SIXTEEN

TIME.

Long time.

Long, long, long time.

Awareness.

Awareness of a lack: something was not there.

Everything.

Everything was not there.

Everything with a name, everything that had a word to describe it, was not there. Not even darkness. Not even nothingness. Not even absence.

Only awareness.

At play upon the field of awareness, one random thought:

When I got there, there wasn’t any “there” there.

With that thought came understanding, and with that understanding came memory, and with that memory Pallas Ril wished she had a mouth, because she really, really, really needed to scream.

But a mouth and a scream both have words to describe them, and there were none of such things.

2

OVERNIGHT, A NEW immersion game had sprung up like mushrooms, suddenly appearing on sites all over the net. Called Sim-River™, it was an extension of the classic world-building series, with a couple of original twists. At its heart, it was very straightforward: The player takes on the persona of the overseeing god of an Overworld river valley. The goal was to promote the growth of a high civilization among the tiny simulated farmers and miners that form the valley’s population base. The path to that high civilization was fraught with dangers, however, from simple drought and flood cycles to natural disasters such as tornados, earthquakes, and even volcanoes; from crop disease and equipment failure up to marauding dragons and invasions by hostile elves and dwarfs. The player accessed the game through a second-hander sim helmet, the same one used to replay recorded Adventure cubes, and so the immersive experience was very intense, detailed, and realistic. None of that was particularly original, or very different from dozens, if not hundreds, of similar games.

The original twists, however, brought the game to a whole new level of popularity. One was that this game was interactive: Every person logged on worldwide played together in real time, all participating in pursuing their collective goal. The actions of the river god represented the average of their intended moves. Further, the more people who were logged on at any given time, the more powerful the god became—this was the trade-off for the reduction of individual choice in the specific moves.

Finally, the game was based on reconstructed Studio Adventure files, taken from the Adventures of a real Overworld river goddess, Pallas Ril. More than simply watching its effects, a player could feel the power of being a god.

It was overwhelmingly addictive. In only a few days, the hardest-core of the hard-core players had adopted a nickname: they called themselves godheads.

Everyone played it. Marc Vilo played it while he recovered from the implant surgery that had linked him with the electronic group-identity that was the Board of Governors. Avery Shanks would have played it, even through her Teravil-induced haze, had her Social Police guards allowed her into the Earth-normal areas of the Curioseum. Perhaps even Duncan Michaelson might have played it, save for the cyborg yoke that shorted out his higher brain functions; he now existed only as an organic switching nexus for the net lines hardwired into his brain’s sensory cortex.

The creature that had been Arturo Kollberg played it, though he had no need to; it amused him to pretend to be only a peripheral part of a grand mass-consciousness, instead of its focal node. He, alone of all the players on Earth, actually understood the game’s true function: to gather and concentrate the attention of billions of people at once. To make them all think about the same thing, in the same terms, at the same time—to align and synchronize the patterns of their consciousness into a single shared intention—and to feed all of that mental energy into the net, structured in a way that made it extremely convenient to use. He, alone of all the players on Earth, could feel the progress of the game without resorting to technological resources.

He had only to close his eyes.

He was not the recipient of that energy, however. The energy of concentrated attention is essentially magickal; use of magickal energy is best left to an expert. The energy was directed precisely, surgically, for a single purpose: to enhance and strengthen a tiny white pinpoint of a star upon the brow of Tan’elKoth’s mental image of Faith Michaelson.

Channeling the energy through the boundary effect between Earth-normal and Overworld-normal fields had originally presented something of a problem; Tan’elKoth had to remain in the Overworld-normal sections of the Curioseum for his personal powers of magick to function, yet to receive the energy coming to him, he must also be linked to the net.

And so, as Tan’elKoth knelt in a meditative posture beside the bed into which Faith Michaelson had been strapped, he would occasionally rub the shaved-bald patch on his skull, just behind and above his left ear, and finger the neat arc of stitching that held the flesh closed. Beneath that stitching was a thoughtmitter: proprietary Studio technology orginally designed as a data and energy link between the differing physics of Earth and Overworld.

For days he sat, motionless in concentration; he would not allow mere mortal exhaustion to limit him. The child, lacking his resources, was kept continuously medicated. A cycle of stimulants and hypnotics maintained her in a dreamlike state of semi-awareness. Periodic injections allowed her to enter REM sleep for half an hour or more—the REM state was close enough to waking consciousness for Tan’elKoth’s purposes—but to allow her to fall deeper than that would risk all they had so far gained.

