’t happening. This has to be some kind of dream.

“Whyyy donn’t youuu runnn? Youuu alllwayszzz used-d-d to runnn,” it says, the blade of Kosall rising to exactly the same angle as its stiffened penis. It leans close enough that I can smell the remnants of Garrette’s blood and the preservative gas on its breath. “Whazzza matterr? Sssommmethinnnng wronnnng with yourrr legszzz?”

Small sick noises come out of my throat. I try to push myself down into the chair.

Raithe touches its shoulder. “Pallas Ril,” he reminds it firmly.

“Hunngerrrr. Ssshe mussst . . . die fasst-t-t-?”

“Yes,” Raithe says firmly. “Swiftly. Instantly. And precisely as you were instructed; otherwise, she will destroy you herself, without effort.”

“Nnnhh. Hunnnngerrrrrr . . .” Its voice trails into a mechanical growl like an idling turbine.

“Yes, I suppose you are,” Raithe says thoughtfully, and then his colorless eyes swing round to me, and he stretches his lips into what he probably thinks looks like a smile. “And, I think, I have in mind the perfect snack.”

8

I DON’T KNOW how long it takes the demon to haul me up the mountain. Hours, probably—an endless nightmare of bouncing facedown over its rock-hard shoulder. I fade in and out of consciousness, blacking out from pain and fatigue and a fucking in-credible migraine from hanging upside down: like I’m birthing wasps inside my skull. I puked out the last of whatever was in my guts a long time ago; now, whenever I wake up I retch and dry-heave until my eyes uncross. When I cough, I can taste blood.

And the goddamn sword keeps knocking me in the eye. They found another scabbard from somewhere and tied Kosall into it before they strapped its harness across the corpse’s back. I twist my wrists against the thin unbreakable strap of the stripcuffs that bind them together behind my back; it slices through the flesh, and blood trails down my inverted arms to the elbow, then trickles up my back and around my neck to drip along my jaw.

If I can just get one hand loose, and get hold of Kosall’s hilt—

The demon jogs upward at a steady lope. There is no such thing as fatigue for its dead muscles, which do not rely on chemical reaction for their energy. It skirts the pass, avoiding the easy road, clambering high up the facing slope of Cutter Mountain, inhumanly agile among the crags, even with bare toes and a single free hand.

Hanging down over its shoulder, I can see nearly all of Khryl’s Saddle below me. The crest of the pass has become a rat’s nest of rail spurs sprawling around the stark skeletons of a half-completed depot; a customs office roughly marks the official border between Transdeia and the Ankhanan Empire. There are tents everywhere, from small two-man wall tents to enormous canopies: a mess hall, a corrugated machine shed large enough that you could dismantle a pair of steam locomotives inside it and not get the parts mixed up, latrines, a Company store, and god knows what all.

An Overworld Company base camp: they’re laying rail down the western slope of the Saddle. Into the Empire. That goddamn rail line looks like a tongue, lapping out to get a taste of Ankhana.

The top curve of the sun lifts out of the eastern foothills, sparking a gold shimmer in my eyelashes. I guess that having this demon burst into flame or something at the first touch of sunrise was too much to hope for.

High on the western face of Cutter Mountain—not far below me, now, where I should have been able to spot the spring—all I can see is a low brick cylinder out of which runs a long, twisting sluice pipe, new enough that the leaking joints haven’t yet begun to rust. The pipe empties into a slats-and-pitch watertank on stilts, which in turn sprouts a number of smaller pipes that spider down into the rising skeleton of the depot.

Down in the tangle of rails, a shifting crowd of workmen form a long, disorganized queue—too tired and bleary from a night spent at this elevation even to bother looking up, where they might see us. Now, at dawn, the construction people have come stumbling and scratching out of their tents to line up for water from a spigot-fed trough, churning the soppy earth around it into ankle-deep muck.

That ankle-deep muck is now the headwaters of the Great Chambaygen.

