FOUR

ANKHANA SPREAD LIKE a canker across the valley floor, a rank and oozing fester that drained its sewage and manufacturing waste into the river that men called the Great Chambaygen. As the barge lumbered round a river-bend far to the north and east of the Imperial capital, the city coalesced out of the pall of smog that covered it: a ragged blot upon the earth, washed by the haze of intervening miles to the necrotic grey of dead flesh.

At the bow of the riverbarge stood a fey in woolen clothes tattered by time and hard travel. He looked as though the clothes may have fit him once, long ago—he had the frame for it, broad shouldered for one of the First Folk—but now they hung on him as though on a rack. His face had been carved into deep lines: scars of privation and grief deeper than any a true primal ever shows. His hair stuck straight out from his scalp around his sharply pointed ears: a platinum brush the length of the first joint of his thumb. His boots might have been fine, if they were not so battered; for a belt, he wore a thick-braided hemp throwline, tied around his waist. He bore no purse, and in place of a gentleman’s weapons he had only the mop on which he leaned.

He stared downriver at Ankhana, and his knuckles whitened on the mop’s handle. His lips pulled back over teeth sharp as a wolf’s, and his great golden eyes, their pupils slitted to razored vertical lines in the afternoon sun, burned with barely controlled desperation. Once, not so long ago, he had been a prince.

His name was Deliann.

“You workin’, decker?” the foredeck second rasped behind him. “Or you fuckin’ off?”

The primal gave no sign that he heard.

“Hey, shitsuck, you think I’m not talkin’ to you?”

Thunderheads spread like a hand extended to grasp the towering twin-bladed spire of the Colhari Palace; they grumbled and spat lightning at the earth. He could see, even from this distance, that the threatened rain held off: the black-brown coal smoke of the Industrial Park still hung thickly over the northern quarters of the city. No rain had yet come to drive it down from the autumn sky and wash it into the river.

Another storm, another fishkill: the runoff from Ankhanan streets slew river life wholesale. Deliann shook his head bitterly. You have to go a week downriver before you can drink the water again. And my brothers like to remind me that I am one of these people.

But I’m not. I’m not.

What I am is worse.

For more than a thousand years that city had fouled these waters, from its very birth as a river pirates’ camp on the island that was now Old Town. Panchasell Mithondionne himself had laid siege to the city, more than nine hundred years ago, leading the Folk Alliance against it when the city was a haven for feral humans during the Rebellion. He had fallen there, killed in his final failed assault, passing the lordship of his house, and all the First Folk, to the Twilight King, T’farrell Ravenlock.

This is where we lost, Deliann thought. The Folk had fought the ferals for decades beyond the Siege of Ankhana, but this had been the turning point of the war. Now, nearly a millennium later, even feys who were themselves veterans of the Feral Rebellion, who had fought the ferals hand-to-hand, no longer called them ferals. Everyone called them what they called themselves: human—“of the humus.”

The Dirt People.

“Hey.” Now the voice behind him was accompanied by a rough shove on the shoulder and a short rrrip of tearing cloth—the foredeck second’s fighting claw had tangled in Deliann’s shirt. He turned to face the foredeck second, an aging ogrillo with a rumpled mass of scar where his left eye used to be and a broken ivory stump where his left tusk had once jutted up from his undershot jaw. The foredeck second kept his snout canted slightly to the primal’s right so that he could look down at him with his remaining red-gleaming eye.

“You know the only thing I hate worse’n fuckin’ lazy-ass deckers tryin’ to scam their passage?” The ogrillo leaned close enough to hook out Deliann’s eye with one twitch of his tusk. “Fuckin’ elves, that’s what. Now: You moppin’? Or you swimmin’?”

The primal barely glanced at the second; he looked up, beyond the ogrillo’s shoulder, at the twin teams of ogre poleboys that now jammed their thirty-foot lengths of oiled oak hard into the river’s bed. The teams—each made up of six ogres nine or more feet tall, weighing over half a ton apiece—leaned into their poles in slowly counted cadence, pitting their massive muscles against the barge’s momentum, their clawed feet digging furrows in the barge’s deck cleats.

“Why are we stopping?” he asked tonelessly.

“You stupid, shitsuck? Ankhana’s top port on the river—our slip don’t come open till afternoon tomorrow.” The foredeck second grunted a laugh as ugly as he was. “You think ’cause we a day early, you don’ gotta make you full passage-work? Fuck that. You work, elf. Or you fuckin’ swim.”

“All right. I’ll swim.”

Deliann opened his hands to let the mop handle drop to the deck. Expressionlessly, he turned and gathered himself to leap into the water, but the foredeck second was too quick: his heavy hand closed around the primal’s arm, the fighting claw below the thumb digging into the primal’s ribs, and hauled him roughly back to the deck. “Not fuckin’ likely,” the ogrillo snarled. “You owe one more day’s work, shitsuck. What’re you, some kind of Cainist? Think you can do what you fuckin’want?”

“I’m not sure what a Cainist is,” Deliann said. “But you should let me go.”

“Fuck that. No fuckin’ elf scams me.”

He yanked Deliann’s arm upward, inflicting a little preliminary pain and pulling him off balance. He expected a struggle or even a fight, and was more than ready for either—but instead, the skinny, haggard primal went absolutely still. “You want to take your hand off me.”

The ogrillo’s hand sprang stiffly open, and his fighting claw flattened back against his forearm. He frowned at his hand in disbelief. “What the fuck?”

“I’ve endured you for five days,” Deliann said distantly, “because I had no swifter course for Ankhana. Now I’m leaving, and you can’t stop me.”

“My ass,” the ogrillo said, lifting his other hand and making a fist to curl his fingers out of the way of his fully extended fighting claw. There was no law on the Great Chambaygen save what the barge crews made for themselves—and no one would task a deck officer for the maiming or death of a mere decker. “I’ll gut you like a fuckin’ trout.”

The creases that hunger and hard travel had etched into the primal’s face deepened now, and transformed into something like age—impossible age, as though Deliann looked down into the world from some millennial distance—and the ogrillo’s fist dropped limply to his side.

The ogrillo snarled, his vented lips pulling back from his tusks, and wrenched his shoulders as though his arms were held by invisible hands that he could shake off—but they weren’t. They swung freely, but not under his command. Both arms hung dead from his shoulders.

“I’m elfshot,” he muttered with growing amazement that swiftly became righteous fury. “Fucker elfshot me! Yo, carp!” Along the entire length of the barge, heads came up at the foredeck second’s yell.

Though the river is a lawless bound, there are a few traditions that the barge crews honor above their lives, and none more than this one. In seconds, all twelve ogres had shipped their poles; all the cargoboys had dropped their bottles, set down their cards, and put away their dice. Even the deckers, the poorest of the river scum who worked for nothing more than food and transport, set aside their buckets and their brushes and mops and picked up belaying pins and cargo hooks, and every one of them came running full tilt toward the bow.

Deliann watched them come with only a slight tightening of his feathery brows. The nearest ogre—then another, then a third—pitched forward and slammed thunderously to the deck, howling and clutching thighs knotted in convulsive cramps that crippled them as effectively as a knife to the hamstring.

The rest of the crew had to slow their headlong rush to pick their way around and over the writhing ogres; before they could, a sheet of flame twenty feet high sprang up from the deck to bar their path.

“It’s just a Fantasy!” the ogrillo yelled. “It’s just fuckin’ elf magick, you morons! It can’t really hurt you!”

Apparently some of the crew knew, as the foredeck second did, that most of the magicks worked by the First Folk operate on the mind of the victim only; braver than their fellows, they leaped through the fire—and staggered screaming across the deck, clothes and hair blazing, trailing smoke and flame as they dived for the river.

The foredeck second’s good eye blinked, and squinted, and blinked again. “Elf magick can’t really hurt you,” he repeated numbly.

“That might be true,” Deliann said, “if I were really an elf.”

He reached up and grabbed the foredeck second by his one good tusk and hauled the ogrillo’s face down to his own with shocking strength. He put his lips against the ogrillo’s ear-cavity and said softly but distinctly, “I don’t like violence. I don’t want to hurt you, or anyone else. But I’m leaving. I don’t have time to be gentle. If anyone comes after me, I’ll kill them. You understand? And then I’ll come back here, and I’ll kill you. Tell me you understand.”

The ogrillo stepped back and tossed his head, trying to rip his tusk free, but this skinny, almost fleshless fey had astonishing power in his hand and arm. He yanked the ogrillo close once more, and now smoke leaked from within his grip, smoke that reeked of burning ivory as the tusk scorched against his palm; the ogrillo gave out a low moan that rose toward a despairing shriek.

“Tell me you understand,” he repeated.

“I, I, I—I get it,” the ogrillo whimpered. “Go—just go!”

Deliann opened his hand, and the ogrillo staggered, his tusk blackened where the primal had held it. He nearly fell into the flames, but as he stumbled back the fire died as though smothered by an invisible blanket, leaving only a broad line of smoldering embers across the deck.

Deliann turned to the bow and looked down, to be certain none of the crewmen who’d sought the river were in his way below, then he dived in and swam strongly to the bank. He pulled himself from the water and struck out running along the river without so much as a bare glance back at the barge: running hard for Ankhana.

Manblood, he could hear his brothers sneer. It was their favorite jab. Always must be doing; never can be being. That manblood—like a human, you throw time away. Like a wastrel who finds a pouch of gold in the street, you have so little that spending what little you have means nothing.

Maybe so, he answered them inside his head, but right now, I have more time than you do. And he wanted so desperately to be wrong about that; the ache of his wish that this was not true burned his heart like the fire he’d set on the barge’s deck.

Ankhana’s outskirts lay three miles ahead along the flat flood-plain, and night lowered upon the city with the rain.

He had an ugly, stumbling run, as though his legs belonged to someone else—as though both were half crippled, and his natural gait was the average of two conflicting limps. Despite this, he ran hard and fast, pulling Flow to power his overworked muscles, and made the shantytown that surrounds Ankhana’s Warrens in a quarter of an hour.

