This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2024 by Ann Leckie

“Lake of Souls” copyright © 2024 by Ann Leckie

“Footprints” copyright © 2007 by Ann Leckie; first published in Postcards from Hell: The First Thirteen

“Hesperia and Glory” copyright © 2006 by Ann Leckie; first published in Subterranean, Issue 4 © 2006 by Subterranean Press

“The Endangered Camp” copyright © 2009 by Ann Leckie; first published in Clockwork Phoenix 2, ed. by Mike Allen © 2009

“Another Word for World” copyright © 2015 by Ann Leckie; first published in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, ed. by Microsoft and Melcher Media © 2015

“The Justified” copyright © 2019 by Ann Leckie; first published in The Mythic Dream, ed. by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe © 2019

“Bury the Dead” copyright © 2007 by Ann Leckie

“The Sad History of the Tearless Onion” copyright © 2009 by Ann Leckie; first published on PodCastle © 2009 by Escape Artists Inc.

“Night’s Slow Poison” copyright © 2012 by Ann Leckie; first published in Electric Velocipede, Issue 24 © 2012

“She Commands Me and I Obey” copyright © 2014 by Ann Leckie; first published in Strange Horizons, 2014 Fund Drive Special issue © 2014

“The Creation and Destruction of the World” copyright © 2015 by Ann Leckie; first published on PodCastle © 2015 by Escape Artists Inc.

“The God of Au” copyright © 2008 by Ann Leckie; first published in Helix, Spring 2008 © 2008

“The Nalendar” copyright © 2008 by Ann Leckie; first published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Issue 36 © 2008

“The Snake’s Wife” copyright © 2007 by Ann Leckie; first published in Helix, Fall 2007 © 2007

“Marsh Gods” copyright © 2008 by Ann Leckie; first published in Strange Horizons, 7 July 2008 © 2008

“The Unknown God” copyright © 2010 by Ann Leckie; first published in Realms of Fantasy, February 2010 © 2010

“Saving Bacon” copyright © 2014 by Ann Leckie; first published on PodCastle © 2014 by Escape Artists Inc.

“Beloved of the Sun” copyright © 2010 by Ann Leckie; first published on Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue 54 © 2010 Firkin Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Leckie, Ann, author.

Title: Lake of Souls : the collected short fiction / Ann Leckie.

Other titles: Short stories

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2024.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023039654 | ISBN 9780316553575 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316553810 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Science fiction. | Short stories.

Classification: LCC PS3612 .E3353 2024 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230830

ISBNs: 9780316553575 (hardcover), 9780316553810 (ebook)

E3-20240221-JV-NF-ORI

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Lake of Souls

There was a lake by the village, but it wasn’t the Lake of Souls. Just water, and mud and stones, and out farther, deeper than Spawn could really see from the shore, a green-brown darkness where something lurked, something, Spawn began to feel, that was waiting. The dark depths of the lake exerted a troubling fascination. So much so that as days went by, Spawn spent more time on the lakeshore staring toward those compelling depths than any other activity.

Sometimes a mother would scuttle over to where Spawn sat and cry, “What, what? Are you still a nauplius, staring one-eyed, no need to eat? Come away, come away!”

“Yes, Mother,” Spawn would say, and sometimes even obey, but sometimes not.

One day old Darter Spine came over to where Spawn sat by the waterside and said, “What are you doing, little spawn, little egg, you aren’t a larva anymore. You are a nymph, only one more molt until adulthood. It won’t be long, little spawn, before you feel the next molt coming on, and what will your name be? What shape will your soul take? The mothers are worried about you, little egg, staring all day into the lake.”

“Why worry?” asked Spawn. “My soul will be what it is.” And would have said more, but there were no words to describe the pull of the lakebottom. Spawn wanted more and more to walk out into the water, sink down into the depths of the lake, burrow into the mud, dark and cold and solitary.

“Little egg, little spawn,” said Darter Spine. “Our souls enter into our eggs, the gift of the Lake of Souls, but we also make them what they are. The mothers are worried about you, little egg. Little spawn. Come away from the lake, don’t stare so, don’t be…” Darter Spine clicked fretfully, agitated. “Don’t. Come away.”

Spawn came away, and tried to stay away, but the pull of the lake (the wet dark, alone, alone, cool and dark and alone) was strong and the mothers noticed it. Spawn’s broodmates noticed it, and scuttled on by without speaking.

And one afternoon, while Spawn was resting in a fresh-dug burrow (the dirt was moist and cool and whispered of the lakebottom) two mothers stopped, not knowing Spawn was there, and spoke.

“That little spawn,” said one, “I worry. Always staring out at the lake. Like one of the soulless drowned.”

“That little spawn took so long to come out of the hatching pool,” said the other. “I worried. I worried. And now.”

“Always staring. Always staring out at the lake. Like one of the soulless drowned. Should we have culled, should we?”

“That little spawn,” said the other. “The little eggs, the little spawns, they love the water, but this one more than most, always, always. Always trying to dive back into the hatching pool. Always walking into the lake.”

“Like one of the soulless drowned.”

“What if,” asked the other, “what if there should be no soul mark, when next that little spawn molts? What if that little spawn has no soul?”

“Then that little spawn will have no name,” said the first mother, sadly, fearfully. “That little spawn will go into the lake and drown.”

“Oh! Oh!” cried the other. “I hate to think it! The little egg! The little spawn!”

“Only an animal,” said the first. “Not one of the people at all. Not if there is no soul. We should not worry. We should not worry, things will be as they will be. Some little spawn are devoured by animals, some are killed and injured in accidents. These are things that happen. Some little eggs hatch without souls. This is a thing that happens. There is nothing we can do.”

The other clicked sadly again, and the two mothers scuttled on.

After that, Spawn wondered more and more about the Lake of Souls. Would watch the mothers tending the hatching pool—“I bring the water of the Lake of Souls to the eggs,” a mother would say, when she would bring fresh water to the pool, and sing. Oh, the waters of the Lake of Souls are endless. Off to the east, all the people are born there. Little eggs, your souls are with you in the water, fluttering like flowers, bright like stars.

Spawn went to find Darter Spine, who was pulling weeds in a village garden. “Darter Spine,” asked Spawn, “where do souls come from?”

Darter Spine paused, a thorny stem in one pereopod. “This little egg, this little spawn, has been listening to gossip.”

“Do I not have a soul?” asked Spawn. “Am I only an animal? Will I not have a name?”

“How can I know, little spawn, little egg?” asked Darter Spine, and reached for another thorny weed. “How can anyone know until the little egg molts into adulthood and shows a soul mark?” Darter Spine tugged on the weed. “And even then, sometimes one loses one’s soul, and the village sits for days beside the corpse and sees nothing, not a hint.”

“Because a soul eater has attacked them,” Spawn suggested.

“Sometimes, yes,” Darter Spine agreed. “Sometimes a sickness. Sometimes, who knows? And sometimes, little egg, sometimes a little spawn hatches without a soul. Or so they say.”

“Do souls really come from the Lake of Souls?” asked Spawn. “The mothers say they pour water from the Lake of Souls into the hatching pool, but it’s just water from the stream, I’ve watched.”

“Here, little egg.” Darter Spine gestured with another pereopod, toward the weeds. “Help me. We will talk as we work. This is good, this thing. Learning to live, not staring out at the drowning waters.”

Spawn hesitantly plucked at one weed, then another one.

“Good, good, little spawn,” said Darter Spine. “You ask a big question. The answer is complicated. I do not know if the Lake of Souls is a real lake or not. I do not know if the mothers give little eggs like you their souls by pouring water into the hatching pool and singing their song.” Darter Spine made an amused click, and then sang, “The waters of the Lake of Souls are endless. The mothers sang that even when I was an egg, and I am very old. Pull harder, it will come out. There. Good. Now.” Spawn and Darter Spine continued their slow progress across the garden patch. “I do not know if the Lake of Souls is really where souls come from. But it is obvious, is it not, little spawn, that the people are different from animals?” Darter Spine tilted so that Spawn could better see the bag strapped to Darter Spine’s thorax. “It is this, little egg, that is the proof that people are not animals. We make a bag to carry things. We make containers. We build a pool to hatch our eggs in, we don’t leave them at the stream side, or curl them in our tails. We make things to hold things. And we speak. And why, tell me, little spawn, little egg, why do only the people, of all the creatures in the world, do these things?”

“Because we have souls?” guessed Spawn.

“Maybe,” said Darter Spine. “Maybe, little egg. No animal has a soul that I ever knew. Have you watched, after a hunt?”

“We don’t wait to see it, maybe,” Spawn suggested. “We eat them right away.”

“There is a village, far away,” said Darter Spine, “where they let every animal they hunt lie for three days, just to be sure it doesn’t have a soul. They will tell you, if you ever meet them, that someone in the past, some mother of mothers, saw a soul come out of an animal, but they themselves have only ever seen the regular sort of scavengers.”

“Maybe animal souls look different from ours,” offered Spawn.

“Maybe,” clicked Darter Spine. “And maybe it isn’t our souls that make the difference between people and animals. But difference there is, little egg. And whatever the reason for that difference is, one of the things that makes us people is that we learn from those who came before us. We ignore those lessons at our peril, little spawn. And one of those lessons is that it is bad to let those without souls live among us. And if one soulless is allowed to live in a village, there are always more hatched eventually, and more and more, until something unpleasant must be done.”

Spawn felt thoracic muscles tense, and restrained the instinctive, alarmed scuttle backward. “What would you do, what would the village do, if I didn’t have a soul?”

Darter Spine pulled a few more tough, thorny weeds. “I have worried about you, little egg. So late to come out of the hatching pool. Late to all your molts. As a zoea you wandered here and there instead of following some adult and learning from them. And drawn to the lake, so strongly, so obviously. You think of it now, do you not, little spawn? The cold and dark and deep?” Darter Spine clicked reassuringly. “But we all are so drawn. Some say they are not but I believe they lie. We all are drawn, but we know what we must do. We learn the lessons passed down to us. And here you are, doing as you should. You see? Put these worries from your mind. Continue to do as you should. Continue to ask questions, but… discreetly, little egg. Discreetly. Soul or no, some in the village do not want to ask themselves questions about what is true or not true, or to hear anyone say that truth may be complicated.”

Some days after their conversation in the garden, Darter Spine retreated into a burrow and the villagers whispered one to the other that Darter Spine was molting.

“A dangerous time,” whispered one mother to the next. “Especially for the old.” And the whisper scurried through the village. And close behind it, a day or so later, another whisper, that Darter Spine’s molt was not going well, and that many had over the years wondered about Darter Spine’s soul, soul mark or no soul mark. That elder had always been peculiar, so the mothers and mothers’ mothers had said. “What if?” the mothers whispered. A good person, who made beautiful gardens and was kind to all in the village, but peculiar. “What if? What if Darter Spine’s soul has died. What if this elder dies and a soul does not emerge? This elder will be lost!”

Eventually the village’s doctor visited Darter Spine, trailed by a nymph Spawn knew, one that no longer spoke when they crossed paths. That one will be a doctor after the next molt, Spawn thought. What will I be? But there was no answer to that question, and no explanation, when Spawn looked for it, to account for why Spawn had never chosen a path, found some adult to learn from. I might have learned from Darter Spine, came the thought then, but perhaps it is too late now.

Four days into the molt Darter Spine died. The doctor and the nymph assistant dragged the corpse out into the middle of the village, and Spawn was stricken with unnameable emotion at the sight of the old one bent over, half in half out of the old shell, the long triangular soul mark visible even on the soft pale body underneath.

Everyone must have felt it, because the whole village was silent for some minutes, and then a mother began, faintly, to sing. Come out, soul, emerge! Flutter, soul, flutter! Fly, soul, fly! Spread your beautiful wings and fly away!

Another took up the song. Circle around us, flutter, soul, flutter! See the village where you have lived, fly, soul, fly! Observe the garden you tended for years. Spread your beautiful wings and see for the last time your life here!

“It will be a day or so,” said someone, as more villagers gathered. “It will be a day or even two before that soul emerges.” And they sat down on the ground to begin the vigil.

But two days later no soul had emerged. The vigil, which had been by turns loud with happy and admiring remembrances of Darter Spine, or quiet with susurrant admonitions to the dead elder’s soul, fell silent.

“Is it time?” asked someone, very, very quietly. “Is it time to put this person into the lake?” Angry hisses greeted this question, but someone else said, “This elder is beginning to smell and there has been nothing.”

“Wait!” cried Spawn. “Wait another day.”

“This little egg,” whispered one mother to another. “This little spawn finally had found a teacher, and now is alone.”

“The little spawn!” replied the other mother. “The little egg!”

“One more day,” said the doctor. “No longer.” Because the smell was beginning to attract even more and larger scavengers, and the vigil keepers could only do so much to drive them away.

And the next morning, Darter Spine’s putrefying corpse twitched and heaved, as though something moved within it. Then dozens of tiny holes opened like mouths, and out swarmed the soul. Black and wet, drying quickly in the cool morning air, they flexed their limp wings, which filled and stiffened and caught the light of the rising sun, casting bands of color, like light through water drops.

Flutter, soul, flutter! Sang the mothers, relief clear in their voices. Fly, soul, fly!

One mother gently pushed Spawn forward into the cloud of newborn winged things and others made approving noises. “Say goodbye, little egg. Say goodbye, little spawn. Let that elder say goodbye.”

One winged, jeweled bit of soul landed on Spawn’s carapace, crawled a few steps, and then flew off, its shining wings humming.

“You see, you see,” said a mother. “That elder would say goodbye to this little egg. That elder will live on. That elder will still care for this little spawn.”

“Goodbye, Darter Spine,” said Spawn, filled with some emotion that, on consideration, must have been grief, though who that grief was for Spawn could not have said.

The soul fluttered around the village for the rest of the day, lighting on people, creeping into and out of burrows, darting over the hatching pond. People made way for them, careful of their delicate wings, speaking respectfully to the soul of that elder, Darter Spine. Saying, Goodbye, all will be well, we will maintain your gardens you worked so hard on, the village will be safe and will remember you. And the next morning, when the sun rose, the soul was gone, flown away into the forest, into the air, into wherever the dead go when they leave us.

Spawn sat by the lake for a time, after Darter Spine’s soul had gone. Thinking.

The next day, Spawn caught and skinned a mudcreeper and began working its hide into a bag. And three days later, the finished bag held in one pereopod, Spawn left the village.

Avacorp Mission Data: Project 33881-B66

THIS DATA IS PROPRIETARY AND SUBJECT TO ASCENDANCY NONDISCLOSURE LAWS

I came to, cold and paralyzed. No worries, right, because I knew I’d be cold coming out of cryo. All that meant was, I was alive, and my assignment was over. Because no one was actually going to need me, no terraforming survey has needed an anthropologist for more than a hundred years.

Subjective, that is. I have no idea how much time passed while I was on ice.

But I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care either way. I waited, like I’d been told to, for the doctor to come and help lift me out of the chamber and give me meds. Except no one came.

And I couldn’t get myself up at first. I was shaking too hard, and having trouble moving my arms and legs, let alone getting my hands to grip the sides of the chamber. It took me a while, I don’t know how long, but eventually I managed to haul myself up and out, and stumble, shivering, to the first open door I saw.

I’d done the training, before they iced me. I hadn’t paid much attention, not really, but at least I knew I should find the infirmary through that door, light and warmth and a doctor to take care of me until I was ready to move, but instead I found dim blue emergency lighting, and a mess—packets, trays, instruments scattered everywhere, drawers and cabinet doors hanging open. Shattered glass. Smears of what looked like dried blood.

Hello, I tried to call, but my voice wasn’t working yet. “Is anyone here?” That came out as a choked hiss.

I found a blanket in the jumbled mess, and managed to get it around my shoulders, and I sat there on the floor of the infirmary, shivering, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now.

At some point I fell asleep. As if I needed more, after however many years I’d been on ice. When I woke, everything was just the way it had been. And I was still cold, but I needed something to eat, and I needed to find out just what was going on.

There was no food. The dim emergency lighting was everywhere on the ship. Everywhere was a mess, as though someone—something?—had pulled everything out of its place and then discarded it. I did not find one single other person. Though I did find, here and there, more smears on the floor that looked remarkably like dried blood.

Training. What had the training said to do if something like this happened?

I hadn’t paid much attention, but I’m sure I would have remembered if the training had said anything about this kind of situation. The training was useless. I needed help.

There was an ansible on the bridge. I could use it to reach Avacorp headquarters. I could call for help. Help that wouldn’t be here for decades, but I could think about that later. Right then, at that moment, I needed to hear from someone, anyone, because I was beginning to feel like I didn’t really exist, like I was some insubstantial ghost.

But there was no ansible on the bridge. There was instead an instrument panel spidered with cracks and gouges, and a ragged hole where the ansible should have been.

At first I sat down and cried. I was lost. I was billions of miles away from any other human being. I would die, the last icy particles of myself subliming away in the lonely vacuum.

After a while, though, the practical part of my mind took over. I was still cold. I was hungry. I could use a shower. If I was going to die I might as well be as comfortable as possible. I wiped my eyes and got up and went to the refectory.

The cabinets in the refectory were bare, that should have held the day-to-day rations of the crew, but in the kitchen I found slabs of meat in cryo. And there were potatoes in the ag section. I chewed raw slices of meat while those cooked.

After a while—after I’d eaten, and slept again—I did my best to pull what data I could from the smashed drives that held the ship’s surveillance recordings. Most of them were incomprehensible fragments—one second of empty corridor, half a word from someone I couldn’t see except a shoulder, that sort of thing. But then I found a stretch of intact data.

The recording shows three people looking at a data display, two of them sitting and one standing behind them. On the display is something that looks like a phylogenetic tree. The person on the left side of the display points to it and says, “Right there. Why is it putting the jewel flies and the lobster dogs so close together?”

The person sitting on the right side does something on a panel of controls in front of her and then swears. “One hundred percent homology? No way. Who processed those?” She turns to look at the standing person. “Fim. You did both of these in the same day.” Her voice is thick with contempt. “Did you clean the homogenizer between samples?”

“I did!” insists Fim.

“Really?” asks the person on the right. “I’m having trouble believing that.” He gestures at the data display.

“You need to be more careful, Fim,” says Left. “Double-check everything. Avacorp isn’t paying us to be sloppy.”

Fim seems agitated. Angry. I can’t really blame him. I wouldn’t like being talked to like that. On the other hand, maybe he has a history of being slapdash with his labwork. “Let me see,” he says, and reaches forward to fiddle with the controls, scrolling through the tree, more data in a sidebar. “See?” he says. “It aligns within a longer sequence. Inside the genome. It’s real.”

“It can’t be,” pronounces Right. “It’s because we don’t have a reference genome, so it’s going to be more sensitive to contamination. We need to run those samples again. And I’m prepping it this time.”

Well, that didn’t tell me anything helpful.

I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to remember that all the ship’s landers and emergency pods could track the ansible. No one’s ever going to access this recording in my lifetime, probably not even me, but I still don’t want to say it. So I’ll just note that I discovered that nearly every single emergency pod had been damaged beyond repair. The landers too—I checked those even though I knew I couldn’t pilot them. I thought there was a lander missing, but I really had no way to double-check that, just vague memories of the training I hadn’t paid much attention to before they iced me down. Because why would I need it? Right?

Anyway, the ansible is down on the planet. Why is it down on the planet? Obviously someone took it down there, but why?

Obviously if I want to call for help I need to get to where the ansible is. And all the vehicles that might take me there have been purposefully damaged to prevent that. What the hell?

But I have all the time in the world, and a lot of the places I’ve been, nearly everyone has a bit of experience repairing things like emergency pods and locators and such. You don’t waste that kind of thing, not on a poor, isolated habitat. I’ve learned some things from my fieldwork.

I really should be recording as much as possible in this journal. So that whoever comes and finds… whatever they’ll find here won’t be wondering what the hell happened. But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m down on the planet, I’m alive. That’s all. That’s… that’s all. The pod isn’t getting me out of here, not that I thought it ever would, but.

On the way down, I thought I was going to die. I wasn’t just afraid I would die. I was certain I would be dead in the next few moments. And.

I mean, you don’t take the backup crew job unless you’re all right with maybe coming back to find everyone you ever knew dead, or unthinkably old. And that goes double for the anthropologist position—you’re only there in case. And that’s an in case that hardly ever happens. If you’re healthy enough to handle the decades in cryo, it’s a guaranteed way to lose everyone and everything in your life, to go to sleep and wake up to a world where nobody knows you, a tidy sum in your account that you didn’t even have to do anything for but lie there in a freezer. It was perfect.

But in the pod, waiting to die, I saw suddenly that I was totally alone. There was no one. Not just no one coming to help me, but no one to see me die, no one to even know I’d lived. No one to wonder what had happened to me, no one to care. It was…

I don’t want to talk about it.

Been a few days. Sorry. I… who am I apologizing to? I guess Avacorp will turn up eventually, but it’s not like I’ll be here when they do. Not unless I can find that ansible. And even then maybe not.

I have potatoes, and strips of dried meat. The pod has some emergency rations, and some clean water. I have the ansible tracker that I pulled out of the pod—I didn’t even have to wire it up to anything, it’s made to snap free, thank all the gods. I’d hoped the pod would come down near the ansible itself, but it’s not like emergency pods are easy to steer, or like I know how to pilot anything in atmosphere. So I’d brought a pack, and a lightweight, waterproof sheet I’d found on the ship.

There wasn’t really any point in staying with the pod. The sooner I can get to the ansible the better. So I shoved everything I could into the pack, shouldered it, picked up the ansible tracker, and headed off.

I guess I should take notes. Even if I’ll never see my paycheck now.

The ground where I came down was spongy. Like, literally spongy, water pooling up when I set my weight on the ground. There were weird fungal-looking growths here and there, and pink tendrilly things that for some reason made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and when I realized they were actually moving, squirming just slower than I could see right off, and the ones nearby were reaching for me, I almost took off running.

Which wouldn’t have been smart. I made myself take a few deep breaths, checked the direction I needed to go, and started walking.

The pink squirmies reached and reached for me, all the way across the sponge-soggy ground, but they were rooted. They brushed my ankles as I passed, and I was glad of the trousers that kept my skin covered.

There was more here than the fungus and the pink squirmies. There were black and brown things that popped up out of the ground and then disappeared again. There were shapes that floated above me, brown and gray and pink. Mostly they were vaguely triangular, but some of them seemed like collections of bubbles. After a while I came to… I guess I’ll call it a forest. There were tall things like trees, with thick, rubbery trunks and fleshy blue limbs. The ground was drier, and there were hardly any of the pink squirmies, which was a relief. I didn’t like the fleshy trees either, but night was falling, and I thought about the adventure vids I’d watched as a child—they all seemed to agree that resting on the ground was a bad idea. And I didn’t know what sorts of predators there might be down here. They probably couldn’t digest me, but maybe it would be too late for me by the time they found that out. So I thought maybe I should climb a tree, even though I didn’t like touching them, and I pulled myself up onto a lower branch when this thing flew out at me and bit me in the arm.

I swatted at it but it clung on, making chewing and sucking noises, and fuck it hurt. The thing was a good twenty centimeters long, black and pink, and slimy, like a giant slug. The pink stripes started to turn red and I thought, Holy fuck that’s my blood, and I saw it move just a bit farther into my arm.

No matter how I swatted and pulled I couldn’t get it off me. I had to slice it away with the knife I’d brought, and it kept moving and scooted off somewhere, and I’m pretty sure some of it is still in my arm. So that’s a no on sleeping in a tree, then.

I turned on my handlight, but I was almost instantly surrounded by flying things, and every pink squirmy on the ground strained toward me and I turned off the light and wrapped myself in the waterproof sheet and here I am, hoping nothing comes along and tries to eat me. Nothing else.

I decided that if I was going to die it didn’t matter what I did, and if I wasn’t I might as well sort through the remains of the project data.

I already knew that the air down here was more or less breathable—I’m not stupid, I’d checked before I got into the pod, but obviously I was breathing, so the crew members talking about the atmosphere wasn’t terribly interesting.

There was a fragment of gossip—Fim, he of the sloppy lab techniques, apparently had something sketchy in his past. Well, who on this mission didn’t? I mean, everyone had signed up to basically lose contact with everyone they’d ever known, for the rest of their lives. We all had something sketchy in our past, something we were trying to outrun.

Another fragment—the captain explaining to someone that they kept a close watch on things that might be entering or leaving the system because Vancorp would just love to get its hands on a world like this, and they would surely try to. They’d tried it before.

Is that what this is? Did Vancorp do this? Sabotage the mission somehow, kill the crew, so that they could show up and claim salvage on the ship and claim the world before Avacorp could stop them? But there wasn’t another ship in orbit, and if Vancorp turned up and murdered the crew, that wasn’t legitimate salvage. Avacorp would surely litigate, and it would be a pretty clear-cut case in Avacorp’s favor.

Oh, but if someone in the crew was working for Vancorp. If someone in the crew managed to kill everyone, space the bodies, grab the ansible, and come down here… so the ship in orbit would be abandoned, and Vancorp would know it, because their agent would have told them.

Whoever it was, they forgot about me. They must have, because I’d have been so easy to get rid of, just lying there on ice. Sloppy.

Spawn had never traveled far from the village before. People did travel, sometimes quite far—Darter Spine had visited the other surrounding villages, or so Spawn had understood from that elder’s stories. But it would be better to avoid others just now. Or so Spawn felt, though without entirely understanding why that should be. It was just a feeling.

The limits of the village’s territory were marked by the Mounds of the Prodigies. These were raised burrows large enough to hold three or four people, and inside each one, lit by carefully cultivated bioluminescent mosses, was a prodigy.

Each prodigy was different. One was part of a tree that had been struck by lightning. Others were particularly large or misshapen animals or plants. Each one had a story attached to it—each was something that had brought a lesson, or an opportunity for bravery.

Spawn considered stopping to make an offering at the prodigy directly east of the village—it was a rock that had fallen fiery from the sky long ago, and now sat, pitted and red, in its mound. But something far away eastward pulled, and Spawn went past the mound without stopping.

Then Spawn felt both a lifting of some burden and a tickle of fear. There was no one else out here. There was nowhere safe to sleep, unless Spawn dug a burrow every night. It was dangerous out here for an adult, for a group of adults, let alone a single nymph like Spawn.

By sunset Spawn was in a forest thick with trees. The ground was harder than Spawn would have preferred—indeed, there was no real possibility of digging a burrow that would keep away forest predators. And predators there were—Spawn noted that fully half the trees around held obvious signs of hosting shell biters, horrible things that would latch on to a person and chew and chew until nothing was left. And in the undergrowth, hiding in the sparse pink grass, Spawn saw the thready, viscous web of a soul eater. And there would be more. There was nothing for it but to keep going.

Spawn walked for two days, exhausted, watching for predators, for the traps they laid for the unwary. Always feeling the tug of the lake, of the wet, of the water. The Lake of Souls, it had to be, the call of any other lake or stream just an echo of that. It must be. Spawn would find it.

By the end of the second day, Spawn came to a village. Or, more correctly, to the edge of a village’s territory, marked by the low mound of one of their prodigies.

Would another village’s prodigies protect Spawn, the way they protected the village Spawn had come from? Perhaps. At the very least, the mound offered shelter.

This particular prodigy appeared as a tree stump, strangely chewed-looking. Spawn wondered what its story was, though not with sufficient curiosity to seek out the village to which this prodigy belonged. “Great One,” said Spawn, waving a pereopod and bowing low to the ground. “I am a traveler. I seek only a safe place to spend the night. I offer this mudcreeper in thanks for your hospitality.” The mudcreeper having been presented, Spawn waited. There was no sign, and so it might be assumed to be safe, and with a buzz of relief, Spawn curled up at the foot of the tree-stump prodigy and slept.

Spawn skirted more villages, always walking toward the east. Occasionally glimpsing people going about their business, sometimes hearing them chatter. Always avoiding them. Until one day Spawn emerged out of thick forest onto the bank of a stream and found another nymph.

The nymph was staring into the water, waving pereopods in what Spawn took to be agitation. “Hello,” said Spawn, as politely as possible. “I did not mean to surprise you. I am a traveler.”

The nymph stared, one eyestalk swiveling oddly. Then it said something that Spawn could not understand.

“I don’t understand you,” said Spawn. And then remembered Darter Spine’s tales of traveling. If one traveled far enough, people spoke very differently, so the elder had said. “I don’t know how to talk like you,” Spawn said, knowing it was futile to say so, knowing it was likely obvious without saying the words.

