EIGHTEEN

ANKHANA EMBRACED DAMON of Jhanthogen Bluff with a jungle of dreams.

An oak shouldered him aside as it lashed upward from a crack in the flagstone dockside, shoving him stumbling into a head-high corn patch; the stalks crackled and burgeoned with young ears that grew from fingerlings to the size of his hand while he stood and watched with open-mouthed awe. Pumpkin and watermelon vines snaked along the stone and coiled around his ankles. Intertangled apple and peach and willow leaped from the Chambaygen so fast that the reeds festooning their upper branches dripped chill river water onto Damon’s feverish brow. Barges and boats and floating piers were shoved and twisted and overturned.

In minutes the river had become a marsh, and the great wall of Old Town had become a vertical forest of leaves and brilliant blossoms.

I have done this, Damon thought.

The buzzing in his veins—a strange fizzy bubbling up and down his neck that swirled into his head and out again—had started as a tiny hiss, but had boiled and burst since the green had come to devour the city. He walked in a dream, and knew it was a dream; this could not happen, except in a dream.

The friars Damon had detailed to patrol the dockside and watch for any sign of Master Raithe and the Sword of Saint Berne were all Esoterics: veterans, experts in covert operations skills ranging from hand-to-hand combat to demolitions to magickal counterespionage. At the first creak and rustle of the foliage that sprang to life around them, they had scattered and taken cover like the professionals they were.

He was alone.

Damon couldn’t see them anywhere within the riot of waving, weaving green, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He wasn’t sure of anything. I’ve been sick, he thought. I’ve had a fever.

I must still have a fever; this must be a fever dream.

He’d been at the dockside for days, he guessed. He couldn’t bear to be away. He’d posted his guards and watchmen, but he couldn’t trust them to watch and guard, not really; whenever he left the riverside he was tormented by visions of Raithe slipping away, sneaking, escaping—

And Raithe, he knew, was at the core of what was happening to Ankhana; let him go, and all hope of answers would be lost with him. So Damon always came back, to pace and brood and contemplate the river, because the only man in Ankhana he could still trust was himself.

Because this is my dream.

His stomach had been troubling him, and now in the green storm his guts twisted, and he retched: a brown-traced milky fluid spilled from his lips. How long had it been since he’d last eaten?

What had he last eaten?

The streaks of brown in his vomitus looked like blood.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and its touch stung him sharply. His lips had cracked and split and smeared his hand with fresher blood. He was thirsty, dreadfully thirsty . . . He knelt and cupped river water to his mouth, but his tongue turned the cool water to nails and broken glass. He could feel it tearing open his throat, shredding him inside—

Maybe what I need isn’t water.

He looked back at the pool of his vomit, at the swirls of brown; he looked down at the smear of red across the back of his hand. Blood, he thought.

Blood.

He would have to hunt.

A flash of furtive motion caught his eye. He rose to a stalking crouch, parting reeds with his hands, then slipped forward through the stand of corn. There it was again—was it again? Was it the first time? Had he seen this before, or was he remembering an older dream?

The flash of a boot heel, as it vanished behind the trunk of an ash; a startled glimpse of a woman’s face, eyes wide and staring for one brief second until screened by rustling corn, the smell of unwashed crotch and armpit, the mouthwatering earthmetal savor of blood—

His dreaming jungle was full of people.

Slowly, his jungle came to life in his ears. Grunts and growls, screeches and screams, all manner of bellows and howls and shrieks echoed near and far: calls not of beasts, but of men. Calls of the beasts that men had always been.

He followed a crackle of motion and was brought up short by a yell that was chopped to a thin moan. Thrashing a clearing in the reeds was a tangle of human flesh: a man and a woman and a knife struggled together near the river, and Damon couldn’t make his eyes interpret who was doing what to whom. He could see only limbs, and metal, and blood.

Blood—

The blood pulled him forward, and he followed, thirsting. This was only a dream, after all.

He entered the reeds, and something struck him from behind.

Overborne, crushed to the ground, he tasted the viny resin of the broken reeds that jabbed his face, while what might have been a knee dug painfully into his back and frantic hands scrabbled at his clothing. He lay unresisting, abstractly wondering how this happenstance figured into his dream, until dully ripping teeth latched into the joining of his neck and shoulder and gnawed at his flesh. The pain—real pain, too-real pain—woke him from his daze. This is no dream of mine.

Damon reached back and gripped with one hand the head of the man who chewed on him, while his other hand sought the man’s eyes with stiffened fingers. The fellow grunted into Damon’s trapezius, and his fists flailed ineffectually. Damon’s fingers drove slowly deeper into his eyes, and the man stopped punching and started trying only to get away, thrashing and pushing and moaning. Damon let him go, and heard a grunt of impact and a wet gurgle; before he could roll over and sit up, one of his Esoterics had tackled the man, pinned him, and cut his throat.

“Master Damon!” the Esoteric gasped, springing to Damon’s side with his bloody knife still in hand. “Master Ambassador, I’m sorry—I couldn’t get to you—all this—” He waved his bloody knife at the riot of green around them.

Damon couldn’t take his eyes off the knife: rivulets of red trickled from the blade along the friar’s wrist. It looked so warm, so . . . satisfying—

He had to remind himself that this was not merely a dream. He still had duties here. “I’m hurt,” he said distantly. He took his hand away from the bite wound on his shoulder, and more blood spilled down his robe. “This must be washed, and bandaged.”

The young friar gasped, reaching for Damon’s shoulder to examine the wound, but Damon pulled away. “Your knife,” he said, averting his face.

“Master?”

“Clean your weapon, Brother,” Damon said thickly. “First, clean your weapon. Always.”

The friar flushed. “I, I, I’m sorry, Master—” he stammered. “It’s just—” His defeated wave took in the jungle around them, the towering cliffside forest of the wall, the throat-cut corpse two steps away, the man who lay on the riverbank with a knife handle sticking out from his eye socket, the bloody trail of broken reeds that led to where a woman lay pumping out the last of her life a few yards away. “—everything’s so crazy . . . What’s happening—it’s driven everyone mad.”