Raithe stayed behind, keeping out of the watershed with his secmen—fake secmen, I realize now. They had to be Social Police in drag, because no secman ever born—let alone four of them—would have stayed cool through what happened down there at the crater. Soapy, though, he never gets nervy; the fucking Apocalypse wouldn’t make a soapy blink.

They have to stay on the far side of the crest of the pass, because Shanna will be able to feel their hostile intention if they come into her watershed. They’ll be around, though. I don’t know what it is about that Raithe fucker—I don’t know why he hates me the way he does—but real hate, bone hate, is something I understand. He’ll be watching.

The demon carries me northwest, paralleling the wash of wastewater that trails from the trough to join the overflow from the tank above it. A few minutes’ hike takes us down a quarter mile west of the camp, where the sewage and overflow reenters the original streambed: a small, shallow wash that leads to a tiny waterfall, tumbling maybe fifteen feet to a rocky pool in a crevice. The demon carries me carefully around the folds of rock, out of sight of the camp, moving into the wash beside the stream. The surface of the stream is flattened, its ripples rounded and smoothed and thick with grease, and the water smells of urine and sulphur.

The demon clambers down the rocks beside the falls, then tosses me onto the jagged stone like a sack of dead cats. Hands cuffed behind me, useless legs, there’s nothing I can do to break the fall except tuck my head and hope I don’t fracture my skull. My head bounces off the rock, showering stars through my vision and actually driving off the migraine for about five seconds before it comes roaring back hard enough to kill a bull.

The corpse dips one hand into the stream, and tilts it above my face, drizzling the filthy water across my lips. Then it cups water into its hand again and lifts it to my brow, letting the slime drip down through my hair, baptizing me with the foulness the Overworld Company has made of the headwaters of the Great Chambaygen.

In seconds, my nerves begin to tingle with a warm here-ness, an odd and undefinable sensation of being hugged and held and comforted by something inside me. Scabs peel from my burns as my flesh begins to renew itself.

This is her way of telling me she’s on her way.

Oh, Christ, if only I could die before she gets here—

If only—

And as scalding tears etch my face like acid, the demon crouches beside me and begins to feed.

9

OUTSIDE THE WORLD Mommy sang with the river; when Faith got too scared, she could snuggle her head a little deeper into these amazing silky sheets and pull the covers up over her head and close her eyes and let the music carry her away. She had been really scared at first, when the man had grabbed her and Daddy got so angry, but you couldn’t stay really scared very long, not with the river singing in your head.

Cause the river was always gonna be the river, so there was nothing to be scared of.

Besides, this was a really amazing house, bigger than home even, and it was in the middle of Boston, which Faith had never been to before and she hadn’t seen very much of it except from the window of Grandmaman’s big car, but she was still pretty sure that Boston was amazing, too. She didn’t mind too much staying here for a while, because there were all these people who were really really nice to her all the time, and she didn’t have to put away her own clothes or make her bed or anything. There was an old lady whose name was Laborer Dobson who didn’t seem to have anything to do except follow Faith around and pick up after her. Laborer Dobson was a pretty nice old lady, though she didn’t say much, but she smiled all the time and didn’t seem mean and once already had slipped Faith a piece of the most amazing candy that was called a chocolate truffle.

Mommy had been working really really hard on the Overworld sick people, and she’d been singing the whole time, a new kind of song that Faith didn’t recognize but that she loved all the same. Mommy was content, she was happy, and so Faith was happy too, even when Laborer Dobson came in and made her get out of bed and get all dressed up for Sabbath Breakfast. Faith knew it was supposed to be capitals from the kind of serious way everybody looked when they said it, and from the dress she was supposed to wear, which was a big white fluffy dress that went all the way down to the floor, with puffy sleeves and a really amazing satin shirty kind of thing.

