TWELVE

THE CAINESLAYER LEANED on the silvery weather-split rail that surrounded the roof of the barge’s deckhouse and stared out over the docks of Ankhana with eyes the bleached blue-grey of a frozen river under a cloudless winter sky. He could have been made of carved oak and knotted rope upholstered with leather; his hair was shaved to an eighth-inch fuzz over his scalp, and muscle jumped at the corners of his knife-edged jawline.

He squinted one eye against the side-glare of the rising sun and thought about destiny.

He wore a simple tunic and pants of brown suede, loose and baggy, a shade or two lighter than his skin. In the case by his cot in the deckhouse cabin were the scarlet robes of a Monastic Ambassador, but he no longer wore them; he planned to resign his diplomatic post as soon as he reached the Ankhanan Embassy.

But after that—?

For the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn’t know what to do next.

The city around him now had been his home for more than twenty-four years; he had been born here, had passed his childhood in a neighborhood of the Industrial Park that could be seen from where he now stood. Behind him, across this channel of the Great Chambaygen, rose the massive walls of Ankhana’s Old Town, great cliffs built of limestone blocks each near the size of the barge on which he’d ridden the river from the God’s Teeth, towering eight times the height of a man, blackened with a thousand years of smoke and weather, dropping sheer to the river’s channel.

The smithy built by the man he had called his father still stood, not far from here; if he closed his ice-pale eyes, he could see the small room, off the overhead chamber, where he had slept. With his powers of mind, he could view himself at any age there, could see his parents as if they still lived, or could cast forth his sight to capture the face of someone sleeping in that tiny windowless room even on this bright morning. He could spy upon the tenement where his first love had lived, or the cell beneath the Monastic Embassy where he had spent so many hours kneeling in meditation. The city had been a part of his family, a parent, the older brother he’d never had. And now the city was sick.

Ankhana was coming down with a virus.

The city had been feeling poorly for some days now, feverish fancies invading its collective dreams, but it did not yet comprehend just how ill it was. The city’s immune system—the Imperial constabulary and the army—had geared up to fight off a bacterial infection: a growing internal colony called Cainism, a philosophical disease that attacked the citizenry’s faith in the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth, and in the Empire itself. This particular infection, as it spread, emitted toxins that had caused painful abcesses of disorder at the city’s extremities of Alientown and the Warrens, and that had occasionally pocked Old Town itself.

The city’s immune system was admirably suited to battle infections of this type; these were swiftly contained, sequestered, and concentrated in only a few places, where each individual bacterium could be sanitized in turn. Yet aches continued to settle into the city’s joints, and its fever continued to inch upward every day, for the city’s true illness came from a virus.

A virus is a wholly different order of disease.

A black pall of smoke twisted upward from the northwest quadrant of the capital, the Alientown ghetto. All the still-standing buildings that fronted the river were blackened; most others had partially collapsed and still others had burned to the ground. What little he could see of Alientown from here looked like the scorched-earth shell of a castle after a marauding army has slaughtered all within.

All this meant little to the Caineslayer; he merely gazed incuriously at the wreckage. The Caineslayer had been born in the mountains, five days ago. He did not yet know his new life well. He could still be surprised by how the world made him feel, because he did not react to it in the familiar patterns of his former life; he was almost continuously startled by how different he had become.

Now, for example: standing here, he surmised that he was alone, or very nearly so, in the knowledge of the city’s illness. Perhaps only one or two of the hundreds and thousands of people around him even understood the concept of viral infection; he himself had not, until it had been explained to him in detail by the late Vinson Garrette. And instead of leaping to the docks to cry the city’s doom, instead of racing to the embassy to warn the Acting Ambassador of the danger, instead of taking any action at all upon his knowledge, he simply leaned upon the rail, picking at its splinters with his fingernails, and watched.

On the dock below him was assembled the capital detachment of the Imperial Army Band, two hundred strong, their instruments’ brass gleaming gold in the bright noontide sun. They stood at parade rest, horns and pipes slung like weapons, their tall cylindrical caps white as clouds and festooned with braid as iridescent as sun dogs. Within the band’s broad arc stood a half century of Household Knights at attention, their long hauberks shining under mantles of maroon and gold, their halberd blades of scarlet steel flashing like torches.

He wondered how many of them were sick: how many already had that boil of madness festering within their brains.

A ribbed gangplank joined the barge’s deck to the dockside. At the gangplank’s foot waited a pair of stolid, thick-shouldered draft horses harnessed to a large cart. A platform had been built upon the cart, rising perhaps four or five feet above its bed, and on the platform was a sort of rack hastily improvised out of splintery, warped scrap lumber. Waiting at the corners of the cart were four friars, Esoterics despite the dirt-brown robes that proclaimed their Monastic citizenship. Such robes are worn ordinarily only by Exoterics, the public faces of the Monasteries. These robes served admirably to conceal the Artan springless pellet bows that each man bore.

The ice in the Caineslayer’s eyes glinted with a new reflection: Down the long ribbed gangplank from the deck to the dock, two friars—real Exoterics, these—bore a litter. On the litter lay a medium-sized, ordinary-looking man of middle age, black hair showing streaks of grey that matched the grey scattered through his untrimmed week’s growth of black beard. The man’s arms dangled, limp, over the litter’s rails, as though he were unconscious; the Caineslayer knew that he was not.

The man did not move because only immobility could hurt more than motion: the man held himself still because to move might lessen his suffering, and that he could not bear. For him, only pain had meaning.

For five days—since the moment of his birth—the Caineslayer had kept company with this man, first on the train down the western slope of Khryl’s Saddle to the riverport of Harrakha, then on the barge downriver from Harrakha to the Empire’s capital. The Caineslayer had taken his meals in the ugly deck shelter of scrap wood and filth-crusted canvas that had served this man for his cabin, had slept there, read there, had done his daily exercises there; the Caineslayer had knelt beside this man’s rude cot for his daily prayers to the Savior, the Ascended Ma’elKoth.

He had never left this man’s side, because to leave would be to miss the pain. The Caineslayer ate this man’s pain, drank it, breathed it, soaked it in through his pores. It was his reason for existence. This man had many names, of which the Caineslayer knew some few; he numbered them in his head while he watched the friars who had borne the litter lift the crippled man and chain him upright to the rack upon the wagon’s platform.