“What’s happening has driven no one mad.” Damon pushed himself exhaustedly to his feet, and the fizzy buzz in his head got louder and louder. “It’s merely given us permission.”

“It’s like a dream,” the young friar said helplessly.

“Yes,” Damon said. “But not my dream. Or yours.” The buzz in his head fizzed louder still, bubbling in his arteries, gurgling through his heart.

“Yes, that’s it,” the younger man murmured. “That’s exactly it. We’re not even real. We’re trapped in someone else’s dream.”

“Get up. Gather the others. We still have duty, here.”

“Duty? What duty can we have in a dream?”

“This is a dream. It is also real. It is the dream of a god, and the gods dream reality.”

The buzz became a growl, then rose to a grinding whine.

“What god?” The young friar grimaced disbelief. “What god would dream this—this insanity?”

For answer, Damon pointed out over the river.

The long grey blade snarling in his hand, water streaming from his buckskin tunic and pants, Raithe of Ankhana strode along the surface of the river as though the rippling waters were carved of stone. He walked awkwardly, half stumbling, his legs barely able to support his weight. He headed upstream, and on his face was thunder.

Damon said, “That one.”

2

“. . . SO BEAUTIFUL . . .”

Avery Shanks rolled over and locked her jaw against a groan. The expanded-foam pallet that had been her bed on the cold tile floor of the veterinary surgery had been comfortable enough to let her sink into occasional periods of exhausted sleep, but every time she awoke she felt as though someone had removed all her cartilage and replaced it with industrial-grade sandpaper.

Her sleep had been plagued by nightmares of being seized and fondled, her elbows and knees and hips grabbed by bony fingers fleshed with rotting meat, her breasts and buttocks and crotch squeezed and rubbed by a mass of Laborers who crowded around her, stealing her air with their horrible breath, and all of their faces had Kollberg’s empty leer. She rubbed grit from her eyes and tried to remember what had awakened her.

“I never knew . . .”

It was Tan’elKoth: a reverent whisper. Avery took her hands away from her face, and caught her breath.

A new light had entered the surgery: a light softer, more full, more golden than had been seen on this planet in a thousand years: as though someone had captured the first breaking dawn of a preindustrial May, bottled it like brandy, and decanted it only now, aged and mellowed and purified into a glow that shouldn’t exist outside of sonnets and fairy tales: a light that is felt with the heart more than seen with the eye, a light that draws the spirit upward beyond the dull confines of Earth. It was the light that poets write of, when they describe the transfiguring brilliance of a lover’s smile; it was the light that painters dimly echo with the secondhand image called the halo.

This light shone from Tan’elKoth’s face.

“Is it done, then?” Avery whispered, afraid to speak aloud. “Have you done it? Is she safe?”

Tan’elKoth’s gaze was farther away than miles can measure: he looked into a different universe. “How could I have dreamed—?”

Avery’s eye, though, was drawn to the slow writhe of Faith, where she lay strapped to the table, an IV drip keeping her in permanent nightmare. “Is it over?” she asked, more insistently. “Can she rest now? Tan’elKoth, can she rest?”

Slowly Tan’elKoth’s gaze returned from that unimaginable distance, and to his lips came a smile of gentle satisfaction that threatened to become triumph.

“Soon, Businessman,” he murmured. “Soon.”

3

THE ONLY LIGHT in the techbooth that served the Interlocking Serial Program came from the heart of Ankhana itself, translated into the cold electronic glare of eleven POV screens. In the center of the booth sat the creature that had been Arturo Kollberg; its eyes could have been mouths, swallowing the raw uptangling of Ankhana’s unnatural spring.

The creature never moved as the techbooth’s door opened behind its chair. The Social Police officers who ushered Tan’elKoth inside said nothing, nor did the creature acknowledge this arrival. The door closed again.

Electronic screens gleamed moss green and sky blue and stone brown.

Tan’elKoth said, “It is done.”

The creature closed its eyes for a moment, enjoying the fountain of power it could taste flowing into Tan’elKoth and out again.

“It is well,” Tan’elKoth said, “that you have sent for me now. We have much of which to speak.”

A filth-crusted hand waved at a screen, where a skeletal young man armed with a shimmering sword walked unsteadily upon the surface of a river, between trunks of saplings that twisted out from the water as though in pain. “Have you seen this?”

“Seen it?” Tan’elKoth snorted. “I created it.”

Eyes closed and opened again: chewing.

“The goddess walks within that body,” Tan’elKoth said. “By my will she died; by my will, she lives again.” His voice carried subterranean echoes of triumph. “It is time, I believe, to renegotiate our deal.”

“Oh?”

“I pledged to neutralize both Caine and Pallas Ril. This I did. You pledged to return me to my people. This you did not. Instead, I was kidnapped. Threatened. Beaten. And maimed. Had I known your nature, there would have been no agreement between us. Now, though—now!” The triumph rose from the caverns beneath his tone into full dark malice. “Now the goddess walks the fields of home. Forewarned. Forearmed. Unbeatable. Your only hope is to deal with me. Only I can influence her. Only I can counter her power. Only I can save you.”

“Where is Avery Shanks?” the creature said tonelessly.

“With the child.” Tan’elKoth made a slicing gesture with the edge of his hand, dismissing any possible threat. “Businessman Shanks gives you no leverage. Your sole hope of success is the link I have with the goddess through the child. This link depends entirely upon the child’s well-being: It is a function of a certain configuration of her nervous system, both physical and chemical. If Faith even falls too deeply asleep, the link will be severed; more convulsions—of the sort that separating her from Avery Shanks seems to cause—may destroy the link altogether. Permanent brain changes result from even mild emotional trauma; the effect on the link would be entirely unpredictable. You cannot risk harm to any of us.”

The creature did not answer.

“Further, you dare not delay. The goddess’ connection to the river is also a function of nervous configuration—right now, this connection is tenuous and unreliable, but it will become progressively less so as she reconfigures the body she has possessed. With the power she already has, she can reshape the body she now wears, or duplicate her former one: at that time, she will have regained all of her former power. Even I, perhaps, could no longer resist her.”