A couple of Laborers, whose names she didn’t know yet, neatened up her room while Laborer Dobson fixed her hair, and pretty soon she was ready for Sabbath Breakfast. Laborer Dobson held her hand all the way down the three flights of really really big curvy stairs, through the front hall to the dining room.

The dining room was really big, with wood paneling up higher than her head, and satiny-looking wallpaper above that. The table was really big, too, with candles on it and everything. Her uncles—whose names she had forgotten already—and Grandmaman were already sitting down, and there were more Laborers standing behind each chair with fancy uniforms on and real serious looks on their faces. Laborer Dobson showed Faith to a place that was set for her with a special chair, so that when she climbed up into it she was sitting all the way up at the big table just like a grown-up. She clambered up onto the chair and suddenly started to giggle.

“Faith,” Grandmaman said in a mean voice. “Stop that snickering at once.”

“Sorry, Grandmaman,” she said, and she put both hands over her mouth to try and keep her delighted laughter inside.

“What on Earth has you tickled, child? Share your joke with your uncles. I’m certain they will enjoy it.”

“There isn’t any joke, Grandmaman. I’m just happy.”

“Happy? Of course you are. Coming here to a proper household must be a terrific relief—”

“Not your house,” Faith said, giggling. “I’m happy because Daddy’s here.”

“What?”

“Not here here,” Faith explained. “There here. He’s with Mommy, now.” Her golden eyebrows drew together in a puzzled frown. “But Mommy doesn’t seem very happy about it . . .”

10

THE TOUCH OF Hari’s lips brought the goddess back to her own individual thread of melody within the Song of Chambaraya.

Since the instant she had stepped forth from Ankhana, she had buried herself in Chambaraya’s supernal harmonies, finding within them the infinite mathematical iteration of her theme: an endless Bach invention upon the semilife of her countervirus. Her sole distraction had been Faith’s distress—her own moment of maternal weakness—when she had become once again merely Shanna Michaelson, when she had cast aside her task and stridden at speed toward the nearest transfer point. But Hari had sworn, through Faith, that he would handle Earth; he had reminded the goddess that she had her own job to complete. She trusted him.

She had to.

And so she had surrendered to the Song, and watched a billion generations of her creation wheel across her consciousness like a galaxy in which each star is life itself. She had found her HRVP sample in Kris Hansen, and had cultured it in her own bloodstream; here as well did she create and culture its cure. At the close of a billion generations, its chorus still sang sweet and true: without a single discordant mutation.

But when Hari touched her now—sharp as a needle in the swollen chancre that her headwater had become—she felt his pain and his distress. Across the leagues she touched him with power; she knit his skin and eased his heart, while a pang of pure dread struck her own. This sensation was so alien to her nature that for a time she could not identify it, nor could she guess at its source.

Her daughter’s distant counterpoint still chimed within her melody, happy to be part of her even in the alien place to which her grandmother had confined her. Faith was not afraid; her father had promised he would come, had promised to make everything right—yet he had come here, alone, wounded and in pain, leaving Faith in the hands of his enemies.

And perhaps, in this, she had found what poisoned her serenity with dread.

The grace note within Chambaraya’s Song that was the physical form of Pallas Ril arose from its place of contemplation—a sun-dappled glade amidst oak and walnut, above a willow-lined stream some three days’ ride to the south and east of Ankhana—and sought within the Song a hint of remembered phrase, the echoed theme of a rocky splashing rapids seven leagues away. She caught that phrase within herself, and Sang it as the river did; in joining those notes to the slumberous rhythm of the sunlit glade, she brought them together in space and time.

One single stride carried her from the glade to the rapids.

Another seven leagues away, she found the low susurration of a marsh, rustling with the laughter of cattails and the subterranean rumble of solemn trees; again, she melded the disparate melodies into her Song that she might step from the rapids to the marsh.

In this manner, she strode the length of the river.

As she approached, she felt within him pain far beyond any mere insult of the flesh: terror and cold rage. Horror. Despair.