The storm swung out to meet him, and soaked him thoroughly in rain that reeked of sulphur. Without slackening his pace, he turned up the road that circled northward around the Warrens and the Industrial Park.

Even the empty-eyed human dregs that crowded these outlying slums had a moment to spare to spit at him as he passed; to hurry past humans as though he had someplace to go was disrespectful. Ankhana was the heart of the human lands, and the only Folk who had ever been welcome here were those who knew their place.

Finally he reached Ankhana’s Folk ghetto, Alientown, and he released the swirl of Flow that had given him strength. He needed more attention than mindview could spare him, if he wished to negotiate these narrow, crowded streets, jostling and being jostled by countless shoulders of primal, stonebender, ogrillo, and human alike.

As night fell, even some trolls took to the streets; now and again one would pause to speculatively watch him pass, and to make hungry sucking noises as it inhaled the drool that leaked around its curving tusks. The stench stole breath from his lungs; the noise and sheer restless energy of this place made his head swim. The filth, the waste, the emptiness he saw in the eyes of the Folk here—Ankhana had been the reason he’d left humanity behind for the deepwood.

Alientown had been transformed in the twenty-odd years since he’d last walked these streets. Then, it had been a tiny cramped ghetto, jammed with primals, stonebenders, treetoppers, ogrilloi and their giant cousins—all scraping out bare livings on the fringes of the capital, selling their strength and the use of their bodies to their human masters, losing themselves in narcotics and drink, snarling and snapping at each other like rats in an overcrowded cage.

In the old days, human constables had kept order in five-man patrols, their brutal tactics and free use of their iron-bound clubs earning them the nickname headpounders; now, it seemed that the pounders had been replaced by teams of two—one human and one Folk, usually primal or stonebender. The humans wore black and silver, the Folk scarlet and gold. Again and again, Deliann saw these pairs shouldering through the streets, breaking up fights, forestalling arguments, opening the crowds before the carriages of the wealthy. He could only shake his head in wonder.

Twenty years ago, wearing those colors had announced membership in two of the powerful Warrengangs, the Subjects of Cant and the Faces—but neither of those gangs had had territory in Alientown, and the Faces had certainly never extended their membership to include Folk. And those gangs had been criminals: the Faces had been peddlers of flesh and illegal narcotics, and the Subjects of Cant had been pickpockets and beggars, with strong sidelines in protection and extortion. How they had been transformed into a public constabulary, he could not imagine.

The ghetto had tripled or even quadrupled in size, bulging outward like a colony of fungus, and now, at night, it bloomed like a pitcher plant, sticky-sweet and dangerously inviting. A riot of colored lights clashed into muddy rainbows on the wetly glistening cobbles: light cast from blazing coronal signs that wreathed hulking hotels and casinos.

These signs proclaimed the entertainment to be found within: games from knucklebones and roulette to cockfighting, bear-baiting and human/Folk/ogrillo cross-species pit-fighting; food from the most exquisite imported tophalmo wings to all-you-can-eat spiced-pork-and-cornmeal buffets; drink ranging from grain alcohol to Tinnaran brandy; narcotics from simple roasted rith to exotic powders that make one’s darkest fantasy feel as sharply real as a poke in the eye; whores to suit any species, sex, age, experience, and taste, from delicate pederasty to the kind of action where the price includes on-site postcoital medical care.

Twenty years ago, when somebody wanted something special in Alientown, something that he just couldn’t find anywhere else—it might be illegal, or seductively dangerous, or simply too repugnant for widespread popularity—he’d go to an establishment called the Exotic Love. The Exotic Love seemed, to all appearances, to be a small, well-appointed, rather exclusive brothel, just off Nobles’ Way; but once a man became a regular, once he had shown he could be trusted—that is, once the proprietor had acquired enough blackmailworthy evidence that this fellow dared not take a breath without permission—he would find himself ushered into a sensual world of literally infinite possibility. At the Exotic Love, nothing was out of reach; it was merely expensive.

But now, it seemed that all of Alientown had been transformed into a street-bazaar version of the Exotic Love, and the place itself could not be found. Deliann stood in the street, staring blankly up at the sign of the fungist who had taken over the building just off Nobles’ Way. He read mechanically down the list of stimulant, narcotic, and hallucinogenic spores for sale within; this was a futile self-deception, a dodge to briefly postpone the moment when he would realize that he had no guess what to do next.

He had come so far—

Light fingers brushed his flanks, where most Folk carry their purses. Deliann’s hand flicked almost too fast to be seen, and he hauled the owner of those fingers around in front of him: a dirty-faced human child. “Sorry, fey, sorry—I just tripped,” the boy said hastily.

“This place,” Deliann said heavily. “This place was once called the Exotic Love. What happened to it?”

The boy’s eyes went wide and round, then closed to streetwise slits. “Hey, I don’t whistle that tune—but I gotta sister, she’s eleven, never done nothing but the once awhile blowjob—”

“That’s not what I asked for.”

“Right, right—truth: she’s thirteen, but I swear—”

Deliann shook him once, hard. “The Exotic Love,” he repeated.

The boy’s eyes rolled, and suddenly he screamed with shocking, painful volume, “Short-eyes! Short-eyes! Get this Cainist buttfucker offa me!”

The boy kicked him in the shin—it hurt less than his shout—and wrenched his arm free. He dashed away and vanished into the crowd, many of whom now stared at Deliann with gathering hostility, muttering darkly among themselves. One took it upon himself to express the general sentiment: “Short-eyes motherfucker . . . Wanna stick a kid, y’oughta pay for it like decent folks!”

It might have turned uglier—some in this crowd looked to be the sort to enjoy a casual stomping, and none of these could see any hint in this ragged, exhausted-looking primal of just how lethal the attempt might turn out—but shouldering through the crowd came a tall man in a chainmail byrnie of black and silver, and a thickly muscled stonebender in a scarlet-and-gold cloth kirtle.

“All right, all right, shove it over,” the stonebender repeated tiredly, stepping on toes, elbowing ribs, occasionally giving this one or that an encouraging shove. Her short arms were knotted like cypress knees; when she shoved, people moved. “Break it up. Keep it moving—yah, you, shit-in-the-head. Get going.”

The man came over to Deliann and sized him up with a cold stare. “Got trouble, woodsie? Or looking for some? Either way, we’re here for you.”

“What I’m looking for,” Deliann said slowly, “is the feya who used to run the brothel here.”

“Here?” His brow wrinkled. “Don’t think so. Ruufie—the fungist, here—he’s been here, what? More’n eight years, I’d have to guess—since before I came on Patrol. Hey, Taulkg’n, you know of any brothel here?”

His partner snorted into her beard and muttered something Deliann half heard, that might have been a derisive comment on humanity’s short lives and shorter memories. She gave the last of the onlookers a healthy shove down the street and turned back. “Yah, the Exotic Love, useta be.”

“The Exotic? No shit.” The man’s eyes lit up, and a half smile canted his mouth. “Hey, Taulkie, this woodsie’s looking for the Duchess.”

The stonebender approached, her fists on her hips. She looked Deliann up, then down, then up again, and shook her head sadly. “Don’t bother, woodsie. She won’t see you.”

“I don’t know any duchesses,” Deliann said patiently. “The feya I want went by the name Kierendal.”

“That’s her,” the man said. “They just call her the Duchess because she’s fucked better’n half the Cabinet.”

The stonebender trod heavily on her partner’s toes. “Mind your manners.”

“Just tell me where I can find her.”

“She runs Alien Games, now—”

“Alien Games? That whole-block complex, back on Khazad-Lun?”

“Yah, but she won’t see you, woodsie, I’m tellin’ you. She’s busy, you hear? She’s an important—”

Deliann missed the rest of what the stonebender tried to tell him: he was already running.

2

ALIEN GAMES SQUATTED at the center of the swamp that was Alientown like an immense, malignant toad queen, glistening with multicolored slime. Only eight years old, it had already grown until it swallowed every adjacent building; now the size of its footprint exceeded that of the Colhari Palace itself. Three restaurants, seven saloons, four casinos, two theaters, and dozens of performance booths of varying sizes and degrees of privacy—within that complex could be purchased anything from cigars to sudden death, with room charges prorated by the hour. It shone like a beacon that might be seen from the moon, ringed by a gigantic halo. The halo was the rainbow reflection that scattered from a stupendous bubble of force—a titanic Shield—that enclosed the entire structure, made faintly visible by the drizzle that collected on its surface and trailed to the streets.

Deliann leaned against a wall of rain-slickened limestone, within the mouth of an alley down the street. The soggy wool of his tunic dragged at his shoulders. The runoff that dripped onto his face from the eaves above had a faintly acid, chemical taste, and he stood just deep enough within the shadows of the alley mouth that his face picked up only dim highlights from the lurid scarlet, green, and golden glare.

Alien Games blazed even brighter in mindview than it did to normal vision. A gigantic vortex of Flow towered above it, impossibly vivid intertangling rivers of crimson and amethyst, ichor and viridian, azure and argent curling like party streamers down toward the roof. At the perimeter of the Shield bubble stood massed crowds of onlookers, peering at the nobles, celebrities, and society brilliants who alighted from each carriage of the endless train as it pulled to a stop at the purple velvet carpet that ascended the broad marble steps. The onlookers leaned on the Shield as if it were glass, pressing their noses against it as though they could will themselves from the chill damp darkness outside to the endless summer noon within.

A marquee the size of a riverbarge burned on the roof of the immense vaulted portico, proclaiming the Senses-Shattering World Premiere of some vulgar-sounding show featuring performers of whom Deliann had never heard.

He spent a moment studying the operation of the bubble. Clearly, it consisted of several overlapping Shields; Alien Games must employ six or seven thaumaturges, probably human, to maintain it. Whenever a carriage would approach along the street, its footmen forcing a path through the crowds, a gap would open, just large enough for the carriage and its attendants to pass; then the gap would close behind them like a gate to keep the rabble out. Some of the Shields would be semipermanent, charged in advance like those that sheltered the entire complex from the drizzle outside, maintained by stored power instead of the disciplined mind of a thaumaturge, but the ones that opened like gateways must be the work of men, not crystals. He could slip through one of the crystaled Shields without too much difficulty and without raising much of an alarm—but then he’d have to find some other way to attract Kierendal’s attention.

