SIX

“CHANGELING?” THE HIGH, thin voice sounded like a breathy piccolo, and a hand like a coin-sized grapnel tugged at his ear. “Changeling, wake up!”

Deliann rolled over. He didn’t want to open his eyes; he couldn’t remember exactly, but he was moderately sure that waking up would hurt, somehow—and he was so warm, so comfortable, and the bed was so soft . . .

“Changeling!” Something poked him hard in the neck; he couldn’t be sure, but it might have been a kick from a very small bare foot. “Kier says she needs you.”

Just as well, he thought, rubbing at his gummy eyelids until he could part them. If I sleep any longer, I’ll probably start to dream.

The heavy brocade curtains drawn across the windows in Kierendal’s bedchamber were outlined by the yellow glare of the afternoon outside. Standing on the mattress next to his shoulder was an extraordinarily beautiful treetopper, her diaphanous wings a transparent shimmer in the gloom. She looked like a twenty-inch human female of extravagantly sensual proportion: long elegant legs, a tiny wasp waist, outrageously high firm breasts. She wore a minuscule shift, belted at the waist, barely long enough to cover the swell of her ass and revealing a dangerous amount of cleavage.

“Tup . . .” he said thickly. “H’long . . . Timezit?”

“It’s about four,” Tup said. “You’ve been asleep for five hours or so. You have to get up, now—Kier sent me to get you.”

“Yes, all right,” he made himself say, and sat up.

He had only a fuzzy recollection of coming into this room; Kierendal had led him here after they’d let the Aktir go; at the end of his performance for the people who were watching through that man’s eyes, Deliann had nearly collapsed. He had barely kept his head up long enough to eat some of the soup that Kierendal fed him. He remembered being led in here . . . he remembered Kierendal’s lips, soft against his ear: “Do you know, you are the only human who’s ever had me for free?”

He remembered her mouth against his, and that’s when he realized he was naked.

He pulled the sheet around his hips. “Urh, Tup? You wouldn’t happen to know where my pants are?”

“On the chair. Come on, hurry up.”

He felt as if his whole body were turning red. He had some hazy impression that Tup was—or used to be—Kierendal’s lover. Had he done something with Kierendal? What had happened between them? He would remember if he’d had sex—

Wouldn’t he?

He gathered the sheet higher around his waist. “Tup, please. If you wouldn’t mind—?”

Tup put her hands on her hips. “Changeling, I live in a whorehouse. You think I’ve never seen a dick before? Please. I’ve seen yours; I was here when Kier undressed you.”

He closed his eyes, sighed, and opened them again. Well, at least that means I didn’t have sex. He glanced at Tup, who glared at him impatiently.

Probably.

“All right,” he said. “All right, I’m coming—I mean, I’m getting ready.” He climbed out of bed and into the pants Kierendal had given him.

“Better hurry,” Tup said. “She’s pretty upset.”

“About what?” Deliann asked dully, pulling the shirt on over his head. “And what does she need me for? She has plenty of security.”

“She didn’t say, exactly. Some snarl with a roger, up in the suites. He’s got a hostage. She said to tell you this roger’s sweaty and feverish—he’s claiming his dolly was trying to poison him.”

Deliann went still, half into the shirt, while a jagged ball of ice congealed in his stomach. That’s it, he thought. That’s why I didn’t want to wake up. That’s exactly it.

A slow weight gathered on his shoulders, crushing him toward the floor, but he just shook his head and slipped on the pair of sandals beside the chair.

“Show me the way,” he said.

2

TUP LOOPED THROUGH the stairwell above him, circling and doubling back to maintain airspeed while she led him up toward the Yellow Suites, in the east wing of the fifth floor. Deliann struggled to keep pace, gasping with the pain each step brought his maimed legs.