Dominic, this man said he had been called by the slaver from whom he claimed to have escaped, in the days before his arrival at the abbey of Garthan Hold; in Kirisch-Nar, where he had fought in the catpits, he was known as Shade; among the surviving remnants of the Khulan Horde, he had once been k’Thal, and was now known only as the Betrayer, or the Hated One. In the Ankhanan Empire, he had been called the Blade of Tyshalle, and the Prince of Chaos, and the Enemy of God. In the land of Arta, the Aktiri world, he had been named Administrator Hari Khapur Michaelson.

But everywhere he was known by one of these names, he was better known by another name, his true name, the name he’d been given by the Abbot of Garthan Hold.

Caine.

It was the Caineslayer’s greatest pride that he had taken this name of legend and made of it a mere sound: a monosyllabic grunt of contempt.

2

ON THE COLD dawn of his birth, when he had let himself into the railcar compartment where the cripple who had once been Caine lay, dumb with misery like a wounded dog, the Caineslayer had sat across from him and asked, “How, then, should I call you?”

The cot on which the cripple lay was bolted to the compartment’s wall, to the splintered woodwork where seats had been ripped out to make room for it. The cripple was strapped to the cot with leather bands across his knees, hips, and chest, to keep him in his place against the jolting sway of the train. The compartment stank of human waste; the Caineslayer could not tell if perhaps the cripple had fouled himself, or if this stench was only a reminder of the dunking he’d taken in the polluted headwaters of the Great Chambaygen, where it drained away the sewage from the construction camp on the crest of Khryl’s Saddle.

The cripple was covered with a filthy blanket, half sodden already with seepage from the oozing burns that splotched his body like patches sewn onto tattered clothing. He did not turn his head or make any indication that he had heard the Caineslayer’s question; he stared out the grime-streaked window at the billows of coal smoke that rolled backward from the locomotive, smoke that had stained the leaves of trees that lined the winding railway a uniform necrotic grey.

The Caineslayer settled himself onto the surprisingly comfortable cushion of the opposite bench. For a long, wonderful moment he merely sat, staring, savoring the sight, breathing the smell, letting the cripple’s aura of rank despair settle into his bones like the warmth of his home hearth on a winter’s night. But there was something missing, something the Caineslayer still needed. He could see a blind lack in the cripple’s hollow gaze.

In the face of his pain, the cripple had sunk into some inner circle of animal incomprehension; he had found a state of dreamlike semiconsciousness where his suffering seemed removed, distant, the anguish of a fictional victim in some old half-familiar story. But the Caineslayer had armed himself against even this pathetic defense. He had been forewarned.

The Caineslayer had a device.

The Caine Mirror, he called it privately; a box shaped roughly like a medium-sized valise, filled with tangles of fine cabling and a bank of transparent glass bulbs, powered by a chip of griffinstone smaller than the nail of the Caineslayer’s little finger. On its front were a pair of handgrips covered with thin-beaten gold; between the handgrips was a mirror of silvered glass. To hold those handgrips, to direct his disciplined mind into that silvered glass, was to enter an intimacy so extreme that it transcended obscenity: as though he’d gouged out the man’s eye and fucked his bloody socket.

It let him inside the man who had been Caine.

The Caineslayer leaned forward and dug his fingers into the blanket that covered the scorched flesh of the cripple’s ribs, grabbed, and twisted. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me. How should I call you?”

The cripple’s response was to roll his head to one side. His face was as empty as his heart.

“Should I call you Hari?” the Caineslayer asked pleasantly. “Viceroy Garrette called you Administrator”—he pronounced the foreign words with careful precision—“Michaelson. Is that what you’d prefer?”

Consciousness swam up to the surface of the man’s eyes, and with consciousness came suffering; he stared at the Caineslayer through a haze of pain, and the Caineslayer smiled. “It wouldn’t seem right, to call you Caine,” he said. “Caine is dead, you told me—and I know this to be true. I killed him.”

Those suffering eyes drifted away, back toward the windows, and the cripple spoke in a half whisper still ragged with residual screams. “Whatever.”

“Ex-Caine? Perhaps—” The Caineslayer’s smile widened into a grimace of happy malice. “—Tan’Caine?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You think not? I say it does. Perhaps I shall use Hari, after all. That is how Pallas Ril calls you, isn’t it? Mmm, your pardon, Hari: I meant to say, called you.”

A brief, almost invisible twist flickered over the cripple’s features; if the Caineslayer hadn’t known better, he might have fooled himself into believing it the trace of a smile. “You’re wasting your time,” the man he had decided to call Hari said. “I don’t know why you think you can hurt me more than I’ve hurt myself.”

“There are many things you don’t know,” the Caineslayer observed. Hari shrugged and turned once more toward the window.

“Aren’t you curious?” The Caineslayer leaned forward to give Hari a theatrically sly sidelong look. “Don’t you want to know who I am? Why I have destroyed you?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, kid.”

The Caineslayer frowned. “You don’t care? You don’t care why this has happened?”

Hari drew a deep sigh and rolled his head back to meet the younger man’s eyes. “You don’t know why it happened,” he said. “All you know is why you did what you did.”

The Caineslayer’s frown deepened into a scowl; he had not come this far to be lectured like a boy at the abbey school.

“And second? Yeah.” Hari shrugged. “I don’t care.”

The Caineslayer’s hands twisted into fists. “How can you not care?”

“Why is bullshit,” Hari said exhaustedly. “Why won’t bring back my wife. Why won’t save my father, or return my child, or let me walk again. Fuck why. Reasons are for peasants.”

“Perhaps,” the Caineslayer said through his teeth. He slid sideways to place himself beside the window out which Hari stared. The trees had closed around the tracks until the train seemed to be rocking through a tunnel of smoke-poisoned leaves. “Perhaps I am a peasant. Then it is a peasant who has brought you low.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“I was born to Marte, wife of Terrel the blacksmith. They named me Perrik,” he began, speaking with the slow, deliberate cadence of an elKothan priest reciting the daily liturgy.

“You’re wasting your time,” Hari repeated. “I don’t want to know.”

The Caineslayer’s fist struck like his father’s hammer, a long powerful arc of force that exploded against Hari’s face, smashing his nose into a splatter of blood and tissue. Hari grunted and his eyes went glassy for a moment. When their focus returned, he expressionlessly licked blood from his mouth and watched the Caineslayer, silently waiting for what he would do next.

The Caineslayer’s fist ached with the fierce need to hit him again and again and again; he burned to kill this man, to beat the life from him flesh to flesh and bone to bone—but killing would not answer his need. “This isn’t about what you want. Nothing is about what you want, not ever again. This is about me. About what I want.”