The nymph made frustrated noises, and then gestured emphatically, Come with me.

“I just want to keep going,” Spawn said. But then realized that maybe that wasn’t the best choice. Maybe the people here would have food to share, and shelter, and Spawn could rest for a few days in security. Maybe even learn to talk like these people, just a little, the way that Darter Spine had.

The nymph’s village was much like the one Spawn had come from, except instead of many small burrows, there was one large one in the middle, and a few smaller ones ringing it, all raised up, like smaller mounds of the prodigies. It made Spawn shiver to make that comparison, even as the nymph began to chatter to the village mothers. One listening adult, an elder near as ancient as Darter Spine, turned toward Spawn then, and said, in perfectly comprehensible if strangely accented speech, “Welcome, nymph.”

“Thank you, elder one,” said Spawn, with some relief.

“I am called Diver Wing. Are you on your…” The adult paused, thinking. “I did not think your people sought for their names, but I cannot think of any reason for a nymph to be so far from home.” Then, with a wave of one pereopod, “Oh, did they cast you out as soulless, those heartless ones, those superstitious ones?”

“I want to find the Lake of Souls,” said Spawn. “They did not cast me out.”

“Ah!” cried the adult. “Like my old friend Darter Spine.”

“Did you know Darter Spine?” asked Spawn, excited now, and dismayed. Had Darter Spine come this way? The elder had never said that explicitly, but Spawn should not have been surprised.

“I did,” said the adult. “Does that one still live?”

“No,” said Spawn sadly. “Darter Spine died not long ago.”

The elder made a sad buzzing noise. “We took our names together. We had come to the shore of a lake, and saw a diver scoop up a tiny darter, only for the darter to stab its spine through the diver’s wing. Both then fell to the ground. We separated them, the darter we put back in the water, the diver we tossed back up to the sky. We did not have to say anything to each other. We turned, then, and came back to the village, and were marked with our names. No doubt it sounds trivial, but in the moment it was full of portent.” Diver Wing sighed again.

“What?” One didn’t take a name. One’s name emerged from the mark of one’s soul, something that was an intrinsic part of oneself.

“Ah, you do things differently among your people,” said the adult. “Stay, child, for a few days at least. There will be a naming soon and it’s right that you should be here for it. The Lake of Souls is far, far away and you will not make such a long journey without rest.”

Within a day of Spawn arriving at the new, strange village, the nymph began its molt into adulthood. Unlike molts where Spawn had come from, this happened in the middle of the large, communal burrow, with everyone watching. And helping—Spawn wondered what might have happened if Darter Spine had molted, this last time, where anyone might help, not just the doctor coming in after the elder had been struggling for days.

And another difference—rather than coming out of a burrow with a soul mark emerging on its own under the new carapace, here the doctor stepped up to the molting nymph and asked a question. I am Strange Traveler, replied the nymph, and with a stone blade the doctor cut a shape in the newly exposed tissue.

“You are a portent,” said Diver Wing, after translating. “Be proud, little spawn.”

“But what of Strange Traveler’s soul?” Spawn asked.

Diver Wing made a dismissing gesture with one pereopod. “Do not tell anyone in your home village I said this, but where you come from, a molting nymph is given a drug that causes your soul marks. It is no real sign of a soul at all.”

“But I’ve seen it!” Spawn protested. “I’ve seen, once or twice, the winged bit of soul escaping, when a new adult molts.”

“No doubt,” agreed Diver Wing. “So Darter Spine said as well. But know that it isn’t merely a thing that happens when you molt into adulthood. It’s a thing that someone in the village makes happen.”

“So how do you know if someone has a soul or not?” asked Spawn.

“We all have souls, little egg,” said Diver Wing. “We just don’t always see them.”

Spawn thought a moment, and then said, “Darter Spine said that we are born with souls and also we make them.”

“And you were asking,” guessed Diver Wing, “because you are the sort of little spawn who the mothers of your village feared had been born with no soul. I suppose you are looking for the Lake of Souls because you feel the pull of the water, the whisper of the cool green depths. You are afraid that you have no soul, afraid of what might happen if that is true. And perhaps you think the endless waters of the Lake of Souls might afford you one, if you reach it.”

“I just want to know if it’s real,” Spawn explained. “Darter Spine said everyone felt the pull of the water, they just lied and said they didn’t.”

Diver Wing buzzed sadly. “Darter Spine would think that. But no. I never felt it, not the way that Darter Spine described, or the way I’ve seen it in some here in this village. But here, let’s congratulate Strange Traveler, and eat and drink.”

Seized with a sudden, strange urgency, Spawn said, “But let me ask, please. What happens here, in this village, if a person has no soul?”

“You mean, if we don’t see a soul when a person dies?” replied Diver Wing. “Then we mourn, because something has happened to that soul, and that person is no longer in the world.” Diver Wing made a thoughtful noise, and then added, “We don’t look for a soul before death. We don’t cull the little eggs for such reasons, not here.”

Somehow that both comforted and distressed Spawn.

A few days later, Spawn went to Diver Wing and said, “It is time I moved on.”

“Well,” replied Diver Wing. “Are you still determined to find the Lake of Souls?”

“I am,” said Spawn.

“Let me warn you, then,” said Diver Wing. “I have no doubt that the Lake of Souls once existed. Our people came from its depths, and, imbued with souls, walked on its shores, and away. That was a very, very long time ago. We have wandered far from that place where we came out of the waters, and perhaps it is too far to walk in one lifetime. Perhaps the lake is no longer there. Neither of those things would surprise me, and I do not like to think of little eggs wandering alone on such a fruitless quest. I think it likely that, like Darter Spine before you, your soul sent you out to find your name, and that your name is here, not on the shores of that distant lake. Let me make a suggestion: Ask the prodigies. It is how nymphs here begin their search for their own names—they honor one or more of the village prodigies. Sometimes a nymph dreams a name, sometimes a portent appears.” Diver Wing made an amused noise. “Sometimes a nymph already knows what name to take, and those days are spent making offerings to the prodigies, hoping for guidance and thinking on adulthood. Try it and see. Spend some days thinking, and if it doesn’t suit, then you can continue your journey.”

“I don’t belong to this village,” Spawn said, thinking of the days-long feast that had just concluded. “And I do feel the pull of the waters. I feel that I must find the Lake of Souls.”

“You won’t get there,” warned Diver Wing. “But do as you must.”

Spawn left the village that day, but as the mound of one of the prodigies came in sight, the thought occurred that it couldn’t hurt to ask for help or guidance. And Diver Wing had said that the nymphs of this village would do so, when setting out to look for their adult names. Diver Wing didn’t seem to think of a name as being a sign of one’s soul, the way that Spawn had been accustomed to. But this had worked for Darter Spine—Spawn had seen that elder’s soul, there had been no mistaking it.

The water still pulled, the whisper of cool depths to the east, the place where Spawn must go to find… something. Home? A soul? Something nameless and beautiful. But so distant. Spawn had journeyed for many days, and Diver Wing had said the Lake of Souls wasn’t anywhere near here, might be so far away that one could walk all one’s life and never reach it.

An offering to the prodigy here, Spawn thought. A night of rest, safe in the prodigy’s mound. Quiet time to think of what to do next. Perhaps there would be a portent of some kind. Having so resolved, Spawn turned to look for something to offer to the prodigy, perhaps a mudcreeper, those were always easy to find near a village.

Something strange stood just behind the prodigy’s mound. It was a vivid blue, with an orange stripe that seemed to glow in the shade of the trees. The creature seemed to be standing on its back legs, its full length stretched tall. It didn’t look like any creature Spawn had ever seen before, but it clearly was a creature. It had stilled suddenly, and turned what Spawn took to be strange, flat eyes toward Spawn in almost the same moment that Spawn noticed it.

And over one shoulder it carried a bag.

That was how you knew. That was what Darter Spine had said, and the more Spawn had thought about it the more obviously true it was. The difference between animals and people was that people made things. Not out of their own bodies, but out of other things.

But maybe this bag was part of the creature? It looked like the creature’s skin, though it wasn’t the same color.

Slowly, stiffly, the creature began to back away. It turned the big knob on the top of its body—yes, Spawn was sure those were two eyes set in the front of it, strange-looking but surely they were eyes—turned to look quickly all around and then back at Spawn, shifting slowly away. And when Spawn did nothing, it moved more surely, stepping backward, still stretched tall on its back legs.

A prodigy. A real, live prodigy, or at the very least an incredible portent. So when it turned and strode more surely away, Spawn followed.

Avacorp Mission Data: Project 33881-B66

THIS DATA IS PROPRIETARY AND SUBJECT TO ASCENDANCY NONDISCLOSURE LAWS

So I’ve seen a lobster dog. There was no mistaking it, even from the little bit of description I had. It was alone—the bits of information I’ve managed to reassemble suggests they tend to stay in colonies, or packs, or whatever. But this one is all by itself, kind of moving around aimlessly in a clearing. I don’t know if they’re dangerous—well, hell, everything here is dangerous.

It stopped when it saw me—three eyes on stalks, all pointing right at me, weird little limbs that had been waving around suddenly froze. But it didn’t attack, just sat there, so I backed up, and when it didn’t come after me I turned and walked away. I couldn’t help but think of the bit of recording I’d seen, the mention of lobster dogs and jewel flies. I didn’t see any flies, though.

I think I’ve managed to get most of the last bits of the death leech out of my arm. Not fun. That was not fun at all. But I’m pretty sure there’s still some of it in there. Some antiseptic and some plaskin and it’s… not as good as new. It hurts. I can only carry my bag over the other arm, which is annoying. The plaskin keeps ripping free around the edges. I’m lucky the death leech didn’t get me in the leg. Or my stomach. I’m sure that would have been the end of me. As it is I’m hoping my arm doesn’t get infected. I guess I’m lucky most of the bacteria here—are there bacteria here? There must be—I’m lucky most of the bacteria here wouldn’t know what to make of me. If I end up dying of gangrene it’ll be something I brought with me. Delightful thought.

I’ve seen a few other death leeches—they live in the trees, and now I know what I’m looking for, I think I can tell which trees have them. They leave a sort of trail on the trunks. Or maybe that’s a kind of tree the leeches like, but at any rate I don’t go near those if I can help it. Instead I look for a hole or even dig one partway if the ground is loose enough, and wrap myself in my blanket and wait for morning. If I can’t sleep I sort through the data I brought from the ship, that’s been indexing while I walk. I’m getting closer. I know I’m getting closer to the ansible. It shouldn’t be much longer now.

But what am I going to do when I get there?

While the agent is attempting to repair what’s repairable of the data I grabbed before I left the ship, and sort it for me by date, I look at random samples of it.

“Fim!” Fim again. Sitting at a lab bench, a pipette in hand. I feel like I’m watching a serial drama and a plot thread has resurfaced. The person speaking is the woman on the left, in the lobster dog fragment. “You can’t leave that lid stopper-side down like that!”

“The bench is clean,” Fim insists, gesturing with the pipette.

Which only makes the woman more angry. “It’s a potential source of contamination, and we can’t synthesize more tr—” The fragment cuts off.

“Tell me more about Fim,” I order the agent, and it dutifully presents me with a list of data fragments.

Most of them are useless. Half a second of the back of Fim’s head. A fragment of a text file, nothing left of it but the words experience in. The woman complaining to the other person from the lobster dog fragment that she has no idea how Fim could have ever and the rest of those words are lost. A voice saying, Not Fim! and then laughter.

The agent blinks an alert in my vision to tell me that it’s repaired what it can, and ordered it by date. I ask it for the latest comprehensible thing it can show me.

It’s Fim. Holding something long, and heavy, to judge by the way he’s holding it. There’s blood on the thing, whatever it is. “Tell me again my labwork is sloppy,” he snarls.

I remember the blood I found smeared in the corridors of the ship. The smashed data drives. The space where the ansible should have been. No bodies, anywhere. Every data drive smashed. Every lander and emergency pod disabled, except one, and that one was missing.

Was it Fim who brought the ansible down here?

Had Fim just lost his temper very, very spectacularly and then fled to the planet? Or had it all been part of a plan, Fim making sure that Vancorp could come in and find an abandoned ship, a planet with no one alive to assert a claim? Salvage.

Either way, Fim had missed some things. He’d missed me. And he hadn’t completely destroyed all the incriminating data on the drives. Not that any of that would make much difference in the end, but still.

“Your labwork is sloppy, Fim,” I whisper.

Didn’t sleep well. My arm hurts too much. I’m out of the forest now and back onto spongy ground, back to fungus and pink squirmies. So many pink squirmies. I didn’t want that, I didn’t want to walk through the horrible wormy things, but that was the direction the ansible tracker said.

I actually turned around to walk back into the forest, and then I realized that the lobster dog was following me.

I mean, I think it’s the same one. I’m pretty sure it’s the same one. It’s not like I’ve seen any others. It’s not like I could tell them apart if I had, I guess, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same one. Or maybe I’m hallucinating from lack of sleep and the pain in my arm, and I’m sure I feel feverish, and no, I’m not going to think about that.

The lobster dog watched me from behind a tree, its three eyes looking right at me. Was it hunting me?

“Go away,” I said. The thing just sat there looking at me. I pulled my blanket off my shoulders and flapped it with my good hand. “Go away!” It just stared. And then it made a strange buzzing noise.

“Go away,” I said again, and then I sat down. Right there, on the edge of the forest. I just couldn’t bring myself to go any farther. I needed rest. I needed a doctor to fix up my arm. I needed to not be stranded on a strange planet with weird alien animals staring at me.

The lobster dog came out from behind its tree and started creeping toward me.

It looks more like a really big, reddish-brown wood louse. Or a wood louse crossed with a lobster? Kind of? “Good boy,” I said, and then realized that maybe it was a good girl. Or, why would aliens have boys or girls or anything else we had? “Good lobster,” I said. “Nice lobster.” I knew I was in trouble. “I’m going to call you Champ. Hey, Champ.” It crept closer, very cautiously. I shrugged the bag off my good shoulder and started rooting through it, in case the emergency aid kit had anything in it for fever, because I was definitely not in good shape.

Champ came right up close and buzzed gently at me. “I’m hallucinating, aren’t I?” I said to it. It just stared and buzzed again. “Go away,” I said.

It curled its fan-shaped tail underneath itself and settled down onto the spongy ground, waving its little arms—there were a lot of them. More than two, anyway.

There was no way I was going any farther. I found a tab that promised to be a febrifuge as well as a painkiller, and I swallowed it dry. And then I pulled my blanket over myself and I lay down and closed my eyes. I mean, it wasn’t like I could do anything about it if Champ tried to eat me.

When I woke, I felt better. Much, much better. My clothes were damp—I must have sweated out my fever. I should have taken that tab days ago. In fact, I felt so much better I could think of looking at the wound on my arm without wanting to throw up. It still hurt, but a lot less, and the swelling was way down. I made sure I was well under the blanket, and turned on the handlight. Peeled back the plaskin—damn stuff never did stick right, it was probably expired, just my luck.

The wound was clean. Like, weirdly clean. No dirt, no fragments of cloth from my sleeve, no bits of death leech. What the hell?

Flying things were swatting into my blanket, so I turned off the light and lay back down, trying to think.

Someone had cleaned out my wound. In fact, I realized, I wasn’t damp from sweat. It was water. Someone had rinsed out my wound, and gotten a lot of me wet in the process. And then put the plaskin back, and covered me with my blanket again? What the fucking hell?

“Fim?” I asked aloud. The image of him snarling and brandishing that heavy club came to mind. Somehow I couldn’t believe in Fim helping me. But if not Fim, then who?

Something buzzed quietly, and patted and smoothed my blanket.

“Champ,” I said, and got another buzz, another pat.

Champ.

Did Champ clean my wound and cover it back up and then fucking tuck me back in? Champ, the lobster dog? How long had the crew been looking at the lobster dogs and nobody thinking that maybe they should defrost the anthropologist?

Did the crew not wake me up because it never occurred to them that the lobster dogs might be intelligent, or were they interpreting the guidelines as narrowly as possible so that Avacorp could come in and take over this nice, relatively hospitable planet without worrying about the legal headache of dealing with existing residents?

My thinking felt clearer than it had for days. Thanks to Champ.

What was I doing here? Why was I walking toward the ansible, when I was pretty sure that all I would find was Fim, the mass murderer?

Then again, where else was I going to go? What was there to do, besides find the ansible and try to contact Avacorp? If nothing else I had to tell Avacorp that the lobster dogs might well be people—that’s my job, that’s the whole reason they brought an anthropologist along.

And maybe that’s the reason they keep us on ice. Oh, yes, we brought one along, just in case, don’t worry. But we’re not awake unless the crew decides we’re needed, and maybe the crew is under orders—or at least the strong suggestion—to do their best not to need us.

I’d suspected that when I took the job, honestly. I didn’t really care. I’d wanted the money, and the fresh start. But now here was Champ, pulling death leech teeth out of me, and buzzing and patting me. I mean, it could have done anything else. It could have walked away from me, or killed me, or just sat there and watched me die of my death leech bite, or anything. Instead it tried to help me. And stayed next to me and, I don’t know, maybe Champ isn’t trying to comfort me when it pats me, maybe it means something totally different to Champ’s people, but it means something and Champ is here, doing it.

That changes everything. There are laws about terraforming planets with intelligent inhabitants—as in, you’re not allowed to. If I’d been defrosted and shown the lobster dogs, I’d have had to tell Avacorp that, no, this mission was a bust, there might be trade with the lobster dogs but there would be no farms, no vacation resorts, no corporate facilities, no luxury estates, no colonies here. Avacorp would much prefer I not have the chance to say that, but by law they had to have me along and pretend they cared whether there was intelligent life here.

Vancorp’s no different. If Vancorp comes and claims salvage, how likely are they to pay any attention to the lobster dogs, if Avacorp’s crew didn’t?

I have to get to that ansible. I have to report, to tell Avacorp as plainly and officially as possible that the lobster dogs are intelligent, and this world is effectively off-limits. Because if I don’t, whether it’s Avacorp or Vancorp, it’s the end for the lobster dogs.

This planet is crawling with parasites. Champ is sitting next to me, buzzing quietly, using its four little arms to pull things off me, little round things with yellow and pink fluff that hides their jabby bits. I pull them off Champ, when I notice them trying to squirm into the joins in the lobster dog’s carapace. The pink squirmies are still weird, but Champ sits right on them like they’re nothing, so maybe they’re just grass.

I’m not going anywhere just yet. I’m thinking more clearly now, thanks to Champ, and I’m not sure what I’ll find when I reach the ansible. I need to think. To plan. But thinking isn’t happening, so I decide to look at what data is left on the lobster dogs. Turns out there’s a nice long, newly repaired fragment.

“… parasitic infection that changes the behavior of Terran insects,” says the woman from the lab. “So let’s say you have a mostly aquatic species…”

“But the lobster dogs aren’t aquatic,” protests someone whose voice I haven’t heard before, some other murdered crew member.

“They were once,” says the woman. “But let’s say the ones that this parasite lays its eggs in, those are compelled to go up onto dry land. Those eggs hatch, and…”

“And jewel flies,” says the unfamiliar voice. “But…”

“What if there was some kind of bottleneck?” asks the woman. “Some kind of huge extinction event. The only surviving lobster dogs are ones that have somehow gotten tangled up with the jewel fly eggs. They both survive, but as one species. Kind of. I mean, we know that lobster dogs are born with the jewel fly eggs in them—it’s in their genes.”

“But how?” asks the other voice. “And what were the jewel flies supposed to do once they’d gotten the lobster dogs on land?”

“I don’t know!” exclaims the woman, almost happily. “I admit this is all entirely specu—”

And the fragment ends.

Well, none of that helped me. And I can’t sit here forever being groomed by Champ the lobster dog.

Maybe I could find a colony, a village or whatever, and, you know, do my job. Learn to communicate, learn how Champ and their people live. That…

That would not be terrible. If I could find something on this planet I could eat.

But first things first. I have to find the ansible. I have to send that message to Avacorp, to let them know they can’t have this planet. This place belongs to Champ’s people.

And I’ve been thinking. Even if I get a message to Avacorp, that doesn’t mean they’ll let anyone else read it. Maybe they’ll just delete it, or lock it away somewhere and not tell anyone so that they can still come in here and terraform.

No, I have to get the message out to someone else, too. Not just anyone, but someone who’ll care about the lobster dogs. Like, maybe the anthropology department at the university. Maybe a couple of academic data repositories I’ve worked with in the past. Or, you know, all of the above.

I have to be careful. Avacorp will certainly examine any data I send through the ansible. But there are ways, and I know some of them.

So. I have to compose at least two messages. One for Avacorp telling them about Vancorp’s interference, and about the lobster dogs. And one for the university and the data repositories, with everything I know about Champ’s people, and what’s happened here. I’m going to have both messages ready before I move on, so that the moment I find the ansible I can send them.

The prodigy was obviously feeling very much better. Spawn was unsurprised—no one could possibly feel good with pieces of shell biter stuck inside. It sat there, with its strange sheet wrapped around its waist, its odd, forward-facing eyes staring ahead. Occasionally it made noises with what Spawn had guessed was its mouth (a weirdly wet opening under its eyes, with two ridges of hard, white plates inside it). Every now and then it used the fringy things on the end of its front legs to pull float-lice off of Spawn. It was a strangely companionable experience.

The prodigy wore a covering over its skin, Spawn had discovered. The covering was made of fibers of some sort. So was its bag. That was interesting. It reminded Spawn of baskets and mats, but it was so much finer. How was it done? Spawn had no way to ask.

Maybe just waiting was the way to learn things. In the meantime, Spawn had nowhere urgent to be. The Lake of Souls would not be significantly more or less reachable for a day or two spent with the prodigy. And after all, this was the sort of thing that made a story that lasted generations.

The next morning, the prodigy stood, gathered up its things, and walked south. After a few steps it made some noises, and then turned and made shooing gestures at Spawn with its fringed front legs. It wants me to go away, Spawn thought, disappointed. The prodigy made more noises, louder, and the gestures became more emphatic.

“All right,” Spawn said, and turned and walked back toward the forest, and stepped behind a tree. The prodigy waited, and then, apparently satisfied, continued its walk to the south.

Before Spawn could follow, a spider-squid leapt out of the tree and wrapped Spawn in its mouth tentacles.

Spawn screamed, and struggled against the tentacles as the spider-squid’s mouth yawned wide and it spat. Only a little of the corrosive poison landed on Spawn—the rest landed on the spider-squid’s own tentacles. Spawn smelled corroding shell and screamed again. And then the prodigy was there, making loud, trumpeting noises, hitting the spider-squid with its forelegs, the fringes balled up. Kicking with its back feet.

The spider-squid turned its attention to the prodigy, and Spawn tore free from the tentacles, which immediately whipped to surround the prodigy. The spider-squid’s mouth yawned again and “Look out!” cried Spawn and then the spider-squid spat full into the prodigy’s upper body.

The prodigy screamed as the poison ate through its covering and then its skin. It was a horrible, alien sound. Spawn scrabbled at the ground, desperate for some kind of weapon. One pereopod came upon a stone, and without thought Spawn threw it, hard, at the spider-squid, straight into its mouth and down its throat. The spider-squid made a small choking noise, and then dropped the prodigy and turned and fled.

It would be back once it had dealt with the stone, but Spawn thought there would be at least a few minutes’ respite. The prodigy lay on the ground, moaning, the covering over its body eaten away, the skin no longer smooth and brown but rough and red and blistered. Bright red liquid welled, and soaked into what remained of its covers. The prodigy made quick, gasping noises with its mouth, and the skin around its flat eyes seemed to be swelling, which Spawn remembered from the wound in its arm was a bad thing. This was way beyond anything Spawn could help with.

Slowly—Spawn’s own wound stung, and made using the pereopods on the left-hand side difficult and painful—Spawn wrapped the prodigy in its own strange sheet, and then began dragging it back toward the village. It was an awkward, difficult business and it took far longer than Spawn had hoped. By nightfall there was no village in sight, and the prodigy was clearly very ill. Its skin was mottled all over now, and definitely swollen all around its eyes and mouth. It gasped and gasped, and seemed to be covered with moisture. It needed shelter, at the very least, and a doctor as soon as possible. Looking desperately around, Spawn only saw what might be a mound, and immediately made for it.

It was the mound of a prodigy. Shelter and safety for the night. As quickly as possible Spawn dragged the prodigy inside, and looked around to see what help might be here, if any.

The first thing Spawn saw was the prodigy whose place it was, and Spawn could not suppress a buzz of fearful surprise—there was no mistaking those two curved ridges of white plates, the mouth around them now dried, its edges pulled back, the skin around sunken. It was the same. It was the same as the prodigy Spawn had brought here with such effort. Only very obviously dead for a long while.

Spawn’s prodigy made a sighing noise. It sounded like, Fim. And it reached out one fringed foreleg toward the dead one. Tried to rise, but it was too badly injured. “You should lie still,” Spawn told it, and dragged it to lie alongside the corpse.

The living prodigy reached out again, and grasped a smooth, flat stone that the dead one held in its lifeless, bony grip. The stone glowed then, as though it had suddenly come alive, and Spawn’s prodigy made noises at it. And after a few minutes the stone replied, and finally Spawn’s prodigy lay back onto its sheet, the glowing stone still clutched in one foreleg.

“I’m going to get a doctor,” said Spawn. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.” It might be wiser to wait until morning, when everyone was awake, but Spawn feared the prodigy was too gravely injured to last the night without help.

But the village was awake, sitting vigil at a funeral. “Oh,” said Spawn, coming into the space in front of the central burrow, where the villagers sat around the dead elder. “Oh, Diver Wing.”

Strange Traveler waved Spawn over. “Hello,” said Strange Traveler. “Hello, welcome. Hello.” It was, Spawn supposed, all the words Strange Traveler knew that Spawn knew as well.

“I need a doctor,” said Spawn, and then, spotting the doctor among the mourners, “You, Doctor. Someone is hurt.” Someone, or something? But the prodigy surely had a soul. It had a bag. It had been kind to Spawn. It had saved Spawn’s life.

Spawn could not afford to think about any of that. “Doctor, Doctor, you must come!” and moved by Spawn’s obvious urgency and beckoning and pointing gestures, the doctor came.

But they were too late. The prodigy lay lifeless beside the other, the one whose mound this was. The smooth, glowing stone murmured to itself, or perhaps to the now-dead prodigy.

The doctor made a frightened noise and backed out of the mound, taking Spawn along. And then, firmly but gently, the doctor pushed Spawn to sit and examined the wound the spider-squid had left. The faint noise of excited buzzing and singing that had followed Spawn and the doctor faded away, Diver Wing’s funeral winding down. The elder’s soul must have appeared shortly after Spawn and the doctor left.

“I would have liked to have seen Diver Wing’s soul,” Spawn said. And then thought of the dead prodigy. Did it have a soul?

Prodigies didn’t have souls, as far as Spawn knew. They weren’t people. But this thing had surely been some sort of person.

The doctor said something incomprehensible. And then one single fragment of soul darted out of the mound of the prodigy. It lighted on Spawn for a few moments, and then flew away.

Spawn stayed in the village for a while. The villagers were kind, and generous, and Strange Traveler took time to teach Spawn how to speak like the people in this village did. It wasn’t easy, and after weeks Spawn could only say and understand a little bit, but it was interesting and satisfying, and it kept Spawn from thinking too much about the future, or the recent past. And before the wound the spider-squid had inflicted healed completely, Spawn began to molt.

When the old shell was off, the doctor, hefting a stone blade in one pereopod, asked, “Do you wish to change the name the spider-squid gave you?”

“What name?” asked Spawn. The injury hadn’t been in a place where Spawn could see it easily, and the idea that it might serve as a soul mark struck Spawn with a sense of both surprise and obviousness. And when the doctor said the name, unhesitatingly, as though it was obvious, Spawn said, “Don’t change it.”

After recovering from the molt, Spawn stayed awhile to help with hunting, and planting, and burrowing. And to consider what to do next. There was still the possibility of the (perhaps endless) quest to the east. There was this village, which had been friendly and hospitable. Where Darter Spine had stayed, long ago. But Darter Spine had returned home. Why?