“Then now is the time to act.”

“There will be no better time. With every minute of delay, your task grows more nearly impossible.”

“All right. I’m convinced.”

Tan’elKoth scowled; it seemed he had not expected to win so easily. “These, then, are my demands—”

“Screw your demands,” the creature said, its voice gathering humid lust.

Tan’elKoth shook his head pityingly. “Do you understand anything of what I’ve said?”

The creature rose, and offered the chair to Tan’elKoth. “Sit.”

“Don’t think that you can continue to bully me,” Tan’elKoth began, but the creature walked to one of the techbooth’s control boards.

“Stand, then,” it said emptily. “Here, look at this.”

Tan’elKoth glanced reflexively at the bright bank of screens. The creature touched a control stud, and from each screen lanced a searing blade of light. Tan’elKoth shielded his eyes against the glare, but from inside his skull, just beneath that short arc of stitching that circled behind his left ear, a burst of power slashed his brain to ribbons, and he fell facefirst to the techbooth floor.

The creature looked down at his twitching body as though it wanted to say something, but could not remember what.

4

SHATTERED, SLASHED AND burned, broken, deep in the shadowed retreats of his mind, Tan’elKoth at last began to see the truth.

I have been a fool.

The implanted thoughtmitter was doing something to him—doing something to his mind, to his spirit—calling to him, revealing both itself and him in a way that the limitations of his physical senses would never have allowed him to perceive. The blades of light had sliced away his eyes, but in robbing him of sight they had gifted him with vision.

He saw, vague as a half-remembered dream, the Face in the Lesser Ballroom of the Colhari Palace: the Face that had been the highest, purest expression of the dreams of a sleepless god. That Face had been a jigsaw sculpture, pieced together of the clay-formed shapes of his Beloved Children, layered and built one laboriously perfect figure at a time, into a face. A Face: the Face of Ma’elKoth. His greatest work: The Future of Humanity.

Now, as he reached forth his metaphoric hand toward that icon of his vanished godhead, he saw that his art had been instead prophecy. This hand, with which he reached for that ghost of a dream, was no hand of flesh and bone, but was some shifting agglomeration of tiny figures, thousands of them, naked and clothed, birthing and dying, eating, screwing, shitting, killing.

Those tiny shapes had become his flesh and bone.

He had become a hive of humanity, a structural framework that organized and shaped and gave purpose to the millions of tiny lives that fed him their devotion. A dizzy shift of perspective brought him an inch closer to the truth: The jigsaw figures were fully life-sized. He himself was an unimaginable giant, built of a dozen million people, twenty million, more—

Laborers and Leisuremen, Investors and Artisans, all burning for a taste of Home. Their hunger overpowered him, left him shivering, gasping, sweating tears of human blood.

He had been blinded by his eyes: This world of gleaming steel and glass, of toxic sludge and chirping electronic voices, was a fraud. A confidence game. A sucker play. The institutionalized alienation that was the metastructure of modern Earth had deceived him into believing himself an individual—a deception directed not specifically at him, but generally, over each and every one of the millions who together made him what he was.

Each of the millions who organized themselves into his body wore blank white fabric tied across their faces: Magritte’s lovers, kissing through eyeless hoods.

They could not even guess that they were each part of one greater form; they had been veiled so that they could not see what they had become. Those sheets were tied about each neck with a hangman’s noose. Tan’elKoth felt about his own neck an identical noose, even as he became aware of an identical sheet tied over his own head.

He lifted his agglomerate hands and tore the veil from his eyes.

He found that he, himself, was only a small part of something as much greater than he as he was greater than the man who formed a curl of hangnail upon his thumb: a titanic shapeless mountain of blind humanity, and more than a mountain. Tan’elKoth was himself a mountain—

This amorphic pulsing mass was the size of a planet.

The size of Earth.

And in its roiling, shifting pseudolife, it shaped itself into a Face of its own, a face with blankly staring eyes like lakes of people, nostrils greater than whole nations, a mouth like the ocean, wide with an idiot’s gape.

A face like Kollberg’s.

And the hoods that cloaked the uncountable billions comprising this amoebic groping Kollberg-mass covered only their individual eyes: their tens of billions of mouths were open, and every single one of them howled to be fed. This was the shared hunger for Home that burned within him: not homesickness, but starvation indeed. That bright, sweet world on which he’d built his Face, was to this great hungry mass only food.

How bitter, bitter, to be so easily deceived—

He had thought he was leading them; he had thought he was deceiving them; he had thought he was entering an alliance of convenience . . . But in truth, he had surrendered himself years before he ever came to this world; he was only an expression of this blind god writ small. He was nothing more than a link between this conglomerate creature and its supper: a hand, a tongue—

How has this happened, that I must feed my world to the monster I have become?

He stood upon the blind god’s finger, as it lifted toward its slack oceanic mouth. He was finally—inarguably, revoltingly—only a crust of snot that this creature had picked from its nostril and was now about to consume once more. Those gargantuan writhing lips closed around him.

The blind god licked him from its finger, chewed him up, and swallowed him.

The god who had been a man opened the eyes of its new body, where it lay on the techbooth’s floor. Kollberg sat on the edge of the control board, swinging his bare feet and holding his hands clasped between the knees of his filth-and bloodstained dungarees.

Tan’elKoth’s prophecy had come fully to pass: The god within him lived.

For one long, long suspension of movement, Kollberg stared at Ma’elKoth, and Ma’elKoth returned his gaze: the blind god regarded itself thoughtfully, like a man gazing at his image in a mirror—except that here, the mirror gazed back.

5

PALLAS RAITHE STUMBLED forward, driven by screams.

She—for Pallas Raithe was female in ways more profound than any detail of anatomy—clung for a moment to the branch of a willow that had sprung from the river’s bed only minutes ago, and that already suffered the slow murder of drowning. She held the buzzing blade of the sword out away from her stolen body and wrapped her other arm around the branch to keep herself upright on the river’s shifting surface. Her halting spray of melody within the Song of Chambaraya limped painfully among the contrapuntal shifts of harmony and rhythm; it lurched from offbeat to discordant and back again, a squeal of random noise that befouled the music, tainted and twisted it.