Kierendal paced back and forth in the corridor, waiting for them. She wore her afternoon business attire—loose pants and shirt of shimmering black silk set off with a single string of gleaming pearls—and her silver hair was drawn back in a bun so tight it brought an extra slant to her eyes. A spot of blood showed at the corner of her mouth, where she’d been chewing her lower lip with her needle-sharp canines. She had a pair of her overt guards with her, ogres each nearly nine feet tall and five feet wide, dressed in heavy calf-length hauberks and carrying morningstars the size of Deliann’s head. “Deliann,” she said shortly, nodding him toward an open door beside her. “In here.”

When Tup started to flutter in with them, Kierendal shook her head. “You stay out of here. Go back down to my chambers, wait for me there.”

“Aww, Kier—”

Kierendal bared her sharp and bloody teeth. “Go. Now.”

Tup went.

Within the room, a tearstained human girl of about twenty sat on the edge of the bed. A stonebender knelt on the bed beside her, holding a bloody towel against the girl’s cheek. As Deliann entered, the stonebender drew back the towel, revealing an ugly gaping wound on the girl’s face. Instead of a cheek, the side of her face was a pair of raw-meat flaps that didn’t quite join up; she looked like somebody had stuck a knife in her mouth and sliced through her cheek all the way back to the hinge of her jaw.

Deliann winced; his stomach wasn’t steady enough for this.

“Bleed’s almost stop,” the stonebender said kindly. “Good girl, brave girl. Fix you good, no worry.”

Deliann could see that she used to be beautiful.

Dully, through the wall, he could hear the sound of someone pacing back and forth, heavily, like he was stomping cockroaches with big boots. “Whaddaya fuckin’ think?” someone was saying in the adjoining room. “Whaddaya fuckin’ think? What was I s’poza do?”

The stonebender began to stitch the girl up with his blunt, nimble fingers, using a long curved leather-working needle; the stitches would hold the skin and muscle in place while his magick accelerated the natural healing process. Probably wouldn’t scar—not much, anyway—but it had to hurt. She whimpered, and tears leaked from her eyes, and Deliann had to look away.

“Her roger’s still next door,” Kierendal said. “Near as I can tell, he started acting up out of nowhere, and Tessa cried the carp. He only had time to cut her once; she made the door in a scramble when the guards broke in.”

“Tup said something about a hostage?”

She shook her head grimly and nodded at a small spy gate set into the adjoining wall. “Have a look, if you want. The bastard knifed one of my boys and coldcocked the other. I don’t want to send in anyone else. It’s not just that he might kill Endy; I’m a little worried about letting any more of my people get close to him.”

Deliann nodded. “Not just him—if he’s sick, she has it, too. We shouldn’t be in here. Let the healer stay with her.”

Might as well; if the whore was infected, the healer was already dead.

He took Kierendal’s arm and drew her back out into the corridor. He lowered his voice, leaning close to her to keep his words private. “Did you touch the girl? Has anyone else touched her, or been close to her or the, er, the roger?”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right. Tup said something about poison?”

“Yes. I can’t be sure—you can guess that she’s not talking too well,” Kierendal said with a nod toward the wounded girl. “I’m only going on what I’ve overheard from next door. He’s been saying something about poison in her mouth—crazy talking, like her kiss would kill him and he had to cut off her lips to save his life, like that. That’s why I thought you should have a look at him. You . . . showed me . . . more than I want to know about this disease of yours, but you’re the expert.”

“I’m no expert,” Deliann told her gloomily.

“You’re the closest I have.”

“All right. First, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone in Ankhana could be infected—this is probably some kind of drug reaction. The disease broke out all the way up beyond Khryl’s Saddle—”

“It’s not worth taking a chance,” Kierendal said grimly. “You give me a yes, I’ll burn down this whole fucking wing. You put me through that fey’s death. You made me know what it feels like. I won’t watch my people die like that. I’ll kill her myself.”

Deliann’s golden gaze met Kierendal’s silver for a long moment; he saw how much it hurt her even to say such a thing. He also saw that she’d do it, no matter how much it hurt.

But it’s not HRVP, he told himself. It can’t be. It’s some kind of drug reaction, that’s all. Like I said.