Because of little eggs like Spawn, perhaps. Because there were no other adults there who might understand that pull toward the water, who might sympathize with a little spawn who the mothers feared might have no soul. Darter Spine had known that one made one’s soul. But Darter Spine was gone now. If Spawn went back home, there would be at least one adult in that village who little eggs like Spawn could come to.

“And we will visit, you and I,” promised Strange Traveler.

“We will,” Spawn agreed.

The journey back seemed longer than it had been in the other direction. And Spawn’s spirits rose at the approach to familiar territory. Home. A little undercurrent of apprehension, yes—would anyone recognize their little egg? Would Spawn be welcome? Or would the villagers think some stranger had come visiting?

“It’s that little egg!” cried one mother as Spawn came into the village.

“It’s that little spawn!” cried another. “Oh, little egg, you wandered off and we worried for you. We feared you left to find the Lake of Souls and we would never see you again.”

“That little egg is an adult now,” said someone else, and all around people were coming out of their burrows, or stopping their work.

“Will we have a feast?” asked a nymph. “Will there be stories of sights and adventures?”

And someone cried, “What is your name, our child, our new adult? Turn and show us, we cannot see it behind your bag.” Was that, Spawn wondered, a somewhat apprehensive question? Was there some doubt that Spawn would have a soul mark at all?

Spawn dropped the bag, and turned so everyone in the village could see the name, the shape of the wound the spider-squid had left. There was a brief, awed silence. “It’s a portent,” murmured one of the mothers.

Then, “Welcome!” cried the villagers. “Welcome home, Lake of Souls!”

Footprints

The ground was a soft, springy mat of blue-gray mosslike something. Cooper’s boots left shapeless dents. He could poke a finger into it, and make a hole that closed over immediately. And he could push a torn and empty ration carton down into it and it would slowly reemerge full, as though it had never been opened. It was unnerving. But it had kept him alive.

“How far?” he asked the little girl walking beside him. He’d asked before.

“A long way,” she said, and smiled and tilted her head, blond curls swinging. He’d found her the day after the crash, sitting on the endless blue-gray plain, tattered Mr. Bear in her lap. When he’d asked her name, she had frowned, not understanding. She couldn’t possibly be human, and why she appeared to him as she did, or was able to communicate with him, Cooper didn’t know. But he was grateful—she had taught him about the moss. He might have starved otherwise.

“Tell me about the tooth fairy again,” she said, eyes wide.

“He’ll lie again,” said Mr. Bear. One button eye hung precariously from a worn thread.

The damn bear. Or not, just like the girl wasn’t a girl. They were the only beings he’d encountered since his crash landing. It felt like he’d walked halfway around the planet with them.

He turned, even though he knew there was no way to gauge the distance he’d walked. Behind him were the dents their feet made, except… “There’s only one set.”

“Of teeth?” asked the little girl, stopping as he stopped.

“Of footprints.” The double set only stretched back a few yards and then suddenly were a single track. “But…” His own seemed to disappear.

“I want to hear about the tooth fairy,” the girl insisted. “Does she have wings? Does she wear a pink dress and ballerina shoes?”

“There’s no tooth fairy,” said Mr. Bear. “We pulled out every last one, and none of them grew back.”

The little girl held the bear in front of her, arms straight. “They did.”

“Not the way he said. And no coins either.” It hung motionless in her grip. “I liked the screaming, though.”

Cooper had found the bear unnerving from the moment it had first spoken. He ignored it. “Listen, honey, I really need to contact my people. I need to tell them where I am.”

“We know,” she said. “We’re taking you.”

“It just seems like it’s an awfully long way.”

“It is an awfully long way.” She tucked the bear under her arm headfirst and started off again.

“I’m hungry again,” said Mr. Bear, upside down and backwards.

Cooper caught up with them in a few long strides. “What does Mr. Bear eat?” he asked.

She put her hand in his. “Does the tooth fairy have a pony?”

“A sparkly pony with long pink hair,” said Cooper. “And lots of teeth.”

The little girl laughed. “I like you. You’re funny.”

“And delicious,” said Mr. Bear.

Hesperia and Glory

Dear Mr. Stephens,

It is entirely understandable that you should wish a full accounting of the events of the last week of August of this year. If nothing else, your position as Mr. John Atkins’s only living relative entitles you to an explanation.

I must begin by making two points perfectly clear. The first is quite simple. The account you have read in the papers, and no doubt also received from the chief of police of this town, is entirely false.

My second point is this: There is not now, nor has there ever been, a well in my cellar.

It is true that ever since my return from the war I have walked with a cane, and stairs are difficult for me. But the house was my great-aunt’s, and my parents and I often spent summers here when I was a boy. In those days I marshaled my leaden armies across the packed dirt floor of the cellar, destroying and resurrecting whole battalions by the hour. I know every inch of that cellar floor. I wish to be quite particular about the matter.

Your cousin Mr. Atkins came to my house with Mr. Edgar Stark. I’ve known Mr. Stark since college, and he is a frequent visitor at my house. I live a quiet life, and am, I admit, somewhat prone to melancholy. Mr. Stark’s lively humor and good spirits are a dependable restorative, and for this and many other reasons I value his friendship. It is not unusual for him to bring a friend or two on his visits, so I was not at all surprised when he arrived in company with another man, whom he introduced as John Atkins, an old school friend of his.

To be entirely honest, I found Atkins unprepossessing. His suit was gray with dust and his collar wilted and dirty. As I shook his hand I could not help but notice his listless grip and slightly petulant expression. All of this I put down to a long drive in the heat, but upon further acquaintance it was clear that the expression, at least, was habitual.

Each morning he spent at my home he was up early, before the heat made his room unbearable. After a quick breakfast of bread and jam and cold coffee he would take his place in the living room on the couch, stretched out, his feet on the cushions, eyes closed, brow knitted in concentration. He arose only briefly in the afternoon to plug in the electric fan and bring the ice bucket from the dining room to the couch. After supper he went directly to his room, but he slept poorly, if at all; each night I heard his step overhead, pacing back and forth.

Stark did his best to stir his friend, with no success. Atkins did not like music, either from the piano or the Victrola—the noise distracted him. Books were out of the question, as, he informed us, reading only put other people’s ideas into his head. “Well, then, Atkins,” I said on the third morning, after another attempt to find something that would entice him off the couch, “what do you like?”

“I like to be left alone,” he snapped.

We were only too happy to grant his wish, and went out onto the terrace to sit in a couple of dusty wrought-iron chairs in the shade of an old sycamore. Quite naturally, I asked Mr. Stark for an explanation. He told me that John Atkins was mad. Or rather, that he purported to be mad. He had avoided college, work, enlistment, any sort of responsibility, by pretending insanity. He had deceived various doctors and had spent much of the past year in isolation at the latest doctor’s orders. Stark believed Atkins was not truly mad, because the mad did not merely lie about all day. “If you’re mad, you should be… mad,” he said. The doctor had approved Atkins’s departure from the sanatorium and advised that his surroundings for the moment should be peaceful and calm. So naturally Mr. Stark had thought of my house. “I thought you could only be good for him. And he was quite interested in your house, when I described it to him. Particularly the well in your cellar. It’s the first time in ages he’s shown any sort of interest in anything.”

“There’s no well in my cellar.”

“John and I were good friends at school, before college. Something happened, I don’t know.”

“There’s no well in my cellar,” I said again. It disturbed me that he had not seemed to hear what I had said.

“I need another drink,” he said, and that was the end of the matter.

You may wonder that I did not take offense at your cousin’s behavior. The truth of the matter is, I had seen something like it before. Some doctors called it funk and some neurasthenia. I called it perfectly natural, if you’d been at the front long enough. Atkins had never enlisted, but whatever his problem, I didn’t doubt that it was real enough.

That evening, when I heard Atkins’s step, I determined to speak with him, so I rose and took my stick, meaning to make my slow way up the stairs. Instead I heard Atkins come down, and walk through the dining room out onto the terrace. I followed him.

The night was cool and cloudless, but not silent. Crickets chirruped, and other night insects shrilled and chorused. All the colors were gone out of the bricks, the grass, the leaves of the trees; everything was shades of black and gray. Atkins was still in his shirtsleeves, and he stood on the grass with his face turned up to the sky. He was there long enough for my leg to grow tired, and I seated myself in one of the chairs and waited.

After a while he turned, and as though he’d known I was there all the time he came and sat in another of the chairs. In the dark his face was shadowed oddly, his glasses dark circles where his eyes should be. “Edgar thinks I’m mad,” he said conversationally, as though he’d offered me a cigarette.

“You’re not mad.”

“Of course not.”

“Have a drink?”

“No,” he said, and hooked one of the chairs with his foot and dragged it closer with a shriek of iron against brick. “You can bring me some ice.” He put his feet up on the chair.

“All out, old man.” Actually the ice man had been just that morning, and I’d taken more than usual, because of my guests. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

He made a slight movement that might have been a shrug. “I’m not like just anyone else,” he said after some minutes had passed. “I matter.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Things have gone terribly wrong, and only I can fix them. It’s all my brother’s fault. My half brother, really. Asery.” The last word was drawn out, filled with hate. “His father led a rebellion against the king of Hesperia—my father, Cthonin VI. He failed, of course. His head rolled down the palace stairs and into the square in the capital, and the body was buried under the steps, so that every day Hesperians would have him underfoot. I’ll never understand why his son didn’t join him, infant or not.”

“And where is Hesperia?” I asked.

“On Mars, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “How foolish of me.”

He told me then of the antiquity and superiority of Martian civilization, and of Hesperia, which was the greatest of Martian nations. Each Hesperian learned, from his mother’s knee and throughout his schooling, the importance of right thinking. “On Mars,” he said, “we understand that what one thinks makes the world.”

“Do you mean to say that each of us makes our own world with his thoughts?” I’d heard the idea before, usually at two in the morning from young men drunk with a heady mix of champagne and philosophy, and whose lives had yet to run up very hard against reality.

“No, no,” said Atkins testily. “Nothing so trivial. There’s only one universe. But that universe is formed by thought. If it were left to undisciplined minds, the world would be chaos.”

“Your mind is disciplined,” I ventured.

“I was bred to it. I am Cthonin Jor, Prince of Hesperia. Some day I will be Cthonin VII. But first I must defeat Asery.”

I asked him then to tell me the tale, and thus he began:

In Hesperia (here I set down his words as best I remember them) the canals run deep and wide, and straight as death. The dirt, thick and heavy and scarlet, makes the water the color of blood. Some canals in less blessed regions have run dry, but in Hesperia green grows thick and lush thirty miles on either side of the broad waterways that crisscross the land.

The canal called Fortunae does not run through Hesperia proper, but it is important nonetheless. It runs northward from the southern ice to a series of falls that cascade down into the Lake of the Sun, which is nearly a sea, wide and shallow. In unimaginably ancient times it was believed that on the day of creation the sun itself rose from that lake. It was the site of a tremendous temple complex, nearly all of which has disappeared without a trace after so many thousands of years. But one part of the temple still stands: the Wheel of Heaven, six hundred sixty-nine chambers, each built side to side in a great circle under the lake. The ring turns by the width of a chamber each day, and there being only one entrance a single room is accessible each day, and that same room, once its day has passed, cannot be entered again until the six hundred and sixty-nine days, which is the length of the Martian year, pass once more. The entrance is reached through a cave behind the falls.

The Fortunae comes out again at the western shore, at a headland called the Cape of Dawn. On this headland is one of the many pumping stations that send the water of the Fortunae on to where it meets the canals of Hesperia proper, in mountains to the west. Near the station is a town, and this is the administrative center of the province, which is, of course, governed by Hesperia.

It was there that I had been sent by my father, and there that my brother Asery came to me nearly a year ago as I sat in my chair on the steps of the governor’s palace, my counselors beside me. Before me was a great plaza, paved with the local brown stone in various shades, depicting a coiled serpent surrounded by a border of alternating jasper and copper in which the artist had cunningly concealed the drainage grates so necessary for a large, flat surface near so much water. Across the plaza, to the north, was the canal come again out of the lake. On the east was the lake itself, and to the west a barracks, and the town beyond. The air there is always filled with the sound of rushing water, and the rumble of the great pumping station.

Some of my soldiers were playing a ball game in the square in front of us, and I was proposing a wager on the outcome with my vice-governor when the voice of the crier interrupted us and Asery came before me. He is a tall man, nearly as tall as I am, with dark hair and gray eyes inherited from his father, and he carries himself with the same arrogance. On this day he was dressed in plain garments, covered with red-brown dust, as though he were some homeless wanderer just come off the road, not a gentleman seeking audience with the governor of the province, and a prince.

“Welcome, brother,” I said. “Please sit with us.”

“I will not sit,” he said.

This sort of disrespect was like Asery, but I am a patient man. “Couldn’t you even bathe between here and… wherever it is you’ve come from? Our mother would be shocked to see you.”

“Our mother is not easily shocked,” he answered. “After all, she bore you without any noticeable display of shame.”

My counselors, who had been whispering among themselves, fell silent. Even the ballplayers stopped, and the ball bounced away and then rolled to the edge of the plaza, stopping and spinning on a grate. They moved together, closer to where I sat, and where my brother stood before me. Asery did not move, nor did he look behind him where they gathered.

“I hope you’ve not been thinking of taking up your father’s ambitions,” I said.

“I have not come to take up any ambition. I only wish to speak with you.”

“You’ve made a bad start of it,” I told him. “But then, your family’s arrogance is famous.”

“The contrast with the habitual modesty and diffidence of the house of Jor is marked,” he said, with the slightest of bows. “I stand reprimanded.

That was better. “What can I do for you?”

“You can restore the Fortunae to its original course.” Now, this had been the pretext for his father’s rebellion. At one time another canal had flowed north from the upper shore of the lake, and from there into Tharsis. “A hundred years ago Hesperia annexed this province and turned its waters westward. Now the lakes and rivers of Tharsis are dry, and its fields are desert.”

“Nothing stops them from building another canal. Or buying the water they require. Isn’t Tharsis famous for its silver mines? Aren’t their artisans the most marvelous workers of metal on Mars?”

He exhaled sharply, derisively. I couldn’t read the expression in his gray eyes. “I wish I could make you see what Mars is really like, away from the canals, away from your palace.”

I realized then what he had come to do. I stood and signaled the soldiers, and with a cry Asery pulled a sword from under his dusty shirt and sprang forward. I stood to face him and drew my dagger.

Our blades met, and over his shoulder I saw the soldiers turn as the grates around the court lifted and fell clanging to the stones, and up out of the drains came men in dusty red-brown, swords raised. In a moment they had ringed the plaza, even in front of where I stood on the palace steps.

Asery was a wily and treacherous swordsman, and I had to fight with all my attention. I did not have time to look over the plaza, or think of my counselors who had been next to me, but it was evident that the soldiers from the barracks had joined us, because from time to time I heard their voices raised in the battle cry of Hesperia: For Hesperia, and glory! And though he had a sword and I had only my dagger, we fought until each of us was exhausted, and I, anticipating his feint, disarmed him and sent his sword spinning across the stones of the plaza.

It was then that I looked up from the fight and saw that the battle was lost. My own soldiers lay dead or bound, and my vice-governor was held by two rebels.

I turned and ran up the palace steps.

Atkins paused, and before he could continue I asked why he had not merely thought Asery dead on the spot? Or willed his enemies’ swords to turn into flowers?

“You don’t believe me,” he accused.

“On the contrary. I’m just trying to understand.”

For a few moments the only sound was the night insects, and the soft sighing of a breeze in the tree leaves. “They would never have believed that their swords would suddenly turn to flowers.”

“So they all have to believe?”

“Not all,” he said. “Just most. If someone more powerful has some other vision, or if everyone around you remains unconvinced, your efforts will come to nothing. You see how important it is, the right kind of thinking.” He sat up straight, and brought his feet down off the chair in front of him. “You see how malicious it was, for Asery to suggest that Tharsis was badly off.”

I allowed that I did.

“The discipline is not only in bringing one’s will to bear, but in keeping in mind the proper order of things.”

I had no reply, and in a moment Atkins continued his story.

I fled through the palace to the stables (he said), where I mounted a raptodont, a stallion with splendid black feathers. These are nothing like your Earth horses. They are two-legged, nearly six feet from clawed foot to powerful shoulder, and nearly twice that from dagger-toothed snout to the tip of the long, muscular tail.

I rode away from the palace, safely past the town and away into the countryside. I might have followed the canal west, but I would be too easily caught. The lake lay to the east, and north was Tharsis—I could expect no help there. South, then.

The southern Fortunae was too obvious a route, so I rode southwest through the gentle grasslands that surround the Lake of the Sun, an ocean of green starred here and there with flowers of pink, blue, and yellow. After an hour or so the grass gave way to a desolate, rolling landscape of blue-gray moss, rocks showing through like bones, and I turned south and rode with the wind at my back.

As I rode I tried to think of some way to defeat Asery. I could work toward small things that would, in the end, lead to his undoing, but what? And as I thought, another idea came to me. What if I did not work with the future, but the past? What if I brought my will to bear in a time before anyone could believe or disbelieve in his existence? Was it even possible? I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing before, but the idea pleased me so well I began straightaway. Let Asery’s father never have conceived him! And his father and his father, for good measure, all the way back to the founder of the line. To this end I bent my will.

Eventually I turned southeast, into grassland again, and soon after reached the shores of the canal. The wind out of the north had increased, and now blew cold and hard, whipping and flattening the grass and chilling me, but just over the next rise I knew I would see the bulk of a pumping station and beside it the white walls of the barracks. I urged my mount faster up the incline.

And then pulled hard on the reins, coming to a sliding halt that nearly overset me. Ahead was no station. The wind-tossed grass and the waters of the canal simply ended, as though by the stroke of a sword. Beyond was a desert of dry dirt and rocks, where the wind threw up red-brown clouds and whirlwinds. Behind me was grass, water, and blue sky. Ahead was lifeless rock, and a sky turned red with dust. As I watched, a foot of green crumbled into dirt and blew away—the line was advancing!

Did Asery have so much power, and was this, then, his goal? Not merely the overthrow of the royal house of Hesperia, but the destruction of all life on Mars?

At the speed that line of destruction was advancing, I could not possibly reach Hesperia in time to find help. My campaign to erase Asery from the history of Mars had clearly not succeeded. My only hope—Mars’s only hope—was to kill him outright, no matter how difficult that might prove. I turned my exhausted mount and rode north.

I rode all that evening and into the moonless night, the jeweled stars thick overhead, until nearly within sound of the great falls my mount collapsed in mid-stride and fell dead on the grass. I left it where it had fallen, and ran on.

When I could see the glint of starlight on the lake, and the falls were a constant thunder, I stopped and knelt in the tall grass for a brief rest, and to take stock. This saved my life; no sooner had I sunk down than I heard the faint sound of voices. As I knelt, hardly daring to breathe, the voices came closer.

“That’s the last of you. Keep a close watch! It’s worth our lives if we let him escape.”

I did not recognize the voice, or the next one. “Are we so sure he’s nearby?”

“We found his mount not far from here, dead but still warm. You know your orders.”

“Kill him on sight.” Two voices together.

Here was a dreadful pass! Crouched down in the grass, mere yards from my enemies, who had just expressed their determination to kill me. I could not stay where I was for long—the rising sun, or the most cursory search, would reveal me. On the other hand, the third man seemed to be leaving, perhaps to report to Asery himself! If I could follow him unseen…

I lay belly-down and crept forward, hoping that until I was past the sentries any movement of the grass would be attributed to the rising wind. I quickly lost any sound of the officer, but at least I knew what direction to take, and was, I judged, going to pass the two sentries safely.

But at the last moment my luck deserted me. With a thud an arrow buried itself into the ground inches from my shoulder. I immediately pushed myself upright and ran, and another arrow hissed past me. Stealth was impossible now. My best hope was to escape into the caves of the falls.

The shouts of my pursuers behind me, their arrows flying to the left and right of me, I gained the path that leads to the largest of the caverns. It is narrow, and the water-covered stones are cold and slick, and I had to slow somewhat to avoid slipping and tumbling to the water-pounded rocks below. Still, I heard Asery’s men behind me, and I did not dare to stop and see if it were only the first two or if others had joined them. I plunged ahead, and finally into the entrance of the Wheel of Heaven.

No Earth monument can be as grand as the ancient ruins of Mars! The cavern entrance is plain at first, but as you go deeper the ceiling rises and is lost in darkness, though the lights that in those far-off days lit the hall still light it now. The walls of black stone narrow to a corridor, on the walls of which are ancient figures of men and beasts in bas-relief, men that are long dead and turned to dust, beasts the like of which Mars has not seen in ten thousand years. In the eerie gleam of the ancient lights the figures seem to be on the verge of movement or speech. Near the entrance to the Wheel is a shadowed side path, a turning that leads into a maze of tunnels that honeycomb the bluff. If I could gain that I would be safe.

The corridor ended in a broad step of rough black stone, smoothed at its center, where so many feet have trod. In the wall at the back of the step was a doorway, a rectangular hole with no frame, and darkness within. Black stone blocked a third of the doorway, and as I watched the stone slipped forward just the smallest amount. I must have ridden longer into the night than I had realized, and it was nearly dawn, and the day’s chamber passing on.

I knew the path I sought was along the wall to my left, but as I turned to search for it, my pursuers came into view, nearly a dozen armed men. I was out of time! Quickly I made for the black step. “Stop him!” cried a voice, and arrows rained down, but I was through the inexorably closing door. Captive in the Wheel of Heaven for a year, but safe from Asery meanwhile.

“The year is nearly past,” Atkins said. “When the chamber opens again I will return.”

“And where will you find this chamber?” I asked. “We’re nowhere near Mars.”

“The well in your cellar is the opening,” he said.

“There is no well in my cellar.”

He made that almost-shrug again. “You aren’t enough to trouble me, and no one else has been down there for years.”

“Are you certain?”

He laughed, and said nothing else, and so I bade him good night and left him sitting on the terrace. I went into the kitchen, meaning to make myself a drink, but when I opened the ice-box I found that the ice I’d bought that day wasn’t there.

The events of the next day are quickly and easily told. This part of the official account is accurate: That morning I saw Atkins go down to the cellar, the only entrance to which is by steps leading down from the kitchen. I heard a terrible scream, as did Mr. Stark, who came running from the living room. He was down the steps before me, and moments later I heard him shout, “Help! John has fallen into the well!”

The police came, and several of the neighbors, and all were in the cellar for some time, and when they came up I was told that they had been unable to retrieve Mr. Atkins’s body from the well. I was assured that his death was unquestionably accidental, and that I should not feel in any way responsible. When they had left, I made my way down the steps, to find only the packed dirt floor of the cellar covered over with a layer of dry, red-brown dust.

I swear to you that I am sane, and that every word I have set down here is true. Of course, it is impossible that your cousin was indeed a fugitive prince of Mars—John Atkins was born here on Earth, and Mr. Stark had known him since boyhood. But it is also certain that he went down into my cellar and disappeared without a trace. How am I to understand these events? I have pondered the question at some length, and have reached certain conclusions.

Who among us does not yearn for some noble purpose? Who would not wish to take the part of the prince and the hero, in an ancient and romantic world where men war openly and honorably with sword and bow? And who can blame John Atkins if, discovering a way to make this desire a reality, he threw aside all else in life but this one aim? Who would grudge him Hesperia, if he could attain it?

I say plainly—I would. And I do.

Let a million readers of dime novels lose themselves between the pages of their books, and let them rise refreshed and ennobled by what they find. But let that dream become a reality—how many Princes of Hesperia can there be? There is only room in the story for one. What of the rest of us? And if such a thing is possible, what of Earth? Who might reshape our world with his imagining, and to what ends?

This is what I think happened: John Atkins did succeed in opening a door to Mars. But the Mars he found was not the Mars he imagined. Reality delivered the ultimate rebuke to his tampering, and at the last showed him not the waters of the Lake of the Sun and the verdant grasslands surrounding it, but the dry and lifeless Mars that would assert itself even as he tried to banish it with his fantasy. So I interpret his story. So I must believe, for the safety of my own world.

I am not a prince, or a noble anything. I can only do my small part. I’ve swept the dust from the cellar floor, and disposed of it. One of my neighbors has brought a chair down for me, and here I sit. Mr. Stark has gone, and I’ve had no visitors for some time, except the doctor, who is clearly concerned. And I can’t explain myself—how could I, without sounding completely mad? I am as sane as anyone, perhaps saner than most. I align myself with the real. I am witness to the truth.

There is not now, nor has there ever been, a well in my cellar.

The Endangered Camp

After the terrible push to be free of the Earth was past, we could stand again. In a while, the engineers had said, everything would float, but for now we were still accelerating. We were eight in the small, round room, though there were others on the sky-boat—engineers, and nest-guardians examining the eggs we had brought to see how many had been lost in the crushing upward flight. But we eight stood watching the world recede.

The floor and walls of the room were of smooth gold metal. Around the low ceiling was a pattern of cycad fronds and under this scenes from the histories. There was the first mother, ancestor of us all, who broke the shell of the original egg. The picture showed the egg, a single claw of the mother piercing that boundary between Inside and Outside. With her was the tiny figure of her mate. If you are from the mountains, you know that he ventured forth and fed on the carcass of the world-beast, slain by the mother, and in due time found the mother and mated with her. If you are a lowlander, he waited in the shell until she brought the liver to him, giving him the strength to come out into the open. Neither was pictured—the building of the sky-boat had taken the resources of both mountains and lowlands.

On another panel was Strong Claw, her sharp-toothed snout open in a triumphant call. She stood tall on powerful legs, each foot with its arced killing claw, sharp and deadly. Her arms stretched out before her, claws spread, and her long, stiff tail stretched behind. The artists had worked with such skill that every feather could be distinguished. Behind her was the great tree that had carried her across the sea, and in the water were pictured its inhabitants: coiled ammonites, hungry sharks, and a giant mosasaur, huge-mouthed enough to swallow a person down at a gulp. Before Strong Claw was forested land, full of food for the hunting, new territory for her and her daughters yet unhatched.

A third panel showed the first sky-boat departing for the moon that had turned out to be farther away than our ancestors ever imagined. That voyage had been a triumph—the sky-boat (designed, all were ceaselessly told, by lowlander engineers) had achieved a seemingly impossible goal. But it had also been a disaster—as the mountain engineers had predicted, and the lowlanders refused to believe until the last, irrefutable moment, there had been no air on the moon. But as we had now set our sights on Mars, the artist had left off the end of the tale, to avoid ill-omen.

The engineers had used mirrors to cast an image of the Earth on the last, blank panel of the curved wall. It was this that held our attention.

As we watched, disaster struck. A sudden, brilliant flash whited out the image for an instant, and after that an expanding ring began to spread across the face of the world, as though a pebble had been dropped into a pond. Almost instantly a ball of fire rose up from the center of the ripple and expanded outward, obscuring it. I blinked, slowly, deliberately, sure that my vision was at fault. Still the fire grew until finally it dissipated, leaving a slowly expanding veil of smoke.

There was silence in the sky-boat for some time.

Out of the speaking tube came the quiet voice of an engineer in the chamber below us. “A great stone from the void.” There are many such, it seems, but no song speaks of them, no history tells us what happens when one strikes the Earth. This would not hinder the engineers, who are full of predictions and calculations.

“I was not informed,” said White Ring into the tube. She was facing the image, her back to us. “Why?”

“We did not know,” came the faint voice of the engineer.

“Do we not watch the skies?”

“The skies are vast. The stones are dark. We might have seen it if we looked in precisely the right place, at the right time. Or perhaps not.”

“And now?”

Around me, not a feather stirred. “The cloud will continue to expand. The impact will leave a crater.” Here the voice hesitated. “My colleague thinks perhaps twenty-five to thirty-five leagues wide, though I believe she has miscalculated the object’s size. Perhaps forty-five to sixty leagues.” White Ring’s killing claw clicked on the floor. “I have not calculated how long it will take the cloud to disperse,” the engineer continued. “I fear it will grow to cover the whole world. There may be fires as rocks fall back down to the ground. It hit water, so—”

“Silence!” ordered White Ring. “How far will the damage reach?”

A moment of silence from the tube. “It depends,” came the voice, slowly, carefully. “On how thick the cloud is, and how long it stands between the Earth and the Sun. And if there are fires. And other things we haven’t calculated yet.”

For just a moment White Ring’s feathers ruffled as though a breeze had stirred them. Nearly every other face was turned toward the view of Earth, but I looked at her, sidelong, without moving my snout. I felt the muscles in my back and my legs tense, and I forced them to relax lest the click of my largest claw on the deck betray my thoughts.