He moved out into the street.

He forced his way through the press, ignoring the counter-shoves and curses that pursued him. When he reached the midstreet point where the carriages had been passing through, he wedged his arms between a large human and a small troll. “Excuse me,” he said politely.

The human and the troll looked down at the ragged, bone-thin primal between them, then smirked at each other. The human said, “Piss off, elf. Find your own spot.”

“I have,” Deliann told them, and shoved them violently apart. They stumbled into the people to either side, neither remotely prepared for Deliann’s preternatural strength. The troll wisely recognized that this fey had unknown resources, and faded back, muttering darkly to itself in its native speech of grunts and slurps; the human, less intelligent, decided to take exception.

“Hey,” the man said, “hey, you little bastard, who you think you’re shoving?”

Deliann stood still, waiting, feeling a little sick.

The man raised a heavy fist. “I’m gonna enjoy making—”

Deliann interrupted him with a stiff overhand right that smashed blood from the human’s nose. The human’s eyes filled with blinding tears, and Deliann kicked him solidly in the balls. While the man folded, Deliann stepped around him, put one hand on the back of the man’s head and the foreknuckle of his other hand against the man’s upper lip. The knuckle against the man’s shattered nose was more than enough to stand him up and bend him over backward until he fell to the ground.

When he had the man arranged on the ground to his satisfaction, Deliann kicked him once more: the toe of his boot stabbed with exceptional precision into the man’s solar plexus. The man curled into a fetal knot of pain, his breath coming in ragged, broken gasps.

Deliann straightened. He eyed the surrounding crowd expressionlessly. “Anyone else?”

No one offered themselves.

He bared his exceptionally long, sharp, carnivore’s teeth. “Then back off.”

He turned away, unable to hide the twist of revulsion on his face. To do such things gently would require him to be clever, and he was too tired to be clever; it would require imagination, and that he dared not touch. For two weeks his imagination had given him nothing but the color of screams, the texture of dead children, the smell of genocide.

Inside the endless summer noon of the bubble, the ushers and footmen all wore livery of scarlet and gold; flanking the door were six sleepy ogres, up past their bedtime in full field armor, their steel enameled in the same colors so that it gleamed like glazed pottery. They held their blood-colored halberds extended at parade rest.

Deliann’s mindview showed him no swirls of Flow around anyone on the street, except for a tiny whorl that brought a bright glow to the jewelry of the beefy woman who descended from a carriage with the help of two solicitous porters. He nodded to himself. With any luck, all he’d have to deal with out here would be ordinary guards.

In mindview, he tuned his Shell to the shifting pattern of the Shield in front of him and took the measure of the thaumaturge who maintained it. The man was barely third-rate; this Shield was hard-pressed to hold back the rain, much less the crowd that pushed against it. Deliann gathered Flow, focused it into a lance of power, and punched through the Shield with the brisk efficiency of an injection. His Shell was tuned delicately enough to register the scarlet grunt of pain from the thaumaturge; with little effort, he swelled his lance of Flow until it forced open a door-sized hole in the Shield, and he stepped through.

The crowd at his back stared in silent wonder: to normal sight, he had effortlessly walked through the bubble that had resisted their best strength. They surged against it behind him, but he had already released his power, and the Shield was once again solid as a wall. The thaumaturge inside would have no illusions about what had happened, though; he should have already sounded some sort of alarm.

Sure enough, within the space of a single breath an elegant primal in formal evening wear detached himself from the group at the doorway and touched the shoulders of a pair of burly stonebenders in the scarlet footmen’s livery; the trio approached him over the dry cobbles of the Shielded street as quickly as they could without appearing to hurry.

They met Deliann twenty yards from the entrance, arrayed in a loose arc that effectively barred his path without being so obvious as to be rude. The fey was tall and graceful, and his dark suit was immaculately tailored; his manicure gleamed like his buttons as he clasped his hands together and leaned politely toward Deliann. “May I help you, sir?”

“Yes, you may,” Deliann said, brushing between him and one of the stonebenders as though they were not there. “Announce me.”

“Sir?” the fey said delicately, in an eloquently dubious tone that described, in one word, the tatters of Deliann’s clothing, the wear of his boots, his hempen belt, and the unnatural creases that marked his face. He followed at Deliann’s shoulder, and the stonebenders brought up the rear; Deliann could hear them cracking their knuckles.

Deliann said, “You may announce me as the Changeling Prince, Deliann Mithondionne, Youngest of the Twilight King.”

The fey took this without even a blink. “Does the prince have a reservation?”

Deliann kept walking.

“Please, Your Highness,” the fey murmured smoothly, well practiced in his technique of handling lunatics, which he clearly presumed Deliann to be, “this is not an insuperable difficulty. We have a section reserved for visiting royalty; if the prince would care to follow me?”

Deliann could guess exactly what awaited him if he did so: a savage beating in a darkened room, his unconscious and bleeding body dumped on the street outside the bubble as a salutary example for any other gate crashers. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “I didn’t come for the show. I’m here to see Kierendal.”

“Please, sir; I’m afraid I must insist.”

Hands as hard as the roots of a mountain seized his arms. The pair of stonebenders bent him forward with efficient leverage, making him look as though he’d half fainted and he needed their help to walk; in fact, his boots barely brushed the cobbles. For one moment, his exhaustion dipped him into unresisting comfort, the childhood ease of being carried, even though their grip hurt his arms—but they were taking him the wrong way. He got his feet beneath him, and he opened his mind.

Far above, the arc of the Shield shimmered in the mental light cast by the vortex of Flow. In one second, his Shell extended to fifteen times the height of a man and touched that Shield; in the next second, he had grasped its harmonic and tuned his Shell to it. Resonating perfectly, his Shell slid through the Shield’s arc and touched an argent ribbon in the vortex above. In the next second, the lights went out.

Darkness fell like a hammer.

The sudden absence of those myriad colored lights stunned the crowd to an immobile silence, likewise the footmen, even the horses that drew the carriages—it was like being struck blind. For a second that stretched toward infinity, the street was utterly dark, utterly silent, held like the breath of a child looking for the monster under his bed.

Then Deliann burst into flame.

He burned like a torch, like a bonfire, like a thousand magnesium flares struck in a single instant; he burned as though every last foot-candle of the light that had blazed like the sun around Alien Games had become fire that roared from his flesh. The two stonebender footmen howled and staggered back from him, smoke billowing from the seared flesh of their palms. The primal in formal wear covered his face with his arms and screamed like a terrified child.

Deliann’s ragged clothes burned to cinders in an instant, a puff of ash that whirled up into the night. His hair sizzled away. His bare flesh bore scars of recent wounds, badly healed: a curving scab crossed his scalp, like a shallow sword cut. One of his thighs was swollen, inflamed half again the size of the other, and the shin of the other leg had a slight bend in the middle; at the bend grew a knot on the bone the size of an apple.

Naked, bald, engulfed in flame, he paced the purple carpet to the entrance, trailing burning footprints.

Everyone gave way before him except one of the ogres, braver or more stupid than the rest: it made a tentative jab at him with its halberd. At the first touch of the flames that howled around Deliann, the blade melted and dripped to a pool of white-hot metal at his feet, and half the shaft flashed to broken coals.

The firelight reflected from their eyes came back the color of fear.

“I’m here to see Kierendal,” Deliann said. “I don’t have time to be polite.”

A beige shimmer gathered in the air before him, and then a tall feya stepped sideways from nowhere, as though an invisible door had opened edge-on in the air.

Taller than Deliann and even thinner, draped in an evening gown that glittered as though woven of diamond, she was graceful as a soaring hawk. Her platinum hair coiled high above her upswept ears in an extravagantly complex coif, and her eyes glinted with flat reflections the color of money, like silver coins set in her skull. The teeth that showed behind her thin bloodless smile were long and needle-sharp, and the nail of the forefinger that she stretched toward him was filed and painted to resemble a raptor’s talon made of steel. “You,” she said, “really know how to make an entrance. Want a job?”

For a blank moment, Deliann could only stare through the flames; then he began, “Kierendal—”

“I beg your pardon, as an inconsiderate hostess,” she interrupted him blithely. “How embarrassing; I’ve overdressed.” And without so much as a hitch of her shoulders, her gown slid down her slender form and piled on the carpet. She stepped out of it toward him, as naked as he, perfectly at ease, opening her arms. “Is this better?”

Deliann’s mouth dropped open. Her nipples were painted the same color as her eyes, and they looked as hard as the metal they mimicked. In that second of utter astonishment, the fire that sheathed him faded and winked out.

He hadn’t even seen a flicker from her Shell, and in one sickening second, he realized why: She had never been here in the first place. What he’d seen had been a Fantasy, projected from some place of safety, probably into his mind alone. And while he’d gawked, she’d retuned the Shield overhead and cut him off.

He started to think he might have made a mistake.

Even as he began to extend his Shell, reaching in a new direction, someone threw a heavy net over his head; the weaving was thick and metallic, and as it closed around him, the image of Kierendal and her gown vanished as though wiped from existence by an invisible hand. A heavy fist knocked him to the porch, and he couldn’t even pull enough Flow to enhance his strength and rip free of the net—some kind of scarlet counter-force flared over the net, blocking his best attempt. An ogre grabbed him by the ankles and yanked him off the floor, gathering the net around him to make a sack.

The ogre lifted him like a bagged kitten. “Guezz you don’ really keep up with the latez zztuff from the zity, when you’re ou’ in the forezz, eh there, woodzie?”

3

THE CHAIR WAS heavy, very sturdily constructed of hard maple, and bolted to the floor. The manacles that attached Deliann’s left wrist to his right ankle were threaded through the support bars that connected the chair’s legs.

It took the ogre something less than five minutes, after it unbagged Deliann within this tiny room, to demonstrate to him conclusively that he couldn’t pull enough Flow in here to light a candle; some unknown quality of the room’s construction cut him off as absolutely as had the weave of that net. The ogre had made this point by knotting its great horned fists and beating him into semiconsciousness with swift, passionless efficiency. Then it had affixed the manacles, and left.