She never achieved real rest, but neither did he.

All would be worthwhile, if he could only touch the river’s power. The irony of so extending himself to summon back the shade of Pallas Ril made him occasionally smile; but, in the end, were they not both gods? He had spoken of this to no one; he did not dare even think it too clearly. But he knew, within his heart of hearts, that once he joined with the rivergod, all would be different. There would be no more beatings, no more torture and humiliation at Kollberg’s hands.

Kollberg, he told himself with a trace of contempt, believed Pallas Ril would be trouble.

That vile little man had no conception of what real trouble was. Once the link to the rivergod had been completed, Tan’elKoth would undertake to teach him.

3

SHE REMEMBERED THE point of Kosall ramming between her eyes, remembered the sound when the frontal bone of her skull splintered around it, remembered the brief instant of humming buzz that made her whole body burn as oblivion swallowed her.

But something had changed. Something had touched her within the vast lack that was her death; something must have, or she wouldn’t have recovered awareness. Perception filtered through her, slow and pure as springwater through limestone: She was not alone.

A body, living breath and blood and bone—a body that was hers, but not hers: hard and lean, tanned suede and knotted rope, a hand that clutched steel wrapped in sweat-damp leather, a shaven skull—

She clutched at that body, poured herself into it, howling. But this was no empty vessel; an ego held this body already, an ego with an identically fierce need to exist—a mind disciplined and directed, that struck back at her with the force of absolute terror: a rejection so utter that her grip upon the body burned her like the heart of the sun.

But she could not let go.

Even agony was welcome, after the lack.

She shrieked pain and rage, and the other shrieked pain and rage, and the battle was joined.

4

A DECKER FINALLY found him there among the cargo crates, two days downriver from Ankhana. This particular decker had been troubled ever since the barge had undocked with a peculiar, intermittent buzzing in his ears. He could hear it only when he chanced to be on watch in the quietest quiet of night; even the faintest breeze would bury the sound, to say nothing of the daylight chatter of deckers and crew, and the sonorous chanteys the poleboys used to keep themselves in step.

Finally, half through his watch in the small hours of moonless morning, the decker reached the end of his patience; he took his lamp, left his post, and began to explore. It was neither a swift nor an easy search, especially since his natural initial assumption was that the humming buzz must be coming from within one of the crates; he spent nearly an hour pressing his ear to the splintered slats of one crate after another.

Finally, his wavering lamp flame picked out the shape in its cramped tunnel, deep within the least tidy of the stacks. One look at the rigid body of the young man lying on the deck, corded tendons standing out from collar to jaw, both hands locked around the hilt of a sword—the edges of whose blade seemed to fade into a shady nonexistence—and he went right back out and woke the afterdeck second.

The afterdeck second was less cautious. He crawled in beside the young man, scowling at him. He sat, and scowled at the way the young man’s back was arched, bridging above the deck. He scowled at the rictal terror locked onto the young man’s face, and he scowled at the bands of white across the knuckles of the young man’s hands. “Maybe I should give him a kick or something,” he told the decker. “See if I can wake him up.”

The decker shook his head. “What if he don’t wanna be kicked?”

The afterdeck second’s scowl darkened. “What’s that friggin’ noise?”

He was referring to the peculiar sizzling hum that seemed to come from the young man’s vicinity, the same hum that had finally drawn the decker within. “I think,” the decker answered hesitantly, “I think it’s the sword . . .”

The afterdeck second pushed himself back, pressing against the crate behind him. It was an open secret, whom they’d carried from Harrakha down the river to Ankhana. The decker could be right. This could be the Sword of Saint Berne.

“Get a poleboy down here,” he said. “Right now. Get a couple of poleboys and shift some of these crates. But quietly, for the love of fuck—wake the captain, and you’ll be swimming to Terana.”

The poleboys were ogres; a pair of them were able to swiftly and quietly enlarge the space where the young man lay. Once done, the afterdeck second instructed one of them to give the young man a poke with his pole—thirty feet of sturdy oak, as big around as a man’s knee. The poleboy gave the young man a hesitant nudge on the shoulder.

The young man writhed, and the humming buzz got briefly louder and lower in pitch, and the pole was now twenty-seven and a half feet of stout oak; its terminal thirty inches rolled slowly across the deck and came to rest against the afterdeck second’s feet.