He clutched his fist with his other hand, trying to massage the bloodlust out of it. “Think of this as a reverse interrogation. There are some things I want you to know. I’m going to tell you. If, at any time, I think you’re not listening, I will hurt you. Do you understand?”

Hari’s response was a blood-smeared stare, blank as an empty plate.

The Caineslayer once again dug his fingers into a twist of the filthy blanket and scraped the rough fabric of Hari’s tunic against the moist scabs of his burns. “I know you’ve been tortured before, Hari. The, mmm, Black Knife Clan of the Boedecken ogrilloi, wasn’t it? And I am not insensible to the fact that only last night you tried to force my men to kill you. I suspect that pain means as little to you as your life—but both your life and your pain are very important to me.”

He settled into himself and took a deep, slow, patient breath. “Five days from now, we arrive in Ankhana; once there, you will be delivered up unto the civil authorities for execution. In the meantime, I want you to hurt—and I want you to listen.”

Outside, the trees had fallen away, revealing rugged hills of gorse and bracken rolling toward a blue-misted reach: the unforgiving Kaarnan Wilderlands. Inside, the Caineslayer had begun again.

“I was born to Marte, wife of Terrel the blacksmith. They named me Perrik, and for much of my childhood, I expected to be ordinary—and happy, very much like they themselves seemed to be. My mother was from Kor, and she was older than my father; she had secrets that neither of us understood, but we always knew she loved us . . .”

3

FOR DAYS—THROUGH the whole trip out of the God’s Teeth, through the layover in Harrakha while the barge was prepared, on the first days of the maddeningly slow journey down the lazy curves of the Great Chambaygen to Ankhana—the Caineslayer had told the tale of his parents. He rarely spoke of himself at all; instead, he told every incident he could remember of his father and his mother, sparing nothing: from the first belt Terrel had laid across his legs to the honeycakes Marte would bake as the summers faded into autumn rains, from the time Baron Thilliow of Oklian had had Terrel whipped for cutting the frog of his favorite mare’s hoof, to the season of savage rows his parents inflicted upon each other when he was ten: when he first learned that Marte had been pregnant when Terrel married her—and pregnant by another man.

Good and bad, dramatic and trivial, he told every faintest detail; he wanted to bring his parents to life for Hari, even as they lived in his own heart.

Strangely, Hari seemed to somehow divine the Caineslayer’s purpose; he never enquired why the Caineslayer wanted him to know all this. Only occasionally did he speak through his haze of inner pain; sometimes to offer a comment, or to ask for a clarification of some obscure detail—sometimes a mere grunt of understanding.

Late one afternoon, as the barge drifted through a slow curve that divided low, rolling hills of grassland, Hari said, “I’m guessing, from all this, that I’m never gonna get a chance to meet your folks, huh?”

The Caineslayer met his gaze squarely, and his voice was dry as the desert stone of his mother’s homeland. “Both my parents were in Victory Stadium at the Assumption of Ma’elKoth.”

“No shit? Died there, huh?”

“Yes.”

“How about that.” His eyes fixed on some misted reach, miles away and years ago. “Y’know, I can remember thinking, while I was getting ready to go out on the sand—I was hiding in a vent from the gladiator pen, and the wagon with Ma’elKoth and Toa-Sytell and . . . and everybody . . . was just rolling through the gate—I was thinking, that if somebody I loved had died because someone did what I was about to do, I wouldn’t rest until I hunted the bastard down and killed him with my bare hands.”

“How about that,” the Caineslayer echoed expressionlessly.

“So where were you?”

The Caineslayer stared a question at him.

“You weren’t there,” Hari said. “You weren’t at the stadium.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know you can fight. If you’d been there, either your parents would be alive, or you’d be dead.”

“I was—” The Caineslayer was forced to take a pause, to swallow his old, familiar pain. “—otherwise engaged.”

Hari turned his palms toward the canvas tenting overhead. “You’re an elKothan, right? A Beloved Child of Ma’elKoth?”

“I am.”

“Yeah.” For a moment, another of those flickering, bitter almost-smiles passed over his features. “Me, too.”

The Caineslayer frowned. “You?”

“Yeah. I went through the very last Ritual of Rebirth before the Assumption. Baptism of blood and fire—signed, sealed, and sanctified, that’s me.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Ma’elKoth did.” He shrugged and waved this digression aside. “He summoned his Beloved Children to the stadium that day. How come you weren’t there?”

“I—” The Caineslayer had to look away; the pain this memory brought was astonishing, a savage stabbing ache undiminished by the passage of seven years, unassuaged by his sure knowledge that his pain and loss had been the knife that carved his destiny. He could not have changed events then any more than he could reach back through seven long years and change them now.

But the pain—

He had one defense against this pain: he reminded himself that this pain belonged to Raithe of Ankhana. I am the Caineslayer, he told himself. That pain is a revenant of someone else’s life.

“I was in the scriptorium of the Ankhanan Embassy,” he said, “copying my report on your murder of Ambassador Creele.”

Hari made a grunting noise that could have been a snort of incredulous laughter; after all these days, recognition finally flared within his shadowed eyes. “I remember you . . .” he said wonderingly. “You were one of the kids who frog-marched me up to his office. You had some silly-ass melodramatic shit to say about the Monasteries coming after me; something like that. Yeah, that was you—I remember the eyes.”

“I would have hunted you for Creele’s sake alone,” the Caineslayer said softly. “He was a great man.”

“He was an asshole. He deserved what he got.”

“And I?” the Caineslayer asked. “What did I deserve?”

Hari rolled over far enough to turn his face to the canvas wall of the deck shelter. “Don’t come crying to me, kid. You got more out of life than most ever do: when the world hurt you, you got the chance to hit back. Count yourself lucky, and shut up.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” The Caineslayer found his hands had become convulsive fists once more. “That I’m lucky?”

“What do you want from me? An apology?” Hari twisted back to look at him, black rings of bruise around his eyes, his nose still swollen from the blow that had smashed it three days before. “Or forgiveness?”

The Caineslayer’s fists trembled, and he could not take his eyes from the bulge of the thyroid cartilage in Hari’s throat; he could feel an arc of energy from the hammer edge of his hand to that still target, as though Hari’s larynx and the Caineslayer’s fist were two pieces of the same lodestone.

Slowly, the Caineslayer forced his fists to open, and he choked back his taste for blood. “So,” he murmured. “So.”