The chair faced a blank grey wall that was stippled with faint brownish smears: probably old, haphazardly wiped blood. By twisting uncomfortably in the seat, Deliann could watch the door behind him, but his battered body swiftly stiffened into knots of bruise. He surrendered with a sigh and turned his face back toward the wall. The room was cold; the manacles were like ice against his wrist and ankle, and gooseflesh bunched his bare skin all over his body. For a long time, he did nothing but shiver and listen to himself breathe.

Finally, the door behind him opened. Twisting to watch Kierendal enter the room cost him a stifled groan. She appeared exactly as she had in the Fantasy; the way she moved wasn’t quite gliding, but it was decidedly more stylish than an ordinary walk. At her side paced a thick-muscled ogrillo bitch dressed in loose-fitting coveralls, slapping her palm with a sort of flexible club made of tightly braided leather. The club was as long as Deliann’s forearm and as thick as his wrist.

Kierendal had something small and roundish in her hand, like a nut, that she pretended to be interested in rolling back and forth between her fingers. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you,” she murmured distractedly, “what happens to little elves who play with fire?”

“Don’t call me elf,” Deliann said slowly. “I’ve taken that name from humans, and from ogrilloi. I don’t have to take it from you.”

“That,” Kierendal said, “is not an answer to my question.”

An invisible hand with talons of ice reached into his stomach and twisted his guts into a ball of agony. Pain drove a gasp past his lips, and a red haze descended across his vision—but he was not without resources, even here. With an ease that belied the snarl of pain on his face, he tuned his Shell to hers, tapping into the shaft of brilliant green that poured power from her aureate Shell into his guts; he took some of that power for himself and used it to weave a shunt for the energy she threw at him—a mental chute that funneled her power into his Shell instead of his body.

The knots eased, and he prepared to strike back. She could no more pull inside this room than he could; the little nutlike thing in her hand could only be a griffinstone. Deliann tuned his Shell to an octave that Kierendal shouldn’t be able to see and reached a tendril toward it—

“Thought you’d try that,” she said. She glanced at the ogrillo bitch, who slapped the braided leather club against the side of Deliann’s head sharply enough to shower a galaxy of stars across the inside of his eyes. He lost mindview.

Kierendal bared her teeth.

Steel claws hooked under his ribs and wrenched his stomach inside out. He doubled over, heaved between his knees, and vomited convulsively, retching, splashing puke across his bare ankles. Kierendal stepped back crisply to keep it from soiling her spike-heeled formal sandals.

When he could control his head enough to lift it once again, Kierendal looked down at him, and her starkly chiseled face bent into a mask of friendliness. She didn’t seem to mind the smell. “Now you understand your position. I want you to understand mine. In just less than one hour, the curtain goes up on a show I have been preparing to mount for more than a year. I have performers from all over the Empire, from Lipke, from fucking Ch’rranth; I have seventy-eight thousand royals of my own money on the line, and I have partners who put in more—the kind of partners who don’t believe in taking losses. If they don’t turn a profit, they will collectively fuck my ass until I bleed to death.”

She pronounced each crudity with a certain satisfied precision, as though she enjoyed being in this place where she could use whatever language pleased her. “And now, I also have some scary freak who claims to be the Changeling Prince throwing around fire magick like a human thaumaturge’s worst nightmare, and I need to know what’s going on. You’re a Cainist, aren’t you?”

Deliann shook his head. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Don’t shit me, cock. I have two bishops and a pig-fucking Archdeacon of the Church of the Beloved Children in the house tonight. I knew it—I knew some crazy Cainist bastard would try something stupid.”

“I’m no Cainist. I don’t know why people keep telling me I am.”

Kierendal snorted. “That just makes it worse. It’s this simple, cock: I need to know who you really are, who sent you, and what you’re really after, and I don’t have much time to figure it out. So I’m going to hurt you until I like the answers you give me. Understand?”

Deliann said, “I need your help.”

She clenched her fist around the griffinstone until scarlet power leaked between her fingers like smoke. “You have a peculiar way of asking for it,” she said through her teeth.

“I didn’t come here to ask,” he said flatly. “I would not presume on our relationship. I am Deliann Mithondionne, Youngest of the Twilight King, and by the fealty you owe my father, I demand your service.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to, cock?” Kierendal said disbelievingly. She paced around him, staring, as though his bald, scorched nakedness might look different from another side. “You can bluff the woodsies, but you’re in the big city now. I have sources all over this fucking continent. First: Prince Deliann is dead. He probably died years ago. An Aktir had taken his place, an imposter—and don’t try telling me the Aktiri aren’t real; I know better. And the Aktir, the imposter, was killed two weeks ago, on the far side of the God’s Teeth. One of the Mithondion princes figured out what he was, and the Aktir attacked him. The prince’s retainers killed him.”

“Torronell,” Deliann supplied, and his scalded features twisted with some pain that was not physical. “It’s all true—almost.”

“Almost?”

Deliann smiled, just a little. “I’m no imposter, and I’m not dead.”

Kierendal snorted. “And here’s the nut-cutter, cock: I knew the Changeling. He worked for me, doing security over at the Exotic Love, almost twenty-five years ago, before his Adoption into House Mithondionne. He worked for me for nearly a year, and I got to know him well, if you follow my meaning. And you’re not him.”

“Are you so sure, Kier?” Deliann asked sadly. “Put hair back on me, and eyebrows, and have I really changed so much?”

She looked at him truly closely for the first time, and she frowned. Her lips pulled back over her teeth as though she saw something that frightened her. “There’s a resemblance,” she admitted, slowly, as though it hurt her. “But you’ve aged—aged like a human . . .”

“I am human,” Deliann said simply. “I always was. I am also Deliann.”

Kierendal straightened, and she shook her head, denying what she saw, denying whatever she might feel. “Even if you were the Changeling, I wouldn’t help you. I don’t owe that bastard shit. Or his fucking Twilight King. What did they ever do for me?” Colors roiled across her Shell without mixing, like those on a soap bubble in the sun. “I still haven’t heard a reason I shouldn’t have Tchako here kill you and dump your body in the river.”

Deliann knew this was no idle threat. He could see it in her fists, clenched so tightly that her long sharpened fingernails had drawn blood from her wrists. She was not thinking clearly, was not susceptible to reason, and was as dangerous as a wounded bear. He understood her easily, perfectly.

He felt exactly the same way.

He’d always seen himself as one of the good guys, one of the heroes, someone who has a certain moral center that he could hold against the world, someone who had drawn a line that nothing could force him to cross. He would willingly die before doing what he was about to do; that was a choice he could make. But if he chose death before dishonor, he’d be making that choice not only for himself, but for millions: millions who wouldn’t get a choice at all.

“If you fail in your duty to my father,” he said, “the death of the First Folk will be on your head, Kierendal. Within two years, we will be extinct.”

But he was only stalling, only delaying the inevitable; he already knew he wouldn’t be able to reach her with words.

“I don’t have time for this shit.” She gestured to Tchako, and again the leather club slapped across Deliann’s skull, blowing a spark shower across his vision.

When he lifted his head again, a warm trickle down the side of his neck told him his scalp had split under the blow. He wondered idly if this was the sword cut reopened, or if the leather had torn a new wound. He said softly, “Nothing you do to me will change the truth.”

“I haven’t heard any truth yet,” she snarled, lifting the griffinstone: a threat.

“You’ve heard nothing but.”

Her snarl thinned to a whine of frustration and her fist tightened around the griffinstone. Agony seized Deliann’s guts. He doubled over, retching, his stomach afire as though he’d swallowed burning coals, but he made no effort to tap her Shell and defend himself. This was what he’d been waiting for.

He tuned his mind to the link she had created between their Shells. He opened himself to the pain, accepted it, anchored it to the center of his being, even though doing so caused it to swell to a hurricane of anguish that threatened to snuff him like a candle; this was the only penance he could make for what he did next.

At the last instant, some premonition warned her of what he was doing, and the shades of horror bloomed across her Shell. She fought him then, wildly, as an animal fights when backed into the deepest corner of its own den. She screamed—one thin despairing wail—

Through the link that bridged them, he poured himself into her.

4

IMAGES CASCADE IN roiling, fractal turbulence, unpredictable, incomprehensible, inconceivable: dual views, inside and outside, feeling and watching together, vomit splattering over bare ankles, too near spike-heeled sandals, gut-pain and the heart-pain of inflicting pain, a burning man-shape outside on a darkened portico, and yet again, peering out with eyes of flame at a halberd’s blade as it melts and drips to a puddle that sets an echoing blaze in the carpet—

WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME?

Shh, hush now, it’s too late to stop it. Ride it out.

The images begin to organize, to sequentialize: walking through a mutated, horribly half-familiar Alientown, words with the Patrol, a kick from a pickpocket. Faster now: a dive from the bow of a riverbarge, the silky stroke of the water parting around their short brush of hair, flames and shouting, the fierce grip of the ogrillo deck officer—

What is this?

This is my life.

Days of deck swabbing, brush cutting, clearing jams of tangled flotsam—the dangerous, backbreaking passage-work of a decker on the Great Chambaygen. More days, limping down out of the God’s Teeth alone, each step a new adventure in pain, through the forest, following a stream for water, pulling Flow for energy, mindholding rabbits and squirrels until they can be taken by hands that break their necks. At first, they sear the scraps of flesh with the fire from their mind, but as days pass and their resources dwindle, they need the Flow they gather for other things, and the bloody tang of raw flesh is sharp on their tongue.

This is our lives?

Our life.

We are Deliann.

And hours wasted in agony, weaker and weaker; days lost to mindview, fighting exposure and shock with Flow, layering new calcium across broken ends of bone in his legs, wishing he understood healing more completely, wishing he had the strength to splint the bones straight—botching the job, leaving a pocket of infection in the bone of his left thigh, fusing his right shin crooked—using his disciplined concentration to fight back the despair, the black fist that crushed his heart—

We don’t understand.

Patience. This won’t take long.