The afterdeck second recalled that he had been considering giving the young man a kick, and he imagined what the rest of his life would have been like if thirty inches had come off his leg.

“Go wake the captain,” he said grimly. “Tell him we gotta send somebody back up to Ankhana, to the Monastic Embassy. Right now.”

5

IN SILENCE SO absolute that he had no memory of sound, the Caineslayer fought for his life.

At its most basic level, this was a battle for the physical territory of his nervous system. From her beachhead in the palm of his left hand, she scaled his nerves like leprosy: tiny incremental snippets of death creeping beneath his skin. He fought back with a fiercely vivid mindview image of his body, but—

He could no longer imagine his left hand.

Intellectually, he could remember details: the curve of a new hangnail on his little finger, the arc of a scar across one knuckle, the deep-etched battle cross in the center of his palm—but these had become mere description, abstract and juiceless. He could no longer put them together into the image of how his hand had looked. His self-image ended at his wrist. The hand beyond had become a clouded shape, mostly undefined . . . but slim and long and clearly a woman’s. Seen with physical eyes, the hand would appear unchanged; but within, where it counted, the life of that hand now resonated to a different mind.

She had taken his hand and made it her own.

At its broadest, most metaphysical level, this battle was symbolic. The Caineslayer had made of himself a knot: a gnarl of memories and intentions, of love and rage, hate and fear and desire. She enclosed the knot, turning it this way and that, teasing out its raveling ends, patiently untying him. He clenched himself against her every touch: this knot was the pattern of his identity, the structure of consciousness maintained by the resonance of his nervous system. Maintained by the runes painted upon the blade they both now held. To be untied would be to vanish into undifferentiated Flow. It would be death.

Absolute death. Consciousness and identity extinguished.

The permanent lack.

Up and down the spectrum between these two extremes their battle raged, and their primary weapon was the logic of pain: This hurts, doesn’t it? How about this? Don’t you know how easy it is to stop the pain? Just let go—

He hit her with his father’s fist; she tore his belly with child-birth; he scorched her with the humiliation of Dala’s scorn, when the woman who had taken his virginity had laughingly called him a child in the presence of her new man; she smothered him with the drowning grief of knowing she would always come second in her husband’s heart. In sharing pain, he learned her, and she him; they became more intimate than husband and wife, or parent and child, and this intimacy made their fight more savage. They fought with the passionate frenzy of betrayed lovers.

And the Caineslayer was losing.

Sucked into the darkness—

Eaten by the Aktir Queen.

On one thing, the antagonists were perfectly agreed. When he felt an approach of any kind, he lashed out wildly, and she helped guide his hand. If his concentration were to break, she would eat him whole. If hers faltered, he would cast her back into the outer darkness. Only gradually did he come to realize that his eyes were squeezed shut, that the sense he used to detect intrusions was not his, but hers: some malign perception of the life that animated the meat around him, and made it men.

That was when he knew she had taken too much of him already. If he had seen one slim chance of survival, he might have clawed for it in wild panic, but he had no chance at all. He became calm. Even serene.

In that serenity, he found strength.

He would go down into the darkness, but he would go down fighting.

His own powers of mind gave him unexpected resources: just as she fought to tune his nerves to resonate with the pattern of her mind, he could tune his own mind to hers. He drove his attention into the void that had been his left hand, and he found her perception there. He felt the barge captain and the deckers and the poleboys and the wider sweep of illness and burgeoning insanity that was the city upstream; he felt the fish in the river, and he felt the weeds and algae on which they fed.

Now, he understood her. The theft of his body was not her goal, it was only a stepping-stone, a staging area. She wanted the river, and more than the river: She wanted all that the river touched and all that touched the river. She wanted the Flow of life that sluiced through him. She wanted to hold him under that river until all that they both were had been washed away.

Among the lives he could now feel, he sought one that might capture even a fringe of the Aktir Queen’s attention: anything that might turn the edge of her scalpel mind. Far, far away—muffled yet painful, a splinter in a frostbitten finger—so distant and faint that he doubted the Aktir Queen could have felt it without the focused refinement of his own powers of mind, he detected a tiny wail of absolute terror.

It was a little girl, screaming for her mother.

6

DOSSAIGN OF JHANTHOGEN Bluff, Master Speaker of the Monastic Embassy in Ankhana, had set up the Artan Mirror atop its own brass-bound carrying case within a small shelter on the barge’s deck. The shelter was made of crate slats and tar paper, hastily appended to the similar structure the barge crew had constructed to keep the autumn rains off the rigid form of Ambassador Raithe.