“We must go back,” White Ring said. Snouts turned toward her in surprise. She turned her head to look behind her, and then turned fully, her daughter ducking low to avoid her tail. Others in the ring ducked and turned so that all who had faced forward could face the center of the circle. “We can stay above until the cloud disperses, and then land.”

“Can we go back?” One of the younger females.

“We must,” said White Ring, her tone admitting no dispute. “This venture was risk enough with the world safe behind us. If we are the only ones left alive…”

White Ring’s daughter called through the speaking tube, and an answer came back. “We might be able to, if we act soon enough. We will have to make some calculations. But…”

“Make them,” said White Ring. Her daughter eyed the rest of us, watching.

They had told us that leaving the Earth would be difficult. Three of our number had died in the punishing climb. But all of us standing here had survived it. Could those so silent and still around me be willing to throw that away, to throw away everything we had worked for? It seemed so.

The engineer had said, If we act soon enough. A question of fuel, no doubt. If I did not speak up now, the time would be gone.

But here was my difficulty: Every other person in the room was a lowlander. The superiority of mountain optics had ensured that some of the engineers aboard were highlanders, but I was one of only two surviving who was not either an engineer or an egg tender. If I spoke now, no one else would speak in support of me, unless they were completely convinced of my argument. Or unless I killed White Ring, in which case they would likely follow me out of fear if nothing else. But as things stood, I would not be allowed even to strike.

But I am no coward. “We must not go back,” I said.

My neighbors sidled away, as far as they could in the cramped space, claws clicking on the metal floor. I stood face-to-face with White Ring.

“I hear nothing,” said White Ring. Her killing claw tapped once, twice.

“This ship won’t be built again,” I said, “not in our lifetimes. Look!” I gestured at the picture with one clawed finger, at the still-spreading smoke. “Will we reach Mars, or will we die having made all this effort and accomplished nothing?”

White Ring looked around the circle, watching the faces and the demeanor of the others. I did not dare take my eyes off her to make the same survey. “I hear nothing,” she said again.

“Coward! You disgrace our ancestors!”

Instantly White Ring’s neck snaked forward and she snapped her teeth together a breath from my neck. I stood still as stone.

“Will you challenge me?” White Ring hissed. “At this time? Is your ambition so great?”

I would not allow my feathers to lift, or flutter. I would not allow a single twitch that I did not intend. “Did Strong Claw turn back?” I asked. I would have pointed to the picture, but I did not wish to move.

“She knew all was well behind her,” said White Ring. “If none survive on Earth, and we die attempting Mars, what then?”

“We don’t know there’s air to breathe where we’re going,” said the daughter beside White Ring, when I didn’t answer. “There was none on the moon.”

“What a wonder this is! You lowlanders disbelieved when the engineers from the mountains said there was no air on the moon. Now you disbelieve when you are told that Mars certainly has an atmosphere.”

“Bent light,” White Ring began, her voice scornful.

“There is more than just the bending of light to prove it. There are plants, the astronomers have said so. We see them wax and wane with the seasons. There is no reason to think that Mars will not be much like Earth.”

“The astronomers are not all agreed. Not even those from the mountains.”

“But you have staked your life on it,” I pointed out.

“While other lives were sure to continue,” said White Ring. “What if everyone else is dead?”

“Then they are dead because Earth is now unlivable,” I said. “And in that case, why turn back?”

“I know your ambition of old,” said White Ring. “I had not thought you would exercise it at a time like this.”

My feathers twitched then, I couldn’t avoid it. I allowed them to tremble and rise. White Ring and her daughter watched me with malice, the other five with fear, or perhaps something else.

The moment stretched out. Time—time might be an enemy or an ally. Prolong the contention, and the moment to turn back would have passed. Allow the return to begin, and there would be only a short space, if any at all, in which it would be possible to correct our course.

“You call me ambitious,” I said, “and I am. I would reach Mars! Did any of us embark without a similar ambition? But now you abandon what we have all worked so hard to attain! And when I point this out, I am threatened. Why is this? If one of you”—and here I pointed around the circle—“had spoken, would this have been the response?” Had I seen movement among the others? Someone about to speak, some thoughtful twitch of feathers? “You may kill me if you like, as I am clearly outnumbered. But it will not change the truth.”

One of those who had been silent spoke. “There is something in what she says.”

White Ring was silent a moment. “It would be best not to fight,” she said. “I would not lose more of us. Bring out the histories.”

“Bring out the histories,” I agreed.

She scratched at the unyielding metal ground with her foot, never taking her eyes off me. Then she barked a short order to her daughter, who repeated White Ring’s word into the speaking tube.

The ladder well was behind me. I did not look as I heard the singer climbing into the room, or move as he squeezed past into the center of the circle in front of White Ring. I never moved my eyes from her, and let the others shift to let him by.

He was shorter even than most males, and his feathers were a dull brown, specked with black. He was an unprepossessing thing until he opened his mouth, as I well knew. He was my son.

He lowered his head in front of White Ring. “You choose first,” she said to me. I should have been daunted—if I chose first, hers would be the last word. But I was not.

“I choose Strong Claw’s Voyage,” I said.

We are all susceptible to the power of song. The songs you’ve known since hatching, in the mouth of a great singer, will quicken your pulse and stop your breath. As my son called out the opening lines to the history I had chosen, all in the room were compelled by his voice to listen. Feathers ruffled and then settled, and all were still and there was no sound but his song.

There is no need to give the details here. The story is told, in its essentials, in the picture on the wall of the sky-boat, and in any event I might have chosen anything from the histories I wished, so long as White Ring would feel safe making the obvious choice when her turn came.

No, the song, and its argument, is already clear to you. Instead, I will tell you about my son.

When I was younger, and looking for a mate, I had resolved to have only the strongest, wiliest male I could find. I wanted large, strong daughters. I wanted children who would distinguish themselves on a hunt. I turned down suitors who were stupid, or weak, or too short. Some I killed. I would have killed the little brown-feathered thing that approached me last, but he opened his mouth and sang.

His voice! I lost all reason.

When the first clutch of eggs hatched, I had five daughters and six sons. Three of the daughters seemed strong enough. Three of the males were small and weak, and I thought they might die. But one of those, as I bent near to it, tiny, naked-looking thing, let out one barely audible peep.

I ate the four weaklings and fed them to him. His health was all my care in the coming months, and he grew strong.

He was undersized, but he was clever. I taught him what I could, and when the day came, that comes for all male children, the day to leave his mother and sisters behind forever, I instructed him to seek out the singers guild.

For most mothers, when that day comes it is as though they never had male children. The boys go off to other territories, and if they’re seen again the sight raises no sentiment in the breast of the formerly doting mother. Your daughters are yours for life; your sons cease to exist when they leave the nest. But I took what steps I could to ensure that my son would be mine, no less than my daughters, even after he had gone to the singers guild.

I didn’t know then that I would be on the sky-boat, or that a giant rock would hurtle out of the heavens and destroy the Earth. And even had I known, I could not have predicted that the lowlander singer would die during the launch, leaving my boy the only historian on the ship. But I knew that a singer’s voice has a power entirely different from claws and teeth. White Ring had said she knew my ambition of old, but she did not realize its true extent.

The song ended. Strong Claw, victorious through all dangers, never turning back though she knew not what the end of her voyage would be, stood at last on the shore of the land she had discovered. Every listener sighed to hear it. It is an old song, and a pleasing one, with a clear lesson—the strong and resolute prevail.

It was no more than I had already said. And as I had hoped—expected!—White Ring answered with The Endangered Camp.

It is a story older even than Strong Claw’s. It begins when a party of hunters goes out looking for iguanodon. (I myself have never seen an iguanodon, but they thunder through the oldest stories in vast herds.) They leave behind them in the woods their camp, a nursery. Mounds of earth and leaves, the singer sang, the infants waiting their time to come forth, and the guardians of the nests watchful.

An idyllic scene! But while the hunters are gone, the camp is attacked. The beast’s tearing claws and rending teeth kill one guardian, and the others circle the nests as well as they can, and cry out together, Let the hunting party return!

Close around me, the listeners were rapt and their eyes wide, and they barely breathed, such was the power of the singer’s voice.

The hunting party did return, of course. They heard the cries of the guardians, and ran with desperate speed back to the camp. Three guardians were killed, and four hunters, but they drove off the beast, saved the eggs, saved the pack. So the history tells us.

Now, this is the strange thing about history. When we are in doubt as to what course to take, or there is some debate, we examine the histories, we say, “So our ancestors did then, and so we should do now.” And we think of the past as a solid, unbreakable rock that will always have the same form. But by accident or design, the rock is shaped. A singer drops a line here, a verse there, knowing or unknowing. And if you change the past, you change the future.

Stop with the beast defeated, and the eggs safe, and the salutary moral is clear. The lowlander singers I had heard had always stopped there. But it’s not the end of the story. The four dead hunters had been among the most experienced, many of the others were injured, and food was scarce that year anyway. The seven dead from the attack fed the pack for a while, but after that they plundered the nests to survive, and no children were born that year.

I did not think White Ring would expect the singer to continue, even if she knew of the ending. The ill-omen of it would be too strong. Any singer would know what she meant by requesting it, and know, if he knew the end, to leave it off. But oh, my clever boy! He sang the rest of the song.

For a moment, as he continued where she had expected him to stop, she stood paralyzed. The others blinked in surprise, but his voice transfixed them and they were silent. White Ring drew her head back, and I saw her killing claws twitch. Even so she waited until he had finished.

“You made that up,” accused White Ring’s daughter when he fell silent. White Ring still held her threatening pose, ready to strike. But she dared not touch the singer; there was no other on board.

“You’re very young,” I said, my leg muscles tense with the desire to jump. “It’s fashionable these days to leave that verse off, but anyone of any experience and education knows that’s how the story ends.” I swiveled my snout toward White Ring, and bared my teeth. “Isn’t that so?”

“I have never heard it,” said White Ring, still poised to strike. Her gaze was fixed on the boy, a small, brown-specked shape in the middle of the circle. “You have violated your obligation as a singer. Why? There can have been no collusion. Can you have done such a terrible thing merely from a hatred of lowlanders?”

Even if I had told her he was mine, she would not have been able to imagine why such a thing would matter. And besides, he had sung truly. I might have laughed, but I did not; this was a dangerous moment.

“I have heard it,” said a quiet voice. The others turned their heads, but I never took my eyes off White Ring. She never took her eyes off my son.

“My great-aunt’s mate was a singer,” the voice continued. I placed it—a sturdy, handsome male, gray- and black-feathered, still young. He had kept quiet before now, as was proper. “He died when I was still a chick, but I remember he sang it in just that way.” Silence. And then, even more timidly than before, “I was surprised to hear it requested. I wondered if you would signal the singer to leave the ending off. But then I thought, He won’t sing the ending, no one ever has except my uncle.”

White Ring and her daughter would have no qualms about killing the black-and-gray male. They drew their heads back, hissing.

In that instant, a voice came from the speaking tube. “We have completed our calculations.”

The low ceiling made it impossible to jump. Instead I drew my head back and then struck forward with all the force I could muster, hoping the boy would be quick enough to move out of the way.

The room erupted in screams and shouts. My teeth snapped together where White Ring’s neck had been an instant before. I grabbed her shoulder and as she raked me with her claws I brought my foot up with its deadly killing claw. White Ring grabbed me and sank her teeth into my shoulder, but she was too late. My foot came up, and I drove my claw into her belly and pulled my leg convulsively back.

Her jaws opened in a scream, and I let go of her and stepped back. The black-and-gray male was locked with the daughter. No one else was in the room—they must have fled down the ladder well.

“You are dead, White Ring,” I said. Pink entrails sagged out of the bleeding slash in her belly. “I need only keep out of reach for a while.”

“Return to Earth,” she said. “What if we’re all that’s left?”

I wanted to take a step back and lean against the wall, but I wasn’t sure if she still had strength for a last charge, and I didn’t want to show any weakness.

“You have doomed us,” she said, and fell to her knees, and then onto her side, guts squirting out with the force of her fall. Still I did not approach. Until she was reliably dead she was a danger.

Instead I looked over at the black-and-gray male, who stood now over the daughter’s corpse. His feathers drooped, and he was covered in blood, whose it was impossible to tell. “Are you hurt?” I asked. I hoped he wasn’t. He was handsome, and obviously strong.

“Yes,” he said.

“Go down to the doctor. On your way, inform the engineers of the change in command.” He bowed his head low and limped to the ladder well. My son had climbed up, and made way for him.

I stepped over to the daughter and pushed her with my foot. She was dead. Carefully, tentatively, I did the same for her mother.

Dead.

“Well, my chick,” I said. “There will be new songs, and they will be yours.” I turned to see him standing at the well. He bobbed his head. We had always understood each other.

My shoulder hurt, and my neck, where I had been clawed. I would have to see the doctor soon enough myself, but not this very moment. I turned around to see the image of the smoking, burning Earth. “Earth is dead, or if not it may as well be. Mars will be ours.” If anyone still lived on the Earth, perhaps one day they would venture away from the world and find, on Mars, the evidence of our triumph.

Let cowards retreat. We go forward. We live!

Another Word for World

Ashiban Xidyla had a headache. A particularly vicious one, centered somewhere on the top of her head. She sat curled over her lap, in her seat on the flier, eyes closed. Oddly, she had no memory of leaning forward, and—now she thought of it—no idea when the headache had begun.

The Gidanta had been very respectful so far, very solicitous of Ashiban’s age, but that was, she was sure, little more than the entirely natural respect for one’s elders. This was not a time when she could afford any kind of weakness. Ashiban was here to prevent a war that would quite possibly end with the Gidanta slaughtering every one of Ashiban’s fellow Raksamat on the planet. The Sovereign of Iss, hereditary high priestess of the Gidanta, sat across the aisle, silent and veiled, her interpreter beside her. What must they be thinking?

Ashiban took three careful breaths. Straightened cautiously, wary of the pain flaring. Opened her eyes.

Ought to have seen blue sky through the flier’s front window past the pilot’s seat, ought to have heard the buzz of the engine. Instead she saw shards of brown and green and blue. Heard nothing. She closed her eyes, opened them again. Tried to make some sense of things. They weren’t falling, she was sure. Had the flier landed, and she hadn’t noticed?

A high, quavering voice said something, syllables that made no sense to Ashiban. “We have to get out of here,” said a calm, muffled voice somewhere at Ashiban’s feet. “Speaker is in some distress.” Damn. She’d forgotten to turn off the translating function on her handheld. Maybe the Sovereign’s interpreter hadn’t heard it. She turned her head to look across the flier’s narrow aisle, wincing at the headache.

The Sovereign’s interpreter lay in the aisle, his head jammed up against the back of the pilot’s seat at an odd, awkward angle. The high voice spoke again, and in the small bag at Ashiban’s feet her handheld said, “Disregard the dead. We have to get out of here or we will also die. The speaker is in some distress.”

In her own seat, the pink- and orange- and blue-veiled Sovereign fumbled at the safety restraints. The straps parted with a click, and the Sovereign stood. Stepped into the aisle, hiking her long blue skirt. Spoke—it must have been the Sovereign speaking all along. “Stupid cow,” said Ashiban’s handheld, in her bag. “Speaker’s distress has increased.”

The flier lurched. The Sovereign cried out. “No translation available,” remarked Ashiban’s handheld, as the Sovereign reached forward to tug at Ashiban’s own safety restraints and, once those had come undone, grab Ashiban’s arm and pull.

The flier had crashed. The flier had crashed, and the Sovereign’s interpreter must have gotten out of his seat for some reason, at just the wrong time. Ashiban herself must have hit her head. That would explain the memory gap, and the headache. She blinked again, and the colored shards where the window should have been resolved into cracked glass, and behind it sky, and flat ground covered in brown and green plants, here and there some white or pink. “We should stay here and wait for help,” Ashiban said. In her bag, her handheld said something incomprehensible.

The Sovereign pulled harder on Ashiban’s arm. “You stupid expletive cow,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign picked Ashiban’s bag up from her feet. “Someone shot us down, and we crashed in the expletive High Mires. The expletive expletive is expletive sinking into the expletive bog. If we stay here we’ll drown. The speaker is highly agitated.” The flier lurched again.

It all seemed so unreal. Concussion, Ashiban thought. I have a concussion, and I’m not thinking straight. She took her bag from the Sovereign, rose, and followed the Sovereign of Iss to the emergency exit.

Outside the flier, everything was a brown-and-green plain, blue sky above. The ground swelled and rolled under Ashiban’s feet, but given the flier behind her, half-sunk into the gray-brown ground, and the pain in her head, she wasn’t sure if it was really doing that or if it was a symptom of concussion.

The Sovereign said something. The handheld in Ashiban’s bag spoke, but it was lost in the open space and the breeze and Ashiban’s inability to concentrate.

The Sovereign yanked Ashiban’s bag from her, pulled it open. Dug out the handheld. “Expletive,” said the handheld. “Expletive expletive. We are standing on water. The speaker is agitated.”

“What?” The flier behind them, sliding slowly into the mire, made a gurgling sound. The ground was still unsteady under Ashiban’s feet, she still wasn’t sure why.

“Water! The speaker is emphatic.” The Sovereign gestured toward the greenish-brown mat of moss beneath them.

“Help will come,” Ashiban said. “We should stay here.”

“They shot us down,” said the handheld. “The speaker is agitated and emphatic.”

“What?”

“They shot us down. I saw the pilot shot through the window, I saw them die. Timran was trying to take control of the flier when we crashed. Whoever comes, they are not coming to help us. We have to get to solid ground. We have to hide. The speaker is emphatic. The speaker is in some distress. The speaker is agitated.” The Sovereign took Ashiban’s arm and pulled her forward.

“Hide?” There was nowhere to hide. And the ground swelled and sank, like waves on the top of water. She fell to her hands and knees, nauseated.

“Translation unavailable,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign dropped down beside her. “Crawl, then, but come with me or be dead. The speaker is emphatic. The speaker is in some distress.” The Sovereign crawled away, the ground still heaving.

“That’s my bag,” said Ashiban. “That’s my handheld.” The Sovereign continued to crawl away. “There’s nowhere to hide!” But if she stayed where she was, on her hands and knees on the unsteady ground, she would be all alone here, and all her things gone and her head hurting and her stomach sick and nothing making sense. She crawled after the Sovereign.

By the time the ground stopped roiling, the squishy wet moss had changed to stiff, spiky-leaved meter-high plants that scratched Ashiban’s face and tore at her sodden clothes. “Come here,” said her handheld, somewhere up ahead. “Quickly. Come here. The speaker is agitated.” Ashiban just wanted to lie down where she was, close her eyes, and go to sleep. But the Sovereign had her bag. There was a bottle of water in her bag. She kept going.

Found the Sovereign prone, veilless, pulling off her bright-colored skirts to ball them up beneath herself. Underneath her clothes she wore a plain brown shirt and leggings, like any regular Gidanta. “Ancestors!” panted Ashiban, still on hands and knees, not sure where there was room to lie down. “You’re just a kid! You’re younger than my grandchildren!”

In answer the Sovereign took hold of the collar of Ashiban’s jacket and yanked her down to the ground. Ashiban cried out, and heard her handheld say something incomprehensible, presumably the Gidantan equivalent of No translation available. Pain darkened her vision, and her ears roared. Or was that the flier the Sovereign had said she’d heard?

The Sovereign spoke. “Stupid expletive expletive expletive, lie still,” said Ashiban’s handheld calmly. “Speaker is in some distress.”

Ashiban closed her eyes. Her head hurt, and her twig-scratched face stung, but she was very, very tired.

A calm voice was saying, “Wake up, Ashiban Xidyla. The speaker is distressed.” Over and over again. She opened her eyes. The absurdly young Sovereign of Iss lay in front of her, brown cheek pressed against the gray ground, staring at Ashiban, twigs and spiny leaves caught in the few trailing braids that had come loose from the hair coiled at the top of her head. Her eyes were red and puffy, as though she had been crying, though her expression gave no sign of it. She clutched Ashiban’s handheld in one hand. Nineteen at most, Ashiban thought. Probably younger. “Are you awake, Ashiban Xidyla? The speaker is distressed.”

“My head doesn’t hurt,” Ashiban observed. Despite that, everything still seemed slippery and unreal.

“I took the emergency medical kit on our way off the flier,” the handheld said, translating the Sovereign’s reply. “I put a corrective on your forehead. It’s not the right kind, though. The instructions say to take you to a doctor right away. The speaker is—”

“Translation preferences,” interrupted Ashiban. “Turn off emotional evaluation.” The handheld fell silent. “Have you called for help, Sovereign? Is help coming?”

“You are very stupid,” said Ashiban’s handheld. Said the Sovereign of Iss. “Or the concussion is dangerously severe. Our flier was shot down. Twenty minutes after that a flier goes back and forth over us as though it is looking for something, but we are in the High Mires, no one lives here. If we call for help, who is nearest? The people who shot us down.”

“Who would shoot us down?”

“Someone who wants war between Gidanta and Raksamat. Someone with a grudge against your mother, the sainted Ciwril Xidyla. Someone with a grudge against my grandmother, the previous Sovereign.”

“Not likely anyone Raksamat, then,” said Ashiban, and immediately regretted it. She was here to foster goodwill between her people and the Sovereign’s, because the Gidanta had trusted her mother, Ciwril Xidyla, and so they might listen to her daughter. “There are far more of you down here than Raksamat settlers. If it came to a war, the Raksamat here would be slaughtered. I don’t think any of us wants that.”

“We will argue in the future,” said the Sovereign. “So long as whoever it is does not manage to kill us. I have been thinking. They did not see us, under the plants, but maybe they will come back and look for us with infrared. They may come back soon. We have to reach the trees north of here.”

“I can use my handheld to just contact my own people,” said Ashiban. “Just them. I trust them.”

“Do you?” asked the Sovereign. “But maybe the deaths of some Raksamat settlers will be the excuse they need to bring a war that kills all the Gidanta so they can have the world for themselves. Maybe your death would be convenient for them.”

“That’s ridiculous!” exclaimed Ashiban. She pushed herself to sitting, not too quickly, wary of the pain in her head returning, of her lingering dizziness. “I’m talking about my friends.”

“Your friends are far away,” said the Sovereign. “They would call on others to come find us. Do you trust those others?” The girl seemed deadly serious. She sat up. “I don’t.” She tucked Ashiban’s handheld into her waistband, picked up her bundle of skirts and veils.

“That’s my handheld! I need it!”

“You’ll only call our deaths down with it,” said the Sovereign. “Die if you want to.” She rose, and trudged away through the stiff, spiky vegetation.

Ashiban considered tackling the girl and taking back her handheld. But the Sovereign was young, and while Ashiban was in fairly good shape considering her age, she had never been an athlete, even in her youth. And that was without considering the head injury.

She stood. Carefully, still dizzy, joints stiff. Where the flier had been was only black water, strips and chunks of moss floating on its surface, all of it surrounded by a flat carpet of yet more moss. She remembered the Sovereign saying, We’re standing on water! Remembered the swell and roll of the ground that had made her drop to her hands and knees.

She closed her eyes. She thought she vaguely remembered sitting in her seat on the flier, the Sovereign crying out, her interpreter getting out of his seat to rush forward to where the pilot slumped over the controls.

Shot down. If that was true, the Sovereign was right. Calling for help—if she could find some way to do that without her handheld—might well be fatal. Whoever it was had considered both Ashiban and the Sovereign of Iss acceptable losses. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted both of them dead. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted the war that had threatened for the past two years to become deadly real.

But nobody wanted that. Not even the Gidanta, who had never been happy with Ashiban’s people’s presence in the system, wanted that, Ashiban was sure.

She opened her eyes. Saw the girl’s back as she picked her way through the mire. Saw far off on the northern horizon the trees the girl had mentioned. “Ancestors!” cried Ashiban. “I’m too old for this.” And she shouldered her bag and followed the Sovereign of Iss.

Eventually Ashiban caught up, though the Sovereign didn’t acknowledge her in any way. They trudged through the hip-high scrub in silence for some time, only making the occasional hiss of annoyance at particularly troublesome branches. The clear blue sky clouded over, and a damp-smelling wind rose. A relief—the bright sun had hurt Ashiban’s eyes. As the trees on the horizon became more definitely a band of trees—still dismayingly far off—Ashiban’s thoughts, which had this whole time been slippery and tenuous, began to settle into something like a comprehensible pattern.

Shot down. Ashiban was sure none of her people wanted war. Though off-planet the Raksamat weren’t quite so vulnerable—were, in fact, much better armed. The ultimate outcome of an actual war would probably not favor the Gidanta. Or Ashiban didn’t think so. It was possible some Raksamat faction actually wanted such a war. And Ashiban wasn’t really anyone of any significance to her own people.

Her mother had been. Her mother, Ciwril Xidyla, had negotiated the Treaty of Eatu with the then Sovereign of Iss, ensuring the right of the Raksamat to live peacefully in the system, and on the planet. Ciwril had been widely admired among both Raksamat and Gidanta. As her daughter, Ashiban was only a sign, an admonition to remember her mother. If her side could think it acceptable to sacrifice the lives of their own people on the planet, they would certainly not blink at sacrificing Ashiban herself. She didn’t want to believe that, though, that her own people would do such a thing.

Would the Gidanta be willing to kill their own Sovereign for the sake of a war? An hour ago—or however long they had been trudging across the mire, Ashiban wasn’t sure—she’d have said certainly not. The Sovereign of Iss was a sacred figure. She was the conduit between the Gidanta and the spirit of the world of Iss, which spoke to them with the Sovereign’s voice. Surely they wouldn’t kill her just to forward a war that would be disastrous for both sides?

“Sovereign.”

A meter ahead of Ashiban, the girl kept trudging. Looked briefly over her shoulder. “What?”

“Where are you going?”

The Sovereign didn’t even turn her head this time. “There’s a monitoring station on the North Udran Plain.”

That had to be hundreds of kilometers away, and that wasn’t counting the fact that if this was indeed the High Mires, they were on the high side of the Scarp and would certainly have to detour to get down to the plains.

“On foot? That could take weeks, if we even ever get there. We have no food, no water.” Well, Ashiban had about a third of a liter in a bottle in her bag, but that hardly counted. “No camping equipment.”

The Sovereign just scoffed and kept walking.

“Young lady,” began Ashiban, but then remembered herself at that age. Her own children and grandchildren. Adolescence was trying enough without the fate of your people resting on your shoulders, and being shot down and stranded in a bog. “I thought the current Sovereign was fifty or sixty. The daughter of the woman who was Sovereign when my mother was here last.”

“You’re not supposed to talk like we’re all different people,” said the girl. “We’re all the voice of the world spirit. And you mean my aunt. She abdicated last week.”

“Abdicated!” Mortified by her mistake—Ashiban had been warned over and over about the nature of the Sovereign of Iss, that she was not an individual, that referring to her as such would be an offense. “I didn’t know that was possible.” And surely at a time like this, the Sovereign wouldn’t want to drop so much responsibility on a teenager.

“Of course it’s possible. It’s just a regular priesthood. It never was particularly special. It was you Raksamat who insisted on translating Sovereign as Sovereign. And it’s you Raksamat whose priests are always trancing out and speaking for your ancestors. Voice of Iss doesn’t mean that at all.”

“Translating Sovereign as Sovereign?” asked Ashiban. “What is that supposed to mean?” The girl snorted. “And how can the Voice of Iss not mean exactly that?” The Sovereign didn’t answer, just kept walking.

After a long silence, Ashiban said, “Then why do any of the Gidanta listen to you? And who is it my mother was negotiating with?”

The Sovereign looked back at Ashiban and rolled her eyes. “With the interpreter, of course. And if your mother didn’t know that, she was completely stupid. And nobody listens to me.” The voice of the translating handheld was utterly calm and neutral, but the girl’s tone was contemptuous. “That’s why I’m stuck here. And it wasn’t about us listening to the voice of the planet. It was about you listening to us. You wouldn’t talk to the Terraforming Council because you wouldn’t accept they were an authority, and besides, you didn’t like what they were saying.”

“An industrial association is not a government!” Seeing the girl roll her eyes again, Ashiban wondered fleetingly what her words sounded like in Gidantan—if the handheld was making industrial association and government into the same words, the way it obviously had when it had said for the girl, moments ago, translating Sovereign as Sovereign. But that was ridiculous. The two weren’t the same thing at all.