Coming awake on the broken scree at the foot of the cliff, surprised to be alive, feeling the jagged ends of bone grind together within each leg, looking up to see, high above, one last glimpse of his brother’s face, haloed for an instant against the translucent blue-white brush strokes of high cirrus cloud. As I watch, the face pulls back from the brink, emptying the cliff’s crisp, indifferent skyline—

Leaving me here to die.

We still do not understand.

There is no we.

I understand.

This is my life. I am Deliann.

5

I STAND ON the high cliff, overlooking the mines, while Kyllanni and Finnall sing the Song of War.

Far, far below, vanishing into the clear afternoon distance, the earth is pocked like the surface of the moon, a wasteland of craters and broken rock; the mountains are scarred, whole chunks missing as though bitten off by a god. Within this moonscape, tiny figurines move and work, black dots moving earth and directing sluice pipes, biting into the ground and belching black smoke until the crystal mountain air seems to come to a halt outside their dominion: a dome of smoke and dust enclosing Hell.

Closer below is the fence that L’jannella described, a wire and steel monstrosity, decorated with the dim silhouettes of corpses, outlined against the dust behind.

This is worse than I’d feared, worse than I could have imagined. In five short days, my world has crumbled, rotted: eaten from within as though injected with acid. Everything I thought was strong and sure has turned to paper and spun glass.

“It’s the Blind God,” Torronell mutters harshly, softly enough that at first only I can hear him; but then he repeats it, louder, and his gesture takes in not only the wrack of Diamondwell and Transdeia, but everything that has happened since we left the Northwest Road. “This is all the work of the Blind God. The dil-T’llann has been breached, and the Blind God has followed us from the Quiet Land.”

Of us all, I’m the only one who realizes that Rroni isn’t speaking metaphorically.

Torronell begins to pace in a tight circle, and his face twists with dark thoughts; his scalp is only now showing signs of stubble, only now growing back the hair I burned from him in my effort to save his life. I move with him, keeping between him and our three companions—whether he’s well or not, I have to treat him like he’s infected.

Even ordering us to come here, to this cliff, shows his judgment is becoming erratic. I’d like to think this is only a sign of the stress we’ve been through this past week, but I’m losing hope. I think I’m going to have to kill him.

Kyllanni and Finnall chant on, but I can’t take any more.

This has to be stopped before it begins, and there is no one else who can stop it. “No,” I say hoarsely. “No war. I don’t care what they’ve done. There will be no war.”

Kyllanni and Finnall fall silent; they and L’jannella do not respond to me at all. They turn from me, and look at Torronell.

His eyes blaze with feverish triumph. “Don’t you understand?” he says. “I can tell you why he will not cry war against these humans. Join the Meld.”

“But the curse—” L’jannella protests.

“A lie,” Torronell spits. “Another of Deliann’s lies. Join the Meld.”

Oh god, oh god he’s really sick, after all this, he’s sick after all and I’m going to have to do this. I slide my hand into my rapier’s basket hilt, and wish I could jam this sword into my own heart, instead. The worst of it is, that’s not an answer: my death solves nothing.

His death saves the world.

I try to draw but there is no strength in my arm. How have I come to this? How could I have arrived here?

Why does it have to be me?

There is no one else. There is no other answer.

I pull the sword, the silver of its blade flashing fire in the afternoon sun. The brilliant life-green of the Meld plays around their mingled Shells, and they all stare at me: L’jannella, Kyllanni, and Finnall with shock and disbelief, Torronell with acid triumph. “You see?” he screeches. “These Artans are not of this world—they’re Aktiri! He’s one of them! He’s a damned Aktir!”

He will have already spoken this mind to mind, in the Meld; there can be no denial. In the Meld, lies are impossible. They have heard the truth of me, and they all know it.

“He wants to kill me! He wants to kill us all!”

This he believes, too; it’s even half true. The virus destroying his mind supplies more than enough conviction to carry the other half. The only reply I can make is my fencer’s lunge, the razor tip of my rapier reaching for his heart.

Finnall is faster, throwing herself in front of her prince. My sword takes her just below the arch of the ribs; it slides easily through muscle and liver until the point grates on the back curve of her ribs. She shudders with the cold discomfort that is still too fresh to be pain and grabs the blade with both hands as she falls, ripping it from my loosening fingers.

Oh Finnall, oh god—

But I can’t stop now. My people, my world—they have no one else to defend them.

Training more than a quarter century old, from the Studio Conservatory, reminds me how to kill with my empty hands; I leap at Torronell, and he falls back from me, screeching—and he is still Rroni, still my brother, and the one second’s hesitation this gives me is too long.

Kyllanni’s sword flashes toward me; I see it from the corner of my eye just in time to leap to one side and face him. I can still hear my tutor’s voice: When you’re unarmed and the other guy’s got a sword, run like a bastard.

That’s not an option.

Move out of the line of attack and disable his arm. Don’t fight the sword; fight the man.

Kyllanni lifts his sword and springs at me; I slip aside, but even as I reach for his arm, something strikes me on the head with a humorous metal-on-wood bonk. My vision vanishes in a white glare, and my knees turn to cloth. I stagger back, covering my head, trying to keep moving so they can’t take my vitals.

Torronell holds a bloodied sword.

He hit me, in the head, with a sword.

I stagger back another step, and my foot touches only air.

Bottomless air, I find as my body follows it—and I’m flying, flying, flying, and of course it’s not bottomless, it just feels that way, like I’m never going to land as the cliff face rushes upward past me. I hit an outcrop and bounce, and another one; I hear something break, loud enough that it might be my leg.

My final impact comes as a burst of colorless fire, and then darkness.

6

L’JANNELLA CROUCHES ON the far side of the clearing, away from the embers of last night’s fire. She hugs herself, trembling, though the morning is not cold. Denied the Meld by my order—by my lie—she uses mere words to describe her horror. Language was never designed to carry such freight, but her pale shivering hoarseness is eloquent enough. My best memories of L’jannella all see her giggling with joy at some practical joke, even when it was on her; to see her sickened and so very, very frightened is as painful as the story she tells.

The long silence from the Diamondwell stonebenders is now explained, as is the fate of the legates my father sent to enquire of them. I can barely hear her words over the thunder of blood in my ears, but the sense is clear enough.

The tiny, sleepy, sparsely settled human duchy of Transdeia, formerly a peaceful agricultural land—its only other industry being hospitality for travelers on the Northwest Road—has metastasized into a giant land-hungry termite hill of a nation. Now under the control of a mysterious folk who call themselves Artans, it has swallowed Diamondwell as though the millennium-old stonebender freehold had never existed; the mountains that the stonebenders once cherished have become a blasted wasteland of open-pit mines and giant hydraulic slurries that chew away cliff sides, taking daily bites measured in hundreds of long tons.

The news gets worse: suffocating déjà vu closes around my throat as L’jannella describes the machines in the mining pits: huge hulking metal scoops that belch black smoke and roar with hunger, plows on wheels connected by linked metal treads. I can see them in my head, more clearly probably than she can. I grew up with these machines.

My father—my first father, my birth father—runs a corporation that builds machines like these, and so I know, instinctively, who the Artans are.

And she tells of the fence that surrounds them, a fence supported on steel posts, built of interlocking vertical zigzags of wire; she traces the shape in the air with her finger and tells of the wire coils that top it, coils with sharp blades sticking out along their curves. This, as well, I can imagine too clearly: chain-link fence, topped with razor wire.

Torronell catches my gaze, and accusation glares through the pale sweat that coats his face; he has guessed the truth. His mouth opens as though he would speak, but then closes; he pretends to look away, sneaking a crafty glance at me from the corner of his bloodshot eye.

Oh, god—all gods, human gods, any who will listen—please let that sweat be from fear and disgust, and not from fever. Let his crafty glance bespeak mere hatred.

L’jannella continues mercilessly. At intervals along the miles of that fence, bodies hang—corpses, skeletons, some still in scraps of clothing, mostly stonebenders, some primals, even a few tiny treetoppers—their feet off the ground, arms wide, wired to the fence by their wrists. Crucified.

Crucified by the Artans.

I can’t face Torronell now; if I even glance at him, so much as glimpse his face, I might start to explain, words might start to tumble from my mouth no matter how hard I try to stop them. But those aren’t my people, I want to cry. It’s not my people who have done this. It’s someone else, someone alien, someone who does not partake of my blood, of my world. Even now, old enough to know better, I find myself stunned with astonished revulsion at the horrors of which we are capable.

After twenty-seven years as a primal mage, I can still hate myself for being human.

But I must not show any of this before L’jannella. The secret of my heritage belongs to House Mithondionne, to T’farrell Ravenlock himself, as it has since the day of my Adoption; it is not mine to reveal.

My mind has wandered on these matters, but now L’jannella recaptures my full attention. I gather that she is now relating why she returned alone to make this report, why Kyllanni and Finnall remained behind: “They watch, and wait for us to join them. While they watch, they compose a Song of War.”

I can feel Torronell’s glare burning against the side of my head; I dare not face him. “They can’t do that.”

Torronell speaks for the first time, a harsh throat-scuffing rasp. “How can they not?”

“This Song will not be sung without leave of House Mithondionne,” L’jannella says, “but Changeling, Diamondwell has been under the protection of your House for more than a thousand years, since the days of Panchasell Luckless. The Diamondwell stonebenders are our cousins; isn’t this rape of their land alone a strong enough theme for a Song of War?”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then?” Torronell rasps bitterly. “What? Tell us.”

L’jannella goes on before I can find the words. “Changeling, the humans of Transdeia make war on us already. The legates your father sent—did you not hear me? Their bodies hang on that fence! Finnall’s brother hangs on that fence: Quelliar. Murdered. Can you recall the sound of his laughter, and not burn for war?”

It doesn’t matter. A grinding pain in my chest threatens to close my throat and choke off these words, but I get them out anyway. “No war. There will be no war.”

Torronell stands. “That is not for you to say. I am Eldest, here. We will go and hear their Song.”

“Rroni, no, dammit! You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“And you do? How is this? Do you want to explain?”

He knows I can’t, not in front of L’jannella; is he really sick? Is that why he’s baiting me like this?

Am I going to have to kill him?