Around Raithe circled four Esoterics armed with staves; at intervals, one or more of the Esoterics extended his staff. None ever came closer than arm’s length before the humming blade flashed out and sheared away the staff’s tip. Raithe’s eyes never opened, and his catatonia never altered, save for the instant convulsive slash that met each approach.

The deck was littered with small cylinders of fresh-cut wood. Just inside the door stood two more friars, each bearing an arm-load of fresh staves. Just outside the door stood another four friars, who grimly barred the shelter’s entrance to the curious barge crew and the increasingly belligerent captain.

Dossaign glumly looked askance at his two lieutenants—a Keeping Brother and a Reading Brother—who responded with uncertain shrugs. Dossaign rubbed his eyes exhaustedly; the jarring bouncing coach ride from Ankhana to where the riverbarge had moored had taken more than a day and had left him exhausted and feverish. He suspected that he might be coming down with the same fever that had kept Acting Ambassador Damon in bed in the embassy, despite the Acting Ambassador’s express desire to come here personally and see the situation with his own eyes.

Damon had been obsessive in his search for his Transdeian counterpart ever since Ambassador Raithe had failed to present himself at the embassy days before. He had spoken privately to Dossaign of his growing conviction that something was going hideously wrong in Ankhana, in the Empire as a whole, and that Raithe was somehow at the center of it. He had mumbled disjointedly of Caine and the Patriarch and how he felt the surreptitious gathering of enemies around the Monasteries and around himself personally, and Master Dossaign had successfully dismissed all this as fever-induced raving—right up to the point when he’d boarded the barge.

Certainly he’d never suspected the bargeman’s wild story might be exactly true. Finding that unlikely truth had made him uneasily worry that some of Damon’s mutterings might have more truth to them than a reasonable man would reasonably expect.

Dossaign had already Mirrored the embassy, and had been given assurance that Damon himself would be on hand to receive his next transmission.

Reluctantly now he began the cycle of breath that tuned his Shell to match the power of the griffinstone within this Mirror; a moment more, and his Shell tuned their shared energy to the specific color and shape of the Artan Mirror’s Shell in the Ankhanan Embassy. His own image in the Mirror was replaced by that of a Speaking Brother from Ankhana; Dossaign greeted him formally and asked for Acting Ambassador Damon.

Damon’s hair was rumpled and his brows slick with sweat; his eyes looked like scalded oysters, and he seemed unwilling to meet Dossaign’s gaze squarely.

“We have made our first inspection, Master Ambassador. The circumstance is—” Dossaign shifted uncomfortably. “—exactly as the bargeman described. Ambassador Raithe is locked in some kind of rictus. He does not speak or move, except to lash out with the sword he holds when anyone attempts to approach him. Our antimagick net is useless, and now needs repair; on our attempt to net him, he cut through the net before it could enclose him.”

Damon coughed harshly and wiped his mouth. “And the sword?”

Dossaign turned to the Keeping Brother. “The Acting Ambassador wishes your assessment of the sword. Take my hand and look into the Mirror.”

As the Keeping Brother complied, Dossaign watched the focus of his eyes shift from seeing his own reflection to the image of Damon. The Keeping Brother twitched with an imperfectly suppressed flinch at what he saw, and spoke uncomfortably. “The Reading Brother and his assistant both agree with my provisional assessment—barring closer, uh, study of this, mmm, situation. This is most probably, almost certainly, the enchanted blade Kosall—now known as the Sword of Saint Berne—though there is no record of a possessive or an, er, a convulsive effect in the history of this particular blade, which is, as you might imagine, extensive. This is, in itself, a contraindication; also, the figures on the blade, which appear to be a runic or magickal script of some sort, which we have been, as you might imagine, unable to examine closely—well, Kosall is known to appear as plain steel. Other than that, however—”

“So,” Damon said solidly, his voice strong and dark despite his illness. “You don’t know what is happening to Brother Raithe, and you don’t know what can be done to stop it, or even if such an attempt should properly be made.”

“I, ah, well . . .” The Keeping Brother swallowed. “Mm, no. But—” He waved weakly toward where Raithe lay rigid upon the deck. “—Brother Raithe’s, er . . . radius of reaction . . . continues to increase, as it has ever since we began the examination this morning. We expect his reaction-radius to stabilize at five to six feet, this being the maximum reach he can achieve with the blade, unless he somehow manages to get to his feet.”