The Sovereign stopped. Turned to face Ashiban. “We have been here for two thousand years. For all that time, we have been working on this planet, to make it a place we could live without interference. We came here, to this place without an intersystem gate, so that no one would bother us and we could live in peace. You turned up less than two centuries ago, now most of the hard work is done, and you want to tell us what to do with our planet, and who is or isn’t an authority!”

“We were refugees. We came here by accident, and we can’t very well leave. And we brought benefits. You’ve been cut off from the outside for so long, you didn’t have medical correctives. Those have saved lives, Sovereign. And we’ve brought other things.” Including weapons the Gidanta didn’t have. “Including our own knowledge of terraforming, and how to best manage a planet.”

“And you agreed, your own mother, the great Ciwril Xidyla, agreed that no one would settle on the planet without authorization from the Terraforming Council! And yet there are dozens of Raksamat farmsteads just in the Saunn foothills, and more elsewhere.”

“That wasn’t the agreement. The treaty explicitly states that we have a right to be here, and a right to share in the benefits of living on this planet. Your own grandmother agreed to that! And small farmsteads are much better for the planet than the cities the Terraforming Council is intending.” Wind gusted, and a few fat drops of rain fell.

“My grandmother agreed to nothing! It was the gods-cursed interpreter who made the agreement. And he was appointed by the Terraforming Council, just like all of them! And how dare you turn up here after we’ve done all the hard work and think because you brought us some technology you can tell us what to do with our planet!”

“How can you own a planet? You can’t, it’s ridiculous! There’s more than enough room for all of us.”

“I’ve memorized it, you know,” said the Sovereign. “The entire agreement. It’s not that long. Settlement will only proceed according to the current consensus regarding the good of the planet. That’s what it says, right there in the second paragraph.”

Ashiban knew that sentence by heart. Everyone knew that sentence by now. Arguments over what current consensus regarding the good of the planet might mean were inescapable—and generally, in Ashiban’s opinion, made in bad faith. The words were clear enough. “There’s nothing about the Terraforming Council in that sentence.” Like most off-planet Raksamat, Ashiban didn’t speak the language of the Gidanta. But—also like most off-planet Raksamat—she had a few words and phrases, and she knew the Gidantan for Terraforming Council. Had heard the girl speak the sentence, knew there was no mention of the council.

The Sovereign cried out in apparent anger and frustration. “How can you? How can you stand there and say that, as though you have not just heard me say it?”

Overhead, barely audible over the sound of the swelling rain, the hum of a flier engine. The Sovereign looked up.

“It’s help,” said Ashiban. Angry, yes, but she could set that aside at the prospect of rescue. Of soon being somewhere warm, and dry, and comfortable. Her clothes—plain green trousers and shirt, simple, soft flat shoes—had not been chosen with any anticipation of a trek through mud and weeds, or standing in a rain shower. “They must be looking for us.”

The Sovereign’s eyes widened. She spun and took off running through the thick, thigh-high plants, toward the trees.

“Wait!” cried Ashiban, but the girl kept moving.

Ashiban turned to scan the sky, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand. Was there anything she could do to attract the attention of the flier? Her own green clothes weren’t far off the green of the plants she stood among, but she didn’t trust the flat, brownish-green mossy stretches that she and the Sovereign had been avoiding. She had nothing that would light up, and the girl had fled with Ashiban’s handheld, which she could have used to try to contact the searchers.

A crack echoed across the mire, and a few meters to Ashiban’s left, leaves and twigs exploded. The wind gusted again, harder than before, and she shivered.

And realized that someone had just fired at her. That had been a gunshot, and there was no one here to shoot at her except that approaching flier, which was, Ashiban saw, coming straight toward her, even though with the clouds and the rain, and the green of her clothes and the green of the plants she stood in, she could not have been easy to see.

Except maybe in the infrared. Even without the cold rain coming down, she must glow bright and unmistakable in infrared.

Ashiban turned and ran. Or tried to, wading through the plants toward the trees, twigs catching her trousers. Another crack, and she couldn’t go any faster than she was, though she tried, and the wind blew harder, and she hoped she was moving toward the trees.

Three more shots in quick succession, the wind blowing harder, nearly pushing her over, and Ashiban stumbled out of the plants onto a stretch of open moss that trembled under her as she ran, gasping, cold, and exhausted, toward another patch of those thigh-high weeds, and the shadow of trees beyond. Below her feet the moss began to come apart, fraying, loosening, one more wobbling step and she would sink into the black water of the mire below, but another shot cracked behind her and she couldn’t stop, and there was no safe direction, she could only go forward. She ran on. And then, with hopefully solid ground a single step ahead, the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, and the moss gave way underneath her.

She plunged downward, into cold water. Made a frantic, scrabbling grab, got hold of one tough plant stem. Tried to pull herself up, but could not. The rain poured down, and her grip on the plant stem began to slip.

A hand grabbed her arm. Someone shouted something incomprehensible—it was the Sovereign of Iss, rain streaming down her face, braids plastered against her neck and shoulders. The girl grabbed the back of Ashiban’s shirt with her other hand, leaned back, pulling Ashiban up a few centimeters, and Ashiban reached forward and grabbed another handful of plant, and somehow scrambled free of the water, onto the land, and she and the Sovereign half ran, half stumbled forward into the trees.

Where the rain was less but still came down. And they needed better cover, they needed to go deeper into the trees. Ancestors grant the woods ahead were thick enough to hide them from the flier, and Ashiban wanted to tell the Sovereign that they needed to keep running, but the girl didn’t stop until Ashiban, unable to move a single step more, collapsed at the bottom of a tree.

The Sovereign dropped down beside her. There was no sound but their gasping, and the rain hissing through the branches above.

One of Ashiban’s shoes had come off, somewhere. Her arm, which the Sovereign had pulled on to get her up out of the water, ached. Her back hurt, and her legs. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and she shivered, with cold or with fear she wasn’t sure.

The rain lessened not long after, and stopped at some point during the night. Ashiban woke shivering, the Sovereign huddled beside her. Pale sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, and the leaf-covered ground was sodden. So was Ashiban.

She was hungry, too. Wasn’t food the whole point of planets? Surely there would be something to eat, it would just be a question of knowing what there was, and how to eat it safely. Water might well be a bigger problem than food. Ashiban opened her bag—which by some miracle had stayed on her shoulder through everything—and found her half-liter bottle of water, still about three-quarters full. If she’d had her wits about her last night, she’d have opened it in the rain, to collect as much as she could.

“Well,” Ashiban said, “here we are.”

Silence. Not a word from the handheld. The Sovereign uncurled herself from where she huddled against Ashiban. Put a hand on her waist, where the handheld had been tucked into her waistband. Looked at Ashiban.

The handheld was gone. “Oh, Ancestors,” said Ashiban. And after another half-panicked second, carefully got to her feet from off the ground—something that hadn’t been particularly easy for a decade or two, even without yesterday’s hectic flight and a night spent cold and soaking wet, sleeping sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree—and retraced their steps. The Sovereign joined her.

As far back as they went (apparently neither of them was willing to go all the way back to the mire), they found only bracken, and masses of wet, dead leaves.

Ashiban looked at the damp and shivering Sovereign. Who looked five or six years younger than she’d looked yesterday. The Sovereign said nothing, but what was there to say? Without the handheld, or some other translation device, they could barely talk to each other at all. Ashiban herself knew only a few phrases in Gidantan. Hello and goodbye and I don’t understand Gidantan. She could count from one to twelve. A few words and phrases more, none of them applicable to being stranded in the woods on the edge of the High Mires. Ironic, since her mother, Ciwril, had been an expert in the language. It was her mother’s work that had made the translation devices as useful as they were, that had allowed the Raksamat and Gidanta to speak to each other. And who is it my mother was negotiating with? With the interpreter, of course.

No point thinking about that just now. The immediate problem was more than enough.

Someone had shot down their flier yesterday, and then apparently flown away. Hours later they had returned, so that they could shoot at Ashiban and the Sovereign as they fled. It didn’t make sense.

The Gidanta had guns, of course, knew how to make them. But they didn’t have many. Since they had arrived here, most of their energies had been devoted to the terraforming of Iss, and during much of that time they’d lived in space, on stations, an environment in which projectile weapons potentially caused far more problems than they might solve, even when it came to deadly disputes.

That attitude had continued when they had moved down to the planet. There were police, and some of the Terraforming Council had bodyguards, and Ashiban didn’t doubt there were people who specialized in fighting, including firing guns, but there was no Gidanta military, no army, standing or otherwise. Fliers for cargo or for personal transport, but not for warfare. Guns for hunting, not designed to kill people efficiently.

The Raksamat, Ashiban’s own people, had come into the system armed. But none of those weapons were on the planet. Or Ashiban didn’t think they were. So, a hunting gun and a personal flier. She wanted to ask the Sovereign, standing staring at Ashiban, still shivering, if the girl had seen the other flier. But she couldn’t, not without that handheld.

But it didn’t matter, this moment, why it had happened the way it had. There was no way to tell who had tried to kill them. No way to know what or who they would find if they returned to the mire, to where their own flier had sunk under the black water and the moss.

Her thoughts were going in circles. Whether it was the night spent in the cold, and the hunger and the fear, or whether it was the remnants of her concussion—and what had the Sovereign of Iss said, that the corrective hadn’t been the right sort and she should get to a doctor as soon as possible?—or maybe all of those, Ashiban didn’t know.

Yesterday the Sovereign had said there was a monitoring station on the Udran Plains, which lay to the north of the Scarp. There would be people at a monitoring station—likely all of them Gidanta. Very possibly not favorably disposed toward Ashiban, no matter whose daughter she was.

But there would be dozens, maybe even hundreds of people at a monitoring station, any of whom might witness an attempt to murder Ashiban, and all of whom would be outraged at an attempt to harm the Sovereign of Iss. There was no one at the crash site on the mire to see what happened to them.

“Which way?” Ashiban asked the girl.

Who looked up at the leaf-dappled sky above them, and then pointed back into the woods, the way they had come. Said something Ashiban didn’t understand. Watched Ashiban expectantly. Something about the set of her jaw suggested to Ashiban that the girl was trying very hard not to cry.

“All right,” said Ashiban, and turned and began walking back the way they had come, the Sovereign of Iss alongside her.

They shared out the water between them as they went. There was less food in the woods than Ashiban would have expected, or at least neither of them knew where or how to find it. No doubt the Sovereign of Iss, at her age, was hungrier even than Ashiban, but she didn’t complain, just walked forward. Once they heard the distant sound of a flier, presumably looking for them, but the Sovereign of Iss showed no sign of being tempted to go back. Ashiban thought of those shots, of plunging into cold, black water, and shivered.

Despite herself, Ashiban began imagining what she would eat if she were at home. The nutrient cakes that everyone had eaten every day until they had established contact with the Gidanta. They were traditional for holidays, authentic Raksamat cuisine, and Ashiban’s grandmother had despised them, observed wryly on every holiday that her grandchildren would not eat them with such relish if that had been their only food for years. Ashiban would like a nutrient cake now.

Or some fish. Or snails. Surely there might be snails in the woods? But Ashiban wasn’t sure how to find them.

Or grubs. A handful of toasted grubs, with a little salt, maybe some cumin. At home they were an expensive treat, either harvested from a station’s agronomy unit, or shipped up from Iss itself. Ashiban remembered a school trip, once, when she’d been much, much younger, a tour of the station’s food-growing facilities, remembered an agronomist turning over the dirt beside a row of green, sharp-smelling plants to reveal a grub, curled and white in the dark soil. Remembered one of her schoolmates saying the sight made them hungry.

She stopped. Pushed aside the leaf mold under her feet. Looked around for a stick.

The Sovereign of Iss stopped, turned to look at Ashiban. Said something in Gidantan that Ashiban assumed was some version of What are you doing?

“Grubs,” said Ashiban. That word she knew—the Gidanta sold prepackaged toasted grubs harvested from their own orbital agronomy projects, and the name was printed on the package.

The Sovereign blinked at her. Frowned. Seemed to think for a bit, and then said, “Fire?” in Gidantan. That was another word Ashiban knew—nearly everyone in the system recognized words in either language that might turn up in a safety alert.

There was no way to make a fire that Ashiban could think of. Her bag held only their now nearly empty bottle of water. People who lived in space generally didn’t walk around with the means for producing an open flame. Here on Iss things might be different, but if the Sovereign had been carrying fire-making tools, she’d lost them in the mire. “No fire,” Ashiban said. “We’ll have to eat anything we find raw.” The Sovereign of Iss frowned, and then went kicking through the leaf mold for a couple of sturdy sticks.

The few grubs they dug up promised more nearby. There was no water to wash the dirt off them, and they were unpleasant to eat while raw and wiggling, but they were food.

Their progress slowed as they stopped every few steps to dig for more grubs, or to replace a broken stick. But after a few hours, or at least what Ashiban took to be a few hours—she had no way of telling time beyond the sunlight, and had no experience with that—their situation seemed immeasurably better than it had before they’d eaten.

They filled Ashiban’s bag with grubs, and walked on until night fell, and slept, shivering, huddled together. Ashiban was certain she would never be warm again, would always be chilled to her bones. But she could think straighter, or at least it seemed like she could. The girl’s plan to walk down to the plains was still outrageous, still seemed all but impossible, but it also seemed like the only way forward.

By the end of the next day, Ashiban was more sick of raw and gritty grubs than she could possibly say. And by the afternoon of the day after that, the trees thinned and they were faced with a wall of brambles. They turned to parallel the barrier, walked east for a while, until they came to a relatively clear space—a tunnel of thorny branches arching over a several-meters-wide shelf of reddish-brown rock jutting out of the soil. Ashiban peered through and saw horizon, gestured to the Sovereign of Iss to look.

The Sovereign pulled her head back out of the tunnel, looked at Ashiban, and said something long and incomprehensible.

“Right,” said Ashiban. In her own language. There was no point trying to ask her question in Gidantan. “Do we want to go through here and keep going north until we find the edge of the Scarp, and turn east until we find a way down to the plain? Or do we want to keep going east like we have been and hope we find something?”

With her free hand—her other one held the water bottle that no longer fit in Ashiban’s grub-filled bag—the Sovereign waved away the possibility of her having understood Ashiban.

Ashiban pointed north, toward the brambles. “Scarp,” she said, in Gidantan. It was famous enough that she knew that one.

“Yes,” agreed the Sovereign, in that same language. And then, to Ashiban’s surprise, added, in Raksamat, “See.” She held her hands up to her eyes, miming a scope. Then waved an arm expansively. “Scarp see big.”

“Good point,” agreed Ashiban. On the edge of the Scarp, they could see where they were, and take their direction from that, instead of wandering and hoping they arrived somewhere. “Yes,” she said in Gidantan. “Good.” She gestured at the thorny tunnel of brambles.

The Sovereign of Iss just stared at her. Ashiban sighed. Made sure her bag was securely closed. Gingerly got down on her hands and knees, lowered herself onto her stomach, and inched herself forward under the brambles.

The tunnel wasn’t long, just three or four meters, but Ashiban took it slowly, the bag dragging beside her, thorns tearing at her clothes and her face. Knees and wrists and shoulders aching. When she got home, she was going to talk to the doctor about joint repairs, even if having all of them done at once would lay her up for a week or more.

Her neck and shoulders as stiff as they were, Ashiban was looking down at the red-brown rock when she came out of the bramble tunnel. She inched herself carefully free of the thorns and then began to contemplate getting herself to her feet. She would wait for the Sovereign, perhaps, and let the girl help her to standing.

Ashiban pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and then reached forward. Her hand met nothingness. Unbalanced, tipping in the direction of her outstretched hand, she saw the edge of the rock she crawled on, and nothing else.

Nothing but air. And far, far below—nearly a kilometer, she remembered hearing in some documentary about the Scarp—the green haze of the plains. Behind her the Sovereign of Iss made a strangled cry, and grabbed Ashiban’s legs before she could tip all the way forward.

They stayed that way, frozen for a few moments, the Sovereign gripping Ashiban’s legs, Ashiban’s hand outstretched over the edge of the Scarp. Then the Sovereign whimpered. Ashiban wanted to join her. Wanted, actually, to scream. Carefully placed her outstretched hand on the edge of the cliff, and pushed herself back, and looked up.

The line of brambles stopped a bit more than a meter from the cliff edge. Room enough for her to scoot carefully over and sit. But the Sovereign would not let go of her legs. And Ashiban had no way to ask her to. Silently, and not for the first time, she cursed the loss of the handheld.

The Sovereign whimpered again. “Ashiban Xidyla!” she cried, in a quavering voice.

“I’m all right,” Ashiban said, and her own voice was none too steady. “I’m all right, you got me just in time. You can let go now.” But of course the girl couldn’t understand her. She tried putting one leg back, and slowly, carefully, the Sovereign let go and edged back into the tunnel of brambles. Slowly, carefully, Ashiban got herself from hands and knees to sitting by the mouth of that tunnel, and looked out over the edge of the Scarp.

A sheer cliff some six hundred kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high, the Scarp loomed over the Udran Plains to the north, grassland as far as Ashiban could see, here and there a patch of trees, or the blue and silver of water. Far off to the northwest shone the bright ribbon of a river.

In the middle of the green, on the side of a lake, lay a small collection of roads and buildings, how distant Ashiban couldn’t guess. “Sovereign, is that the monitoring station?” Ashiban didn’t see anything else, and it seemed to her that she could see quite a lot of the plains from where she sat. It struck her then that this could only be a small part of the plains, as long as the Scarp was, and she felt suddenly lost and despairing. “Sovereign, look!” She glanced over at the mouth of the bramble tunnel.

The Sovereign of Iss lay facedown, arms flat in front of her. She said something into the red-brown rock below her.

“Too high?” asked Ashiban.

“High,” agreed the Sovereign, into the rock, in her small bit of Raksamat. “Yes.”

And she had lunged forward to grab Ashiban and keep her from tumbling over the edge. “Look, Sovereign, is that the…” Ashiban wished she knew how to say monitoring station in Gidantan. Tried to remember what the girl had said, days ago, when she’d mentioned it, but Ashiban had only been listening to the handheld translation. “Look. See. Please, Sovereign.” Slowly, hesitantly, the Sovereign of Iss raised her head. Kept the rest of herself flat against the rock. Ashiban pointed. “How do we get there? How did you mean us to get there?” Likely there were ways to descend the cliff face. But Ashiban had no way of knowing where or how to do that. And given the state the Sovereign was in right now, Ashiban would guess she didn’t either. Hadn’t had any idea what she was getting into when she’d decided to come this way.

She’d have expected better knowledge of the planet from the Sovereign of Iss, the voice of the planet itself. But then, days back, the girl had said that it was Ashiban’s people, the Raksamat, who thought of that office in terms of communicating with the Ancestors, that it didn’t mean that at all to the Gidanta. Maybe that was true, and even if it wasn’t, this girl—Ashiban still didn’t know her name, likely never would, addressing her by it would be the height of disrespect even from her own mother now that she was the Sovereign—had been Sovereign of Iss for a few weeks at the most. The girl had almost certainly been well out of her depth from the moment her aunt had abdicated.

And likely she had grown up in one of the towns dotted around the surface of Iss. She might know quite a lot more about outdoor life than Ashiban did—but that didn’t mean she knew much about survival in the wilderness with no food or equipment.

Well. Obviously they couldn’t walk along the edge of the Scarp, not given the Sovereign’s inability to deal with heights. They would have to continue walking east along the bramble wall, to somewhere the Scarp was lower, or hope there was some town or monitoring station in their path.

“Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, and reached out to give the Sovereign’s shoulder a gentle push back toward the other side of the brambles. Saw the girl’s back and shoulders shaking, realized she was sobbing silently. “Let’s go back,” Ashiban said again. Searched her tiny Gidantan vocabulary for something useful. “Go,” she said, finally, in Gidantan, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. After a moment, the Sovereign began to scoot backward, never raising her head more than a few centimeters. Ashiban followed.

Crawling out of the brambles back into the woods, Ashiban found the Sovereign sitting on the ground, still weeping. As Ashiban came entirely clear of the thorns, the girl stood and helped Ashiban to her feet and then, still crying, not saying a single word or looking at Ashiban at all, turned and began walking east.

The next day they found a small stream. The Sovereign lay down and put her face in the water, drank for a good few minutes, and then filled the bottle and brought it to Ashiban. They followed the stream’s wandering east-now-south-now-east-again course for another three days as it broadened into something almost approaching a river.

At the end of the third day, they came to a small, gently arched bridge, mottled gray and brown and beige, thick plastic spun from whatever scraps had been thrown into the hopper of the fabricator, with a jagged five- or six-centimeter jog around the middle, where the fabricator must have gotten hung up and then been kicked back into action.

On the far side of the bridge, on the other bank of the stream, a house and outbuildings, the same mottled gray and brown as the bridge. An old, dusty groundcar. A garden, a young boy pulling weeds, three or four chickens hunting for bugs among the vegetables.

As Ashiban and the Sovereign came over the bridge, the boy looked up from his work in the garden, made a silent O with his mouth, turned and ran into the house. “Raksamat,” said Ashiban, but of course the Sovereign must have realized as soon as they set eyes on those fabricated buildings.

A woman came out of the house, in shirt and trousers and stocking feet, gray-shot hair in braids tied behind her back. A hunting gun in her hand. Not aimed at Ashiban or the Sovereign. Just very conspicuously there.

The sight of that gun made Ashiban’s heart pound. But she would almost be glad to let this woman shoot her so long as she let Ashiban eat something besides grubs first. And let her sit in a chair. Still, she wasn’t desperate enough to speak first. She was old enough to be this woman’s mother.

“Elder,” said the woman with the gun. “To what do we owe the honor?”

It struck Ashiban that these people—probably on the planet illegally, one of those Raksamat settler families that had so angered the Gidanta recently—were unlikely to have any desire to encourage a war that would leave them alone and vulnerable here on the planet surface. “Our flier crashed, child, and we’ve been walking for days. We are in sore need of some hospitality.” Some asperity crept into her voice, and she couldn’t muster up the energy to feel apologetic about it.

The woman with the gun stared at Ashiban, and her gaze shifted over Ashiban’s shoulder, presumably to the Sovereign of Iss, who had dropped back when they’d crossed the bridge. “You’re Ashiban Xidyla,” said the woman with the gun. “And this is the Sovereign of Iss.”

Ashiban turned to look at the Sovereign. Who had turned her face away, held her hands up as though to shield herself.

“Someone tried to kill us,” Ashiban said, turning back to the woman with the gun. “Someone shot down our flier.”

“Did they now,” said the woman with the gun. “They just found the flier last night. It’s been all over the news, that the pilot and the Sovereign’s interpreter were inside, but not yourself, Elder, or her. Didn’t say anything about it being shot down, but I can’t say I’m surprised.” She considered Ashiban and the Sovereign for a moment. “Well, come in.”

Inside they found a large kitchen, fabricator-made benches at a long table where a man sat plucking a chicken. He looked up at their entrance, then down again. Ashiban and the Sovereign sat at the other end of the table, and the boy from the garden brought them bowls of pottage. The Sovereign ate with one hand still spread in front of her face.

“Child,” said Ashiban, forcing herself to stop shoveling food into her mouth, “is there a cloth or a towel the Sovereign could use? She lost her veils.”

The woman stared at Ashiban, incredulous. Looked for a moment as though she was going to scoff, or say something dismissive, but instead left the room and came back with a large, worn dish towel, which she held out for the Sovereign.

Who stared at the cloth a moment, through her fingers, and then took it and laid it over her head, and then pulled one corner across her face, so that she could still see.

Their host leaned against a cabinet. “So,” she said, “the Gidanta wanted an excuse to kill all us Raksamat on the planet, and shot your flier out of the sky.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Ashiban. The comfort from having eaten actual cooked food draining away at the woman’s words. “I don’t know who shot our flier down.”

“Who else would it be?” asked the woman bitterly. The Sovereign sat silent beside Ashiban. Surely she could not understand what was being said, but she was perceptive enough to guess what the topic was, to understand the tone of voice. “Not that I had much hope for this settlement you’re supposedly here to make. All respect, Elder, but things are as they are, and I won’t lie.”

“No, of course, child,” replied Ashiban. “You shouldn’t lie.”

“It’s always us who get sold out, in the agreements and the settlements,” said the woman. “We have every right to be here. As much right as the Gidanta. That’s what the agreement your mother made said, isn’t it? But then when we’re actually here, oh, no, that won’t do, we’re breaking the law. And does your mother back us up? Does the Assembly? No, of course not. We aren’t Xidylas or Ontrils or Lajuds or anybody important. Maybe if my family had an elder with a seat in the Assembly it would be different, but if we did, we wouldn’t be here. Would we?”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, child,” replied Ashiban. “When the Raksamat farmsteads were first discovered, the Gidanta wanted to find you all and expel you. They wanted the Assembly to send help to enforce that. In the end my mother convinced everyone to leave the farmsteads alone while the issues were worked out.”

“Your mother!” cried the woman, their host. “All respect, Elder, but your mother might have told them to hold to the agreement she worked out and the Gidanta consented to, in front of their ancestors. It’s short and plain enough.” She gestured at the Sovereign. “Can you tell her that?”

The front door opened on three young women talking, pulling off their boots. One of them glanced inside, saw Ashiban and the Sovereign, the other woman, presumably a relative of theirs, standing straight and angry by the cabinet. Elbowed the others, who fell silent.

Ashiban said, “I don’t speak much Gidantan, child. You probably speak more than I do. And the Sovereign doesn’t have much Raksamat. I lost my handheld in the crash, so there’s no way to translate.” And the Sovereign was just a girl, with no more power in this situation than Ashiban herself.

The man at the end of the table spoke up. “Any news?” Directed at the three young women, who had come in and begun to dish themselves out some pottage.

“We didn’t see anything amiss,” said one of the young women. “But Lyek stopped on their way home from town, they said they went in to take their little one to the doctor. It was unfriendly. More unfriendly than usual, I mean.” She sat down across the table with her bowl, cast a troubled glance at the Sovereign, though her tone of voice stayed matter-of-fact. “They said a few people in the street shouted at them to get off the planet, and someone spit on them and called them stinking weevils. When they protested to the constable, she said it was no good complaining about trouble they’d brought on themselves, and wouldn’t do anything. They said the constable had been standing right there.”

“It sounds like the Sovereign and I need to get into town as soon as possible,” suggested Ashiban. Though she wondered what sort of reception she herself might meet, in a Gidanta town where people were behaving that way toward Raksamat settlers.

“I think,” said the woman, folding her arms and leaning once more against the cabinet, “that we’ll make our own decisions about what to do next, and not take orders from the sainted Ciwril Xidyla’s daughter, who doesn’t even speak Gidantan. Your pardon, Elder, but I honestly don’t know what they sent you here for. You’re welcome to food and drink, and there’s a spare bed upstairs you and her ladyship there can rest in. None of us here means you any ill. But I think we’re done taking orders from the Assembly, who can’t even bother to speak for us when we need it.”

If this woman had been one of her own daughters, Ashiban would have had sharp words for her. But this was not her daughter, and the situation was a dangerous one—and moreover, it was far more potentially dangerous for the Sovereign, sitting silent beside her, face still covered.

And Ashiban hadn’t reached her age without learning a thing or two. “Of course, child,” she said. “We’re so grateful for your help. The food was delicious, but we’ve walked for days and we’re so very tired. If we could wash, and maybe take you up on the offer of that bed.”

Ashiban and the Sovereign each had another bowl of pottage, and Ashiban turned her bagful of grubs over to the man with the chicken. The three young women finished eating in silence, and two went up, at an order from the older woman, to make the bed. The third showed Ashiban and the Sovereign where they could wash.

The bed turned out to be in its own tiny chamber, off an upstairs corridor, and not in one corner of a communal sleeping room. The better to keep watch on them, Ashiban thought, but also at least on the surface a gesture of respect. This small bedroom probably belonged to the most senior member of the household.

Ashiban thanked the young woman who had shown them upstairs. Closed the door—no lock, likely the only door in this house that locked was that front door they had come through. Looked at the Sovereign, standing beside the bed, the cloth still held across her mouth. Tried to remember how to say sleep in Gidantan.

Settled for Raksamat. “Sleep now,” Ashiban said, and mimed laying her head on her hand, closed her eyes. Opened them, sat down on one side of the bed, patted the other. Lay down and closed her eyes.