He rose and folded his hands behind his back, pacing the floor of Hari’s deck shelter as though even walking was a wound he could give this man—and perhaps it was. Perhaps the best pain he could offer was the reminder of everything this man would never do again. “So,” he said again, “finally, you understand what you have done to me. Now, I wish to understand what I have done to you.”

He made himself smile, and he turned that smile upon Hari like a weapon. “Talk to me now. Tell me of Pallas Ril.”

4

OF COURSE HE had refused, at first; for hours he refused, while the Caineslayer amused himself with a cheerful alternation of questioning and mild torture. On that day, the Caineslayer had addressed his attention to the nerve cluster in the pad between the thumb and forefinger; even a moderate pinch on it could bring tears to the eyes of a strong man without causing any lasting damage, and the Caineslayer had a grip like his father’s furnace tongs. He kept Hari strapped to his cot—he had seen the lethal skill that still inhabited those hands graphically demonstrated upon the late Artan Viceroy. He sat beside him, holding one of Hari’s hands in both of his, like a dutiful son. Sometimes he would alternate this with pressure on the radial nerve just above the elbow.

One of the charming features of these excruciations is that—with proper timing and intervals of rest—these particular pressure points become more sensitive as they are abused, rather than less. After an hour or two, the subject feels his whole arm burning from within, as though his blood had turned to acid.

In the end Hari had submitted, as the Caineslayer had known he would. The questions themselves—How did you meet? Where was your first kiss? What did she wear on your wedding day? What was the scent of her hair?—would bring the anguish of memory fully to the forefront of Hari’s consciousness. It was clear that to speak of these things hurt Hari more than keeping silent could have—yet once he had begun, he seemed disinclined to stop. Nonetheless he did stop from time to time, requiring the Caineslayer to encourage him again with nerve pressure, as though he wanted the pain, as though he welcomed it, as though he required both the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent; as though to hide from any scrap of his suffering would be a betrayal, a crime, a sin.

The Caineslayer accepted Hari’s shattered heart as a sacrament. He had never been so happy.

He kept the Caine Mirror alongside Hari’s bed; he could dip into Hari’s head at will—immerse himself in Hari’s torment. This he did only at intervals; the Caineslayer felt keenly the danger of swimming those deeps. They tugged at him awake and called to him in dreams, whispering of sinking forever from the memory of light.

Hari spoke through two days, and the Caineslayer listened—prompting occasionally with questions, and more rarely with physical coercion. He heard of many faraway and unlikely places, from the depths of the Boedecken Waste to the gleaming brass streets of Lipke’s capital Seven Wells, from the jungle kingdom of Yalitrayya to the ice fields of the White Desert. Later, they spoke of places even more exotic and unimaginably distant: places such as Chicago and San Francisco—and alien names such as Shermaya Dole and Marc Vilo and Shanna Leighton and Arturo Kollberg.

We have a very simple, straightforward relationship, the Caineslayer reflected from time to time. He and Hari shared a single need: the need to experience Hari’s pain.

That simplicity created a sort of understanding, almost a bond: they cooperated to give each other what each wanted. All the caustic hatred that had corroded his veins for seven years was slowly and surely drained away; his victory had lanced a boil on his soul. Caine was no longer the icon of evil, the Enemy of God, the author of all the world’s ills. He had become simply what he was: a ruthless, amoral man, now beaten—crushed by the world, just like any other.

Only human, after all.

And Hari, too, seemed to take some relief; profoundly attuned to his prisoner’s moods, the Caineslayer could not help but notice that the needle point of Hari’s pain seemed to be slowly blunting. Late on the final night of the journey, the barge lay up along the bank, anchor chains attached to trees that grew beside the Chambaygen’s lazy channel, only a few hours upstream from Ankhana. All was quiet as the crew slept—even the two pole-boys on watch drowsed atop the deckhouse—and Hari seemed almost at peace.

The Caineslayer squatted beside him. “You are calm, now.”

Hari’s sole response was to work the back of his head on his pillow and chafe his wrists against the straps that bound him to his cot.

“You have been calming ever since we began on the river,” the Caineslayer said. “Did you love your wife so little that you no longer suffer her loss?”

“Well, y’know . . .” Hari murmured. “It’s the river. It’s her river.”

The Caineslayer said, “Not anymore.”

“Are you sure? We drift downstream, and how much has really changed? The leaves still turn, the birds still fly. Fish jump. The river goes on.” Hari closed his eyes and gave a sleepy sigh. “Shanna used to tell me that life is a river; a person is like a little eddy that spins in a backflow for a little while, until it uncoils and the river washes it away. Nothing is lost. Maybe a little farther downstream, another eddy spins up, and nothing is gained. Life is just life, like the river is just a river. Other times, she’d say that the river is a song, and a person or a bird or a tree or whatever—an individual—is really just a scatter of notes, a little subtheme, like what they call a motif. That motif might play loud or soft, might be part of the song for a long time or just a little, but in the end, it’s all still one song.”

“So which is it?” the Caineslayer asked softly. “A song, or a river?”

Hari shrugged. “How the fuck should I know? I’m not sure she really meant either one. She was a goddess, not a philosopher. But she knew a little bit about life and death. She was never afraid to die; she knew that dying was part of the whole cycle—that her little eddy would untangle itself back into the current of the river.”

The Caineslayer nodded his understanding. “So: you can bear your loss, because you feel that you haven’t really lost her.”

“It’s her river, kid.”

“As I have observed already,” the Caineslayer said, “not anymore.”

Hari’s eyes slitted open; he watched the Caineslayer without turning his head.

“You must have noticed the silver runes painted on the Sword of Saint Berne,” the Caineslayer went on. “What do you think they were for?”

Hari didn’t answer, didn’t move, only watched: a predator become aware of being stalked by something larger and more fierce.

“I confess that I do not know the actual use of these runes,” the Caineslayer continued. “It did not seem important enough that I should ask. But consider: If the Viceroy wished merely to destroy her body, would not the bare blade have been sufficient?”

Hari’s eyes glittered.

“So: as you go to your death at the hands of your enemies, do not console yourself with vain dreams of Pallas Ril in some misty afterlife where she might be happy, or at least content. The best she might have experienced is an absolute extinction of consciousness. More likely, she screams even now in some unimaginable hell, and will continue to do so. Forever.”

They passed a long interval in which the only sound was the soft splash of the river against the barge’s hull, and the only motion the gentle rocking of the deck.

“You,” Hari said finally, hoarse and slow, “have a gift for hating.”