“And if he does reach his feet?”

“I, ah, well—”

Damon scowled. “You believe this to be a magickal effect?”

The Keeping Brother nodded. “Both of our available mindview-capable friars have confirmed it—although their reports present some difficulties of their own. While he clearly manifests an abnormal Shell pattern—indicating probable magickal causation—there is no discernable current in the Flow-surround; which is to say, if it is a magickal effect, we cannot say from whence the power might be coming.”

Damon sighed. “There is only one solution. We must put him, sword and all, into the Secure Vault.”

Dossaign understood Damon’s thinking. The Secure Vault was part of the Keeping Brother’s domain within the embassy: a basement room built entirely of plated steel, with a door two feet thick. Carefully shielded against Flow, it was the storage vault for dangerous magickal artifacts. The vault itself—and its doorway—were quite large; it might be possible for Raithe to be brought into it without triggering his deadly defensive reflex. Within, Raithe would be entirely sealed off from the general Flow, and he might be able to break the hold of whatever magick gripped him now.

“But, but, but,” the Keeping Brother protested, “how are we to get him to the embassy? We can’t even move him off the barge!”

“First,” Damon said, “we need not move him off the barge—we need only move the barge.”

“The captain will be difficult, Damon,” Dossaign murmured. “He is fractious already, and muttering of reparations from the Monasteries for the days he’s lost. I think if he could have, he would have simply dropped Ambassador Raithe in the river and continued to Terana.”

“Buy his cargo,” Damon said. “Buy his damned ship, if need be. Get Raithe back here. I don’t know what is happening, but I do know that Raithe is at the center of it.”

“But—but, the expense—” the Keeping Brother protested.

“Ambassador Raithe is a Monastic citizen in distress,” Damon said through clenched teeth. “Do as you are told.”

“But,” Dossaign said mildly, “assuming the Ambassador’s situation is unchanged when we arrive, we still have no way to get him off the barge.”

“That’s not your concern. Get him here.”

The connection was broken.

Dossaign sighed. “Well, then. We’re on our way back to Ankhana.”

7

IN THE END, it was what They were doing to the little girl that turned Hannto the Scythe against Them.

He had decided, in the vague and foggy muddle that passed for thought among the shades, that he would have melted the damned crown of Dal’kannith down for scrap metal, had he known that transforming himself into Ma’elKoth would bring him here: a ghost within his own skull, and an unwilling participant in the permanent, infinite rape of this innocent child.

Sometimes, Hannto felt as though he were part of a great sticky web of mucus—glassine slime that clung to the naked body of this little girl, dripping on her eyes, forcing itself into her mouth, her nose, her ears, every drop searching for the orifice that would let it leak into the river. At other times, it felt as though the child had been slit open through the belly, and he drew her entrails out one slow length at a time, examining every inch in turn for any hint of her link with the mind of Chambaraya. Sometimes it had been a pure and simple rape, a punishing insertion, inflicting agony to force surrender: Let us into the river.

Sometimes it felt as though the child had been skinned, and her living flesh draped around him like a costume, as though he might gain the river by a grotesque imposture.

Hannto was not conscious, exactly; he was a personality, but not a person, in any real sense. Like many of the shades, he was a group of interrelated experiences and memories, attitudes and habits of mind, that Tan’elKoth maintained to attend to particular tasks that might otherwise occupy too much of his attention. Hannto in particular was a specialized subroutine that Tan’elKoth used to access the art- and esthetics-related subset of his stolen memories and skills.

But he was also more than this: he was the baseline, the original, the core of the creature that had become the god Ma’elKoth. Hannto, when he could think, liked to think of himself as Ma’elKoth’s soul.

Hannto the Scythe had never been a pursuer of women, or of men; lusts of the body meant little to him. He had never pursued wealth, for wealth was at best only a tool, never a goal. He was not a lover of ease and leisure, not interested in a life of endless play; he did not seek power over others.

His sole passion had been beauty.

Perhaps this had come of being saddled by the circumstance of his birth with a twisted body that inspired only pity, with a face that women compared unfavorably with horse turds; perhaps. He had never cared to analyze the roots of his obsession. It was a simple fact of his existence, like the sun and the wind and his crooked spine. He had never been able to concern himself with right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lie. Beauty was his life’s sole meaning.

Not long after he had taken the enormous step from mere acquisition to true creation, he had even created a new self: he had made of himself the icon of beauty and terror that was Ma’elKoth. But even at his most terrible, there had been nothing of ugliness about him. Until now.