The hall door also had a spy gate in it. Deliann stepped over and slid it open; he’d take a quick look, glance at the guy to set Kierendal’s mind at ease, then tell her everything was all right. Simple. Easy.

Through the gate he could see a fey on the floor in an enormous pool of blood, his head twisted awkwardly, one side of his neck slashed into a ragged mockery of lips. A fly settled onto his face and walked across his open eye.

Scarlet bootprints stained the floor, where someone had tracked through the blood and walked off out of sight.

On the bed was a thick-muscled stonebender, wrists and ankles tied together with a twisted bedsheet, a wadded pillow-case stuffed in his mouth. With small, slow movements, the stonebender rotated his wrists and worked his ankles against each other, surreptitiously loosening the knots that held him.

“Whaddameye s’poza do? Huh? She’da kilt me. Whaddaya fuckin’ think I’m gonna do?” The voice came more clearly through the spy gate; no longer muffled by the intervening wall, it sounded sickeningly familiar.

Then the speaker stomped into view: a huge, broad-shouldered ogrillo, his grey-leather face dripping sweat and one eye glaring feverishly. He wore gaudy, new-looking clothes of garishly dyed linen, now drenched with blood down his right side. He carried no weapon, but the razor-sharp fighting claw on his right wrist was fully extended and bright with blood.

One of his undershot tusks was a broken stump; the ivory of the other was blackened and scorched.

Deliann sagged against the wall.

Better I had died in the mountains, he thought. The pain in his chest wouldn’t let him speak, wouldn’t let him even breathe. Oh, Rroni, why couldn’t you have been a better swordsman? Why couldn’t you have opened my skull right then?

Oh, god, god, I would give anything, if only I had died . . .

The murderous ogrillo in the suite was the foredeck second.

“What is it?” Kierendal said. “It’s bad, isn’t it? I can see it on your face.”

“It’s bad,” Deliann echoed.

Kierendal turned to her ogre guards, her face bleak with harsh necessity. “Evacuate this wing. I want everybody out of here within five minutes. Get all the available security and sweep every room. Anybody still in here, five minutes from now? They’ll die in the fire.”

One of the ogres twitched his enormous morningstar at the door where Deliann stood. “Whad aboud thhem? Whad aboud Endy? How you gonna ged him oud?”

“We’re not,” Kier said. “Endy, Tessa, Parkk—they’re all staying.”

The ogres exchanged dimly dismayed glances. “Bud you said—”

“You don’t have to understand,” Kierendal said. “Just do what I tell you.”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” Deliann said.

He pushed himself away from the wall, wondering numbly that he still moved. How could he stand, under this weight? How could he speak? How could he still live, with his heart rotting inside him? “You don’t understand,” he repeated slowly, painfully. “I know that ’rillo.”

“You do?” Kierendal blinked. “Small world. But that doesn’t change anything—”

“Yes, it does. It changes everything. He’s infected. There’s only one way he could have been infected, to be showing symptoms right now.”

Deliann spread his hands in absolute surrender; agony like this could not be fought, and could not possibly be endured. “I’m immune. I don’t get sick. But he must have somehow caught it from me.”

Kierendal’s eyes went wide and blank.

Slowly, numbly, she lifted a nerveless hand to her face, staring sightlessly past him. She pressed her lips with her fingers, as though remembering her mouth against his—as though trying to calculate the infinite cost of that one kiss.

3

DELIANN LAY IN the darkness, twisted into a fetal knot of pain. Pain paralyzed him, left him helpless, shuddering on the cold, hard floor. He was only one stride from a couch, half a room away from a bed where he could lie, but the only motion his limbs would make was an intermittent nerveless twitch, a racking convulsion halfway between a lung-rotted cough and a dry sob.

He had never imagined there was this much pain in the world.

Lying at the bottom of the cliff in the God’s Teeth with both legs broken had been nothing; it was as though his legs had some kind of a circuit breaker, a transformer that stepped down the pain. His heart, though—

Eaten by acid, it left a smoking hole in his chest, a sucking emptiness that screamed regret. This pain only grew. Long ago it had passed unendurable; he would howl, but the hole in his chest had eaten too much of his strength. He could not even whimper. He could only lie on the cold floor, and suffer.