He looks at me as though my thoughts are written on my forehead. He’s waiting for me to decide.

I know already: I’m going to cave. What choice do I have?

“All right,” I say, defeated. “Let’s go hear their Song.”

7

“I FEEL FINE,” Rroni says thinly. He licks his lips and stares into the flames, and I let myself believe that the flush in his face comes from sitting too close to the campfire. “It’s been four days. If I have it, I’d be feverish by now, wouldn’t I?” His eyes are raw with dread. “Wouldn’t I?”

Our clothes are new, spares from the saddlepacks of the two horses that stand hobbled nearby. We squat on fallen logs around our tiny fire. My hair has begun to grow back, a pale stubble that makes my scalp feel like warm sandpaper; Rroni is still bald and scorched.

Rroni’s lip is split, his face swollen with purple bruise where I hit him. Ever since he woke up he has resisted, more and more, opening himself to the comfort of the Meld; we’ve used our voices in conversation more over these four days than we have in the past ten years.

I miss the Meld, miss the closeness I shared with my brother. I wish, pointlessly, that I could use it now, but I don’t even bring it up. I can’t. A sick pain that pools in the hollow of my stomach tells me that I don’t really want to share the feelings that Torronell conceals. So I can only nod uncertainly, trusting to the night and the campfire’s flicker to conceal my expression. “Yes, four days, I think so. I’m not sure.”

“How can you not be sure?” Rroni hisses.

It’s not like I can flick on a wallscreen and look it up.

I can’t say that—Rroni’s in too much pain.

I have no secrets from my brother. Rroni knew the truth twenty-five years ago, even before my Adoption. These things could not be spoken of, in front of our companions; my true heritage remains a closely guarded secret of House Mithondionne. Everybody—nearly everybody, at least, our companions included—knows I have a secret, but they have never suspected the truth. Everyone thinks I’m a Mule, one of those rare and pitiful creatures born from a human rape of a primal female. It is generally supposed that Changeling is a polite euphemism.

The truth is worse.

I have to face it now: with everything that has happened, I can’t run from it, can’t deny it. I am an Aktir.

Not an Actor, no: my sense experiences have never been transmitted to Earth to be sold by the Studio as entertainment. But an Aktir, yes: I was born on Earth. Born human. Surgically altered at the Studio Conservatory on Naxos to pass for primal.

My name was Soren Kristiaan Hansen. I lived as a human for twenty-two years, long enough to graduate from the Studio’s College of Battle Magick, long enough to make the freemod transfer to Overworld, ostensibly for training—and then I shed my human skin like the dried husk of a butterfly’s chrysalis, and spread my elvish wings.

In my first few years as Deliann, I could barely even think my former name, let alone say it; but the conditioning imposed by the Studio fades over time, if it is not renewed. For dozens of years I have been free to speak the truth of myself, but I never have.

I’m not sure what my truth might be.

I barely remember Soren Kristiaan Hansen: he exists solely as a recollection of a boy who passed his childhood pretending to be the bastard son of Frey, Lord of the lios alfar—a boy who’d never wanted anything so much as to be a primal mage. I’ve been Deliann the Changeling for twenty-seven years, more than half my life—have been Prince Deliann Mithondionne, adopted son of T’farrell Ravenlock, for nearly twenty-five.

My human family will have given me up for dead long ago, and shed few tears. There were other Hansen sons, and in a prominent Business family like the Hansens of Ilmarinen Machine Works, Soren Kristiaan had been as much a marketable commodity as he had been a son and brother.

I don’t miss them. I didn’t like being human, being Business. I am incapable of the kind of nostalgic illusion that would make me homesick for the shallow, narrow-minded world of privilege and profit in which my abandoned family lives. I left Earth behind, shook it off like a nightmare, and have lived my dream for more than half my life. I never expected that quarter-century-old nightmare to reach out, grab me, and crush my heart.

Ah, my heart, Rroni . . . you can’t do this to me. You can’t die.

Torronell is the next-youngest prince of House Mithondionne. He was born three hundred and seventy-three years ago, and from my forty-nine-year-old perspective, anything that old should be indestructible. For the love of god—he was born the same year Darwin sailed on the Beagle; how can he be dying?

“I told you,” I say, “it’s not like I learned about it in school; HRVP was wiped out a hundred years before I was born.”

“Supposedly,” Rroni supplies bitterly.

I nod. “All I know about it comes from Plague Years novels I read when I was a boy. Novels are like . . . like epics. You know a lot about Jereth’s Revolt, say, but you can’t quote the actual text of the Covenant of Pirichanthe.”

Rroni looks away. “That’s a human story.”

“So the best I can remember is that HRVP incubates in something like four days. It could be ten, or two weeks, or a month. I just don’t know. Novelists aren’t always too careful with their facts—and this might not even be the same strain. Viruses mutate—ah, they change characteristics, and symptoms, and effects. That’s how they say HRVP happened in the first place.”

We’ve been over this a dozen times in the past four days. Each time, I repeat what I know, and detail what I don’t know, with identical slow, patient precision. It’s become a bitter ritual, but it seems to help Rroni, to ease his mind somehow, to let him believe that I might be wrong. I have no other comfort to offer.

“How can I die of a human disease?” Rroni has asked, again and again. “We’re not even the same species!”

I have always the same answer. “I don’t know.”

All I can say is that rabies—the naturally occurring, original baseline of HRVP—was infectious in all mammals. And, once the infection has developed, it’s fatal. No percentages, no treatments, no appeals. HRVP is worse: vastly faster, vastly more contagious. HRVP is persistent in the environment; in the absence of a warm-blooded host it sporulates, remaining potentially lethal for months.

And airborne.

I can only pray that I acted fast enough.

The primal male I killed in the village haunts the back of my mind, asleep and awake; I can’t stop thinking about the days-long progress of the disease. How much longer would he have lived in agony? Days? A week? I can’t imagine a more hideous death. Sometimes, in my head, the male has Rroni’s face.

Sometimes he looks like the Twilight King himself.

I remember standing in line, five years old, with a dozen other Business children. I remember the pressure of the airgun against my hip, and the sudden sharp sting of the inoculation. Tears welled in my eyes, but I had blinked them back, and I had not made a sound. It was a solemn occasion, a rite of passage of my Business caste; the inoculation was my passport to the world, and I had accepted it as a Businessman should. I never dreamed that now, after more than forty years have passed, the fate of a world might hinge on that brief pain.

“And so,” Rroni mutters, lacing his fingers into white-knuckled knots, “how long must we wait? How long before we decide whether I shall die, or live? The others will be back from their scout at any moment—they should have been back by yesterday’s dusk. Then what? What shall we tell them? How shall we prevent their exposure?”

He nods miserably toward the horses. “If I am infected, then even Nylla and Passi must be destroyed, as you destroyed the village.”

Rroni and his horses—he often liked to comment that the horse was the perfect expression of T’nallarann: strong, swift, loyal, fierce in defense, faithful beyond the limits of its strength. Now the gaze he turns upon them is freighted with the anticipation of their deaths.

“Any living thing might carry this disease into our villages, and our cities. So we must kill, and kill, and kill. We must make a wasteland of this place, for your HRVP may spread through any creature alive in this land—except you,” he finishes bitterly.

I look at the ground. “We’ll stick to the curse story.”

“They will know we lie.”

“They know that already,” I remind him. “But they don’t know what we’re lying about.”

In the time crunch after I burned the village, the story I came up with had been embarrassingly weak; I’m not a gifted liar. I shouted to my friends a confused tale of a potent curse laid on the village—a curse that had slain the villagers one and all—a curse that had now fallen upon Rroni and me as soon as we walked in; I told them I was afraid that the magick of the curse might be able to bridge through the magickal link of the Meld, and so I refused all contact, mental or physical.

I ordered them to continue northeast into the mountains and complete the reconnaissance. Remember the mission, I told them; nothing was more important than the mission; we have to find out what happened to Diamondwell. Rroni and I would stay here and investigate the action of the curse, and see what might be done to counter it. They could not argue. Improbable as it sounded, the story could have been true, and I am, after all, their prince.

“I don’t like it,” Rroni says. “They are our friends. They deserve the truth.”

I shake my head, still looking at the ground; I can’t face him. “This isn’t about what they deserve. We tell the truth about HRVP, we’ll have to tell them how we know. We’ll have to tell them why I’m immune. And once that’s out, they’ll forget the rest. All they’ll be able to think about is how we’ve betrayed them.”

Rroni turns away, offering me only the back of his bare, scorched skull, and his voice is low and hoarse. “Perhaps we have.”

I stare into the fire. I don’t trust myself to answer, and I’m afraid to meet my brother’s eyes.

“It’s your people who have done this,” Rroni goes on. The words leak out like drops of gall, slow and bitter, as though forced from his lips by pressure that gradually builds inside his head.

“Rroni, don’t. You are my people—”

“Your people . . . made this horror. The ignorant say that Aktiri rape and slaughter and defile everything they touch, for each other’s amusement; and perhaps they who say such things are not so ignorant, after all. How else can this be explained? Why else have you done this to me?”

My heart thuds painfully once, then again. “Is that what you think, Rroni? Do you really think I did this to you?”

Torronell turns his face silently away from the fire, toward the night; he has no answer that I can bear to hear.

Many, many years ago, when I rejected both my Business heritage and the prospect of an Acting career, I liked to tell myself that I did so from some unexpected nobility of spirit, because I couldn’t bear to profit by inflicting harm on others—I was, after all, very young.

I saw the use of cyborged Workers in Ilmarinen’s heavy-machinery factories as being morally equivalent to the brutal violence against Overworld natives that drove all successful Acting careers, because both required a certain objectification of the people they exploited. Ilmarinen MachineWorks used its cyborg Assemblers as replaceable, easily programmed robots; Actors, even those usually considered “heroes,” had to cultivate a similar disregard toward the native Overworlders they inevitably killed and maimed during their Adventures. Expendable—replaceable—“bad guys” were the staple of Studio success.

As years passed, though, I came to understand myself somewhat more precisely, and I realized that my decision had had little to do with morality, and less to do with nobility; that it was really, in the end, a matter of taste.