The Caineslayer inclined his head in a grave sketch of a bow. “If so, it is a gift I received from you.”

For a moment, he found himself wanting to reach out and grasp Hari’s shoulder—to touch him in some way that was not intended to cause pain. In many ways, he was closer to this man than he’d been to the mediocrities with whom he’s studied at the abbey school, and to the spineless Exoterics who had staffed the Thorncleft Embassy. He and Hari were joined in ways forever inaccessible, forever incomprehensible, to those grey souls.

He rose and turned away.

“You know,” he said distantly, staring out the flap of the shelter at a spray of brilliant stars, “under other circumstances, I shouldn’t have been too surprised to find that we had become friends.”

“Kid, we are friends,” Hari told him with a bitter laugh. “You mean you haven’t noticed?”

The Caineslayer met his dark glare across the still, pale flame of the lamp between them and thought for a moment of all they had shared in these past five days. “No, I hadn’t,” he said slowly, frowning and nodding together. “But I suppose you’re right.”

“Fucking right I’m right. Not that it’ll stop me from killing you if I ever get the chance.”

“Mmm, of course not,” the Caineslayer replied, “any more than it shall stop me from giving you to the Imperial authorities for execution.”

“Yeah. Tomorrow morning, right?”

The Caineslayer felt a surprising pang of melancholy as he nodded. “Yes. Tomorrow.”

“You sound like you’re not looking forward to it.”

“Truly, I’m not,” he said. “But I am ready for it. You are part of my former life, Hari. I am ready to move on.”

“Yeah, whatever. You ready to move to your goddamn bed?”

Another glance at the stars—and at the scant oil remaining in the lamp—reminded him how late the hour had become. “I suppose I am.”

“Then shut up and go to sleep.”

The Caineslayer smiled almost fondly. “Good night, Hari.”

“Fuck off.”

5

EARLY THE NEXT morning, as the barge had swung sluggishly out into the Great Chambaygen’s current with the first sparkling rays of the rising sun, the Caineslayer had carried a trencher of thick lentil porridge flavored with salt pork into Hari’s deck shelter, set it beside his cot, and unstrapped one of Hari’s arms so that he could feed himself with the large wooden spoon. Hari took a listless bite or two, then set down the spoon.

“You should eat it,” the Caineslayer said. “It’s better than you’ll get in the Donjon.”

“Yeah, whatever. How about the bedpan?”

The Caineslayer shoved the bedpan within Hari’s reach, waited patiently while he relieved himself, then carried the pan out and dumped its contents into the river. When he came back, Hari still wasn’t eating; he lay on the cot, staring expressionlessly at the canvas overhead. “What’s it gonna be today, then?” he said. “You gonna start on my hand again?”

“No,” the Caineslayer said. Slowly, he lowered himself into the Warrior’s Seat, his legs doubled comfortably beneath him. He rested his hands on his thighs, left cupping his right with thumbs touching: the Quiet Circle meditation posture.

“This is our last time together, Hari; in perhaps two hours I will deliver you to the Household Knights who await us on the Ankhanan docks, and then I shall never see you again—mm, no. I mean to say I’ll never speak with you again, since I do intend to witness your execution.”

“Huh. Don’t get all sentimental; you’ll make me blush.”

The Caineslayer gave his victim a level stare. “I have only one question for you today. I don’t even insist on an answer.”

Hari eyed him uncertainly; this change in their routine had awakened his animal wariness. “Yeah, all right.”

“Was it worth it?”

Hari scowled. “Was what worth what? Is this some of that If I had my life to do over again horseshit?”

“Not exactly. I’m not interested in your life, Hari, but in the effect you’ve had on mine. I want to know: Saving Pallas Ril in Victory Stadium seven years ago—was it worth what you’ve suffered since?”

“Of course it was,” he responded with instant certainty. “I’d do it again in half a fucking second.”

“Would you? Would you really? With all you’ve told me: the destruction of your career, the loss of your legs, of your father, of your home, your daughter . . . and your life. Are you sure?”

“I . . . I mean, I, uh . . .” His voice faltered, and he turned his face away.

“You weren’t even happy together, you and she,” the Caineslayer said. “You told me so yourself. And so: Your sole accomplishment was to postpone her death for seven years. If you had known, then, how that single act would inexorably destroy you, would you have done it?”

Hari’s free hand covered his eyes, and he did not respond.

“You need not answer. I merely want you to consider the question.”

“Faith,” Hari murmured.

“Ah, yes, your daughter,” the Caineslayer said. “And have you done her such a kindness, bringing her into your world? Sometimes, in these nights, you cry out in your sleep, do you know that? Do you know that what you say is Faith, I’m sorry?”

Something faded then from the man who had been Caine: some spark of the flame that had made him loom so large dwindled and winked out. For the first time, he looked old, and tired, and truly, undeniably, finally: crippled.

After a long, long moment spent savoring this extinction, the Caineslayer rose and moved to leave the tent, but Hari turned toward him once again, his face bleak as winter stone.

“I guess I could ask you the same question.”

6

THE CAINESLAYER STOPPED; he looked back past his shoulder.

“What do you mean?”

“Ever think about what destroying me is gonna cost you?”

“Hari, Hari,” the Caineslayer chided, “have we not passed the time when you can expect me to take your threats seriously?”

“It’s not a threat, kid. Sure, let’s say I took your parents from you. You took my wife from me, and you’re gonna watch me die. Whatever,” he said with a one-armed shrug. “Fair enough. I don’t really give a shit; I’m dead already. But how will you live with what you’ve done?”

“What I have done?” The Caineslayer snorted. “I have saved the world from the Enemy of God.”

“Kid, kid.” Hari echoed precisely the Caineslayer’s chiding tone. “You didn’t save shit. When you and Garrette managed to kill Shanna, you wiped out the Ankhanan Empire. And the Monasteries, and Lipke and Kor and Paqula, too. Pretty much everyone on this continent will be dead by this time next year.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Sure it is. What do you think Pallas was doing here, you fucking idiot?”

A spectral shiver trickled down the Caineslayer’s spine, a frictive half-hot frisson like the whisk of fingertips across unvarnished wood. “You’re talking about Viceroy Garrette’s disease—the one he gave to the subs.”

“You knew?”

The Caineslayer met Hari’s blankly astonished gaze and thought, Well. At last I have succeeded in impressing him. He wished he could take more pleasure in it; wished he could coolly reply I know many things, like a wizard in a campfire tale.