She pressed her palm against her ear and pushed as though she could squeeze the screaming out of her head.

Her spring had quickened the virus as well.

Because each life within the city was its own motif within the Song of Chambaraya, Pallas Raithe was acutely aware of each cold slide of steel into flesh, of each crunch of bone beneath a hammer, of each panted breath half held behind a barricaded door, each erratic drumbeat of a terrified heart. She ached for every one, and she could help none of them. Those screams were only human.

In the symphony of agony that was the Great Chambaygen, they were barely a whisper.

One can think of an individual mind as a specific radio signal within the broadcast spectrum that is the universe; following the same metaphor, a living nervous system is a receiver, tuned by birth and experience to capture just that signal. In seizing Raithe’s body, Pallas had been able to detune his nervous system so that it no longer captured his signal; she had warped it close enough to her own frequency that it could receive hers.

Like a detuned radio, where one signal bleeds over another, it received her badly indeed, through bursts of static and waves of interference that made her blast at shrieking overdriven volume one moment, while in the next she was buried in a white hissing wash. Her feedback shrieks had transformed Chambaraya’s Song from stately Bach to a postmodernist screech of pain.

She spun crazily from the willow to a nearby oak, then threw herself into the cattail thicket along the bank. She fell to her knees, clutching the cattail stalks to her hard, breastless chest, and vomit clawed up her throat.

Mommy . . . Mommy, why won’t you help?

Something was happening to Faith, something Pallas Raithe had not the power to comprehend. This body limited her perception until she could barely make out her daughter’s voice.

Touching the river through Raithe was analogous to broadcasting a live netshow over an antique voice-only radio: information could be exchanged, but only in the most limited way. To reconstruct him for the necessary range of broadband infinite-speed access, she would have to steal everything about him that made him who he was, replace each piece with a new creation, and make everything fit and work together in a viable living creature. Simpler to build herself a whole new transceiver.

Simpler, to build herself.

She knelt with her knees still in the water, and dug a trembling hand into the clay: drawing forth minerals into the crystalline structure of bone. Even as she shaped the bone into vaguely female form, she gathered amino and aliphatic acids from the unnatural plant life around her. The river’s water itself would serve for blood and bile and lymph.

Kosall within it contained the perfect template of her mind at the instant of her death. Mind and body are expressions of each other; the pattern stored within the blade was a template for a new body, as well.

A single human body is not such a complex thing, when compared to a full ecosystem.

She built the body from within, beginning with the brain and spinal cord; the more properly tuned nerve tissue she had, the more power she could draw to speed her self-creation. She began to experience a certain doubling of perception: a blurred parallax, like the vision of a person partly blind in one eye.

With the clearer perception of the brain and nerves that lay half complete within their cradle of clay, she felt the blind god enter her.

6

IT FLOWED INTO her like oil. She choked on grease that seeped in through her nostrils, that slid between her lips and poured like poison into her ears, that cupped her breasts and slipped up through her rectum and oozed into her vagina. At the same instant, it seemed a huge abscess had burst within her belly, spilling pus and yellowish corruption; the oil in her mouth and nose and between her legs oozed out from within her, poisoning the world.

There was no mystery for her here: she comprehended instantly what this suppuration truly was. She knew the blind god, and the blind god knew her. The channel that joined them was an inextricable part of what she was; through this channel the blind god poured itself into the Song.

This was what had been making Faith scream.

The blind god flooded into and through her, and Pallas cried out as she opened Raithe’s eyes. The blind god looked out upon the jungle Ankhana had become, and within her it murmured in Ma’elKoth’s baroque contrabasso. Mmm, spectacular. We love what you’ve done with the place.

For an answer, she lashed back with the scream of the river’s agony.

Please, dear girl. The suggestion of a wince: not of pain, but of distaste. This jungle is merely random; of course it hurts. Growing pains, no more. Just imagine what you might do if you act, instead, with purpose.

Images clustered thickly, visions in her mind’s eye. Every puddle became a rice paddy. Every field burgeoned with corn and wheat. Fish swarmed the river so thickly that men lined the banks to catch them with their hands. Cattle and swine bore fat healthy young at need, all year round.

Is lumber needed for the building of homes? Acorns scattered in a patch of dirt became mature oaks in days—in an hour, just like this tangled spring of her creation.

Is the air dirty? Overnight, a billion new trees—a rain forest to order.

Your river alone could support BILLIONS.

And you’ll kill billions to give it to them, she replied. She summoned sharp-edged images of the primal village filled with bloating corpses, and filled their depths with the onslaught of murder in Ankhana itself.

Ah, yes, the disease. Sorry about that.

Sorry? SORRY?

Quite. You must understand, dear girl, this was an instinctive—ah, shall we say, preconscious?—maneuver on Our part. From the days when the appellation “blind” was more than a metaphor. An image grew within her of a newborn infant, eyes not yet open, groping for the tit. This is the great advantage of having allowed Ma’elKoth into Our Union: His vision makes things rather dazzlingly clear.

Think of the disease this way: She saw an oak spring from fertile soil, saw the sapling shoot forth branches and the branches open leaves to the sun—leaves that shaded the ground beneath it, so that by the time the tree was mature, all the other little trees beneath its limbs had died for lack of light. Purely natural. Nothing malicious in the slightest.

On the other hand, one cannot argue with success, can one? Rather clears the board at one swipe. Ah, well: We would take it back if We could—but this is a difficulty you have already addressed, is it not?

And you killed me for it!

Not at all. We killed you because you opposed us. We killed you because you are selfish and willful. We killed you because your opposition would kill Us. We killed you, justifiably, in self-defense.

Look at this: Within her consciousness wheeled the globe of Earth, spinning silently in space: a tiny island in a vast and hostile ocean: an island jammed with fourteen billions already, and more on their way every second. Earth passed the brink of ecological collapse two hundred years ago. Only an extravagant waste of irreplaceable resources has allowed the human race to continue thus far; only a die-off comparable to the Cretaceous can save it now. Five years from now, ten at the most, the die-off will begin.