He had brought madness and death to this whole city.

His stupidity—his simple thoughtless foolishness—had murdered Kierendal, and Tup, and her houseboy Zakke, and the pretty human whore with the slashed face, and the stonebender healer Parkk, and the ogre guards—

and—

and—

and . . .

Kierendal’s first thought had been to seal the building—to save the city by burning down Alien Games with herself and everyone else inside it. She knew what she was in for; he’d made her feel every inch of the death of the young fey at the village outside Diamondwell. A shrieking death in fire, going down to darkness with the smell of your own roasting flesh in your nostrils, was far kinder than what that young fey had endured.

But even that would be useless; she’d given up any hope of slowing the infection. She could save nothing.

Alien Games was a brothel, a casino, an attraction for tourists from all corners of the Empire. The infection that he had carried here would have spread already into the city, and would be creeping outward into the Empire along the arteries of the Great Chambaygen like blood poisoning up a wounded leg.

How could he have been so blind?

In a minute or two, he’d get up. He’d go into the bedchamber next door, where Kierendal sat in darkness with Tup and Zakke and Pischu, her floor boss. He’d take a cup, and fill it with the wine that they were drinking even now.

He thought of Socrates, taking the hemlock and pacing his prison, walking back and forth to bring it on the quicker; he doubted he could do that. He wasn’t entirely sure he could stand at all. Kierendal, she was stronger: she had marched into the bedchamber as though she’d left doubt and fear behind on another world.

On the other hand, only her brief future weighed down on her. Deliann had been crushed by the past.

He hoped that all he would find, on the far side of the cup of wine that waited for him next door, was darkness and an end to pain—but if not, if he was to face some judgment for his crimes, he did not fear it. Even the most brutal hell could not hurt him worse than this.

A small cool hand laid itself along his cheek, fingertips brushing his neck as though feeling for his pulse. Just that simple touch was so comforting, so calming, that he could not pull away from it. That cool touch seemed to draw some of his hurt as a moist towel draws fever. He shuddered as it went out from him, as though something inside him clung involuntarily to the pain, the way muscle clamps tight around a wounding arrow shaft if it’s pulled too slowly.

“Shh, it’s all right,” a woman’s voice told him softly. “It’s all right, I’m here.” Her breath smelled of green leaves turning toward the sun, of grain ripening in fields freshly swept by rain.

“No,” Deliann said. She had taken enough of his pain that he now found he could move, could speak. He pulled away from her hand. “No, it’s not all right. You’ve touched me. Now you’re going to die.”

“I am not so easily slain,” the woman’s voice told him gently. “Open your eyes, Kris Hansen. I bring glad tidings.”

“What?” Deliann said. “What did you call me?”

When he did open his eyes, her face stole his voice.

She glowed in the darkened room with a light of her own, as though a single sunbeam framed itself precisely to her form: a small, slight human woman in ordinary clothing, a spray of dark hair framing an oval face rather ordinarily pretty, features unremarkable save for the serene power that shone forth from them: a shimmering halo of life so refined and concentrated that the sight of her burned away Deliann’s previous experience of beauty like ice in a furnace. Looking on her, he could not even imagine another woman’s face.

Awe compressed his chest. “Who . . .” he gasped breathlessly. “Who are you?”

“I am called Pallas Ril.”

“The Aktir Queen?” he said involuntarily; Pallas Ril was the name of the ruler of demons in the elKothan pantheon, the bride of the evil Prince of Chaos—but none of the elKothan woodcuts or story windows had shown a woman such as this.

“If you wish,” she said.

Electrified, Deliann scrambled to his feet; he made a warding gesture and breathed himself into mindview. “I want nothing to do with the human gods,” he said warily.