Instead, his stomach dropping, he could say only, “Yes.”

“Damn, kid.” Hari shook his head, squinting disbelievingly. “Damn, I thought I was hard-core. So this all started with Garrette, huh?”

The Caineslayer shook his head. “It all started with you. With Creele.”

“What did Garrette tell you?”

“He . . . said it’s called aitcharv . . . aitcharvee . . .”

“HRVP,” Hari supplied. “That’s right. How much did ol’Vinse tell you about it?”

The Caineslayer suddenly found the air to have thickened under this canvas tent—thick as water, thick as stew; he could barely force it into his lungs. “Enough,” he replied thinly.

“And you still went through with it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Garrette was dead. You had me. Why did Pallas have to die?”

The Caineslayer allowed himself a thin, chill smile. “Reasons are for peasants.”

But Hari’s gaze stayed level and steady until the Caineslayer had to look away. “I could say it was because I thought she might rescue you from me,” he said. “I could say it was because I had made a bargain in the name of the Monasteries, and that bargain must be kept. But neither would be true. The truth is simpler, and more complex: She was killed because you loved her, and I wanted to watch you watch her die.”

Hari nodded at this, frowning, as though he understood and could respect such a desire, but then he squinted upward once more. “You ever wonder why Garrette wanted her dead?”

“He said—he said she would have protected the elves from the disease.”

“Not just the elves.”

That spectral shiver near his spine threatened to become trembling. “The Viceroy assured me that humans aren’t in any danger—”

“Humans. Yeah.” An echo of Caine’s wolf-grin stretched Hari’s lips. “You just gotta remember that for Garrette, human meant Artan.”

A sick understanding gathered itself in the Caineslayer’s belly.

“Here’s a question. Garrette had you inoculated, didn’t he? Probably shot up most of the people in Transdeia: they take this black thing and press it against your shoulder and pull a trigger and it makes a sound like fssst. You get that?”

“Yes . . . yes, I did. And the embassy staff, and a lot of the miners and rail porters . . .”

“You’re today’s lucky winner, kid. First prize: a front row seat for the end of the world.”

“He said—he said it was just a precaution—”

“And just because this stuff came from this world—my world—and he’s got all this fancy technology and shit, you thought he knew what the fuck he was talking about.”

“I—” The Caineslayer shut his eyes. “Yes.”

“That’s the problem with you shitheads who think you’re educated,” Hari said with brutal mockery. “You always think that if somebody talks the same way you do, he’s not a moron. But he was a moron, and so are you for thinking he wasn’t.”

The Caineslayer found he could not answer.

“It’s loose in Ankhana,” Hari said. “That’s why Pallas came here. People are sick with it. Human people. Dying already. Killing each other. Locking themselves away with their fevers, because they’re already so crazy that they figure everybody’s out to kill them. Shanna, Pallas, she was the only hope the people of this continent—probably the whole world—had. You killed her. Congratulations. You get to watch everybody die.”

The Caineslayer reached blindly to his side and gathered a handful of the tent’s canvas wall to steady himself. “Watch . . .” he murmured.

“Sure. That’s what that little black fissy thing did for you. You won’t get sick. You’re immune, just like me. Lucky you, huh?”

“You’re lying,” the Caineslayer muttered. He liked the sound of that, so he said it again, more strongly: “You’re lying. You’re making this up.”

Of course he was lying—was this not the man who had been Caine? The Caineslayer had been hurting him for days, and this was the only way a crippled man could devise to hit back at his tormentor: a silly, vicious lie.

“Yeah, all right, sure. I’m lying,” Hari said, maintaining his bleak predator’s grin. “You’re the one with the mind powers—use them, you stupid sack of shit.”

“I don’t have to,” the Caineslayer said firmly. “It’s an obvious lie; why would the Aktir Queen turn one hair to help the people of Ankhana?”

“Maybe because she wasn’t the goddamn Aktir Queen. Maybe because the Church has been lying about her all these years. Maybe because she cared about every living thing, even useless pinheaded weaseldicks like you.”

Hari looked him over then: a long, slow scan from head to toe and back again, as though measuring his every quality, tangible or not. Then he said, “You took an oath when they made you a friar. You took an oath to support and defend the Future of Humanity with every breath of your body from that day forward. And this is how you kept it. You killed them. All of them. Because you wanted to hurt me, you wiped out the fucking human race.”

The Caineslayer gripped the canvas with both hands; his stomach heaved, and bile scorched the back of his throat. “You swore that oath, too,” he insisted desperately. “And look at all the uncountable lives you have taken, all the suffering you have caused—!”

“Yeah, well, you said it yourself,” Hari replied with a shrug. “I’m the Enemy of God.”

7

ON THE DOCKSIDE below the Caineslayer’s position, the military band struck up “King of Kings” while marching in place, and the first martial strains of the Imperial anthem brought him back to the present. At the refrain following the first verse, the band’s diverse elements swung into order like gears interlocking, and sunlight flared golden spikes from polished brass in time with the anthem’s ponderous beat. The Household Knights marched themselves into order around the wagon, expressionless as dolls under the gold-filigreed steel of their helmets; their blood-colored halberds swung in identical arcs like the moment arms of fifty perfectly synchronized metronomes. The Exoterics who had borne the cripple’s litter took the lead ropes of the horses that drew the wagon and walked alongside.

The man who had been Caine sagged from the harness that bound him to the platform’s rack, swinging gently with the wagon’s sway, his head down as though unconscious. The band segued smoothly from “King of Kings” into “Justice of God.”

The Caineslayer straightened; slowly, thoughtfully, he pulled a splinter of the deckhouse rail out of the flesh of his palm and frowned down at the bead of blood that welled from this tiny wound. How had he been so easily beaten?

He no longer doubted that Hari had told him the truth. Whatever had happened in Alientown was only a prelude. This city was sick, festering with madness. He could feel it, smell it on the air. He could close his eyes and see it: see sweat on pale and clammy brows, see eyes parboiled by fever casting hooded glances while trembling hands sharpened carving knives, see the flecks of foam at the corners of dry, cracking lips. He did not need his powers to show him these things. He knew they were there. He knew, because a lie would have been too easy. Too cheap.

And he knew, from long years of study, that Caine’s victories are never cheap; they always cost, in the end, more than God Himself can afford.

Awe stole over him, a tingling sense of the uncanny, when he numbered the days and nights of their journey down from the mountains. Hari had known this all along. With a single phrase, the man who had been Caine had spiked the Caineslayer’s triumph through the heart and burned its corpse to toxic ash. All that time, through all that pain, he’d hugged it to himself, waiting. Waiting until its stroke would kill.