Next she knew, the room was dark and silent, and she ached, even more than she had during days of sleeping on the ground. The Sovereign lay beside her, breathing slow and even.

Ashiban rose, gingerly, felt her way carefully to the door. Opened it, slowly. Curled in the doorway lay the young woman who had shown them to the room, her head pillowed on one arm, a lamp on the floor by her hand, turned low. Next to her, a gun. The young woman snored softly. The house was otherwise silent.

Ashiban had entertained vague thoughts of what she would do at this moment, waking in the night when the rest of the house was likely asleep. Had intended to think more on the feasibility of those vague thoughts, and the advisability of following up on them.

She went back into the room. Shook the Sovereign awake. Finger on her lips, Ashiban showed her the sleeping young woman outside the door. The gun. The Sovereign of Iss, still shaking off the daze of sleep, blinked, frowned, went back to the bed to pick up the cloth she’d used to cover her face, and then stepped over the sleeping young woman and out into the silent corridor. Ashiban followed.

She was prepared to tell anyone who met them that they needed to use the sanitary facility. But they met no one, walked through the dark and silent house, out the door and into the starlit night. The dark, the damp, the cool air, the sound of the stream. Ashiban felt a sudden familiar ache of wishing-to-be-home. Wishing to be warmer. Wishing to have eaten more than what little she and the Sovereign could forage. And, she realized now they were outside, she had no idea what to do next.

Apparently not burdened with the same doubts, the Sovereign walked straight and without hesitation to the groundcar. Ashiban hastened to catch up with her. “I can’t drive one of these,” she whispered to the Sovereign, pointlessly. The girl could almost certainly not understand her. Did not even turn her head to look at Ashiban or acknowledge that she’d said anything, but opened the groundcar door and climbed into the driver’s seat. Frowned over the controls for a few minutes, stretched out to a near-eternity by Ashiban’s fear that someone in the house would wake and see that they were gone.

The Sovereign did something to the controls, and the groundcar started up with a low hum. Ashiban went around to the passenger side, climbed in, and before she could even settle in the seat the groundcar was moving and they were off.

At first Ashiban sat tense in the passenger seat, turned as best she could to look behind. But after a half hour or so of cautious, bumpy going, it seemed to her that they were probably safely away. She took a deep breath. Faced forward again, with some relief—looking back hadn’t been terribly comfortable for her neck or her back. Looked at the Sovereign, driving with utter concentration. Well, it was hardly a surprise, now Ashiban thought of it. The Sovereign had grown up down here, doubtless groundcars were an everyday thing to her.

What next? They needed to find out where that town was. They might need to defend themselves sometime in the near future. Ashiban looked around to see what there might be in the car that they could use. Back behind the seats was an assortment of tools and machines that Ashiban assumed were necessary for farming on a planet. A shovel. Some rope. A number of other things she couldn’t identify.

A well between her seat and the Sovereign’s held a tangled assortment of junk. A small knife. A doll made partly from pieces of fabricator plastic and partly from what appeared to be bits of an old, worn-out shirt. Bits of twine. An empty cup. Some sort of clip with a round gray blob adhesived to it. “What’s this?” asked Ashiban aloud.

The Sovereign glanced over at Ashiban. With one hand she took the clip from Ashiban’s hand, flicked the side of it with her thumb, and held it out to Ashiban, her attention back on the way ahead of them. Said something.

“It’s a translator,” said the little blob on the clip in a quiet, tinny voice. “A lot of weevils won’t take their handheld into town because they’re afraid the constable will take it from them and use the information on it against their families. Or if you’re out working and have your hands full but think you might need to talk to a weevil.” A pause, in which the Sovereign seemed to realize what she’d said. “You’re not a weevil,” said the little blob.

“It’s not a very nice thing to say.” Though of course Ashiban had heard Raksamat use slurs against the Gidanta, at home, and not thought twice about it. Until now.

“Oh, Ancestors!” cried the Sovereign, and smacked the groundcar steering in frustration. “I always say the wrong thing. I wish Timran hadn’t died, I wish I still had an interpreter.” Tears filled her eyes, shone in the dim light from the groundcar controls.

“Why are you swearing by the Ancestors?” asked Ashiban. “You don’t believe in them. Or I thought you didn’t.” One tear escaped, rolled down the Sovereign’s cheek. Ashiban picked up the end of the old dishcloth that was currently draped over the girl’s shoulder and wiped it away.

“I didn’t swear by the Ancestors!” the Sovereign protested. “I didn’t swear by anything. I just said Oh, Ancestors.” They drove in silence for a few minutes. “Wait,” said the Sovereign then. “Let me try something. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“This: Ancestors. What did I say?”

“You said Ancestors.”

“Now. Pingberries. What did I say?”

“You said pingberries.”

The Sovereign brought the groundcar to a stop, and turned to look at Ashiban. “Now. Oh, Ancestors!” as though she were angry or frustrated. “There. Do you hear? Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.” Ashiban had heard it, plain and clear. “You said Oh, pingberries, but the translator said it was Oh, Ancestors. How did that happen?”

“Pingberries sounds a lot like… something that isn’t polite,” the Sovereign said. “So it’s the kind of swear your old uncle would use in front of the in-laws.”

“What?” asked Ashiban, and then, realizing. “Whoever entered the data for the translator thought it was equivalent to swearing by the Ancestors.”

“It might be,” said the Sovereign, “and actually that’s really useful, that it knows when I’m talking about wanting to eat some pingberries, or when I’m frustrated and swearing. That’s good, it means the translators are working well. But Ancestors and pingberries, those aren’t exactly the same. Do you see?”

“The treaty,” Ashiban realized. “That everyone thinks the other side is translating however they want.” And probably not just the treaty.

It had been Ciwril Xidyla who had put together the first, most significant collection of linguistic data on Gidantan. It was her work that had led to the ease and usefulness of automatic translation between the two languages. Even aside from automatic translation, Ashiban suspected that her mother’s work was the basis for nearly every translation between Raksamat and Gidantan for very nearly a century. That was one reason why Ciwril Xidyla was as revered as she was, by everyone in the system. Translation devices like this little blob on a clip had made communication possible between Raksamat and Gidanta. Had made peaceful agreement possible, let people talk to each other whenever they needed it. Had probably saved lives. But. “We can’t be the first to notice this.”

The Sovereign set the groundcar moving again. “Noticing something and realizing it’s important aren’t the same thing. And maybe lots of people have noticed, but they don’t say anything because it suits them to have things as they are. We need to tell the Terraforming Council. We need to tell the Assembly. We need to tell everybody, and we need to retranslate the treaty. We need more people to actually learn both languages instead of only using that thing.” She gestured toward the translator clipped to Ashiban’s collar.

“We need the translator to be better, Sovereign. Not everyone can easily learn another language.” More people learning the two languages ought to help with that. More people with firsthand experience to correct the data. “But we need the translator to know more than what my mother learned.” Had the translations been unchanged since her mother’s time? Ashiban didn’t think that was likely. But the girl’s guess that it suited at least some of the powers that be to leave problems—perhaps certain problems—uncorrected struck Ashiban as sadly possible. “Sovereign, who’s going to listen to us?”

“I am the Sovereign of Iss!” the girl declared. “And you are the daughter of Ciwril Xidyla! They had better listen to us.”

Shortly after the sky began to lighten, they came to a real, honest-to-goodness road. The Sovereign pulled the groundcar up to its edge and then stopped. The road curved away on either side, so that they could see only the brief stretch in front of them, and trees all around. “Right or left?” asked the Sovereign. There was no signpost, no indication which way town was, or even any evidence beyond the existence of the road itself that there was a town anywhere nearby.

When Ashiban didn’t answer, the Sovereign slid out of the driver’s seat and walked out to the center of the road. Stood looking one way, and then the other.

“I think the town is to the right,” she said, when she’d gotten back in. “And I don’t think we have time to get away.”

“I don’t understand,” Ashiban protested. But then she saw lights through the trees, to the right. “Maybe they’ll drive on by.” But she remembered the young woman’s story of how a Raksamat settler had been received in the town yesterday. And she was here to begin with because of rising tensions between Gidanta and Raksamat, and whoever had shot their flier down, days ago, had fairly obviously wanted to increase those tensions, not defuse them.

And they were sitting right in the middle of the path to the nearest Raksamat farmstead. Which had no defenses beyond a few hunting guns and maybe a lock on the front door.

A half dozen groundcars came around the bend in the road. Three of them the sort made to carry loads, but the wide, flat cargo areas held people instead of cargo. Several of those people were carrying guns.

The first car in the procession slowed as it approached the path where Ashiban and the Sovereign sat. Began to turn, and stopped when its lights brushed their stolen groundcar. Nothing more happened for the next few minutes, except that the people in the backs of the cargo cars leaned and craned to see what was going on.

“Expletive,” said the Sovereign. “I’m getting out to talk to them. You should stay here.”

“What could you possibly say to them, child?” But there wasn’t much good doing anything else, either.

“I don’t know,” replied the girl. “But you should stay here.”

Slowly the Sovereign opened the groundcar door, slid out again. Closed the door, pulled her cloth up over her face, and walked out into the pool of light at the edge of the road.

Getting out of the passenger seat would be slow and painful, and Ashiban really didn’t want to. But the Sovereign looked so small standing by the side of the road, facing the other groundcar. Ashiban opened her own door and clambered awkwardly down. Just as she came up behind the Sovereign, the passenger door of the groundcar facing them opened, and a woman stepped out onto the road.

“I am the Sovereign of Iss,” announced the Sovereign. Murmured the translator clipped to Ashiban’s shirt. “Just what do you think you’re doing here?” Attempting more or less credibly to sound imperious even despite the one hand holding the cloth over her face, but the girl’s voice shook a little.

“Glad to see you safe, Sovereign,” said the woman, “but I am constable of this precinct and you are blocking my path. Town’s that way.” She pointed back along the way the procession of groundcars had come.

“And where are you going, Constable,” asked the Sovereign, “with six groundcars and dozens of people behind you, some of them with guns? There’s nothing behind us but trees.”

“There are three weevil farmsteads in those woods,” cried someone from the back of a groundcar. “And we’ve had it with the weevils thinking they own our planet. Get out of the way, girl!”

“We know the Raksamat tried to kill you,” put in the constable. “We know they shot down your flier. It wasn’t on the news, but people talk. Do they want a war? An excuse to try to kill us all? We won’t be pushed any farther. The weevils are here illegally, and they will get off this planet and back to their ships. Today, if I have anything to say about it.”

“This is Ciwril Xidyla’s daughter next to me,” said the Sovereign. “She came here to work things out, not to try to kill anyone.”

“That would be the Ciwril Xidyla who translated the treaty so the weevils could read it to suit them, would it?” asked the constable. There was a murmur of agreement from behind her. “And wave it in our faces like we agreed to something we didn’t?”

Somewhere overhead, the sound of a flier engine. Ashiban’s first impulse was to run into the trees. Instead, she said, “Constable, the Sovereign is right. I came here to try to help work out these difficulties. Whoever tried to kill us, they failed, and the sooner we get back to work, the better.”

“We don’t mean you any harm, old woman,” said the constable. “But you’d best get out of our way, because we are coming through here, whether you move or not.”

“To do what?” asked Ashiban. “To kill the people on those farmsteads behind us?”

“We’re not going to kill anybody,” said the constable, plainly angry at the suggestion. “We just want them to know we mean business. If you won’t move, we’ll move you.” And when neither Ashiban nor the Sovereign replied, the constable turned to the people on the back of the vehicle behind her and gestured them forward.

A moment of hesitation, and then one of them jumped off the groundcar, and another few followed.

Beside Ashiban the Sovereign took a shaking breath and cried, “I am the Sovereign of Iss! You will go back to the town.” The advancing people froze, staring at her.

“You’re a little girl in a minor priesthood, who ought to be home minding her studies,” said the constable. “It’s not your fault your grandmother made the mistake of negotiating with the weevils, and it’s not your fault your aunt quit and left you in the middle of this, but don’t be thinking you’ve got any authority here.” The people who had leaped off the groundcar still hesitated.

The Sovereign, visibly shaking now, pointed at the constable with her free hand. “I am the voice of the planet! You can’t tell the planet to get out of your way.”

“Constable!” said one of the people who had come off the groundcar. “A moment.” And went over to say something quiet in the constable’s ear.

The Sovereign said, low enough so only Ashiban could hear it, “Tell the planet to get out of the way? How could I say something so stupid?”

And then lights came sweeping around the left-hand bend of the road, and seven or eight groundcars came into view, and stopped short of where the constable stood in the road.

A voice called out, “This is Delegate Garas of the Terraforming Council Enforcement Commission.” Ashiban knew that name. Everyone in the system knew that name. Delegate Garas was the highest-ranking agent of the Gidantan Enforcement Commission, and answered directly to the Terraforming Council. “Constable, you have overstepped your authority.” A man stepped out from behind the glare of the lights. “This area is being monitored.” The sound of a flier above, louder. “Anyone who doesn’t turn around and go home this moment will be officially censured.”

The person who had been talking to the constable said, “We were just about to leave, Delegate.”

“Good,” said the delegate. “Don’t delay on my account, please. And, Constable, I’ll meet with you when I get into town this afternoon.”

The Commission agents settled Ashiban and the Sovereign into the back of a groundcar, and poured them hot barley tea from a flask. The tea hardly had time to cool before Delegate Garas slid into the passenger seat in front and turned to speak to them. “Sovereign. Elder.” With little bows of his head. “I apologize for not arriving sooner.”

“We had everything under control,” said the Sovereign loftily, cloth still held over her face. Though, sitting close next to her as Ashiban was, she could feel the Sovereign was still shaking.

“Did you now. Well. We only were able to start tracking you when we found the crash site. Which took much longer than it should have. The surveillance in the High Mires and the surrounding areas wasn’t functioning properly.”

“That’s a coincidence,” Ashiban remarked drily.

“Not a coincidence at all,” the delegate replied. “It was sabotage. An inside job.”

The Sovereign made a small, surprised noise. “It wasn’t the weev—the Raksamat?”

“Oh, they were involved, too.” Delegate Garas found a cup somewhere in the seat beside him, poured himself some barley tea. “There’s a faction of Raksamat—I’m sure this won’t surprise you, Elder—who resent the illegal settlers for grabbing land unauthorized, but who also feel that the Assembly will prefer certain families once Raksamat can legally come down to the planet, and between the two all the best land and opportunities will be gone. There is also—Sovereign, I don’t know if you follow this sort of thing—a faction of Gidanta who believe that the Terraforming Council is, in their turn, arranging things to profit themselves and their friends, and leaving everyone else out. Their accusations may in fact be entirely accurate and just, but that is of course no reason to conspire with aggrieved Raksamat to somehow be rid of both Council and Assembly and divide the spoils between themselves.”

“That’s a big somehow,” Ashiban observed.

“It is,” Delegate Garas acknowledged. “And they appear not to have had much talent for that sort of undertaking. We have most of them under arrest.” The quiet, calm voice of a handheld murmured, too low for Ashiban’s translator clip to pick up. “Ah,” said Delegate Garas. “That’s all of them now. The trials should be interesting. Fortunately, they’re not my department. It’s Judicial’s problem now. So, as I said, we were only able to even begin tracking you sometime yesterday. And we were already in the area looking for you when we got a call from a concerned citizen who had overheard plans for the constable’s little outing, so it was simple enough to show up. We were pleasantly surprised to find you both here, and relatively well.” He took a drink of his tea. “We’ve let the team tracking you know they can go home now. As the both of you can, once we’ve interviewed you so we know what happened to you.”

“Home!” The Sovereign was indignant. “But what about the talks?”

“The talks are suspended, Sovereign. And your interpreter is dead. The Council will have to appoint a new one. And let’s be honest—both of you were involved mainly for appearance’s sake. In fact, I’ve wondered over the last day or two if you weren’t brought into this just so you could die and provide a cause for trouble.”

This did not mollify the Sovereign. “Appearance’s sake! I am the Sovereign of Iss!”

“Yes, yes,” Delegate Garas agreed, “so you told everyone just a short while ago.”

“And it worked, too,” observed Ashiban. Out the window, over the delegate’s shoulder, the sun shone on the once again deserted road. She shivered, remembering the cracked flier windshield, the pilot slumped over the controls.

“You can’t have these talks without me,” the Sovereign insisted. “I’m the voice of the planet.” She looked at Ashiban. “I am going to learn Raksamat. And Ashiban Xidyla can learn Gidantan. We won’t need any expletive interpreter. And we can fix the handheld translators.”

“That might take a while, Sovereign,” Ashiban observed.

The Sovereign lifted the cloth covering her mouth just enough to show her frown to Ashiban. “We already talked about this, Ashiban Xidyla. And I am the Voice of Iss. I will learn quickly.”

“Sovereign,” said Delegate Garas, “those handheld translators are a good thing. Can you imagine what the past hundred years would have been like without them? People can learn Raksamat, or Gidantan, but as Ashiban Xidyla points out, that takes time, and in the meanwhile people still have to talk to each other. Those handheld translators have prevented all sorts of problems.”

“We know, Delegate,” Ashiban said. “We were just talking about it, before the townspeople got here. But they could be better.”

“Well,” said Delegate Garas. “You may be right, at that. And if any of this were my concern in the least, I’d be getting a headache about now. Fortunately, it’s not my problem. I’ll see you ladies on your way home and—”

“Translation unavailable,” exclaimed the Sovereign, before he could finish. Got out of the groundcar, set her empty cup on the roof with a smack, opened the driver’s door, and slid in. Closed the door behind her.

“Young lady,” Delegate Garas began.

“I am the Voice of Iss!” the Sovereign declared. She did something with the controls and the groundcar started up with a low hum. Delegate Garas frowned, looked back at Ashiban.

Ashiban wanted to go home. She wanted to rest, and go back to her regular, everyday life, doing nothing much.

There had never been much point to doing anything much, not with a mother like Ciwril Xidyla. Anyone’s wildest ambitions would pale into nothing beside Ashiban’s mother’s accomplishments. And Ashiban had never been a terribly ambitious person. Had always wished for an ordinary life. Had mostly had it, at least the past few decades. Until now.

Those Raksamat farmers wanted an ordinary life, too, and the Gidanta townspeople. The Sovereign herself had been taken from an ordinary girlhood—or as ordinary as your life could be when your grandmother and your aunt were the voice of the planet—and thrown into the middle of this.

Delegate Garas was still watching her, still frowning. Ashiban sighed. “I don’t recommend arguing, Delegate. Assassins and a flier crash in the High Mires couldn’t stop us. I doubt you can do more than slow us down, and it’s really better if you don’t. Sovereign, I think first we should have a bath and clean clothes and something to eat. And get checked out by a doctor. And maybe get some sleep.”

The Sovereign was silent for a few seconds, and then said, “All right. I agree to that. But we should start on the language lessons as soon as possible.”

“Yes, child,” said Ashiban, closing her eyes. “But not this very moment.”

Delegate Garas laughed at that, short and sharp. But he made no protest at all as the Sovereign started the groundcar moving toward town.

The Justified

Het had eaten nothing for weeks but bony, gape-mawed fish—some of them full of neurotoxin. She’d had to alter herself so she could metabolize it safely, which had taken some doing. So when she ripped out the walsel’s throat and its blood spurted red onto the twilit ice, she stared, salivary glands aching, stomach growling. She didn’t wait to butcher her catch but sank her teeth into skin and fat and muscle, tearing a chunk away from its huge shoulder.

Movement caught her eye, and she sprang upright, walsel blood trickling along her jaw, to see Dihaut, black and silver, walking toward her across the ages-packed snow and ice. She’d have known her sib anywhere, but even if she hadn’t recognized them, there was no mistaking their crescent-topped standard, Months and Years, tottering behind them on two thin, insectile legs.

But sib or not, familiar or not, Het growled, heart still racing, muscles poised for flight or attack. She had thought herself alone and unwatched. Had made sure of it before she began her hunt. Had Dihaut been watching her all this time? It would be like them.

For a brief moment she considered disemboweling Dihaut, leaving them dying on the ice, Months and Years in pieces beside them. But that would only put this off until her sib took a new body. Dihaut could be endlessly persistent when they wished, and the fact that they had come all the way to this frigid desert at the farthest reaches of Nu to find her suggested that the ordinary limits of that persistence—such as they were—could not be relied on. Besides, she and Dihaut had nearly always gotten along well. Still, she stayed on the alert, and did not shift into a more relaxed posture.

“This is the Eye of Merur, the Noble Dihaut!” announced Months and Years as Dihaut drew near. Its high, thready voice cut startlingly through the silence of the snowy waste.

“I know who they are,” snarled Het.

The standard made a noise almost like a sniff. “I only do my duty, Noble Het.”

Dihaut hunched their shoulders. Their face, arms, torso, and legs were covered with what looked like long, fine fur but, this being Dihaut, was likely feathers. Mostly black, but their left arm and leg, and part of their torso, were silver-white. “Hello, sib,” they said. “Sorry to interrupt your supper. Couldn’t you have fled someplace warmer?”

Het had no answer for this—she’d asked herself the same question many times in the past several years.

“I see you’ve changed your skin,” Dihaut continued. “It does look odd, but I suppose it keeps you warm. Would you mind sharing the specs?” They shivered.

“It’s clothes,” said Het. “A coat, and boots, and gloves.”

“Clothes!” Dihaut peered at her more closely. “I see. They must be very confining, but I suppose it’s worth it to be warm. Do you have any you could lend me? Or could whoever supplied you with yours give me some, too?”

“Sorry,” growled Het. “Not introducing you.” Actually, she hadn’t even introduced herself. She’d stolen the clothes, when the fur she’d grown hadn’t kept her as warm as she’d hoped.

Dihaut made a wry “huh,” their warm breath puffing from their mouth in a small cloud. “Well. I’m sorry to be so blunt.” They gave a regretful smile, all Dihaut in its acknowledgment of the pointlessness of small talk. “I’m very sorry to intrude on whatever it is you’re doing down here—I never was quite clear on why you left, no one was, except that you were angry about something. Which…” They shrugged. “If it were up to me”—they raised both finely feathered hands, gestured vaguely to the dead walsel with the silver one—“I’d leave you to it.”

“Would you.” She didn’t even try to sound as though she believed them.

“Truly, sib. But the ruler of Hehut, the Founder and Origin of Life on Nu, the One Sovereign of This World, wishes for you to return to Hehut.” At this, Months and Years waved its thin, sticklike arms as though underlining Dihaut’s words. “She’d have sent others before me, but I convinced her that if you were brought back against your wishes, your presence at court would not be as delightful as usual.” They shivered again. “Is there somewhere warmer we can talk?”

“Not really.”

“I don’t mean any harm to the people you’ve been staying with,” said Dihaut.

“I haven’t been staying with anyone.” She gestured vaguely around with one blood-matted hand, indicating the emptiness of the ice.

“You must have been staying with someone, sib. I know there are no approved habitations here, so they must be unauthorized, but that’s no concern of mine unless they should come to Merur’s attention. Or if they have Animas. Please tell me, sib, that they don’t have unauthorized Animas here? Because you know we’ll have to get rid of them if they do, and I’d really like to just go right back to Hehut, where it’s actually warm.”

Unbidden, her claws extended again, just a bit. She had never spoken to the people who lived here, but she owed them. It was by watching them that she’d learned about the poisonous fish. Otherwise the toxin might have caught her off guard, even killed her. And then she’d have found herself resurrected again in Hehut, in the middle of everything she’d fled.

“They don’t have Animas,” she told Dihaut. “How could they?” When their bodies died, they died.

“Thank all the stars for that!” Dihaut gave a relieved, shivery sigh. “As long as they stay up here in this freezing desert with their single, cold lives, we can all just go on pretending they don’t exist. So surely we can pretend they don’t exist in their presumably warmer home?”

“Your standard is right behind you,” Het pointed out. “Listening.”

“It is,” Dihaut agreed. “It always is. There’s nowhere in the world we can really be away from Merur. We always have to deal with the One Ruler. Even, in the end, the benighted unauthorized souls in this forsaken place.” They were by now shivering steadily.

“Can’t she leave anyone even the smallest space?” asked Het. “Some room to be apart, without her watching? For just a little while?”

“It’s usually us watching for her,” put in Dihaut.

Het waved that away. “Not a single life anywhere in the world that she doesn’t claim as hers. She makes certain there’s nowhere to go!”

“Order, sib,” said Dihaut. “Imagine what might happen if everyone went running around free to do whatever they liked with no consequences. And she is the Founder and Origin of Life on Nu.”

“Come on, Dihaut. I was born on Aeons, just before Merur left the ship and came down to Nu. There were already people living here. I remember it. And even now it depends who you ask. Either Merur arrived a thousand years ago in Aeons and set about pulling land from beneath the water and creating humans, or else she arrived and brought light and order to humans she found living in ignorance and chaos. I’ve heard both from her own mouth at different times. And you know better. You’re the historian.”

They tried that regretful half-smile again, but they were too cold to manage it. “I tell whichever story is more politic at the moment. And there are, after all, different sorts of truth. But please.” They spread their hands, placatory. “I beg you. Come with me back to Hehut. Don’t make me freeze to death in front of you.”

“Noble Dihaut,” piped their standard, “Eye of Merur, I am here. Your Anima is entirely safe.”

“Yes,” shivered Dihaut, “but there isn’t a new body ready for me yet, and I hate being out of things for very long. Please, sib, let’s go back to my flier. We can argue about all of this on the way back home.”

And, well, now that Dihaut had found her, it wasn’t as though she had much choice. She said, with ill grace, “Well, fine, then. Where’s your flier?”

“This way,” said Dihaut, shivering, and turned. They were either too cold or too wise to protest when Het bent to grab the dead walsel’s tusk and drag it along as she followed.

It rained in Hehut barely more often than it snowed in the icy waste Het had left, but rivers and streams veined Hehut under the bright, uninterrupted blue of the sky, rivers and streams that pooled here and there into lotus-veiled lakes and papyrus marshes, and the land was lush and green.

The single-lived working in the fields looked up as the shadow of Dihaut’s flier passed over them. They made a quick sign with their left hands and turned back to the machines they followed. Small boats dotted the river that snaked through the fields, single-lived fishers hauling in nets, here and there the long, gilded barque of one of the Justified shining in the sun. The sight gave Het an odd pang—she had not ever been given much to nostalgia, or to dwelling on memories of her various childhoods, none of which to her recall had been particularly childish, but she was struck with a sudden, almost tangible memory of sunshine on her skin, and the sound of water lapping at the hull of a boat. Not, she was sure, a single moment but a composite of all the times she’d fled to the river, to fish, or walk, or sit under a tree and stare at the water flowing by. To be by herself. As much as she could be, anyway.

“Almost there,” said Dihaut, reclined in their seat beside her. “Are you going to change?” They had shed their feathers on the flight here and now showed black and silver skin, smooth and shining.

Het had shed her coat, boots, and gloves but left her thick and shaggy fur. It would likely be uncomfortable in the heat, but she was reluctant to let go of it; she couldn’t say why. “I don’t think I have time.”

“Noble Eyes of Merur,” said Months and Years, upright at Dihaut’s elbow, “we will arrive at Tjenu in fifteen minutes. The One Sovereign will see you immediately.”

Definitely no time to change. “So urgent?” asked Het. “Do you know what this is about?”

“I have my suspicions.” Dihaut shrugged one silver shoulder. “It’s probably better if Merur tells you herself.”

So this was something that no one—not even Merur’s own Eyes—could safely talk about. There were times when Merur was in no mood to be tolerant of any suggestion that her power and authority might be incomplete, and at those times even admitting knowledge of some problem could end with one’s Anima deleted altogether.

Tjenu came into view, its gold-covered facade shining in the hot sun, a wide, dark avenue of smooth granite stretching from its huge main doors straight across the gardens to a broad entrance in the polished white walls. The Road of Souls, the single-lived called it, imagining that it was the route traveled by the Animas of the dead on their way to judgment at Dihaut’s hands. As large as the building was—a good kilometer on each of its four sides, and three stories high—most of Tjenu was underground. Or so Dihaut had told her. Het had only ever been in the building’s sunlit upper reaches. At least while she was alive, and not merely an Anima awaiting resurrection.

Dihaut’s flier set down within Tjenu’s white walls, beside a willow-edged pond. Coming out, Het found Great Among Millions, her own standard, waiting, hopping from one tiny foot to the other, feathery fingers clenched into minuscule fists, stilled the next moment, its black pole pointing perfectly upright, the gold cow horns at its top polished and shining.