Slowly, sadly, she straightened, and on her face was a small quiet smile. Her Shell filled the room, and more; he could not see its limit, and it blazed like the midsummer sun. “I am human, and a god—but I am not a human god. Know this: I am your friend, Kris Hansen—”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“—and I am the answer to your cry for help.”

Deliann stopped, stunned, swaying in place, helpless against the flood of pain and need that thundered back into his chest—forgotten for one moment, it returned with overpowering force.

“How—? Who—?”

“I am called by many names. The First Folk call Me Eyyallarann.”

Her Shell surrounded him, enveloped him, enwrapped him in effortless comfort; for half a single second, he relaxed—

And flashed on her.

She roared into him; in an instant he was filled to bursting, filled beyond pain, but there was more, infinitely more, as though some cruel giant poured the ocean down his throat. From the scream of an eagle wheeling above Khryl’s Saddle to the slow squirm of a newt spawning in the mud of the Teranese Delta, from the creak of ancient branches in the wind of the Larrikaal Deepwood to the hush of a rivulet washing a mossy stone below Ankhana’s Commons’Beach, she entered him with power that would burst his skull and scatter smoking gobbets of brain throughout the room—

“That’s enough,” she said, and the flood cut off as though a door had been slammed within his brain. “Be careful what you touch, Kris; there are dangers here for such as you.”

Deliann stepped back from her, gasping, his hands pressing against his face until the room halted its dizzy whirl; then he lowered himself slowly and reverently to his knees.

“Your pardon, My Lady,” he said formally in Primal, his head bent before her. “I did not know Thee.”

“Your reverence betrays your human birth,” she replied gravely in the same tongue. “The First Folk do not kneel to Me; I am properly greeted with a kiss, for I am your mother, and your sister, and your child.”

Deliann rose and embraced her; he was, astonishingly, taller than she, and she felt frail in his arms. “What would you have me do?” he asked.

“Hold on to hope,” she said. “Within days, a new disease will strike this city, and the entire land. Whoever it touches need never fear HRVP.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It is how I will defeat this plague. A new plague, that confers immunity to the other.”

“You can do this?”

“I can. That is why you must hold on to hope.”

“Hope?” he repeated. “Immunity—oh, my heart! Kierendal! Kierendal, stop!”

He dashed from the room into the bedchamber next door.

What he found there might have been the aftermath of a cheerful party: bodies sprawled across a wide bed and settled at seeming ease into comfortable chairs, all in the boneless relaxation that might have been sleep—

Zakke reclined in a broad sitting chair, his beard spilling down his chest. Pischu lay on the bed, his hands folded peacefully across his chest. Tup was curled up on a pillow on the vanity table.

Kierendal had crumpled to the floor like a broken doll. She lay on the rug at the foot of the bed, and Deliann dropped to his knees beside her. Her long, almost fleshless legs were twisted beneath her; they looked like they would hurt, if she woke up.

He touched her splash of silver hair. “If only you could have waited,” he whispered.

The room brightened to the gentle glow of a forest moonset. The goddess stood at his back.

“She was afraid,” Deliann said, absently stroking Kierendal’s hair. His voice was empty as a raided tomb. “They all were. She knew what it was going to be like. She couldn’t face that kind of death—she couldn’t watch them face it . . .”

“Do you think she would want to live, if she could?”

“Do I—? Would—?” Deliann turned, wide-eyed, gasping with sudden hope. “Are you asking me?”

“Those who still live need not die of this poison,” the goddess said. “Can you bear the burden of having called them back?”

“I—yes! Yes, anything—anything—”

“This is not a fairy tale, Kris,” the goddess said severely. “I do not take you at your word, when you do not know what you are saying. Any who survive this poison will be infected still. I cannot cure them directly.”

“You—you can’t? Why not?”

“HRVP is not, exactly, alive. My powers of healing are great, but they are no different in kind than any other: I can only spur the body’s natural processes. HRVP is not a natural disease; it is a genengineered bioweapon—” She used, astonishingly, the English words. “—and the body’s natural resistance system is no defense. To spur the body’s processes would bring only a swifter death.”