His destiny had betrayed him, had made him a destroyer on a scale that humbled even Caine. Destiny, he understood with bitter certainty, could not be trusted.

He had no idea what he should do now. Without destiny to guide him, he was lost in a vast, whistling darkness. Any direction he might choose was purely arbitrary; it would make no more sense, offer no more hope, than would sitting still. Which offered neither sense nor hope at all.

He swung himself over the rail and dropped, catlike, to the barge’s deck. He had a need that burned in him like breath to a drowning man. For this need, there was only one answer, and that answer was within the crude deck shelter that had served Hari as a cabin.

He slipped inside. His possessions were enclosed in three packages: one, the trunk that held his clothes; two, the case that held the Sword of Saint Berne, brought from the mountains to the safety of the Ankhanan Embassy; and three, the valise-sized device with two handgrips covered in beaten gold, with the silvered glass mirror between. It was these handgrips that the Caineslayer now took, and this mirror into which his ice-pale eyes gazed.

This is the last, he told himself—promised himself, like a drunkard lifting yet another glass of whiskey to admire its amber glow in the sunlight. One last time.

And he moaned like a lover in passion, low in the back of his throat, as he entered the man who had been Caine.

8

I THINK IT’S the roar of the crowd that brings me up from the pit. People everywhere, all around me, staring, shouting, cheering, pointing. There’s a band in the neighborhood somewhere . . . There they are, marching up ahead while they play some fucking awful piece of crap that sounds like a Max Reger dirge transcribed by John Philip Sousa.

Chained—they’ve got me chained as though there were actually some chance I could get away, wrists manacled to my waist, a kind of gallows vest pegged to the block in front of me with about two feet of links thicker than my finger, chains hooked to straps at my shoulders that hold me up to some kind of scrap-wood rack so that everybody can get a goddamn good look.

People hang out of windows, waving, throwing stuff—a wad of something wet hits my right arm and splashes across my chest, and the thick retchy stench of it brings a word up out of my raddled memory: tumbrel. That’s what they used to call the cart, the kind I’m riding in this nightmare parade, a tumbrel. French for shit wagon. They’ve chained me to the shit wagon.

Nice day for a parade. The sun always looks bigger, yellower, hotter here, the rolling cottonball clouds cleaner and more solid as they tumble through a sky so deep and blue it makes you want to cry. Hot for this time of year, Los Angeles hot—in autumn, Ankhana is usually more like London.

Fog and rain, that’s what I’d wish for—something to drive the crowds indoors, something that really says England. That’s what I’d wish for, if I had any wishes left. Instead, I’ve got Hollywood.

I guess, in a sick way, it’s appropriate.

I remember from the old movies that you’re supposed to stand upright in the tumbrel; it’s traditional. Just one more fucking thing that I can’t get right. Tale of Two Cities . . . Scaramouche . . . The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard . . .That was Shanna’s favorite—

Shanna—

Oh, Christ—

The weight of it threatens to snap what’s left of my spine, and the light of day recedes from me as I spiral back down into the pit.

The pit is a warm and friendly darkness; this is where I have lived, most days since Transdeia, whenever that suede-faced motherfucker Raithe left me alone. What I have for company in the pit are comradely fantasies of having my head blown off by one of those assault rifles that some of Raithe’s friars now carry slung beneath their robes, so they resemble mere concealed swords. I can feel it exactly as it would happen, but in two-hundred-frames-a-second slowmo: the initial entry of the slug as it parts my scalp and punches through my skull, goes tumbling and slivering through my brain, trailing a wake of oblivion before a fist-sized splintered hole erupts on the far side.

I can dream of this, and be happy.

The head shot is only one of several friends of mine; sometimes I can cheer myself with the slice of a short blade into my heart, and darkness scaling my carotid artery like blood billowing through seawater; sometimes the billow of blood is literal, as I watch it pulse from opened wrists. Wrists, hell—I’ve carved enough meat in my day that I could do better, if anyone gives me a chance. I’d only need about an inch of blade to open my femoral artery; that would drop me into my Edenic oblivion almost as fast as one to my heart. It’d be easy. No hesitation cuts: my legs are already dead. Wouldn’t even sting.

I don’t need the pain. I’m not out to punish myself. Only the oblivion counts.

Everything else is just foreplay.

I’d really kind of like to rest here, drift off in some kind of half nap to close out the ugly truth of myself, but the crowd won’t let me. They’re chanting a name over and over in the kind of nasty, mockingly petty singsong that reminds me how much people in general are pretty shitty creatures. When I was maybe ten years old, I tried to kill a kid who was singsonging me like that—the only difference was that he knew my name.

These idiots keep calling me Caine.

I’d ignore them, but they insist on getting my attention with the pieces of fruit, and the eggs, with clods of horseshit and the occasional rock that hit me from time to time. Every once in a while, somebody throws a handful of gravel; some of that sticks to the mingled yolk and peach meat and drippy shit, and some of it works its way in under my collar and trickles down my chest and back and ribs and scrapes into the open sores of my burns. The parade passes a little too close to some buildings, and kids in the windows have a contest to see who can spit the biggest hawker into my hair.

You can’t rest down in the dark with crap hitting you all the time and the damn band blaring and the sunlight sparking off everybody’s iridescent braid and brass horns and halberds polished into scarlet steel mirrors. And the worst thing—the really, deeply, fundamentally loathsome vileness that makes me despise myself beyond any masochistic fantasy of self-hatred—is that I can’t stop Acting.

I’m still doing it: still watching, still commenting, still describing what I feel. Even down in the pit, swimming toward the darkness that is my sole desire, I have to tell myself what I’m doing.

I’m telling myself.

Seven years ago, when I was last here in Ankhana, as I lay dying on the damp arena sand of Victory Stadium, I thought I understood. I thought I knew who my real enemy was: my audience.

But I’m still performing . . .

Now my only audience is me.

Oh, god, god, what an ugly, ugly creature I am.

Because this is what I did it for. This, right here. What’s happening right now. The parade.

This is why Shanna is dead. This is why Faith is gone forever. This is what has killed Dad, and has stolen every joy I’d ever dreamed to have.

And so: Here I am.

The center of attention. The Main Event.

The band plays, the sun shines, the people of Ankhana cheer, and no hell could burn like this.

All this, so that I could be a star.