It was this that made what had been done to Faith Michaelson so repugnant to Hannto the Scythe. It was ugly.

Overwhelmingly, irredeemably, fatally ugly.

He could not close his eyes, for he had no eyes; he could not turn his head, for he had no head. Due to the peculiar specifics of his existence, there was no way he could avoid a savagely intimate knowledge of the endless rape of this child. Hannto found this unendurable, but he could not in any way affect it; he was only a set of traits, skills, and memories, after all. He had no will of his own. He was a personality, not a person.

All the shades resonated with loathing; poor Lamorak could do nothing but sob. Even Ma’elKoth—formerly a god, now merely the splinter personality charged with securing the link to the river—seemed to hate the whole process, but he, too, had no choice.

It had become so crowded in here.

Tan’elKoth’s mental world was crammed to bursting with innumerable, almost insignificant lives: the faceless traces of the faceless masses of Earth, tiny bits of virtually will-free mind.

But virtually is not the same as entirely; their sheer numbers made the power of their aggregate will overwhelming. Hannto felt sure that Tan’elKoth would never have continued to brutalize this child, if not for their ceaseless pressure; but whatever scruple might still have existed within him had drowned in an ocean of people—the ocean of people that Hannto had come to call Them.

Tan’elKoth could no more resist Them than he could turn back the tide.

Every one of Them was hungry for the river, for what it represented: open space, breathing room. Wealth. Land. Clean water, clean air. Fresh food—real fruit right off the tree, real vegetables, real meat. And They didn’t care how They got it.

Individually, perhaps, They might have been repulsed by the thought of harming a child, any child—but each of Them could blame her pain on millions and billions of others as well as themselves, and so each was willing to pour himself into this little girl until their combined pressure ripped her to bloody rags.

One ten-billionth of the guilt for her terror and agony was easy enough to bear.

And so, when the tiny searing pinpoint of the link had opened upon her forehead, like a single star in a vast black sky, Hannto had discovered that one does not need eyes in order to weep. From his rage and despair, from his love of beauty, from somewhere beyond the wall between the worlds, he found an unfamiliar strength. He found, for the first time, the power to say no.

Privately, hugging the thought to himself, shielding it from Ma’elKoth and Lamorak and all the other shades and all the countless, countless blank-faced billions of Them, he said: I won’t.

He was only one against the billions, but he could wait, and he could watch.

If any chance came, he could act.

8

FOR TWO DAYS, the riverbarge had toiled back upriver, pushed by chanting poleboys and pulled by the ox-teams that Master Dossaign had hired along the way. Now it was moored against the foot of the Old Town wall just upstream of Knights’ Bridge.

To get the myriad necessary Imperial permissions had taken nearly a day and a half; over the last few hours, a team of Monastic engineers had hurriedly constructed the enormous swivel-mounted crane that towered above the wall’s top. A double-sheaf block was lashed to the outer timber of the crane’s arm, set up as a luff tackle; from the single-sheaf block at its lower end hung four chains. Each chain attached to a large wooden hook, nailed foursquare around the area on the barge’s deck where Raithe still lay, still twisted in unnatural rictus, the sword still clutched in his hands.

The deck shelter had been cleared away, and now a magick-capable friar worked his way from corner to corner, slicing out the section of deck where Raithe lay with one of the embassy’s prized relics: a Bladewand, recovered from the river six years before, believed to have once belonged to Pallas Ril.

Damon leaned through a crenel of the wall, the embassy’s Master Keeper beside him. Damon picked obsessively at his fingertips, the skin dry, cracked, and oozing blood. He was aware of the sidelong looks from the Master Keeper, but he could not make himself care. The man was an idiot, and he’d always been against Damon—just another of the petty voices who whispered together behind his back. They both silently watched the blue-white plane of energy flicker in and out of existence from the Bladewand’s focal crystal.

The stone of the merlon beside him was moist and cool with dew. Damon leaned his face against it to let it draw some of his fever. Since this morning, he had had little to drink; his throat pained him, making swallowing a chore.

The barge captain stood nearby, wringing his hands, muttering under his breath.

“An inelegant solution,” the Master Keeper murmured for perhaps the hundredth time.

Damon grunted. Yes, his solution was not elegant; neither was it cheap. But it should get Raithe into the Secure Vault without any loss of life.