This is why We killed you: because you would deny the human race what it needs to survive. Can you say We were wrong?

She could not even hope that this was a lie. The truth streamed into her. Twelve billion people would die. Possibly more. She could not imagine it, not even with the power of the god: a planet carpeted in human corpses.

Now see Overworld: Imagine a new Earth, untouched. Imagine Earth as if it had always been in the care of a kindly goddess. With you and your power to guide Us, We could make of this world a perpetual garden.

She could not even lift her head to summon a response.

She was drowning in the truth.

She clung to a single strand of resistance: the distant howls of her daughter’s anguish.

7

AH, YES, FAITH. A writer of your world—Our world—once posed the problem this way: If you could ensure the future survival and happiness of all humanity by allowing one single wholly innocent, utterly inoffensive being to be tortured to death, would you do it? This is a conundrum only when faced by mortals. For gods, the answer is clear. Obvious. You find the stories wherever you look: Attis, Dionysios, Jesus Christ—the Wicker Man, by any other name.

But Faith— Pallas began to recover some scraps of her outrage. She’s my DAUGHTER.

But, dear girl, it was you who gave her over to this torture. We merely use the tool you have crafted for Us.

Faith? Shh, Faith, I’m here. It’s all right.

But Faith could only sob. She was, after all, just a little girl: yet another in the endless litany of innocents violated by a god. By two gods, Pallas thought. The blind god, and me.

She could have sung Faith a human life; instead, she had sung her own dream: complete, perfect union with one she loved.

The cruelty of what she had done had never occurred to her.

How could I have known?

Now within her she saw Ma’elKoth in all his majesty: the chiseled face, the glorious sweep of hair, chest like a barrel and shoulders like wrecking balls; she saw the limpid purity of his eye, the transcendent nobility of his brow. At his side stood Faith, naked, sobbing; the two of them were joined somehow, in some way that she couldn’t make her mind clearly resolve: as though Faith’s two hands had melted together within Ma’elKoth’s grip. She need not suffer so; it is you who prolongs and compounds her suffering. It is you who can release her this very instant.

I can save her?

The image of Ma’elKoth extended his other hand toward Pallas, in a gesture of peace. Of friendship. Of union. All you must do, he told her, is take Our hand.

But Pallas Raithe turned away.

She didn’t even know why.

8

TAKE IT, THE image of Ma’elKoth insisted. Does your daughter’s suffering mean so little to you? Take Our hand, and We no longer have need of the child. We will have no reason to harm her.

Perhaps she had lived with Hari for too long; perhaps that was it. And you’ll have no reason not to.

The image of Ma’elKoth rolled and shifted, rippling from within like a reflection in a water pot gone to boil. For an instant another face showed through Ma’elKoth’s classic beauty: a skull stretched with parchment and raddled with mold and rot, tangled teeth stained grey-brown, eyes glaring with an endless, limitless hunger that terrified her. Yes, a part of Us desires her suffering. The love of cruelty is as human as is the love of a mother for her child. But when you join us, your desires will color Ours. You have learned this from the river; does not your will color its Song? Join Us.

Pallas wept. I can’t.

The blind god showed her a girl child, perhaps eight years old, crouched in an alley behind a Manhattan Labor tenement. She smeared snot from her lip with a dirty hand, and coughed thickly into a drizzle of grey rain that raised blisters on her exposed neck. Can you look at this child and say she has no right to breathe clean air? No right to eat fresh food? Can you tell her she has no right to be free?

The girl picked listlessly through a mound of garbage, only to cry out in joy at finding a dirt-greyed chicken leg with yet a few scraps of meat upon it.

I serve the river, Pallas answered hesitantly, searching her feelings. She’s not my responsibility—

But she is. You know of her suffering, and you have the power to save her. What crime has she committed, that you can condemn her to the life you know she must live?

She’s living in the world you made—

And We have accepted responsibility for that. We are fighting to change it. What are you fighting for?

She summoned an image of the headwaters of the Great Chambaygen before the days of the Khryl’s Saddle railway: the pristine crystal trickle over mossy stones among the majesty of the God’s Teeth. She summoned the rolling waves of virgin forest below the mountain slopes, the slow curve of an eagle riding a thermal, the splash of a grizzly haggling salmon—

Come now, dear girl. This is fatuous. Consider this bear of yours for a moment: Should this bear threaten the life of that young girl, you would kill it without hesitation.

She insisted, desperately obstinate, I will not have your faceless billions unleashed upon my world.

But they are not faceless, not at all. “Faceless billions” is only a phrase. It’s a slogan that you invent to dehumanize them: as abstractions, it is easy to condemn them to their hideous fate. But they are not abstract. Each is a human being, who loves and hates, who cries when he is hurt and laughs when she is happy. All of them are right here. Every single one has a face. Would you like to tell them, in your own words, why they must choke to death on the ruined cinder of Earth?

Don’t pretend you care!

You know We care. You can feel it. Each of them is a part of Us; how can we not care? We care precisely as much as they do.

She had run out of answers; even in this new aspect, Ma’elKoth remained remorselessly logical. She could not imagine allowing ten billion people to die for the sake of bears and elk and trees. But still, she resisted, and still, she did not know why. Perhaps because Overworld was so beautiful, and Earth was so . . . ugly.

Only because We were too young—too blind—to shape it properly. Overworld need not suffer the same fate. Again, a vision blossomed: a city surpassing Athens of the Golden Age; surpassing Imperial Rome; a city emcompassing the best of London, Paris, St. Petersburg; a city with the grace of Angkor Wat, the majesty of Babylon.

Even those bears for which you seem to care so much, and all the trees—every creature, in fact, that grows in the earth or walks upon it, swims the waters or soars the air—can remain. And everywhere she looked, the city opened itself to parks and woodlands, stretches of prairie and silver curves of rivers.

Overworld need not be a second Earth. Between Us, We can make it a second Eden: where women bring forth young in comfort, and men no longer water their fields with the sweat of their brow. Where all that is, and all that ever shall be, is peace.