I hate killing. I cannot bear to inflict pain, or even to know that pain is inflicted on my behalf. Perhaps this comes from the gift I have, the ability to flash into another’s life; perhaps my empathy has become so acute that I feel each hurt in advance. The reason, finally, is irrelevant. The fact remains: I am not, have never been, could never be a killer.

The First Folk do not pray. We do not have gods in the human sense. Our spirituality springs from our inextricable, ineradicable place in the interconnected web of life itself. We touch the source of the Flow, and we find that source within ourselves; the fundamental breath of the world breathes through us, as it does through all living things. We do not ask favors of life, we participate in it.

But I was born human, and in ultimate distress I can’t help returning to the ways of my childhood.

In the depths of night that follow the dying of the campfire’s embers, I find myself praying desperately to T’nallarann that I will not be forced to kill my brother.

8

THE SCENT OF blood hangs in the silver dusk.

I balance on tiptoe at the edge of the dead village, long hair the color of moonlight floating free in a translucent halo around my ears. As T’ffar sinks toward the western horizon and day fades from the sky, my surgically enhanced eyes respond, bringing the sagging, skeletal hulks of the rude shanties before me into relief as bright and sharp as a chromed knife.

This is a bad idea. This is a stupid thing to do.

But I send, in the octave of the Meld, an image of my companions remaining hidden in the forest, and an image of me being very careful as I enter the dead village: Stay here. I’m going in.

The backflow from the Meld, in response, is primarily echoes of alarm and disapproval from L’jannella, Kyllanni, and Finnall, strong enough to make the horses uneasy, overlaid with the acerbic vinegar flavor of my brother Torronell’s contribution: a dead ape with my face, rotting for a season on a pile of oil-soaked logs: Don’t expect me to light the pyre when your manblood finally gets you killed, monkey boy.

I grin sourly. My answering image is of Rroni holding the reins of a horse while I streak from the village like a cat with its tail on fire: Be ready. I might come out of here a lot faster than I’m going in.

The faintest of breezes stirs the forest around me, shifting the canopy of branches and making the green aural Shells of the living trees pulse like shadows cast by candlelight. The village swarms with the smaller, brighter Shells of forest animals, many of them fading now with the day, shading to the earth tones of sleep. Small birds flutter to their nests among the branches; ground squirrels and field mice and their numerous cousins burrow snugly into the earth to hide from the silent swoop of awakening owls. The forest is alive, but this village is dead.

In a living village of the First Folk, these shelters, roughly constructed of woodland scraps, would appear to the eye and hand to be shaped of living trees, polished with rich oils, filigreed with delicate spirals of platinum and beaten gold. In a living village, the air would carry the scents of mushrooms simmering in butter, of fine beer foaming as it spills from oaken casks, of rich wood-smoke from hearths alight with mistletoe and ash. In a living village, even the silences would shiver with the almost-heard laughter of children.

The silences in this village have vanished behind the croaks of ravens, squabbling over carrion.

This village reeks of old meat.

I repeat: This is a bad idea. This is a stupid thing to do.

But I am a prince, and these had been my folk. If I don’t go in, Rroni will; though Rroni is far more the sarcastic society wit than he is a warrior, he is equally a prince. This is my job. I have vastly greater faith in my own ability to survive the unexpected. And let’s face it: I have less to lose.

Poised at the village edge, I set the frog of my recurved bow on the top of my boot, bend the bow and string it. I slide a silver-bladed broadhead from the quiver at my belt and fit its nock to the string. I slip into the village as quietly as a shadow lengthens in the twilight; this is one of the things I do almost as well as a true primal.

The shelters rise around the boles of forest giants in the deepwood, letting the shade of the towering trees do the work of keeping underbrush clear. Needing no more than primal skill with Fantasy for defense, these villages are as open as the forest itself. I drift from tree to tree, letting my nose gather information that my eyes, enhanced or not, just can’t; the shadows within the crude shelters are too dark.

Each window exhales a miasma of rotting blood.

Beyond the splintery gaps in the corner of one collapsing shanty, a squawking pile of black wings and curved beaks shudders in a span of well-trodden earth. I approach, reaching out with a tendril of my Shell to flick the scarlet radiances of theirs. The ravens scatter, some taking wing clumsily, some only waddling away, too fat and gorged with flesh to fly.

What they had fed upon is the corpse of a little feyal, lying carelessly splayed on the earth like a cast-off doll. This feyal had been very young, six or seven years old, and the bright colors of his kirtle have not yet faded in the sun. Loving hands had woven this kirtle, thread by thread, and loving hands had embossed the broad leather belt that girdled it, had made the wooden toy sword and the bow of bundled rushes that lie beside him.

I squat by the corpse, holding my bow and nocked arrow in my left hand, parallel to the earth. I turn the feyal’s face delicately up to catch the last of the day’s light. Maggots squirm in one empty eye socket, and inside the nose and open mouth, yet the other eye still stares from the skull like a dusty opal. The ravens have torn off only the tongue and parts of the lips; even the tender flesh below the jaw is still unmarked.

My heart kicks into a gallop. From the size of these maggots, this child has been dead at least three days; the ravens should have stripped his face near to the bone by now. They should be working on his liver and lungs, unless some larger scavenger has been driving them off—and his corpse shows no sign that anything other than birds has been at him. Something has been chasing off the ravens.

Something in this village still lives.

Get out of there, Kyllanni sends in words. Of the four that wait outside the village, she’s the best hunter, and she understands perfectly what this child’s corpse signifies. This feyal had been left in the open deliberately: bait.

Yes: me, too.

I drop one knee to the earth and pretend that my full attention is engaged in examining the corpse. The faint scrape of a stealthy footfall comes from not far behind me, along with a muffled rasp of breath, labored and harsh.

Changeling, come on! Get out of there! Now L’jannella and Finnall weigh in, adding their urgencies to Kyllanni’s, imagery of a shadowy, monstrous shape looming behind my shoulder. Come on!

I hunch over the child a little more. I can’t help it—it’s an instinctive urge to present a smaller target.

Let him be, Torronell offers, sending a picture of the Deliannfaced ape industriously tinkering with some impossibly complicated puzzle: Let the monkey boy play his game. He occasionally knows what he’s doing.

Please, kind gods, let this be one of those times.

I gently shift the feyal’s body, but find nothing that resembles a death wound. The earth on which it lies is scuffed and printed with countless raven tracks, and so tells no useful tale. The child’s hands have twisted into rictal talons, still stiff as stone though rigor had long passed for the rest of his limp corpse. Fluid has leaked from his partially eaten mouth and soaked into the ground—and has left a crust of its trail on his cheek, rimmed with flaking blood. This crust has a strange, fractal, bubbled look, like dried soap scum.

A sudden coat of sand grows on my tongue and a chilly sickness gathers in my stomach. I peer closely at this crusted streak, holding my breath and cursing the growing darkness.

Sweet shivering fuck.

Oh, fuck, fuck me, god. Please let me be wrong.

It could be any number of things. It could. The kid could have gotten a mouthful of raw rith leaves, for example; he could have been chewing soapbark for the tingle, and had a stroke.

But I don’t really believe it; some childhood bogymen are fixed too firmly in one’s dreams to ever be mistaken. Dried foam on the face, the clawed hands with earth caked under the fingernails, dirt scraped up in the final convulsions—

If the corpse were fresher, I could tell for sure: The tongue would be black, dried and cracked like a mudflat at the end of a summer’s drought; the throat would be so swollen that the head could not be turned.

Again a footfall scrapes behind me, and another. I barely hear them; I’m buried in a fantasy of cracking open the feyal’s skull, of excising some tissue at the base of the brain, of improvising some kind of magickal lenses to make a microscope powerful enough to search for Negri bodies in the nerve cells—

The stealthy footfalls become a sudden rush, and now the shout that comes through the Meld is my brother’s: DELIANN!

I throw myself to the right, the edge of my hand striking the ground to begin a shoulder-roll that brings me to a crouch as my attacker blunders past me. The bow in my left stays parallel to the ground; I stroke the arrow’s nock to my chest and release it without aiming, allowing my body to target without the intervention of my mind.

The silver broadhead punches through the ribs of a youthful, powerful-looking fey. He twists, snarling and clawing at the shaft like a wounded cougar. The shaft snaps, and its splintered end slashes blood from his hand. He croaks, “Murderer—murderer!” in a harsh and rasping whisper, then springs at me, empty hands outstretched, fingers hooked like a raptor’s talons.

I drop my bow and slip aside once again, ducking beneath his wide-flung arm. I draw my rapier from the scabbard that rides my left hip; it chimes like a silver bell as it comes free. As he whirls to charge again, I lunge and drive my blade through the side of his thigh just above the knee, twisting it so that the razor edge slashes out through his hamstring.

His leg springs straight, pitching him sideways to the earth; he writhes there, growling wordlessly, and claws the earth with spastic talons, dragging himself toward me a bloody inch at a time.

He might not be alone, Rroni sends. I’m coming in.

NO! My roar into the Meld spikes a backflow of startled pain from all four of my companions. STAY WHERE YOU ARE!

Don’t shout at us, monkey boy. Being loud doesn’t make you immortal. You need someone at your back.

How can I possibly explain? Rroni, I swear by the honor of our House that you can’t come in here. Come into this village, and you die. Believe me.

Is this some manblood thing, little brother?

Ah, yes, that’s it . . . I have to force the phrase; the Meld makes untruths difficult to share, impossible to conceal. My friends’ sharp orange sting at my lie stabs like a needle into my heart. Please, Rroni. Now I’m asking you. Stay out.

I am Eldest here, Deliann. It was my risk to take from the first. This means trouble—Rroni never calls me by my right name unless he’s too upset to be insulting, and years have passed since the last time he pulled rank. Either come out, or I shall come in and get you.

Don’t. Just don’t.

This exchange takes only a second. I crouch in the wounded fey’s path and extend my Shell to touch the aura, crimson shot through with crackling violet, that pulses around his form like cold flame. As I delicately tune my own Shell to match the bloody hue and the jagged violet discharge of his, my perception of the Meld trickles away. Now, for the first time since the five of us set out from Mithondion, I am truly alone.