“I say just shoot the son of a bitch,” the barge captain growled from behind them. Between the damage done to his deck and being pushed around for four damn days by a bunch of Monastics who all acted like they owned the damn world, he had swallowed about as much crap as any one man can. “A couple guys with crossbows could settle that little cock right down. Whyn’tcha just shoot him?”

“Because he is a Monastic citizen in distress,” Damon said without turning, “and as such, he is by right entitled to whatever aid I can lawfully offer.”

“What about my rights?” the captain said. “I got rights, too!”

“Do you?”

The captain looked at the back of Damon’s head, then at the several heavily armed friars who stood in various postures of attention around him on the wall. Some of them stared back at him with disturbingly expressionless faces.

Damon said, “Perhaps you would care to enumerate these rights?”

The captain lowered his head and stalked away, grumbling under his breath. “Sure, fine, go ahead and serve your goddamn Human Future, who cares if you’re buttfuckin’ people along the way.”

The friar on deck below stood and stepped back, waving the depowered Bladewand three times over his head. The men who held the ropes hauled away, and the section of deck upon which Raithe lay lifted clear, swinging gently and twisting in the late afternoon sunlight.

They’d raise him, deck and all, up over the wall and lower him on the other side, directly onto the bed of a cart that waited in the alley below, with a team already harnessed. Then a slow, careful journey across the cobbled streets of Old Town to the rear of the Monastic Embassy, where ten more friars waited near the loading dock; they would carry the section of deck on their shoulders, slowly and gently, all the way into the Secure Vault, without ever coming close enough to the stricken Raithe to place themselves in danger from the deadly blade.

This operation had garnered a large crowd of curious onlookers, both on the docks opposite and lined up along the stone rail of Knights’ Bridge. As the section of deck went higher and higher along the tall curve of the Old Town wall, spontaneous applause broke out here and there.

Damon barely heard it. He was mesmerized by Raithe’s stillness—even a corpse would have relaxed from rigor long ago.

“He’s been like this for days,” Damon muttered to no one in particular. “How can he keep going? I’m exhausted just looking at him.”

The Master Keeper shook his head. They had speculated endlessly about this, and no one had a reasonable answer. “Effort like that over this length of time—over half this length of time—would kill any ordinary man. I cannot imagine what he’s using for strength.”

“Whatever it is, he uses it still,” Damon said grimly. “He’s moving again.”

Perhaps it was something in the motion of the piece of deck that had roused him, something in the gentle swing and sway as it rose beside the black stone of the wall; perhaps it was the laughter and applause from the crowd. For all Damon would ever know, it might have been some arcane perception of the plan to move him into the Secure Vault.

Some things are destined to remain mysteries.

All Damon knew was that something made Raithe roll, and brought the edge of Kosall against one of the chains that supported the deck; the chain parted with the bright schinnng of sandpaper scraping a silver bell.

“Haul away!” Damon shouted. “Haul, rot your eyes!”

The section of deck swung a little farther than it had before. Two more friars leaped to the rope, yanking on it desperately to get him up and over the wall, but Raithe rolled to the next corner and Kosall sheared the next chain. The crowd yelled in alarm as the deck section swung down like the trap door of a gallows and Raithe tumbled insensibly toward the deck of the barge some sixty-odd feet below.

Damon tracked his fall with grim eyes.

When Raithe missed the deckrail by inches and hit the water with a mighty splash, the crowd cheered again. The Master Keeper waved his arms and shouted, “Divers! Divers, go!” Friars on deck started toward the rail until Damon overpowered the uproar with a shockingly loud, “Hold your posts! That’s an order!”

The Master Keeper turned on him. “Master Ambassador, you cannot—”

“I can. It is you who can’t. I am in authority here. Never presume to issue orders in my operation.”

“But he might still be alive! He can still be saved!”

“Not by us,” Damon said. He opened a hand down toward the impenetrably murky waters of the Great Chambaygen. “You would send men into that? And what will happen to those who are unlucky enough to find him?”

“I—I . . .” In Damon’s eyes, the Master Keeper could see the reflection of severed staff ends clattering across the barge’s deck, and the image struck him speechless. “I am sorry, Master Ambassador,” he gasped, when he had finally recovered his voice. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Damon said, “Fortunate for them that I was,” and turned away. He leaned over the retaining wall and looked down at the roiled murk of the river for any sign that Ambassador Raithe might still be alive.

Minutes passed, and the stricken Ambassador never surfaced.

Damon closed his eyes.