And this was the world of which she had always dreamed, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s why she and Hari couldn’t ever quite manage to be happy: that dreamworld of hers wouldn’t interest Hari one little bit. He’d hate it.

He’d say, “Eternal peace? That’s for dead people.”

He’d say, “Sure, to you it’s a city. To me, it looks like a hog farm.”

Of course, the blind god told her with a hint of irony. In Our second Eden, there is no place for a Caine.

9

SHE REMEMBERED SITTING in Shermaya Dole’s simichair, running the cube of For Love of Pallas Ril. “Fuck the city,” Caine had said. “I’d burn the world to save her.” And she had never understood how he could say that.

And yet, the answer is so simple. He is evil. From the raddled memory that rode the brain within the body that she now wore rose another memory: Hari again, older now, grey in his hair, no beard, only a smear of time-salted stubble along a jawline threatening to become jowls, shrugging in a sedan chair at the rim of a crater high in the Transdeian mountains, near Khryl’s Saddle. “The Future of Humanity,” Hari had said, slowly, a little sadly, as though he were recounting an ugly but unavoidable truth, “is gonna have to fuck off.”

How could he say that? Could he really believe it?

You see? We are not your enemy. He is. He is evil incarnate. Shall We list some of his crimes?

Oathbreaker. She saw his face through Faith’s eyes of memory, as he struggled in the grip of the Social Police and swore that he would save her. As he swore he would make everything turn out right.

Liar. Images cascaded from For Love of Pallas Ril, as Caine ruthlessly and repeatedly lied, even manipulating the King of Cant—his closest friend—into risking his own life and the lives of every man he led.

Murderer. She experienced again finding him in a dank back alley of Ankhana, at the end of Servant of the Empire. She experienced again holding him in her lap as he bled out his life from a deep belly wound, left by the sword of a guard outside the bedchamber of Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon. She experienced again the shock and sickness of recognizing that the rag ball on the cobbles nearby was no rag ball, but was the blood and shitstained head of the Prince-Regent, murdered in his bed.

She could not argue with any of these charges, and yet—

And yet—

Caine—

In the instant she thought his name, she felt his rhythm in the Song: a savage throb of rage and despair masked with dark cheer. She could feel him where he sat at this very instant: chained to a sweating limestone wall, naked in his own shit, gangrene eating his useless, lifeless legs.

She saw the star of absolute white she had glimpsed once before, in the Iron Room, as she had lain bound upon an altar while he bargained with a god for her life. He burned: raw surging energy, sizzling, profoundly alive.

That star—

She remembered facing the god Ma’elKoth in the battle that had raged across the skies above Victory Stadium, seven years ago. She could have crushed him—the river had sung power unimaginable—but the cost of that victory would have been the deaths of tens of thousands of his Beloved Children and untold millions of the trees and grasses, fish and otters and lives of all kinds that fed the river’s Song. So she had offered up her life, and Hari’s, for the sake of those numberless others.

All these years she had blamed him for turning away from her. But it was I who turned away. He was less important to me than creatures I had never seen, and who had never seen me. How, then, can I claim to have loved him? With the love of a goddess, perhaps: the love that cherishes all lives equally, but none especially. Being both goddess and woman has made me a poor goddess, and a worse woman.

Now the choice she faced was a mirror-reversal of that one: She could take the offered hand—she could cooperate, instead of kill—and in so doing save not only the massed billions of Earth, but save her daughter as well.

And still, she did not.

Could not.

Could not forget what they had done to Faith. Could not reward them for it. Could not become an accomplice to her daughter’s rape.

Could not, finally, do as she was told.

Because she didn’t like them.

Illumination dawned within her, and in the new light she saw what had held her back.

It was Raithe.

She had reconfigured his body—and his body had reconfigured her. It shaped the way her will could be expressed; it shaped even her self-image, and the way she thought. She was now something other than she had been, before. She was now a little more human.

More like Caine.

There had burned in Raithe a star of his own.

Now at last she could understand why Hari would get so angry when she would ask him to release his unhappiness and flow with the river. She thought wonderingly, I suppose that if it’s wrong to be unhappy, human beings wouldn’t be so good at it.

But this is only a reflex, dear girl; an artifact of the body you have seized. If you take a different body, your answer may change.

This body is my body. This answer is my answer.

The stakes are too vast to be settled by an accident of biology.

Are they? Then, I suppose you would have to call this—She allowed herself a bitter interior smile. —bad luck.

She resummoned the blind god’s world-Rome, that Edenic city of peace overspreading the whole of Overworld. She sent their joint vision soaring through its skies and diving among its shining white buildings, through its streets and rivers, into its gardens and parks, among its pools and trees, through bedrooms and dens, searching the whole of the blind god’s fond future.

What do you seek?

She found bakers and butchers, scribes and dustmen, farmers and gleaners, teachers, storytellers, playful children, and amorous lovers. She found carters and coopers and masons and millers; she found housekeepers, potters, glaziers, and smiths. She found every sort of human being save one.

What? For what do you search?

I am looking for a white star.

Think not of beauty; beauty is a seducer. There are lives at stake. What of the children?

A wise man once told me, she thought succinctly, that compassion is admirable, in mortals. In gods, it is a vice.

You would kill the human race for the sake of one man?

No, I suppose I wouldn’t. A slow certainty grew within her heart and swelled until it spread out among the trees in the newborn Ankhanan jungle. But who says it’s one or the other?

You serve either life, or you serve death.

What kind of life? This fight isn’t between life and death. It’s between your life and his life. Guess what? I like his better.

He is evil. You have seen his evil, and know its truth.

Another wise man once told me that when somebody starts talking about good and evil, I should keep one hand on my wallet.

She felt a wash of quiet resignation that was almost a shrug, and then a darkening of tone to bleakly impersonal threat. If you are not with Us, you are against Us.

She passed one infinite instant examining herself for fears and second thoughts. She found several of the former, but of the latter none at all. Let it be so.

There came a long, considering pause.

Then:

We have your daughter.