“Eye of Merur,” it said, its voice high and thin. “Noble Het, the Justified, the Powerful, Servant of the One Sovereign of Nu. The Ruler of all, in her name of Self-Created, in her name of She Caused All to Be, in her name of She Listens to Prayers, in her name of Sustainer of the Justified, in her name of—”

“Stop,” Het commanded. “Just tell me what she wants.”

“Your presence, gracious Het,” it said, with equanimity. Great Among Millions had been her standard for several lifetimes, and was used to her. “Immediately. Do forgive the appearance of impertinence, Noble Het. I only relay the words of the One Sovereign. I will escort you to your audience.”

Months and Years, coming out of the flier, piped, “Great Among Millions, please do not forget the Noble Het’s luggage.”

“What luggage?” asked Het.

“Your walsel, Noble Eye,” replied Months and Years, waving a tiny hand. “What’s left of it. It’s starting to smell.”

“Just dispose of it,” said Het. “I’ve eaten as much of it as I’m going to.”

Great Among Millions gave a tiny almost-hop from one foot to the other, and stilled again. “Noble Het, you have been away from Tjenu, from Hehut itself, without me, for fifty-three years, two months, and three days.” It almost managed to sound as though it was merely stating a fact, and not making a complaint. But not quite.

“It’s good to see you again, too,” Het said. Her standard unclenched its little fists and gestured toward the golden mass of Tjenu. “Yes,” Het acknowledged. “Let’s go.”

The vast audience chamber of the One Sovereign of Nu was black-ceilinged, inlaid with silver and copper stars that shone in the light of the lamps below. Courtiers, officials, and supplicants, alone or in small scattered groups, murmured as Het passed. Of course. There was no mistaking her identity, furred and unkempt as she was—Great Among Millions followed her.

She crossed the brown, gold-flecked floor to where it changed, brown shading to blue and green in Merur’s near presence, where one never set foot without direct invitation—unless, of course, one was an Eye, in which case one’s place in the bright-lit vicinity of Merur was merely assumed, a privilege of status.

Stepping into the green, Great Among Millions tottering behind her, Het cast a surreptitious glance—habitual, even after so long away!—at those so privileged. And stopped, and growled. Among the officials standing near Merur, three bore her Eye. There were four Eyes; Het herself was one. Dihaut, who Het had left with their flier, was another. There should only have been two Eyes here.

“Don’t be jealous, Noble Het,” whispered Great Among Millions, its thready voice sounding in her ear alone. “You were gone so very long.” Almost accusing, that sounded.

“She replaced me,” Het snarled. She didn’t recognize whoever it was who, she saw now, held an unfamiliar standard, but the Justified changed bodies so frequently. If there was a new Eye, why should Merur call on Het? Why not leave her be?

“And you left me behind,” continued Great Among Millions. “Alone. They asked and asked me where you were and I did not know, though I wished to.” It made a tiny, barely perceptible stomp. “They put me in a storeroom. In a box.”

“Het, my Eye, approach!” Merur, calling from where she sat under her blue-canopied pavilion, alone but for those three Eyes, and the standards, and smaller lotus- and lily-shaped servants that always attended her.

And now, her attention turned from Merur’s other Eyes, Het looked fully at the One Sovereign herself. Armless, legless, her snaking body cased in scales of gold and lapis, Merur circled the base of her polished granite chair of state, her upper body leaning onto the seat, her head standard human, her hair in dozens of silver-plaited braids falling around her glittering gold face. Her dark eyes were slit-pupiled.

Het had seen Merur take such a shape before—as well as taking new bodies at need or at whim, the Justified could to some degree alter a currently held body at will. But there were limits to such transformations, and it had been long, long centuries since Merur had taken this sort of body.

She should have concealed her surprise and prostrated herself, but instead she stood and stared as Great Among Millions announced, in a high, carrying voice, “The fair, the fierce, the Burning Eye of the One Sovereign of Nu, the Noble Het!”

“My own Eye!” said Merur. “I have need of you!”

Het could not restrain her anger, even in the face of the One Sovereign of Nu. “I count four Eyes in this court, Sovereign—those three over there, and the Noble Dihaut. There have always been four. Why should you need me to be a fifth?” Behind her, Great Among Millions made a tiny noise.

“I shed one body,” admonished Merur, her voice faintly querulous, “only to reawaken and find you gone. For decades you did not return. Why? No one accused you of any dereliction of duty, let alone disloyalty. You had suffered no disadvantage; your place as my favored Eye was secure. And now, returning, you question my having appointed someone to fill the office you left empty! You would do better to save your anger for the enemies of Nu!”

“I can’t account for my heart,” said Het crossly. “It is as it is.”

This seemed to mollify Merur. “Well, you always have had a temper. And it is this very honesty that I have so missed. Indeed, it is what I require of you!” Here Merur lowered her voice and looked fretfully from one side to the other, and the standards and flower-form servitors scuttled back a few feet. “Het, my Eye. This body is… imperfect. It will not obey me as it should, and it is dying, far sooner than it ought. I need to move to a new one.”

“Already?” Het’s skin prickled with unease.

“This is not the first time a body has grown imperfectly,” Merur said, her voice low. “But I should have seen the signs long before I entered it. Someone must have concealed them from me! It is impossible that this has happened through mere incompetence.

“I have dealt with the technicians. I have rooted out any disloyalty in Tjenu. But I cannot say the same of all Hehut, let alone all of Nu. And this body of mine will last only a few months longer, but no suitable replacement, one untampered with by traitors, will be ready for a year or more. And I cannot afford to leave Nu rulerless for so long! My Eyes I trust—you and Dihaut, certainly, after all this time. The Justified are for the most part reliable, and the single-lived know that Dihaut will judge them. But I have never been gone for more than a few days at a time. If this throne is empty longer, it may encourage the very few wayward to stir up the single-lived, and if, in my absence, enough among the Justified can be led astray—no. I cannot be gone so long unless I am certain of order.”

Dismayed, Het snarled. “Sovereign, what do you expect me to do about any of this?”

“What you’ve always done! Protect Nu. All trace of unrest, of disorder, must be prevented. You’ve rid Nu of rebellion before. I need you to do it again.”

That shining silver river, the fishers, the lilies and birds had all seemed so peaceful. So much as they should be, when Het and Dihaut had flown in. “Unrest? What’s the cause this time?”

“The cause!” Merur exclaimed, exasperated. “There is no cause. There never has been! The worthy I give eternal life and health; they need only reach out their hands for whatever they desire! The unworthy are here and gone, and they have all they need and occupation enough, or if not, well, they seal their own fate. There has never been any cause, and yet it keeps happening—plots, rumors, mutterings of discontent. My newest Eye”—Merur did not notice, or affected not to notice, Het’s reaction to that—“is fierce and efficient. I do not doubt her loyalty. But I am afraid she doesn’t have your imagination. Your vision. Your anger. Two years ago I sent her out to deal with this, and she returned saying there was no trouble of any consequence! She doesn’t understand! Where does this keep coming from? Who is planting such ideas in the minds of my people? Root it out, Het. Root it out from among my people, trace it back to its origin, and destroy it so that Nu can rest secure while my next body grows. So that we can at last have the peace and security I have always striven for.”

“Sovereign of Nu,” growled Het. “I’ll do my best.”

What choice did she have, after all?

She should have gone right to Dihaut. The first place to look for signs of trouble would be among the Animas of the recently dead. But she was still out of sorts with Dihaut, still resented their summoning her back here. They’d made her share their company on the long flight back to Hehut and never mentioned that Merur had replaced her. They might have warned her, and they hadn’t. She wasn’t certain she could keep her temper with her sib, just now. Which maybe was why they’d kept silent about it, but still.

Besides, that other Eye had doubtless done the obvious first thing, and gone to Dihaut herself. And to judge from what Merur had said, Dihaut must have found nothing, or nothing to speak of. They would give Het the same answer. No point asking again.

She wanted time alone. Time that was hers. She didn’t miss the cold—already her thick fur was thinning without any conscious direction on her part. But she did miss the solitude, and the white landscape stretching out seemingly forever, silent except for the wind and her own heart, the hiss of blood in her ears. There was nothing like that here.

She left Tjenu and walked down to the river in the warm early evening sunlight. Willows shaded the banks, and the lilies in the occasional pool, red and purple and gold, were closing. The scent of water and flowers seized her, plucking at the edges of some memory. Small brown fishing boats sat in neat rows on the opposite bank, waiting for morning. The long, sleek shape of some Justified Noble’s barque floated in the middle of the channel, leaf green, gilded, draped with hangings and banners of blue and yellow and white.

She startled two children chasing frogs in the shallows. “Noble,” the larger of them said, bowing, pushing the smaller child beside them into some semblance of a bow. “How can we serve you?”

Don’t notice my presence, she thought, but of course that was impossible. “Be as you were. I’m only out for a walk.” And then, considering the time, “Shouldn’t you be home having dinner?”

“We’ll go right away,” said the older child.

The smaller, voice trembling, said, “Please don’t kill us, Noble Het.”

Het frowned, and looked behind her, only to see Great Among Millions a short way off, peering at her from behind a screen of willow leaves. “Why would I do such a thing?” she asked the child. “Are you rebels, or criminals?”

The older child grabbed the younger one’s arm, held it tight. “The Noble Het kills who she pleases,” they said. The smaller child’s eyes filled with tears. Then both children prostrated themselves. “How fair is your face, beautiful Het!” the older child cried into the mud. “The powerful, the wise and loving Eye of the One Sovereign! You see everything and strike where you wish! You were gone for a long time, but now you’ve returned and Hehut rejoices.”

She wanted to reassure them that she hadn’t come down to the river to kill them. That being late for dinner was hardly a capital offense. But the words wouldn’t form in her mouth. “I don’t strike where I wish,” she said instead. “I strike the enemies of Nu.”

“May we go, beautiful one?” asked the elder child, and now their voice was trembling too. “You commanded us to go home to dinner, and we only want to obey you!”

She opened her mouth to ask this child’s name, seized as she was with a sudden inexplicable desire to mention it to Dihaut, to ask them to watch for this child when they passed through judgment, to let Dihaut know she’d been favorably impressed. So well-spoken, even if it was just a hasty assemblage of formulaic phrases, of songs and poetry they must have heard. But she feared asking would only terrify the child further. “I’m only out for a walk, child,” she growled, uncomfortably resentful of this attention, even as she’d enjoyed the child’s eloquence. “Go home to dinner.”

“Thank you, beautiful one!” The elder child scrambled to their feet, pulled the smaller one up with them.

“Thank you!” piped the smaller child. And they both turned and fled. Het watched them go, and then resumed her walk along the riverside. But the evening had been soured, and soon she turned back to Tjenu.

The Thirty-Six met her in their accustomed place, a chamber in Tjenu walled with malachite and lapis, white lily patterns laid into the floor. There were chairs and benches along the edge of the room, but the Thirty-Six stood stiff and straight in the center, six rows of six, white linen kilts perfectly pressed, a gold and silver star on each brow.

“Eye of Merur,” said the first of the Thirty-Six. “We’re glad you’re back.”

“They’re glad you’re back,” whispered Great Among Millions, just behind Het’s right shoulder. “They didn’t spend the time in a box.”

Each of the Thirty-Six had their own demesne to watch, to protect. Their own assistants and weapons to do the job with. They had been asked to do this sort of thing often enough. Over and over.

Het had used the walk here from the river to compose herself. To take control of her face and her voice. She said, her voice smooth and calm, “The One Ruler of Nu, Creator of All Life on Nu, wishes for us to remove all traces of rebellion, once and for all. To destroy any hint of corruption that makes even the thought of rebellion possible.” No word from the silent and still Thirty-Six. “Tell me, do you know where that lies?”

No reply. Either none of them knew, or they thought the answer so obvious that there was no need to say it. Or perhaps they were suspicious of Het’s outward calm.

Finally, the first of the Thirty-Six said, “Generally, problems begin among the single-lived, Noble Het. But we can’t seem to find the person, or the thing, that sends their hearts astray time after time. The only way to accomplish what the One Sovereign has asked of us would be to kill every single-lived soul on Nu and let Dihaut sort them one from another.”

“Are you recommending that?” asked Het.

“It would be a terrible disruption,” said another of the Thirty-Six. “There would be so many corpses to dispose of.”

“We’d want more single-lived, wouldn’t we?” asked yet another. “Grown new, free of the influence that corrupts them now. It might…” She seemed doubtful. “It might take care of the problem, but, Eye of Merur, I don’t know how many free tanks we have. And who would take care of the new children? It would be a terrible mess that would last for decades. And I’m not sure that… It just seems wrong.” She cast a surreptitious glance toward the first of the Thirty-Six. “And forgive me, Noble Eye of Merur, but surely the present concern of the One Sovereign is to reduce chaos and disorder. At the current moment.”

So that, at least, was well enough known, or at least rumored. “The newest Eye,” said Het, closing her still-clawed hands into fists, willing herself to stand still. Willing her voice to stay clear and calm. Briefly she considered leaving here, going back to the river to catch fish and listen to the frogs. “Did she request your assistance? And did you suggest this to her, the eradication of the single-lived so that we could begin afresh?”

“She thought it was too extreme,” said the first of the Thirty-Six. Was that a note of disappointment in her voice? “It seems to me that the Sovereign of Nu found that Eye’s service in this instance to be less than satisfactory.”

“You think we should do it?” Het asked her.

“If it would rid us of the trouble that arises over and over,” the first of the Thirty-Six agreed.

“If I order this, then,” Het persisted, clenching her hands tighter, “you would do it?”

“Yes,” the foremost of the Thirty-Six agreed.

“Children, as well?” Het asked. Didn’t add, Even polite, well-spoken children who maybe only wanted some time to themselves, in the quiet by the river?

“Of course,” the first of the Thirty-Six replied. “If they’re worthy, they’ll be back. Eventually.”

With a growl Het sprang forward, hands open, claws flashing free of her fingertips, and slashed the throat of the first of the Thirty-Six. As she fell, blood splashed onto the torso and the spotless linen kilt of the Thirty-Six beside her. For a moment, Het watched the blood pump satisfyingly out of the severed artery to pool on the white-lilied floor, and thought of the walsel she’d killed the day before.

But this was no time to indulge herself. She looked up and around. “Anyone else?”

Great Among Millions skittered up beside her. “Noble Het! Eye of Merur! There is currently a backlog of Justified waiting for resurrection. And none of your Thirty-Six have bodies in the tanks.”

Het shrugged. The Thirty-Six were all among the Justified. “She’ll be back. Eventually.” At her feet the injured Thirty-Six breathed her choking last, and for the first time in decades Het felt a sure, gratifying satisfaction. She had been made for this duty, made to enjoy it, and she had nothing left to herself but that, it seemed. “The single-lived come and go,” she declared to the remaining Thirty-Six. “Who has remained the same all this time?”

Silence.

“Oh dear,” said Great Among Millions.

The nurturing and protection of Nu had always required a good deal of death, and none of the Thirty-Six had ever been squeamish about it, but so often in recent centuries that death had been accomplished by impersonal, secondhand means—narrowly targeted poison, or engineered microbes let loose in the river. But Het—Het had spent the last several decades hunting huge, sharp-tusked walsel, two or three times the mass of a human, strong and surprisingly fast.

None of the remaining Thirty-Six would join her. Fifteen of them fled. The remaining twenty she left dead, dismembered, their blood pooling among the lilies, and then she went down to the riverbank.

The single-lived fled before her—or before Great Among Millions, not following discreetly now but close behind her, token and certification of who she was. The little fishing boats pulled hastily for the other bank, and their single-lived crews dropped nets and lines where they stood, ran from the river, or cowered in the bottom of their small craft.

Het ignored them all and swam for the blue-and-yellow barque.

The single-lived servants didn’t try to stop her as she pulled herself aboard and strode across the deck. After all, where Het went the necessities of order followed. Opposing the Eye of Merur was not only futile, but suicidal in the most ultimate sense.

Streaming river water, claws extended, Het strode to where the barque’s Justified owners sat at breakfast, a terrified servant standing beside the table, a tray holding figs, cheese, and a bowl of honey shaking in her trembling hands.

The three Justified stared at Het as she stood before them, soaking wet, teeth bared. Then they saw Great Among Millions close behind her. “Protector of Hehut,” said one, a man, as all three rose. “It’s an honor.” There was perhaps the smallest hint of trepidation in his voice. “Of course we’ll make all our resources available to you. I’ll have the servants brought—”

Het sprang forward, sliced open his abdomen with her claws, then tore his head from his neck. She made a guttural, happy sound, dropped the body, and tossed the head away.

The servant dropped the tray and fled, the bowl of honey bouncing and rolling, fetching up against the corpse’s spilled, sliced intestines.

Het sank her teeth into the second Justified’s neck, felt him struggle and choke, the exquisite salt tang of his blood in her mouth. This was oh so much better than hunting walsel. She tore away a mouthful of flesh and trachea.

The third Justified turned to flee, but then stopped and cried, “I am loyal, Noble Eye! The Noble Dihaut will vindicate me!”

Het broke her neck and then stood a moment contemplating the feast before her, these three bodies, warm and bloody and deliciously fresh. She hadn’t gotten to do this often enough in recent centuries. She lifted her head and roared her satisfaction.

A breeze filled and lifted the barque’s blue and yellow and white linen hangings. The servants had fled; there was no one alive on the deck but Het and Great Among Millions now. “Rejoice!” it piped. “The Protector of Hehut brings order to Nu!”

Het grinned, and then dove over the side, into the river, on her way to find more of the Justified.

The day wore on, and more of the Justified met bloody, violent ends at Het’s hands—and teeth. At first they submitted; after all, they were Justified, and their return was assured, so long as they were obedient subjects of the One Sovereign. But as evening closed in, the Justified began to try to defend themselves.

And more of the houses were empty, their owners and servants fled. But in this latest, on the outskirts of Hehut, all airy windowed corridors and courtyards, Het found two Justified huddled in the corner of a white-and-gold-painted room, a single-lived servant standing trembling between them and Het.

“Move,” growled Het to the servant.

“Justification!” cried one of the Justified. Slurring a bit—was she drunk?

“We swear!” slurred the other. Drunk as well, then.

Neither of them had the authority to make such a promise. Even if they had, the numbers of Justified dead ensured that no newly Justified would see resurrection for centuries, if ever. Despite all of this, the clearly terrified servant stayed.

Het roared her anger. Picked up the single-lived—they were strong, and large as single-lived went, but no match for Het. She set them aside roughly and sank her claws into one of the Justified, her teeth into the other. Screams filled her ears, and blood filled her mouth as she tore away a chunk of flesh.

All day her victims had provided her with more than her fill of blood, and so she had drunk sparingly so far. But now, enraged even further by the cowardice of these Justified—of their craven, empty promise to their servant—she drank deep, and still filled with rage, she tore the Justified into bloody fragments that spattered the floor and the wall.

She stopped a moment to appreciate her handiwork. With one furred hand she wiped blood and scraps of muscle off her tingling lips.

Her tingling lips.

The two Justified had barely moved, crouched in their corner. They had slurred their speech, as though they were drunk.

Or as though they were poisoned.

She knew what sort of poison made her lips tingle like this, and her fingertips, now she noticed. Though it would take far more neurotoxin to make her feel this much than even a few dozen skinny, gape-mawed fish would provide. How much had she drunk?

Het looked around the blood-spattered room. The single-lived servant was gone. Great Among Millions stood silent and motionless, its tall, thin body crusted with dried blood. Nothing to what covered Het.

She went out into the garden, with its pools and fig trees and the red desert stretching beyond. And found two of Merur’s lily standards—She Brings Life and Different Ages. Along with Months and Years. And Dihaut.

“Well, sib,” they said, with their regretful smile. “They always send me after you. Everyone else is too afraid of you. I told the One Sovereign it was better not to send forces you’d only chew up. Poison is much easier, and much safer for us.”

Het swayed, suddenly exhausted. Dihaut. She’d never expected them to actively take her side when it came to defying Merur, but she hadn’t expected them to poison her.

What had she expected? That Merur would approve her actions? No, she’d known someone would come after her, one way or another. And then?

“You can try to alter your metabolism,” Dihaut continued, “but I doubt you can manage it quickly enough. The dose was quite high. We needed to be absolutely sure. Honestly, I’m surprised you’re still on your feet.”

“You,” said Het, not certain what she had to say beyond that.

She Brings Life and Different Ages skittered up and stopped a meter or so apart, facing Het. Between them an image of Merur flickered into visibility. Not snakelike, as Het knew her current body to be, but as she appeared in images all over Nu: tall, golden, face and limbs smooth and symmetrical, as though cut from basalt and gilded.

“Het!” cried Merur. “My own Eye! What can possibly have made you so angry that you would take leave of your senses and betray the life and peace of Nu in this way?”

“I was carrying out your orders, Sovereign of Nu!” Het snarled. “You wanted me to remove all possibility of rebellion in Hehut.”

“And all of Nu!” piped Great Among Millions, behind Het. Still covered in dried blood.

“I had not thought such sickness and treason possible from anyone Justified as long as you have been,” said Merur. “Dihaut.”

“Sovereign,” said Dihaut, and their smile grew slightly wider. Het growled.

Merur said, “You have said to me before today that I have been too generous. That I have allowed too many of the long-Justified to escape judgment. I did not believe you, but now, look! My Eyes have not been subject to judgment in centuries, and that, I think, has been a mistake. I would like it known that not even the highest of the Justified will be excused if they defy me. Het, before you die, hear Dihaut’s judgment.”

She was exhausted, and her lips had gone numb. But that was all.

Was she really poisoned? Well, she was, but only a little. Or so it seemed, so far. Maybe she could overpower Dihaut, rip out their throat, and flee. The standards wouldn’t stop her.

And then what? Where would she go, that Merur would not eventually follow?

“Sovereign of Nu,” said Dihaut, bowing toward Merur’s simulacrum. “I will do as you command.” They turned to Het. “Het, sib, your behavior this past day is extreme even for you. It calls for judgment, as our Sovereign has said. It is that judgment that keeps order in Hehut, on all of Nu. And perhaps if everyone, every life, endured the same strict judgment as the single-lived pass through, these things would never have happened.”

Silence. Not a noise from Great Among Millions, behind Het. Over Dihaut’s shoulder, Months and Years was utterly still.

“The One Sovereign has given me the duty of making those judgments. And I must make them, no matter my personal feelings about each person I judge, for the good of Nu.”

“That is so,” agreed Merur’s simulacrum.

“Then from now on, everyone—single-lived or Justified, whoever they may be—every Anima that passes through Tjenu must meet the same judgment. No preference will be given to those who have been resurrected before, not in judgment, and not in the order of resurrection. From now on, everyone must meet judgment equally. Including the Sovereign of Nu.”

The simulacrum of Merur frowned. “I did not hear you correctly just now, Dihaut.”

They turned to Merur. “You’ve just said that it was a mistake not to subject your Eyes to judgment, and called on me to judge Het. But I can’t judge her without seeing that what she has done to the Justified this past day is only what you have always asked her to do to the single-lived. She has done precisely what you demanded of her. It wasn’t the fact that Het was unthreatened by judgment that led her to do these things—it was you, yourself.”

“You!” spat Merur’s simulacrum. “You dare to judge me!”

“You gave me that job,” said Dihaut, Months and Years still motionless behind them. “And I will do it. You won’t be resurrected on Nu without passing my judgment. I have made certain of this, within the past hour.”

“Then it was you behind this conspiracy all along!” cried Merur. “But you can’t prevent me returning. I will awake on Aeons.”

“Aeons is far, far overhead,” observed Het, no less astonished at what she’d just heard than by the fact that she was still alive.

“And there was no conspiracy,” said Dihaut. “Or there wasn’t until you imagined one into being. Your own Eyes told you as much. But this isn’t the first time you’ve demanded the slaughter of the innocent so that you can feel more secure. Het only gave me an opportunity, and an example. I will do as you command me. I will judge. Withdraw to Aeons if you like. The people who oversee your resurrection on Nu, who have the skills and the access, won’t be resurrected themselves until you pass my judgment.” They gave again that half-regretful smile. “You’ve already removed some of those who would have helped you, when you purged Tjenu of what you assumed was disloyalty to you, Sovereign.” The image of Merur flickered out of sight, and She Brings Life and Different Ages scuttled away.

“I’m not poisoned,” said Het.

“I should hope not!” exclaimed Dihaut. “No, you left your supper, or your breakfast, or whatever it was, on my flier. I couldn’t help being curious about it.” They shrugged. “There wasn’t much of that neurotoxin in the animal you left behind, but there was enough to suggest that something in that food chain was very toxic. And knowing you, you’d have changed your metabolism rather than just avoid eating whatever it was. Merur, of course, didn’t know that. So when she said she wanted you stopped, I made the suggestion…” They waved one silver hand.

“So all that business with the single-lived servant, promising her Justification if she would defend those two…”

“This late in the day, the Justified were already beginning to resist you—or try, anyway,” Dihaut confirmed with equanimity. “If these had stood meekly as you slaughtered them, you might have suspected something. And you might not have drunk enough blood to feel the poison. I had to make you even more angry at the people you killed than you already were.”

Het growled. “So you tricked me.”

“You’re not the only one of Merur’s Eyes, sib, to find that if you truly served in the way you were meant to, you could no longer serve Merur’s aims. It’s been a long, long time since I realized that for all Merur says I’m to judge the dead with perfect, impartial wisdom, I can never do that so long as she rules here. She has always assumed that her personal good is the good of Nu. But those are not the same thing. Which I think you have recently realized.”

“And now you’ll be Sovereign over Nu,” Het said. “Instead of Merur.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Dihaut. “For the moment, anyway. But maybe not openly—it would be useful if Merur still called herself the One Sovereign but stayed above on Aeons and let us do our jobs without interference.” They shrugged again and gave that half-smile of theirs. “Maybe she can salvage her pride by claiming credit for having tricked you into stopping your overenthusiastic obedience, and saving everyone. In fact, it might be best if she can pretend everything’s going on as it was before. We’ll still be her Eyes at least in name, and we can make what changes we like.”

Het would have growled at them again, but she realized she was too tired. It had been a long, long day. “I don’t want to be anyone’s Eye. I want to be out of this.” She didn’t miss the cold, but she wanted that solitude. That silence. Or the illusion of it, which was all she’d really had. “I want to be somewhere that isn’t here.”

“Are you sure?” Dihaut asked. “You’ve become quite popular among the single-lived, today. They call you beautiful, and fierce, and full of mercy.”

She thought of the children by the river. “It’s meaningless. Just old poetry rearranged.” Still she felt it, the gratification that Dihaut had surely meant her to feel. She was glad that she’d managed to spare those lives. That the single-lived of Hehut might remember her not for having slaughtered so many of them, but for having spared their lives. Or perhaps for both. “I want to go.”

“Then go, sib.” Dihaut waved one silver hand. “I’ll make sure no one troubles you.”

“And the unauthorized lives there? Or elsewhere on Nu?”

“No one will trouble them either,” Dihaut confirmed equably. “So long as they don’t pose a threat to Hehut. They never did pose a threat to Hehut, only to Merur’s desire for power over every life on Nu.”

“Thank you.” Her skin itched, her fur growing thicker just at the thought of the cold. “I don’t think I want you to come get me. When I die, I mean. Or at least, wait a while. A long time.” Dihaut gestured assent, and Het continued, “I suppose you’ll judge me, then. Who’ll judge you, when the time comes?”

“That’s a good question,” replied Dihaut. “I don’t know. Maybe you, sib. Or maybe by then no one will have to pass my judgment just to be allowed to live. We’ll see.”

That idea was so utterly alien to Het that she wasn’t sure how to respond to it. “I want some peace and quiet,” she said. “Alone. Apart.” Dihaut gestured assent.

“Don’t leave me behind, Noble Het!” piped Great Among Millions. “Beautiful Het! Fierce Het! Het full of mercy! I don’t want them to put me in a box in a storeroom again!”

“Come on, then,” she said impatiently, and her standard skittered happily after her as she went to find a flier to take her away from Hehut, back to the twilit ice, and to silence without judgment.

Bury the Dead

It’s the first Thanksgiving since Grandpa died.