“But I—”

The goddess lifted a restraining hand. “The vaccine you received as a child is another genengineered virus.” She continued to sprinkle English into her Westerling. “This is how I will stop the infection, in the end: I will create a countervirus that will block the receptor sites to which HRVP binds. If your friends are exposed to it soon enough, it may save their sanity and their lives.”

“May?”

The goddess nodded. “They will have a chance, but only that. You might call them back from this gentle death to an unbearable one.”

“How . . . how long? How long before—”

“I believe I will have the countervirus prepared within four days.”

“So they would have a chance. That’s a chance I can take,” Deliann said, rising. “So? What’s the catch?”

The goddess shook her head sadly. “This is the catch, Kris.” She gestured toward the bodies. “Two of these four have yet enough strength to be saved; if I strengthen their hearts, and speed the work of their livers to break down the poison, it will wash from them before it can kill them.”

“Two?” Deliann said. “Only two?”

She nodded. “That man—” Pischu, on the bed. “—had a weak heart. He is already dead. And this treetopper—”

Tup . . . Oh, Kierendal, how will you stand it?

“—her metabolism was too fast; she died only a moment after she drank. So, Kris Hansen: your friend may not thank you for calling her back from death. Can you help her live with what she has done?”

Deliann looked down at Kierendal.

If I’m wrong, there’s plenty of poison left. Once she understands what’s going on, she can make her own choice.

He nodded: to the goddess, and to himself. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can.”

“Then it is done,” the goddess said.

That simply: without a gesture, without even the faintest flicker of the light around them. Kierendal’s shallow hitching breath deepened toward the slow rhythm of sleep.

Now he found that he had recovered the strength to cry.

“My father . . .” he murmured painfully. “My family—Mithondion . . . When you have the countervirus—all of Mithondion will be infected by now . . .”

“Mithondion is beyond my reach,” the goddess said. “My power is that of the river—beyond the bound of my watershed, I am blind and deaf, and largely powerless. If they are to be saved, the cure must be carried to them, even as was the disease.”

“How did you—I mean, when did—” Torronell, his heart whispered, breaking. If she had come two weeks ago, even a week . . . “I mean, where have you been?” His heart cried his real question: Why did you wait so long?

“I was on Earth,” she said simply. “As you named me, I am also the Aktir Queen. You called, and I came.”

“I . . . called?You mean, with J’Than? The Aktir?”

Her luminous, liquid eyes gazed deeply into his. “Hari Michaelson asked to be remembered to you,” she said.

She stepped sideways, and reality warped around her: in the barest blink of an eye, perspective distorted so that it seemed she had moved half a mile away while still remaining within the room; with another step, she was gone.

Deliann stood rooted to the carpet, shaken, gasping.

Hari . . . Michaelson?

At his feet Kierendal stirred, whimpering; Deliann instantly knelt beside her and cradled her head on his knees. “Shh,” he whispered. “Shh. It’s all right. I’m here. It’s all right.”

And for a time, he believed he might be telling the truth.

THERE WAS, IN those days, a man who had been a god. Though a god no longer, he still saw with a more than mortal eye, shaped with a more than mortal hand, and thought with a more than mortal mind. He saw the war made by the dark angel, and he saw the acolytes of dust and ashes, but he did not see the god who lay behind them both. To save his onetime children from this war, he shaped himself a new destiny.

But he was a god no longer; even his more than mortal mind could not guess the limits of his vision, his strength, and his wisdom. Thus did he open the tale of his own destruction.

Others had brought war against the god of dust and ashes, many others, more than can be counted on worlds beyond number. Among its enemies on this world had been Jereth Godslaughterer, Panchasell the Luckless, and Kiel Burchardt. Among its enemies on the other had been Friedrich Nietzsche, John Brown, and Crazy Horse.

Each had fallen to its patient, infinite hunger. It had killed them in its sleep.

On the day the dark angel went forth to war, the man who had been a god took counsel with the acolytes of dust and ashes—

And persuaded them to wake it up.