Once my Shell harmonizes fully to his, I open myself to the liquid swirl of the Flow. With the energy of the forest around me channeled through my mind, I gently take control of his muscles and hold him shivering in place.

He fights me, but as an animal fights, or a human, pitting the strength of his will against my mindhold; he refuses to believe his limbs will not obey him, and fuels his struggle with his rage. I’m not an accomplished mindwrestler—any of my brothers can beat me—but no one can match my raw power. My brothers like to sneer that I’m as graceful as a mudslide, but like a mudslide, I cannot be overcome by mere strength.

I play him like a puppet, using his own muscles to roll him onto his back and lift his face for examination.

Both his eyes are ringed with swollen, purplish-black flesh, and crusted with pale yellow scurf that clings in chunks to his eyelashes and forms a trail down his cheeks. Pink foam bubbles from his mouth, streaked with deeper scarlet that swells from the gaping cracks in his blackened lips. His tongue is black and cracked and leaking blood thick as mucus, and the flesh beneath his chin is swollen until his skin is tight as melon rind.

The cold sickness that birthed in my stomach as I examined the child now freezes into a solid brick of ice.

This is not supposed to be possible.

I would speak my silent ah, shit, holy shit, but my chest squeezes itself until I can’t even whisper.

T’ffar sinks into the west, his rosy bloom replaced by the sheen of T’llan rising over the eastern mountains. I get up, and stand over the fey I hold helpless at my feet, watching his blood fade to black. I lift my slim blade, following with my eyes the moonsilver that ripples over it like water, and imagine the slow, raw-meat rip of thrusting this blade into his belly, probing with the point to find the pulse of his heart, to slash that muscle and drain the life from his eyes.

It’s the only medicine I can offer.

I wasn’t born a primal prince. I could have refused the honor, and the duty. I knew, even on that day when T’farrell Ravenlock spoke the formula of Adoption before the assembled House Mithondionne, that the kind of obligation I face now could become part of my life.

I chose this. It’s too late to take it back.

I lower the point of my moonsilvered blade and touch it to the vault of the helpless fey’s rib cage. Current surges through that physical connection, deeper and more intimate than the mingling of our attuned Shells; he rolls his crusted eyes to meet mine, and I flash on him.

In that second, I become the wounded fey—

Immobile on the cooling earth, trapped inside a body that will not obey me, feeling the stiff sccrrt of my broken rib scraping the arrow shaft that punctures my lung, feeling the hot pool of blood thicken beneath my hamstrung leg. But these are nothing, not even a distraction, behind the agony of my throat.

Someone took a burning log from a bonfire and jammed it into my mouth; now they are pounding it down my throat in time with the erratic thunder of my heart. A thirst is on me, a savage lust for the faintest touch of moisture, that hurts even more than the broken glass that fills my throat. I have dreamed only of water for four nights now, of cool clear forest springs that could ease my throat and quench the blaze of my fever. My face burns with it, roasting slowly in its internal heat, scorching my lips to bloody charcoal, cooking my tongue to blackened leather within the oven of my mouth; water is my only hope of relief. But even the morning dew, sopped from the hanging sheets of moss that drape the trees nearby, seared my throat like boiling acid. It has been two days since I was last able to swallow.

The flash ends a bare instant after it began, but it leaves me shaken and trembling, greasy sweat seeping over my forehead. It could have been worse: I could have sunk fully into his past, experienced the nervous hypersensitivity, the way the faintest whisper stabs like a needle into the eardrum, the dimmest candle becomes a knife in the eye, the unendurable itching, the insatiate hunger and convulsive vomiting, the growing homicidal paranoia that transforms your wife, your children, even your parents into leering monsters that tear at your mind—

I know these symptoms by heart; they form shadow-shapes in the back of my mind, always lurking, sniffing around the fringes of my consciousness, wondering when they might finally match my experience.

Today, I am grateful for the flash that is my gift, because it makes my duty easier: makes it purely mercy.

I hold the fey motionless while I lean on my sword. The blade enters his belly, with a frictive skidding on the muscle that clenches spastically around it. I twist the blade upward until I find his heart, and slash into and through it, the point grating on his spine.

It takes a minute or two for him to die. Even as his heart spasms and blood floods his abdominal cavity, he’s still alive, still awake, still staring up at me with maddened, hungry eyes as his body shuts down piecemeal, blood flow cutting off first to his limbs, then to his guts and chest, trying to keep that last spark of consciousness aflame.

I watch it smolder, and wink out.

I wipe my blade, but instead of returning it to its scabbard, I drive its point into the knot of a tree root that sticks up above the earth and leave it there to gently sway in the moonlight. I yank the broken arrow from the corpse’s side and do the same with it.

Slowly, I untie the braided leather belt that holds my scabbard and quiver. I take it from around my waist and hang it from the hilt of my rapier. My shirt and breeches come next, and my stockings, and boots. All these I pile on the knotted root beside my sword and the broken arrow. I collect my bow from where it lies on the earth, a few paces away; with solemn, ceremonial care, I place it on the pile.

“What in the world are you doing?” Rroni’s voice sounds rusty—it’s been days since he’s spoken aloud—and its accustomed mocking edge is conspicuously absent. “Clothe yourself, Deliann! Are you mad?”

He’s there, behind me; I turn to face him, and meet his eyes. My brother: my best friend. Rroni stands over the dead child, revulsion and horror twisting his delicate features, and for the wrenching eternity between one heartbeat and the next, I can only stare. I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t blink. I am entirely consumed by the agonizing wish that my brother had been born a coward.

A coward would never have come into this village; a coward would never have left Mithondion on a dangerous, useless quest with his half-mad, manblood-tainted brother.

A coward would have lived through it.

I settle into myself, compressing somehow, barely perceptibly, as though the world has become a smaller place and I shrink with it.

“What have you done here? Deliann, answer me! What have they done to you?”

I can’t get my mind around it, not yet—maybe not ever.

Rroni is probably already dead.

He steps closer, a tendril of his Shell questing out, its shade cycling through the spectrum as he tunes it for a mindhold. In the instant it drops out of the octave of the Meld, I snatch my rapier from the root and lunge at my brother. One advantage of my mortal birth is a strength of body that no primal can hope to equal; when the basket hilt of my rapier hits the side of Rroni’s head, he drops like a stone.

I stand over him, breathless at the fierce ache within my chest.

After a moment, I return the rapier to its place on the root’s knuckle, then I kneel beside Rroni and swiftly strip him. I bundle Rroni’s clothing on top of mine, and place Rroni’s boots alongside. Naked, barefoot, and unarmed, I pace the perimeter of the dead village, gathering Flow within a fiery image I hold in my mind, clear as a dream; from my footsteps, the earth sprouts flame.

At the first hint of smoke, our friends call in alarm from the deepwood, using their voices when they find no answers within the Meld. I brush the Meld for one instant: Patience.

I turn to the center of the village, fire skipping at my heels like a faithful puppy. At the knotted root, I take my brother into my arms and turn my face to the indifferent stars.

The death of my entire people dances in this ring of flame around me. I swear—T’nallarann, Lifemind, are you listening?—I swear that this death will not work through me.

With a silent shout of power, I draw the cleansing flame in upon us, a thunderclap cautery that flares like the sun upon the forest floor. A toadstool of smoke rolls toward the moon; it grows from a fairy ring of cinders that smolders like countless eyes in the darkness around us.

I stand at the center, Rroni in my arms, both of us now panting harshly in the smoke-thickened air. His platinum hair has become a reeking tangle-melt of char; his flesh is covered with a fine grey ash, the remnants of its outermost layer. I imagine I look even worse.

“Now,” I mutter, my voice as bleak and colorless as the ashes of my heart, “all I need is a good lie to tell the others, and everything might still be all right.”

9

THE CONNECTION SHATTERED in a blast of white fire across Deliann’s vision, from the slap of Tchako’s leather club.

“What are you doing?” the ogrillo howled, lifting her braided club for another blow. “You murdering motherfucker, I’ll beat you to death! What did you do to her?”

Kierendal lay on the floor in front of him, her face white as though painted with ash. The club hissed through the air and banged his skull again; blood sprayed across the brown-spattered wall, and the room darkened.

The entire flash had happened in the time it took the ogrillo to raise her club.

Deliann tried to lift his free hand up to shield his head and neck, but he couldn’t make his arm work, couldn’t even hold up his head.

“If you’ve hurt her, you mother—”

“Tchako,” Kierendal said from the floor, her voice weak and shaken but strong enough to save Deliann’s life. “Don’t. Don’t hit him. Help me up.”

The ogrillo’s coarse features twisted in a caricature of puzzlement, but she lowered the club and went to Kierendal’s side, extending a scaly hand to help her mistress rise. Kierendal leaned heavily on her for a moment, and passed a hand over her eyes. “Get the keys. Unlock his manacles.”

“Kier, you’re not well—”

“Go, damn you!” the feya snapped, and Tchako could not bear her displeasure. She left, trailing a murderous glare at Deliann.

The door closed behind her.

Kierendal swayed, deprived of the ogrillo’s support. She touched her face again, as though assessing a fever, and then she sank to her knees beside Deliann, heedless of the damage to her exquisite gown.

She placed her hands upon his lap in the ancient gesture of fealty. “I—I can’t believe . . . Deliann, I—”

“It’s all right, Kier,” he said kindly. “I know it’s overwhelming. I’ve had two weeks to get used to the idea, and it still makes me want to scream and never stop.”

She lowered her eyes, bending her long, graceful neck before him. “I am yours, my prince. What would you have me do?”

Deliann took a deep breath, and let himself believe that between the two of them, some lives might still be saved.

“First,” he said slowly, “we need to catch an Aktir.”

AND EACH HAD his own role to play: the crooked knight defended the part-time goddess; the part-time goddess served the land; the acolytes of dust and ashes fed their master’s hunger.

The dark angel made war.

He answered the call of the crooked knight; he used the part-time goddess to work his will; he named the god of dust and ashes his enemy.

On that day, the dark angel broke his chains and went forth to battle.