And yet around him there was no threat, no danger. She could taste the camp at the crest of the pass as though its sewage drained into her mouth; she could faintly hear the cacophony of a thousand lives at the very verge of her watershed. None within the range of her perception meant him ill—their lives were merely the baseline of humanity, the all-too-human blind stumble toward vague dreams of food, sex, and comfort.

What had he to fear?

Thirteen steps brought her to a dawn-shadowed slope below the pass men called Khryl’s Saddle: a curve of earth that joined sawtoothed peaks soot-stained to the color of steel. Within the Song, she found the fundamental trickling chime that was a small waterfall tumbling into a rocky cleft, its music now driven by the allegro hammer of Hari’s heart. One final reality-warping step brought her to his side, into the rocky cleft with the waterfall tumbling above her head.

He lay on his back at the waterfall’s foot, half wedged into a crack in the stone with the spray in his face, his arms bound behind him and a rag tied through his teeth. He moaned thickly through the rag, and his eyes spoke to hers with numb, unreasoning horror.

She knelt beside him, the waterfall’s spray cool and welcome across the back of her neck; even its savor of human waste was not unpleasant, because the grasses and algaes downstream fed upon it and burgeoned as they never had before. She laid her hand upon his cheek.

“It’s all right, Hari,” she said. “I’m here.” She could have built a voice of birdsong and tinkling water, of the skitter of marmots and the creak of stones forced open by the roots of grasses and scrub brush, but she spoke instead with the mouth and throat of Pallas Ril, for the same reason that she pulled at the knot of the rag tied into his mouth with her fingers, instead of calling upon her power. Sometimes, even a goddess must use a human touch.

She understood now his distress: someone had dumped him here to die, and he had feared that she would not arrive in time to save him. Within herself, she allowed a gentle, melancholy undernote to enter the harmonies of her Song. After all these years together, she had never been able to make him understand that a human life is only an eddy in the current; when that eddy, beautiful but transitory, unknots itself into the river, nothing is lost. There is nothing that can be lost.

The river is eternal.

Tears streamed down his face, mixing with the greasy film from the waterfall’s spray. She twisted the knot open in the dirty rag that bound his mouth, and he shook his head aside from her touch, spitting the rag away into the stream with a convulsive gasp. “Shanna—run,” he rasped, his voice jagged as broken glass. “It’s a trap. Run!”

She smiled. How could he still understand so little? “There is no threat here, Hari—”

Hari screamed: a wordless shriek of raw overpowering panic.

It shocked her, stopped her mouth like a punch. Suddenly, inconceivably, the vague dread that had troubled her shifted beneath her with a tectonic infrasound rumble. The planet, of which she was a part, was no longer solid. She discovered, awe breaking over her like the growing light of the dawn in the mountains, that she was actually frightened.

Hari thrashed. His shout came out ripped and bloody as though he vomited barbed wire: “Shanna goddamn your eyes for once in your fucking life just do what I say and FUCKING RUN!”

She stood, and started to turn, and she felt a shock at her shoulder, as though she’d been struck on the collarbone, sharply but not hard—a slap from a child, a lick from a switch, nothing more, no real impact, just a cold wave that passed through her almost too swiftly to be felt, icy wire drawing itself from that shoulder down at an angle to her ribs on the opposite side. She tried to finish the turn, to see what had struck her, but now she was falling, sliding sideways and down and she couldn’t feel her legs, she couldn’t feel her left arm, she reached out for the ground with her right and struck hard on the stone, and flopped faceup—

And standing over her was a woman wearing her clothes, except it wasn’t a woman, not all of one—it was only a torso with the left arm attached; where the head and right arm should be was only a gaping wound the size of the whole world, and as the legs buckled and the headless one-armed torso twisted and crumpled toward the ground, the jet of heart’s blood from the severed aorta fountained like cabernet spraying from a spinning wine bottle, glittering in the rising sun, a rainbow that took her breath away with its beauty.

She thought: That’s me. That’s my blood.