9

THE CAINESLAYER PULLED himself free of the Caine Mirror with a shuddering gasp, and mopped sweat from his mouth with the back of a trembling hand. I should heave this damned thing into the river, he thought. He quieted his shivering and forced his breathing into a regular pattern, but still the weakness in his limbs made him stagger as he stepped back.

Instead of tossing the Caine Mirror into the river where it belonged, the Caineslayer found himself reluctantly offering a silver noble to an ogre who had served as a poleboy on the barge to bear it—and the trunk containing his Ambassadorial robes—to the embassy.

The case containing Kosall he would carry with his own hand. This case was narrow and flat, half again as long as one of his arms, built of light springy slats of wood covered with leather, bound with brass nails.

He held the case cradled like a child, frowning.

Within this case was the most holy relic of the Imperial Church, lost for seven years; a weapon of power that Saint Berne had used not only for the blow that struck down the Prince of Chaos, but now to slay the Aktir Queen. He found it wholly curious: Though he knew full well that Caine had been only a man, that Berne had been a rapist and murderer—and lately only a corpse driven by a demon—and that Ma’elKoth himself was no more than a political prisoner in the Aktiri lands, carrying this weapon still raised a pious chill along his spine.

Though he now knew the truth behind the faith he’d practiced these many years, the faith remained. Somehow, he was able to see Caine as both an ordinary man and as the Enemy of God at the same time, without contradiction. Within this case was a blade that was only a weapon, but also a mythic symbol of the power of a god—who was only a man, but no less a god.

Curious, indeed.

As a symbol, this sword was too potent for him; he had planned—he still planned—to lock it within the embassy’s Secure Vault; he’d allow the Council of Brothers to decide its final disposition. But he could not simply sling it over his shoulder and walk, not now; he had borne it down this river, he had kept it safe, he had never even opened the case—

He could not bear to give it up without at least looking at it, one last time.

He could not bring himself to open the case now, though, not here, not in this crude shelter of slats and canvas—not where at any moment he might be interrupted, be discovered, peered at by dull uncomprehending eyes. This is nothing shameful, he insisted to himself. There is nothing shameful here; but it is personal.

He tucked the case under his arm and stepped out into the slanting sunlight on deck. Around him, the deckers and poleboys worked at their own simpleminded tasks, casting only the occasional incurious glance his way. As he stood there in the doorway, a decker shambled up to him sullenly. “Leaving? Done with shelter?”

“With this?” the Caineslayer said distantly, moving away. “Yes. I am done with shelter.”

Yet he could not make himself carry the case off the barge. Certainly, the simplest course would have been to slip into the city, to find himself a private room in some random tavern, a room with a lock on its door—the simplest course, but not easy. Not easy at all. Somewhere deep within his bowels lurked a dread of what he was about to do, as though this sword might have a power over him not unlike that of the Caine Mirror. Here on the barge, he still had some control.

Holding the case tight in his armpit, he folded his fingers together in a specifically complex knot, breathed deeply three times, and vanished from the consciousness of the barge crew. Any whose eye fell upon him forgot his existence an instant later; any who thought of him assumed he had left the barge with the triumphal parade. He slipped onto the afterdeck, knelt, and crawled into a narrow tunnel formed by untidily stacked cargo crates bound for the Teranese Delta, where the Great Chambaygen emptied into the sea.

He knelt, and lay the case on the deck before his knees. He shut his eyes reverently, opening the case’s latches by feel, then swung back the case’s lid. He covered his face with his hands, breathing into his palms until he felt himself to be calm; then slowly he opened his eyes and took his hands away and looked upon the naked blade within its bed of crushed blue velvet. The shadows of the crates that surrounded him were striped with sunlight leaking through their slats: one single shaft shone the length of Kosall, bringing it to golden life.

Long, a handbreadth wide at the quillons, straight grey steel painted with silver runes, now dark with the brown splashes of the Aktir Queen’s blood—he had not wiped the blade, for fear of disturbing the unknown magick bound into the painted runes, and for the same reason had not returned it to a scabbard.

Kosall.

The blade of Saint Berne.

Its hilt was a span and a half, wrapped with sweat-stained leather, pommel a plain steel knob; his hands trembled, fluttered near and away again like anxious moths. Dare he lift it this one time?

Could he not?

He laid his fingers, delicate as a kiss, upon a quillon. He stroked the chill steel, then took it hard into his hand. As his hand closed around the leather-wrapped hilt, the blade came to life. Warm, humming with power, it left him weak with desire. He pulled the sword up from its bed and raised it before his eyes.

This blade had parted the flesh of Caine.

Holding leather stained with the sweat of Saint Berne, he could feel it: could feel the slide of buzzing steel through lips of skin into the hard muscle of Caine’s abdominal wall, through the writhe of intestine into the sizzle at the base of his spine.

Breathless, trembling, he reached forth with his mind and touched the steel, searching its energies for memories of Caine’s blood and bone. With his power, he looked within the blade—

And something within the blade seized him, gripped his eyes, his heart, his limbs. From his throat came the hope of a scream, strangled to a convulsive gasp; his back arched and his irises rolled up to disappear within his skull.

He pitched backward into darkness. When he hit the deck, he bounced like a doll carved of green wood.

THE DRAGONESS WAS human, but no less a dragoness.

Much has been written elsewhere of the nature of dragonkind. Most of it is wrong. Dragons are not, as a species, creatures of evil bent upon wanton slaughter; nor are they merely great winged lizards asleep upon mounds of treasure. They are neither elemental forces of nature nor repositories of supernatural wisdom.

Mostly, they are individuals. The essential nature of one may vary widely from that of the next.

There are, however, certain assertions that may truthfully be made of dragons as a species. They tend to be acquisitive, vengeful, jealous of their lands and possessions, and surpassingly fierce in their defense. Though slow to anger, they can be extremely dangerous when roused, and none more so than a dragoness defending her young. In these ways, dragonkind is very like humankind.

This is why the dragoness could be human, but no less a dragoness.

The dragoness had lived her life according to the custom of her kind; she patiently oversaw her possessions, slowly extending their borders by gradual effort over many years. She tended her flocks, and added to her wealth by the occasional raid upon an unwary neighbor.

She kept almost entirely to herself; she had little interest in the events of the wider world, and so would likely have never entered this story, save that on one raid—a raid of vengeance, upon her most hated enemy—she had taken the child of the river.

The child of the river was pursued by the god of dust and ashes.

And thus the dragoness became part of this story.