Some time later, the Master Keeper asked in a very soft and thoroughly chastened tone, “Do you think we might try divers now? He’s surely drowned, and we must recover the sword. We cannot risk that it should fall into unwary hands.”

“I am not at all sure he is dead,” Damon said. “He should have been dead hours ago, or days. I do not know what sustained him then; I do not know that it does not sustain him still.”

“What, then, shall we do?”

“What we would have done from the beginning, had I not been so enamored of my own cleverness,” he said stolidly. “We shall wait, and watch, and guard.”

“Huh,” the barge captain grunted from his place along the wall. “Woulda been simpler, you just shot him like I said, huh?”

“Simpler, yes,” Damon agreed. He gave a heavy sigh. “You should go now. I find myself tempted to simplify the problem I have with you.”

9

AT THE BOTTOM of the river, he drowned in the Aktir Queen.

The river itself could not harm him, for the Aktir Queen defended his body with her power; like a child in the womb, breath was unnecessary while the living water flowed around and through him.

He fought as stubbornly and savagely as ever, though he knew he was dying. She continued to hurt him, and he continued to hurt her back. Her endurance was illimitable and her power overwhelming—but he could himself draw upon the power that sustained her, and use it to resist.

So the murder was taking a long, long time.

A day passed, and another; through the goddess’ river-born senses, he could feel the slow wheel of the sun. There may have been more days, or less; though he could sense whether day or night clothed the world above, he could no longer remember if it had done so once, or three times, or five, or a dozen.

Slice by onion-skin slice, she cut away his life.

The final turning point came when some disconnected part of his brain wondered why, exactly, he was putting himself through this. What, exactly, did he have to live for?

To watch Caine die? He had taken his revenge. He had wounded Caine as deeply as he himself had been wounded; he had proved to the world that the Enemy of God was no more than a man.

He discovered that he was no longer interested in Caine’s death. Now, with the final darkness closing in around his mind, he discovered that he was no longer interested in anyone’s death.

Perhaps he was the Caineslayer no longer.

Perhaps he had never been.

He remembered vividly Caine’s despair, his fantasies of oblivion, visions of death seductive and sweet. He thought of how Caine had longed for the emptiness, and the end of pain. The billowing clouds of darkness that would fade until light and dark were no longer even memory—

Here, at the final link of his long and tangled chain of destiny, he found, unexpectedly, a choice.

He chose.

It’s better this way, he thought, and let himself fall into the infinite lack.

10

LATE IN THE dark of autumn, under stone-grey clouds that bleached sunlight to the color of dust, new grass sprang up from the banks of the Great Chambaygen. Among that ankle-high jungle of brilliant young green, crocuses raised their faces and unfolded like warm snowflakes toward an invisible sun. Trees creaked and shivered as new leaves opened like fists that had been held closed against the approach of winter.

The hills below Khryl’s Saddle echoed with the gunshot reports of bighorns clashing in rut, and birds proclaimed their territory with bursts of song; along the river’s length, horses kicked and bucked, cats howled, dogs chased one another through the unseasonably warm breeze. Even slower, duller species such as humanity felt a quickening surge in the blood: the intoxicated fizz inside the head that says It’s spring.

And so it was: all of spring in a single day.

The streets of Ankhana suddenly burgeoned with young corn twisting upward from horse turds; flagstones cracked and split into green-swarmed rubble. Oak and ash, maple and cottonwood splashed out from seeds that should have drowned within the river itself, curling branches up the outer walls of Old Town and twining the piles that supported Ankhana’s bridges. Window-boxes became cascading riots of new greenery, and trellises vanished under the sudden spread of climbing vines. In moments Ankhana could have been a city abandoned to jungle decades before: a skeleton giving shape to the verdant explosion that consumed it.

This was no false spring; for, after all, spring is precisely the earth’s echo of a goddess, when she shouts I AM ALIVE.

DARKNESS IS THE greatest teacher.

A tribe of the Quiet Land once had a rite of passage in which the aspirant was buried alive, deep beneath the earth, where no light could find him and no ear could hear his sobs and his screams. This was the final rite; after a span of days spent in such a coffin the aspirant was released, and numbered among the wise.

They did this because they knew:

Darkness is a knife that peels away the rind of what you think you know about yourself. The shades of your pretenses, the tones of your illusions, the layers of deception that glaze your life into the colors that tint your world—all mean nothing in the darkness. No one can see them, not even you.

Darkness hides everything except who you really are.