She tried to speak, to say Hari—Hari, I’m hurt, you have to help me, but most of her lungs had been left behind within her collapsing torso. She could do no more than move her lips and make faint, desperate smacking noises with her tongue.

Hari, she tried to say, Hari, please—

Then a man-shaped shadow loomed over her, a huge, powerfully built nude figure in silhouette against the lacy white clouds of the dawnlit sky. The silhouette lifted a long broad-bladed sword and reversed its grip upon it, to drive it downward like a fencepost to be set in hard clay.

Its point came toward her eyes, and then she saw no more.

11

IN THE MIDST of the customary Shanks family Sabbath Breakfast, with the morning sun bright through the sheers from the garden outside and the plates still steaming in the liveried servants’ hands, Faith leaped upright from her chair, pounded the polished mahogany tabletop with her tiny fists—ripping her antique ivory linen place setting—and shrieked as though rats gnawed her toes.

An instant later, before anyone in the astonished family could so much as enquire what might be wrong, she collapsed. In the shocked silence that followed, Avery clearly, unmistakably heard a plaintive childish whisper from her granddaughter’s lips: “Hari—Hari, I’m hurt. You have to help me. Hari, Hari, please—”

The servants sprang to her side, and Avery’s voice cracked like a whip over their heads. “Back! Don’t touch her. Dobson, get Professional Lieberman up here instantly.”

Faith was neither choking nor convulsing; while everyone waited for the doctor to arrive from his rooms in the coach house, Avery’s teeth clenched until her ears rang.

His name—

Bitter, bitter, most impossibly bitter, that in Avery Shanks’ own home, her own granddaughter had whispered his name.

12

RIGHT UP TO the bitter, bloody end, I keep on thinking that there must be some way out of this. We’ve been here so many times—trapped, no way out, no chance to survive—and we’ve always done it, we’ve always pulled it off, against all odds, against all reason, against all hope. We’ve always found a way to live.

Through every second that I’ve lain here—on this cliff, with the sewage of the construction camp splashing across my face, with the demon inside Berne’s corpse drinking my horrible aching dread—I have straight-armed despair by numbering all the times we somehow came through. All the way to the end, I force myself to believe that Shanna will see the trap, that she’ll save me, that together we’ll rescue our child, that my father will still be alive, that we can all go home again.

That somehow, I can still get my happy ending.

Then when she comes and the demon still doesn’t strike, I try to speak to her with my eyes, to reach her with the language of my horror; I try to bite through the dirty rag that fills my mouth with the taste of dust and human shit.

She could crumble the rag to its component atoms with the merest gesture; instead she fumbles at the knot with her too human, too fallible fingertips, and when I can spit the rag aside and tell her, she still does not believe me, she still tries to soothe me, and all the furious dread explodes from my throat in a scream that shuts her down, shuts her up, and I see in her eyes that she’s starting to understand—but she’s never been fast, that way; it’s always taken her time to adjust her paradigm, to see the unexpected, and this is time that no wealth at my command can buy her. I rage at her, howling, cursing, goading her with savage words, anything to get her up, to get her moving, to get her away: and so she stands, and starts to turn—

And dies, with my curses as her only farewell.

With a lifeless hand upon its hilt, Kosall gives no rattlesnake buzz of warning. The corpse appears behind her with that invisible speed, and the blade, too, moves too fast for the eye: I see the beginning of the stroke, and the end—the arc of the blade is visible only as a lick of silver flame that tears out her front in a one-blink flash from collarbone to rib, bisecting one breast—

And half of her falls away from the other half, and I have no breath left to scream.

The pieces of my wife fall, and her guts splash out across the rock with the wet slaps of handfuls of mud hitting a sidewalk. The demon Berne steps over her headless, one-armed torso, stands over her—her hazel eyes pick up the blue of the dawn sky, and her perfect lips writhe soundlessly, and her hair gleams with burnished-walnut flame, and oh my god how am I gonna live, now?