And she is your only weapon, Pallas answered with all the coldness of Raithe’s wintry stare. You dare not harm her.

Perhaps so. You, on the other hand—

You, We can hurt.

10

A UNIVERSE AWAY, in the cool green glow of electronic screens that showed a thin young man kneeling on the surface of a river with a sword in his hand, the body that had once contained Ma’elKoth rumbled, “It is better this way.”

The body that had once contained Arturo Kollberg replied, “More fun.”

“Yes, fun. Like the Labor clinic.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

In perfect unison, they murmured, “It’s a pity there’s no way to tell Caine that we’re raping his wife.”

11

IN THAT INSTANT, Pallas Raithe began to die.

All across Ankhana, trees and grasses and flowering plants sagged, wilted, softening and decaying, dripping stinking black goo while still on the vine. This black goo had a chemical reek, of acids and metals and burning oil, and where it dribbled over stone and wood it left vividly permanent stains. Ivy that had scaled the heights of the Colhari Palace wilted, sweating the black oil; corn that had sprung from city streets curled and withered and bled across the stones. Where the oil drained into the river, it killed fish and smothered reeds; in the stables where oat bins had become burgeoning gardens, it flowed around the lips of stamping horses, who choked and vomited and fell kicking to the earth.

The black oil burned Pallas Raithe where it oozed across her skin. The burns swelled with blisters that blackened and burst to release oil of their own that burned her burns again, sizzling deeper and deeper into her flesh. She pushed herself out from among the rotting cattails, back into the river, letting the water close over her, but it could not wash away this acid. It wasn’t on her skin; it came through her skin.

From the inside.

She clutched at the dying willow, shaking. She drew the river’s power—her power—to heal this body that she wore, to build it afresh and renew flesh and bone, but that only brought forth a thicker flow of the black oil; the black oil was part of her, part of the river, part of her power, and it ate Pallas Raithe’s flesh as fast as she could heal. The river howled her pain in a voice of human screams and bird cries, of cat snarls and the shrieks of wounded rabbits, and only a tiny fraction of this pain was physical.

I might pray for help—but to whom? Whom does the goddess ask for help? What am I supposed to do?

—you can fight—

The remembered voice was Hari’s, of course; what other advice did he ever offer? Fighting was his whole life.

—quit whining get off your ass and fucking FIGHT—

She could never make him understand. Some things cannot be fought; some things just are. Day and night. The turn of seasons. Life. Death.

Horseshit, she remembered him saying. What the fuck is a house, then? It’s how you fight the seasons. What’s a campfire? It’s how you fight the night. What’s medicine? It’s how you fight death. That’s what love is, too. Just because you’re not gonna win is no fucking reason to give up.

All right, she exhaustedly told that remembered voice, surrendering. All right. But you have to help me. Hari, I need your help.

—I AM helping you, goddammit—

Which was so like him that it made her smile while the river’s oil-fouled current washed away her tears.

She pulled herself up from the water, carrying Kosall, climbing one-handed the branches of the dying willow. Muscles shivered with oncoming shock; blister-scarred palms blistered anew, swelling into solid boils of blackened corruption. She turned back to the half-formed body she had built in the cradle of the Great Chambaygen’s clay. As she feverishly willed that body into existence, building it of clay and stone and river water, the blind god entered her more fully, more roughly, thrusting itself into her with the overpowering force of billions of desperate lives. It would let her rebuild herself.

It wanted her to.

Already she could feel, with the half-formed nerves of the Pallas Ril body in the clay beside her, the searing poison of the black oil up and down the river. The more life she summoned, the more death it produced. The more one they became.

She could see, now, through the eyes of the Kollberg and Tan’elKoth bodies in the techbooth in San Francisco: could feel the avid lust with which they watched her on the POV monitors: could feel the anticipation of victory building like an orgasm, as they breathlessly watched her create a woman’s body from the earth. She looked down at the half-shaped clay, at its swell of breast and curve of hip, and then she turned away.

She could not do this to her river.

She could focus her power upon the sword itself, one swift twist of will destroying it and herself together—but that would release her pattern from the blade into the river. Destroying the sword would flood her river with her consciousness, and the blind god would ride that flood forever.

The blind god had her in Chinese handcuffs: every move she made tightened its hold upon her.

She had to retreat: to throw herself into the lack, become nothing in that sea of nonexistence. Unmake herself. Using the partial nervous system she had created in the riverbank, she began to restructure Raithe’s nervous system to its original resonance.

The blind god hummed its satisfaction, like a chess player who has caught his opponent in a particularly gratifying fork. Through the two sets of eyes in the Studio’s ISP booth, she saw the swing of Actors’ POVs and understood the blind god’s new pleasure. Actors closed in upon her, crept closer and closer, their breath going short, penises stiffening and labia moistening with the blind god’s lust. These Actors were tools of the blind god already; once she was again nothing more than a pattern bound in the magick of the sword, she could not stop any new hand upon its hilt from calling her forth—but she would not come forth the same.

A different hand upon Kosall would bring a different goddess: one bent already to the blind god’s will.

The ring of Actors closed around her. She could feel them with the blind god’s perception: she knew precisely where each one was, knew his name, her history, the whole of every one of them. She gathered power in the river: she could destroy them with a gesture—and the blind god laughed. Let her kill them.

It had many, many Actors.

And even this shrug of power had quickened the venom that poured through her. Already the river stank of death for a mile downstream; already trees upstream sweated pinpricks of black oil, pocking their trunks with growing lesions of dead bark.

Please, she begged herself. A little inspiration, that’s all I ask. She dived deeper into the Song, begging the river itself for any clue it might offer. Even just a hint.

And a small, timid voice with the querulousness of nervous exhaustion whispered from the far side of Faith’s tears: Well, if all you’re worried about is Aktiri, I think I may be able to help you.

12

THE SHADE OF Hannto the Scythe wasted no time trying to form thoughts and words and explanations: he knew They would come for him, and he knew Their billions were an ocean in which he would drown. Instead, he took his understanding of a technique of Ma’elKoth’s and passed it through the link. It was a slight—even minuscule—alteration of local physics, a tiny shift in the resonance of reality itself that could be made self-sustaining.