But, of course, I’m not gonna live for long.

The corpse lifts the sword high over its head and lets the blade swing down to vertical. He drives it down like he’s staking a vampire, except her heart’s over there somewhere, and the blade with its painted-on runes of silver chops through her eyes, through her skull, through her brain, and into the stone beneath her.

The blade buzzes for one scant second, as though registering the passing of her life. It slides a handbreadth down into the stone below her riven skull and sticks fast; the demon releases it, and its hilt waves a slow good-bye in the breeze alongside the waterfall.

“Yessss,” the demon murmurs in its cracked-quartz voice. “Yesss, that’sss it-t-t-t.”

It does that fast thing to reach my side before I really see it move, and those glass marble eyes open to swallow me whole.

“Yesss, Cainnnnnne. It’sss allll true.”

And I know what it’s talking about. I know what is true.

Other men, they might ask, Why?

I know why.

All this—losing my career, the Abbey, Faith, Dad, and now . . . now . . . this unspeakable thing—all this happened for a reason. For one simple, inarguable, inexcusably self-absorbed reason. Because I couldn’t sit down and shut up. Because I’m too fucking stupid to know better. Because I had to do something, to feel like a man.

Which are all different ways of saying—

I did this, to everyone and everything that I love, because I had to pretend I can still be Caine, one last time.

13

THE DEMON BERNE clasps its enormous erection and swings its leg across me, straddling my chest like a nightmare goblin, and its other hand strokes my face.

“I lovvvve youuuu, Cainnnne.”

It leans toward me like it might bite. Like it might want a kiss. “I lovvvvve youuuuuu.”

And, you know? I think it’s telling the truth.

An odd, distracted peace settles over me, a hollow sort of oh never mindedness. The astonishing thing is that in an absent, unexpected way, I’m kind of okay with this. I can guess what’s happening; I’ve seen it dozens of times, in people who take terrible—even mortal—wounds.

The I’m all right syndrome.

No matter what happens to you, once the first shock of uncomprehending disbelief is over, the next thing you think is: Well, it could have been worse. You’re always kind of impressed with how well you’re handling it, whatever it might be, from a knife in the guts to the death of a child. I wouldn’t be surprised if Shanna died thinking, This isn’t so bad, really . . .

The demon Berne caresses my face with its cold, unyielding palm, feeding—

And maybe that’s where the I’m all right thing comes from: a cluster of demons sucking away your despair, your terror, your grief. Maybe that’s what people are really saying when they shake their heads sadly and nod at each other and murmur in low tones It just hasn’t hit him yet.

They’re saying: The demons are still feeding.

By indulging their own compulsive hunger, demons are doing us a favor.

Once they get full, though, you better watch your ass.

That’s why I can lie here with jagged stone under my back, with Shanna’s blood splashed across my face and her intestines being gently rinsed in the waterfall’s mist, with my useless legs and my useless life, and feel nothing but hope that the corpse goes ahead and kills me while it’s still hungry.

Because I have an idea what’s coming, and I don’t want to be here when it arrives.

The demon Berne licks its lips, and a small round hole appears in one cheek with a wet smack and splinters of its teeth blow out through the other cheek, then another hole appears in its temple and one of its glass eyes shatters and its head snaps sideways like a horse that’s been stung by a wasp and now, from far away up the mountain, I can hear the mechanical chatter of chemical assault rifles.

Sounds just like it does in the movies.

Fucking great shooting—I keep hoping that one of those bullets will go just a hair astray and plow through my skull, but no such luck. Must be the Social Police doing the shooting; everybody knows that Soapy never misses.

More bullets strike with semirhythmic fleshy slaps like a vaudeville hambone guy warming up, dragging the corpse upright and blowing it spinning away, a herkyjerky dance as it wheels its arms and splays its legs, trying to stay with me on the ledge, but more rifle fire sputters above and now a fire hose blast of slugs blows it right the fuck off the cliff.