He felt her puzzlement as though it were a question in reply, but They were closing in, sucking him down, and he had time to offer her only a fading memory of the Colhari Palace, and a reminder that Ma’elKoth had once suffered an Aktir problem, too.

And then the sea of lives dragged him under, and swallowed him.

13

HOLDING HER NERVES of clay in mindview, Pallas built the image at the forefront of her mind: a spherical lattice of shimmering violet, as the shade had shown her. It was an elegant variant of a simple Shield, retuned to near-ultraviolet from its usual warm gold. As she channeled the river’s power into it, it vanished from her mindview: it had reached frequencies she could no longer perceive.

Its centerpoint hovered an inch behind the forehead of the Pallas Ril of clay that grew upon the riverbank, an inch above the midpoint between her eyes. She sang its melody into the Song, and it expanded like a slow-motion shock wave, enclosing all that it touched: the dockside, the warehouses, the caverns below, Old Town behind her, the Warrens, Alientown, and even the South Bank across the river: a million, two million, ten million times the volume of the field Ma’elKoth had set about the Colhari Palace, and more.

The clay Pallas shifted and bubbled, and smoke rose from its eyes. The unfinished nerves within that body of clay were less than ideally efficient, and to overpower any circuit beyond its efficiency causes energy to be lost as waste heat.

She stripped herself from Raithe’s body, and his nerves spasmed with shock and agony. In so doing, she rewrote herself within the sword, overlaid her pattern there with the memories she shared with Raithe; should a mind ever draw her back to consciousness again, she would remember all they had learned.

She could not return him to himself entirely; she could heal neither the burns of his body nor the memories she had scorched into his brain, but what she could do, she did. And she left within him the answer he would require, should he choose to fight on in this war against the blind god: the hiding place of her weapon. It was the only way she could thank him for saving her.

She knit one final command into his brain, hardwired it like an instinct—

Defend the sword.

—then she poured what was left of her will into the clay.

The final burst of power that made her elegant invisible Shield self-sustaining detonated the clay half-body of Pallas Ril in an explosion that left a smoking crater on the dockside and blew Raithe spinning backward through the air all the way across the river.

The sword fell from his hands, splashed into the oil-fouled waters of the Great Chambaygen, and vanished into their oil-sealed murk; Raithe crashed into one of the enormous limestone blocks that formed the base of the Old Town wall, then he, too, fell into the river. He floated facedown, limp as the wilted leaves of the trees that rotted around him.

And the black oil that leaked from those trees burned like gasoline.

14

A HUNDRED YARDS downstream, a man called J’Than—or Francis Rossi, depending on which world he walked—crouched behind the gunwale of a boat canted half-over in the branches of a dying willow. In the narrow brick right-of-way between the Palnar Drygoods warehouse and the steelworks, a likewise dual-named woman—Cholet or Tina Welch—pressed herself against a wall, gasping. On the roof of that same warehouse, a pair of experienced thieves from out of town—from way, way out of town—suddenly paused in the act of belaying a rope they had planned to use to rappel down to the dockside.

Each of these—and seven more like them—had been creeping toward the man on the river, had been watching intently the shimmering sword in his hand, had come closer and closer while the eldritch jungle sprang to life unheeded around them, had slid untouched past the weeping black oil to approach their goal.

And all of them had felt a prickling, tingling wave pass over and through them, an instant before the riverside erupted in a gout of power that spread flames over the oil—flames that sped outward, reaching hungrily toward them and the black oil that dripped from the jungle on all sides. Each of them felt as though he or she now awakened from a bad dream, a dream that had carried them toward this moment without volition. Each of them said to himself or herself, with minor variations according to their individual usages, What the fuck was I THINKING?

And all of them, finding their wills now their own, ran like hell.

15

IN THE TECHBOOTH of the Interlocking Serial Program, the blind god talked to itself.

It had two mouths here. The voice from one was deep and round and mellow as honey; the voice from the other was a harsh cindery rasp. Which voice spoke mattered not at all, because it was only talking to itself.

“A setback,” one murmured, as the POV screen that had shown a view of Ankhana’s decaying-jungle dockside in flames flickered to white static. “Only a setback.”

“Not even serious,” one replied, as another screen that showed the black oil burning on the surface of the river went white, and another.

The booth became brighter and brighter as the POV screens exchanged views of Ankhana in flames for rectangles of featureless electronic snow. The blind god understood what Pallas had done as completely as Pallas had comprehended the blind god, and it was not in the least dismayed. The link to the river shut down only an instant after the last of the screens blanked, and Faith Michaelson sobbed in some remote corner of the blind god’s mind.

The city was now sealed against the Winston Transfer.

“Do we need Actors to get the sword?”

“I should say not. We have troops. Combat troops. Social Police. Armed men. We can take the city, if we want.”

“We want.”

“Yes. We need a story. We need a story to keep the people behind us. To keep everyone on board.”

“Nothing could be simpler. We can tell them we have to invade.”

“The city’s in flames.”

“We don’t have any choice.”

“Of course we don’t have any choice.”

“It’s the only way to save Caine.”

“That’s true. It’s the only way to save Caine.”

The hiss of electronic snow from the techbooth speakers was joined by a wash of rusty, breathless cackles—innumerable MIDI files of canned laughter culled from netshows around the globe—which was the blind god snickering at its own joke.

THERE IS A sense in which the matrix of stories that we call history is itself a living thing. There is a structure to it, a shape, that we call its body; it has certain habitual progressions that we call its movement. We say history advances, or retreats, that it recalls this and forgets that; we look to it as a teacher, as a parent, as an oracle.

We say and do these things, and somehow we still delude ourselves that we are speaking metaphorically.

History is not only alive, it is aware.

It meets every test of consciousness. History anticipates. History intends. History wills.

Its anticipation, intention, and will are the sums of ours; it vectors our hopes and fears and dreams with the stern logic of the inanimate. And there are times when history lifts the hammer, and times when it bends the bow, and there are times when it draws a long, long breath.