It drops away, and I can hear a meaty slap or two as it bounces off the rock face on its way down.

And now, I can feel that it’s gone: I can feel it by the thermonuclear fireball that expands within my chest and burns my heart to ashes and roasts my throat and oh my god oh my god oh my god oh . . . god . . .

. . . god . . .

14

SOME UNIMAGINABLE ETERNITY later: adrift, hopelessly becalmed on my vast bitter ocean, shadows dance before my eyes and voices come to me—faintly, filtering in from the unknowable, irrelevant universe beyond the ache that is all I am.

Our agreement is entirely specific, says a voice that seems both human and synthetic: these are sounds a clockwork doll might make, had it a mouth and throat of flesh. He will be delivered to the capital for execution. The sword will be secured.

The voice that answers is exactly the opposite: though the words are dry and precise, it thrumms like a plucked bowstring. Yes, of course. I will see to him. As for the sword, this is a relic of Saint Berne, and is the rightful property of the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth. It shall be extremely well cared for.

I open my eyes and roll my head toward them to tell them both to shut the fuck up, and I see that suede-faced Ambassador motherfucker squared off with one of the fake secmen.

Between them, in the rainbow spray from the waterfall above, Kosall’s hilt swings back and forth like the arm of a metronome counting off the measure of all the empty noise the world has become. The spray condenses into a trickle, a tiny rill pale-pink with her blood, channeled by the rocky cleft away from the stream to dry in the sun upon the barren stone.

Her eyes, split by the blade that cleaves her forehead like a horrible Athene-in-reverse, are still bright and clear. The spray has washed away the dust that would settle there, and they still sparkle like gemstones, and I can’t understand why I am still breathing.

Raithe turns his own stone-gleaming eyes on me. “What do you say, Caine?” he says with playful mock deference. “Are you ready to go?”

Speech is beyond me.

Raithe shrugs at the fake secman. “You have my thanks. Convey the warm regards of the Monasteries to your superiors in the Overworld Company. Tell them we apologize for Administrator Garrette’s death, but you yourself can testify that it was unavoidable.”

“Agreed,” the fake secman says. “The embassy will be notified of the new Viceroy as circumstances demand.”

“We stand ready to welcome him, in the spirit of true brotherhood,” Raithe says smugly. “Fare you well.”

The fake secmen don’t answer; Soapy never says good-bye. They silently about-face and march off along the ledge.

I was hoping they’d kill me. But that would be redundant.

I’m still breathing, but that doesn’t mean I’m alive.

So it is when Raithe yanks Kosall free by its quillons, bracing Shanna’s face beneath his foot to scrape the blade out of her skull, I feel nothing.

So it is when he leans over me, his blue-white eyes sparking with the same hunger that had been reflected in the glass marbles in the sockets of Berne’s dead face, and says—

“I am Raithe of Ankhana. You, Caine, are my prisoner, and you will die.”

—I am unsurprised to hear my own hollow voice reply, “I’m not Caine. There is no Caine. Caine is dead.”

And somehow this fills him with exaltation. He stands, his brow aflame with glory, and spreads his arms like he wants to hug the whole world. He throws back his head and cries to the limitless sky, “This is the day! This is the day! I AM!”

I have the strength to wonder dully what it might be he thinks he is, but I don’t have the strength to care about the answer. Right now, I can only think of Faith.

I can’t even imagine what this has done to you.

My god, Faith . . . I know you can’t hear me, but—

My god, Faith.

I’m sorry.

THE CROOKED KNIGHT, as with all knights errant, had a path to follow and lessons to learn; each turning upon his path was another lesson, and each lesson led to another turning.

The crooked knight slowly, gradually, and painfully discovered some of the truths that his life had undertaken to teach him: what the road to hell is paved with, that there is nothing pure in this world, and that no good deed goes unpunished.

He learned these truths too late, of course; for he was, after all, the crooked knight.