This morning Gretchen put the extra leaf in the table, pushed and wiggled chairs so that it would seat a crowded-on-one-side seven. The new tablecloth—Gretchen bought it last week without consulting anyone or anything beyond her own pleasure—is spread, and on it sit silver and the best china. Trivets wait for mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and corn. The turkey is dismembered, keeping warm in the oven. Gretchen is ready.

Her younger son, Peter, has arrived, and Gretchen’s new daughter-in-law, Jill. And Jill’s daughter, six-year-old Sydney, a small, quiet creature in a white sailor dress. Sydney had gained Gretchen’s immediate sympathy when she’d come in, looked at the table, and said, I like your pink tablecloth, even before she’d taken off her coat.

“Have you tried Bill’s cell?” asks Jill. They’re all hungry, but they can’t start without Gretchen’s other son.

“I left a message,” Gretchen says. “Would you like a soda, Sydney?” Sydney has been very good so far, but Gretchen knows that the patience of even the best six-year-old has limits.

Sydney looks at her mother, who fails to give a forbidding frown. “Yes, please.”

“It’s strange to sit down without Grandpa,” says Peter—Gretchen’s son, Jill’s husband, Sydney’s stepfather. “It seems like everything’s changed so much in the past year.” He smiles at Jill—they were married six months ago.

As Gretchen turns toward the kitchen, the front door opens, and her other daughter-in-law, Diane, comes in. “Hello, running behind, sorry!” Halfway into the living room, looking through the archway into the dining room, she stops to shrug off her coat.

“Where’s Kimberly?” asks Gretchen.

“She’s coming. Hello, Peter. We stopped to pick up Grandpa. You won’t believe the trouble Bill had.” The front door opens again, and Bill comes into the living room, and behind him, shuffling and swaying, comes Grandpa.

He’s been dead ten months. He didn’t have much hair when he died, and what was left has fallen out. His eyesockets are muddy pits and the skin of his face, neck, and hands is leathery and desiccated, shrunk down to his bones. His lips are pulled back, revealing clamped, grimy dentures. His navy blue suit hangs around him in muddy folds.

“I guess they don’t call them vaults for nothing!” Bill says cheerily. “Hey, Peter, Jill.” He comes straight through to the dining room and kisses Gretchen on the cheek. “Happy Thanksgiving, Mom.”

Diane goes to the door and takes Grandpa by the elbow, pushes and pulls the staggering, swaying corpse toward the head of the table. Kimberly, sixteen, tall like Gretchen, slouches in the door and comes as far as the archway, where she stands, sullen, coat still on. “You got a pink tablecloth, Grandma,” she says. “Grandpa hates pink.”

“I like pink,” Gretchen says. Kimberly has always been sharp, even since she was a baby. She’s probably also noticed that the silver is Gretchen’s own, and not the set Grandpa preferred. Gretchen wishes Kimberly wouldn’t slouch, or let her hair hang down in front of her face all the time. But she also remembers being sixteen, and so she doesn’t say it.

Diane’s hand is on the head chair now, her other hand still on Grandpa’s elbow. Now is the time for Gretchen to speak up. She takes a deep breath, knowing that from here on out there will be no turning back. “There are only seven places, Diane.”

Diane casts a critical eye on the arrangement of chairs. “We could squeeze another one in.”

“That chair’s broken,” Gretchen says, quite truthfully. It had been surprisingly easy to snap one of the legs off, once she’d thought to use a hammer.

Diane frowns slightly—sensing trouble, Gretchen thinks, but not as perceptive as her daughter. “We could set a children’s table,” Diane says.

“Nonsense. Kimberly is too old for that, and we can’t possibly put Sydney all by herself.”

Diane looks at Sydney for the first time, as though it’s only just now occurred to her who would sit at her proposed children’s table, and frowns.

“We could have a dead person table,” suggests Kimberly. She is, she believes, ugly and awkward, and has recently realized that she will never be anyone but herself. The thought fills her with despair.

“We could pull his armchair out of the living room,” says Bill. “And let him sit over here. He doesn’t need to be right up at the table, it’s not like he’s going to eat much.”

“He can’t eat at all,” Kimberly says. “He’s dead. And besides, his mouth is wired shut.”

“Kimberly!” says her mother.

“It’s true. They take these needles, with wires on the ends, and shoot them into your jaw, and then they twist them shut. Like a trash bag.”

“That’s disgusting,” says Sydney, with the appreciation of a connoisseur. At the wedding, Kimberly had worn long, sparkly earrings and red nail polish, and Sydney had thought her the most glamorous person she’d ever seen. Now her first impression is confirmed.

Bill laughs nervously. “He can’t carve the turkey, either, so I guess that’s up to me.”

“The turkey’s mostly cut up already,” Gretchen says. “They did it at the store.” Bill blinks, uncomprehending. “I got the whole dinner from the deli at the store. All I had to do was put it in the oven to keep it warm.”

Diane speaks up, still by the head chair, still holding on to Grandpa. “Oh, Gretchen, you know I offered to…”

“You have better things to do,” says Gretchen. “And so does Jill. And so do I.”

“On Thanksgiving?” Bill is incredulous.

“I just didn’t feel like doing all that work this year,” Gretchen says. She’s angry now, though from long habit her voice and expression give no sign of it. No one has moved to fetch Grandpa’s chair.

“Well,” says Bill, and then takes a breath. “I suppose it’s too late to do anything about it now. Next year…”

“Next year I’ll do whatever I please,” says Gretchen. “Take your grandfather back out to the car. I ordered that vault for a reason.”

“We can’t just leave him in the cemetery. He’s been awfully restless there.”

“You dug him up!” Peter accuses.

“He dug himself out the first time,” says Diane. Kimberly snorts.

Bill’s face reddens. “When Dad left, Grandpa took us in and took care of us.” His voice is tight. “This is his family, his house.”

And he never let me forget it for a moment, Gretchen wants to say, but her anger is bleeding away. Bill is, after all, her son. She knows he’s near tears, knows that he genuinely misses his Grandpa. Knows that all his life he’s expected that one day he would wield that carving knife, and be Head of the Family. And now nothing is the way he expected it to be.

But she won’t relent. “It’s my house,” Gretchen says. “And it’s our family.” Bill says nothing.

Sydney speaks into the silence. “The salad has oranges in it,” she says to Kimberly, though that’s not what she wants to say, not what she means. But she’s hungry. “And there’s chocolate pie for dessert.”

“Cool,” says Kimberly. “Hey, you don’t want to eat with Grandpa, do you?”

“Dead people live in the graveyard,” says Sydney. And then, with a thoughtful frown, “Except on Halloween, and Halloween’s over.”

Kimberly holds her hand out. “Give me five.” Sydney goes around the table and gives her a resounding slap. “Good one!”

“Sydney is a very sensible little girl,” says Gretchen. “Peter and Jill, please get the food out of the oven. It just goes straight onto the table. Diane, I’d appreciate it if you’d get the salad out of the fridge. I forgot your soda, Sydney. Do you want cola or rootbeer?”

“Rootbeer, please,” says Sydney.

“Can I have rootbeer, Grandma?” asks Kimberly.

“I never got to have soda with dinner,” says Bill, trying to sound lighthearted, and failing.

“You can have some tonight if you like,” says Gretchen, unfazed. “Do you want rootbeer too?”

Bill doesn’t answer. Gretchen sends Kimberly and Sydney into the kitchen for the relish plate and serving spoons. Sydney, eyeing the olives, wonders if Kimberly will laugh when she puts some on the ends of her fingers. Kimberly’s approval would be worth a reprimand from her mother. (Kimberly will laugh, and then, to her own mother’s disgust, she’ll put two olives up her nose. At bedtime Sydney will pray devoutly to be just like Kimberly when she grows up.)

By the time dinner is on the table Bill has led Grandpa out. He’s not far—in the car, likely—because Bill isn’t gone long. But he’s not in the house anymore.

“Who’s going to say grace?” asks Diane when they’re all seated, trying to salve Bill’s pride, likely.

Gretchen opens her mouth to answer, but “Grace!” say Kimberly and Sydney together, and Sydney giggles.

Gretchen says amen.

The Sad History of the Tearless Onion

Matthias Fenstermacher loved onions, but hated slicing them, and so he labored to produce a tearless variety. His first attempt was indeed tearless—instead of weeping, the slicer was overcome by fits of uncontrollable giggles. The potential hazard was obvious.

Fenstermacher’s next onion, the product of ten more years of careful work, gave cooks a gentle regret for past pleasures—a good deal more manageable than hilarity armed with a knife. Fenstermacher sent these to market, with great success. He became a very wealthy man.

The first sign of trouble came when a preacher discovered that Fenstermacher’s onion grown in a very acid soil produced violent repentance for past sins. By the time the congregation realized that the local spiritual revival was the product of Allium and not the Almighty, the preacher had disappeared along with the generous donations of his former flock.

The result was hysteria. Whole crops were plowed under. Produce sellers were attacked in the street. Any onion was suspect. Could onions induce murderous rages? Topple governments? Lead nations to war? Well-bred maidens shuddered to think their virtue might be threatened by the rumored Onion D’Amore. Then the injuries from adolescent onion slicing parties began appearing in emergency rooms—Fenstermacher’s first onion had escaped.

By popular acclaim, onions were declared illegal and (except for a few surreptitious sprouts tended by devoted onion fanatics) eradicated. Garlic, shallots, and scallions narrowly escaped, but were no longer entirely trustworthy. Every one of Fenstermacher’s onions was rooted out and burned, his notes and greenhouse destroyed, and Fenstermacher himself, whose only intention had been to spare humanity the stinging tears of Allium cepa, died of grief.

FROM THE IMPERIAL RADCH UNIVERSE

Night’s Slow Poison

The Jewel of Athat was mainly a cargo ship, and most spaces were narrow and cramped. Like the Outer Station, where it was docked, it was austere, its decks and bulkheads scuffed and dingy with age. Inarakhat Kels, armed and properly masked, had already turned away one passenger, and now he stood in the passageway that led from the station to the ship, awaiting the next.

The man approached, striding as though the confined space did not constrain him. He wore a kilt and embroidered blouse. His skin was light brown, his hair dark and straight, cut short. And his eyes… Inarakhat Kels felt abashed. He had thought that in his years of dealing with outsiders he had lost his squeamishness at looking strangers in the face.

The man glanced over his shoulder, and cocked an eyebrow. “She was angry.” The corners of his mouth twitched in a suppressed grin.

“One regrets.” Inarakhat Kels frowned behind his mask. “Who?”

“The woman in line before me. I take it you refused to let her board?”

“She carried undeclared communication implants.” Privately, Kels suspected her of being a spy for the Radchaai, but he did not say this. “One is, of course, most sorry for her inconvenience, but—”

“I’m not,” the man interrupted. “She nearly ruined my supper last night insisting that I give up my seat, since she was certain she was of a higher caste than I.”

“Did you?”

“I did not,” said the man. “I am not from Xum, nor are we anywhere near it, so why should I bow to their customs? And then this morning she shoved herself in front of me as we waited outside.” He grinned fully. “I confess myself relieved at not having to spend six months with her as a fellow passenger.”

“Ah,” Kels said, his voice noncommittal. The grin, the angle of the man’s jaw—now he understood why the eyes had affected him. But he had no time for old memories. He consulted his list. “You are Awt Emnys, from the Gerentate.” The man acknowledged this. “Your reason for visiting Ghaon?”

“My grandmother was Ghaonish,” Awt Emnys said, eyes sober that had previously been amused. “I never knew her, and no one can tell me much about her. I hope to learn more in Athat.”

Whoever she was, she had been from the Ghem agnate, Kels was certain. His eyes, his mouth, the line of his chin… With just a little more information, Kels could tell Awt which house his grandmother had been born in. “One wishes you good fortune in your search, Honored Awt,” he said, with a small bow he could not suppress.

Awt Emnys smiled in return, and bowed respectfully. “I thank you, Honored,” he said. “I understand I must disable any communications implants.”

“If they are reactivated during the voyage, we will take any steps necessary to preserve the safety of the ship.”

Awt glanced at the gun at Kels’s waist. “Of course. But is it really so dangerous?”

“About three months in,” said Kels, in his blandest voice, “we will pass the last ship that attempted to traverse the Crawl with live communications. It will be visible from the passengers’ lounge.”

Awt grinned. “I have an abiding wish to die old, in my bed. Preferably after a long and boring life tracking warehouse inventories.”

Kels allowed himself a small smile. “One wishes you success,” he said, and stepped aside, pressing against the wall so that Awt could pass him. “Your belongings will be delivered to your cabin.”

“I thank you, Honored.” Awt brushed Kels as he passed, awakening some unfamiliar emotion in him.

“Good voyage,” Kels murmured to the other man’s back, but there was no sign Awt had heard.

Ghaon is a moonless blue-and-white jewel orbiting a yellow sun. Its three continents provide every sort of terrain, from the great deserts of southern Lysire, and the rivers and gentle farmlands of the north and west of that same continent, to the mountains of Aneng, still fitfully smoking. Arim, the third continent, is arctic and uninhabited. Aside from the sorts of industry and agriculture that support the population of any world, Ghaon produces pearls and ingeniously carved corals, which, when they find their way outside the Crawl, are highly valued. Flutes carved from the wood of Aneng’s western forests are prized by Gerentate musicians.

According to legend, the first inhabitants of Ghaon came from a world called Walkaway, the location of which is unknown. There were thirteen original settlers, three agnates of four people each plus one eunuch priest of Iraon. The three agnates parceled out the world among themselves: Lysire, Aneng, and the surface of the sea. The priest blessed the division, and each agnate prospered and filled the world.

The legend is only that, of course. It is impossible that thirteen people would possess the genetic diversity required to populate a planet, and in any case studies show that the first human inhabitants of Ghaon, whose descendants now populate Lysire and Aneng, derived largely from the same populations that eventually made up much of the Gerentate. The ancestors of the seagoing agnates arrived several thousand years later, and their origins are obscure.

In any case, the first colonists must have either known about the Crawl before they arrived, or constructed it themselves. The latter seems staggeringly unlikely.

Gerentate explorers found Ghaon some years after that entity’s expansionist phase had run itself out, and so the only threat they presented was a trickle of ill-bred, barefaced tourists.

But the Radch was another matter. Every soul on Ghaon, from the smallest infant at the breast to the most ancient Lysire matriarch in her tent on the edge of the drylands, believed that the nefarious Anaander Mianaai, overlord of the Radch, had cast a covetous eye on Ghaon and contemplated how he might make it his own.

Fortunately enough, the ships and seemingly endless armies of the Radch, which had been the downfall of a thousand worlds and stations, could not traverse the Crawl. Only it stood between Ghaon and the Radchaai. Spies regularly probed this defense, the Ghaonish were certain, and the acquisitive minds of the Radchaai continually planned and plotted how best to breach it.

In vain did more sober minds point out that the worlds of the Gerentate were a larger and in some ways easier target, that the reward for defeating the Crawl was far outweighed by the difficulty of the task, that the sweeping ambition of the Radchaai could hardly notice this one small, somewhat obscure world. The people of Ghaon knew these arguments were specious. The overlord of the Radch had set his mind on acquiring Ghaon—so its inhabitants believed.

Third watch was on duty, guarding the pilot’s station and pacing the corridors of the Jewel of Athat. First watch was asleep. Second watch had finished their supper, and the small table held cups of tea and the remains of the bread. Inarakhat Kels leaned forward, elbows on the table. Ninan and Tris, his fellows on second watch, leaned against the bulkhead.

“A spy!” said Ninan, trying not to sound jealous. “Well, we were about due for another one.” He leaned an elbow companionably on the table beside Kels’s.

“How is it,” asked Tris, “that their attempts are so obvious, and yet the Radchaai are so rich and powerful?”

“They are naturally perverse.” Ninan picked up a teacup and peered at its contents.

“So one imagines,” said Kels. “In any case, Anaander Mianaai must find some other way to pass the Crawl.”

Tris grinned, teeth showing beneath the mask that covered his upper face. “And the others? What do we have to look forward to this time?”

“Chis Sulca,” said Kels. He leaned back, feeling crowded by Ninan. They knew the Ghaonish merchant from previous trips. “A few others.” He thought of Awt Emnys. “The usual sort. A tourist from Semblance.” Ninan and Tris each made derisive noises. “A Faunt clanswoman on her wander. A young man from the Gerentate.”

“Another tourist,” groaned Ninan.

“No!” said Tris, half-laughing. “I spoke to that one. He’s searching for his Ghaonish grandmother!”

Ninan laughed. “He’ll find some runaway or some whore was his ancestress, and to what end?”

“Whoever she was, her grandson has money and time to indulge his curiosity,” said Kels, stung.

Ninan shook his head in disapproval. “He expects to find some ancient, noble agnate, whose matriarch will acknowledge him as her cousin.”

Tris nodded. “He’ll hang an overpriced, tasteless mask on his wall and brag to his neighbors about his exotic and aristocratic blood.”

“What if his blood truly is aristocratic?” asked Kels, knowing what the other two did not. The Ghem agnate was among the most ancient, most prestigious of families. He reached forward, poured himself more tea.

“It hardly matters,” said Ninan. “No agnate would be pleased to find a barefaced brute on the doorstep.”

Under the mask Kels’s eyes narrowed. “He can hardly be blamed for the customs of his people,” he said in his most even voice.

Ninan turned to regard him more closely. “No doubt.”

“It’s been a long day,” said Tris, conciliatory. “And Inarakhat has spent it dealing with passengers. But now we rest, at least until tomorrow.”

“And a dull tomorrow it will be,” said Ninan. “For which, thank Iraon.”

“Thank Iraon,” Tris and Kels echoed in agreement.

Ghem Echend was the most beautiful girl Inarakhat Kels had ever seen. Echend’s mouth was firm and full, her skin a warm dark brown. Her hands were square, and strong, and graceful, as were all her movements. She seemed to laugh even when she merely spoke. But her chief beauty was her eyes, wide and gray and luminous. She never took to the fashion for masks that obscured them. Indeed, she had skirted the outer edge of acceptability, preferring masks that exposed and emphasized her eyes as much as possible.

She had kissed him on a moss-covered hillside by the river. The summer stars had been thick and silver in the sky, no other lights but the city below, and the boats passing, colored lanterns hanging in their masts, red and blue and green and gold. She tasted of flowers. It seemed to him that his heart stopped, and everything bled away from his awareness but her. He lifted a hand to touch her cheek, hardly able to believe his daring. She kissed him again, and taking that for approval he placed a single finger tentatively on the lower edge of her mask.

With both hands she shoved him hard in the chest, and he found himself lying on his back in the soft moss, with only the stars in his vision. “Not yet,” she said, and ran away laughing.

He could hardly breathe with happiness. Not yet!

Never.

Within six months, the extent of his agnate’s debts had been revealed, as well as the lengths to which his aunts had been willing to go to support their lifestyle, which had been beyond their means for quite some time.

When the expected letter, sealed in red and gold, had arrived, it had contained not an offer of marriage but a few curt lines informing him that if recently certain expectations had been raised, they were unfounded and it would be best if he realized this. It was not from Echend, but from the matriarch of her agnate.

He had stuffed a single change of clothes into a sack and gone down to the docks intending to offer his labor to whatever ship would take him farthest away from Athat. No ship would have him, so he made his way to the precinct employment bureau, where the civil servant on duty had judged him a fit candidate for the Watch. Next morning he was on a shuttle for Ghaon’s orbiting station. He had not set foot on Ghaon since.

The Crawl is not detectable by sight, nor by any scanner yet devised. It is, however, ineluctably there. Its outer boundary is littered with the wrecks of ships whose captains disbelieved the warnings. Sometimes these are whole ships, with no sign of damage except their aimless drift. Some are collections of fragments, shining eerily in the light of the warning beacons placed at intervals along the limits of the Crawl. Occasionally a ship traversing the Crawl will come across a human body, rigid and frozen, spinning in the vacuum.

In order to survive the passage through the Crawl a ship must go slowly; it takes nearly six months. In another system it would be a matter of hours. And it is well known that the use of communications equipment within the Crawl has disastrous results.

It is less well known that the Crawl may only be safely crossed by particular routes, which the Ghaons had not recorded or marked in any way. Careful of their one defense, they had been at pains to be sure that knowledge existed only in the minds of pilots authorized to make the trip. The Watch was founded not only to prevent spies from boarding the ships and to enforce the ban on communications, but to ensure that no one meddled in any way with the pilot.

The lounge on second deck was small and narrow, a few tables and chairs along the wall on one side, ports for viewing on the other. Two travelers, one in the brightly dyed, draped robe typical of the world Semblance, the other bare-breasted and skirted in ochre, sat at one table, hunched over a game board, scooping counters out of hollows and placing them around, quickly, with a quiet word every few moves. At the other end of the space Awt Emnys stood, looking out on the void. His face was shadowed, a matter of both relief and disappointment to Kels.

The eyes were Ghem Echend’s. He could not have been more certain if the two genotypes were laid out before him. Echend had not been Awt Emnys’s grandmother, but certainly some aunt or cousin of hers had left Ghaon, gone to the Gerentate.

If Kels had married Echend, he would have had children. Or his co-husbands would, it was all the same. For the first time in years he allowed himself to wonder what that would have been like. He couldn’t imagine an infant Awt with any clarity, but the dark-haired, gray-eyed young boy… a memory flowered in his mind, Kels and his father (so very tall and imposing then!) walking hand in hand down to the riverbank to see the boats come in.

Awt Emnys turned his head, displacing the shadows. He smiled as he saw Kels. “It’s you again.”

“One is always oneself,” said Kels, unaccountably disturbed by the younger man’s words.

“But you’re not always on duty,” said Awt, and came closer to where Kels stood at the other end of the viewing ports. “You all wear the same clothes, and the same masks, and I’m never quite sure who is who.” He smiled slightly, made an apologetic gesture. “I was speaking with the Honored merchant Chis,” he said, as though it followed naturally on his previous words. “She is most gracious. She advises me to give up pursuing my ancestor and instead rent a boat and visit the coastal towns of Western Aneng, where she assures me I will find the most exquisitely beautiful scenery in all known space. Not to mention the finest arrak and the most reasonable prices on cultured pearls.”

“Ah,” said Kels, somewhat disdainfully. “She is from Western Aneng, and biased as a result. All of those are to be found in the vicinity of Athat.”

Awt gave a wry smile. “I suspect her intent is to divert me from embarrassing my grandmother’s agnate with my existence. But you advise me to tour Athat?”

“Certainly.” Athat was the loveliest city on Ghaon, spread over the mouth of the river like an exquisite mask. “There is also a forest preserve, to the south of Athat, that you may be interested in visiting. Though,” he said, frowning, thinking of Awt’s luggage, “you may need to purchase some equipment if you intend to stay there long.”

“I rarely camp on worlds I’m not entirely familiar with.”

“Doubtless a wise policy. One would not advise doing so alone, anywhere on Ghaon.”

“And why is that, Honored?” asked Awt.

“The vondas.”

“Vondas?”

“They range from very small to…” Kels made a wide and shallow cup of his hands. “This large. With the tiny, common ones, a bite will itch for a few days afterwards. Some of the larger ones may affect a person more. Indeed, some of them are in demand for the intoxicating effects of their venom.” He thought of the vonda-bars in the northern precincts of the city and made a soft, disgusted sound. “One doesn’t recommend it. But the one you should be careful of is the tea vonda.”

“It’s dangerous?”

“It’s called a tea vonda because from the moment it fastens itself on you, you have just enough time to prepare and drink a cup of tea before you die.”

Awt raised an eyebrow. “That is, perhaps, not the wisest way to spend those few minutes. Have you ever encountered one?”

“I was bitten,” said Kels. He had been fifteen, and his uncle had been to the market in Athat and bought a basket of berries and left them on a counter in the kitchen that ran long and narrow across the back of the house. The berries were at the height of their season, huge and dark purple, and when Kels had seen them he had reached out without thinking. Almost before his fingers had touched the fruit he’d felt an icy sting.

“What did you do?” asked Awt Emnys. “Not put water on to boil, I presume.”

“I panicked,” said Kels. For a few, blinking moments he’d stood trying to understand what had happened, coldness creeping up his hand toward his wrist, and then his mind had registered the tea vonda fastened to his hand, berry-purple bleeding away from it. Its center was dead white, shot with streaks of silver. Its surrounding membrane pulsed and fluttered, the convoluted edges turning pink and then red as it dug its proboscis deeper into his hand. As he watched, his hand went numb, and the ice continued to inch past his wrist toward his elbow. He tried to scream, but no sound would issue from his throat. “I froze.”

“What should you have done?” asked Awt Emnys.

“I should have taken the largest knife in the kitchen and cut off my hand.” And he’d thought that far, had run along the length of the room to open the cabinet and draw out the knife, heavy-handled, with a blade three inches wide and fifteen inches long. Then he stood there unable to do what needed to be done, no coherent thought settling out of the whirl of fear and panic in his mind. His sister came into the kitchen then. She closed the distance between them at a dead run, grabbed the knife out of his hand, and shoved him against the counter. Then, as though she were dressing game for a feast, she jerked his arm straight and swung the knife down in a fierce blow, crunching through bone and severing his arm just below the shoulder.

Then he’d screamed.

“What happened?” asked Awt.

“My sister found me and cut my arm off. It was very fortunate. I had been very foolish.”

“Indeed.” The skirted woman, from Faunt, spoke up. “Had I been your sister I would have left you to die.”

“Come now, Honored,” said her opponent. “Surely not. Anyone might panic in such a situation.”

“Not anyone fit to survive,” said the woman, with a curled lip. “It speaks poorly of the Watch that such a one would be selected.”

“Surely your people would not be so cruel,” said the man. “Surely not.”

“Cruel? We are practical,” she replied.

“I can’t blame him,” said Awt Emnys. “It’s easy enough to tell yourself the doctor can replace it, but when it comes to actually doing it…” He shook his head. “It only makes sense that we should be reluctant to injure ourselves so grievously.”

The woman scoffed. “I am now convinced that the Gerentate will fall to Anaander Mianaai the moment he turns his attention that way. You are all of you far too sentimental. Ghaon as well, despite the Crawl and the efforts of the Watch.” Here she looked directly at Kels.

“Honored,” said Kels. “There is no need to be rude.”

“I say what I think,” said the woman. “My people don’t hide behind masks.”

“You certainly do,” said Awt equably. “Your mask is rudeness and offensively plain speech. We only see how you wish to appear, not your true self. Mask or not, Watchman Inarakhat has been more honest than you.”

The woman made her disgusted noise again, but said nothing further.

Kels looked out the viewing port for a moment, gathering his thoughts, settling himself. He wanted to leave the lounge, but felt that it would be a retreat of some kind. “Honored Awt, do you intend to approach your grandmother’s agnate?” It wasn’t what he had intended to say.

Awt Emnys seemed unsurprised by the question. “I don’t know. Do you advise it?”

Yes and no and I didn’t mean collided, tangled, blocked his speech. Ghem, who had balked at any association with his own ruined agnate, would be no more charitable toward Awt, and the thought distressed Kels. And also pleased him. Let Ghem see what they rejected!

Or perhaps they would be at least courteous to him. “One could hardly say, Honored. Only…”

“Yes?”

“If you do, buy a mask. Not at the shops near the shuttle port, nor even along the riverbank. Find a place on the third hill, behind the jewelers’ district. And be sure to choose one that is neither very elaborate, nor very brightly colored.”

“That would have been my own inclination,” said Awt. “I thank you again for your advice.” He paused a moment, as though undecided about something. “The merchant Chis is an inveterate gossip.”

Behind the mask, Kels frowned.

Awt continued, quietly. “She tells a fantastic and romantic story of your youthful disappointment in love. Not, I’m sure”—Awt made a small, ironic gesture—“out of any disrespect for you, but to further discourage me from approaching my grandmother’s agnate. Whichever that might be. But when I heard your story just now, I wondered. Have you held to something you should have let go? The daughter of a wealthy, noble agnate might not have chosen her first husband, or even her second. But the third would have been her heart’s choice. Perhaps you didn’t know her as well as you thought. She certainly behaved very badly, if what Honored Chis says is true.” He bowed slightly, apologetic. “Forgive my presumption.”

“Her agnate,” Kels began, and Awt raised an eyebrow. Kels was glad of the mask. “It was a long time ago, Honored.”

“I’ve offended you. Please believe it wasn’t my intention.”

“No, Honored,” said Kels, in his most even voice, and then, at a loss, bowed and left the lounge.

Six months on a small ship is a long time. The view out the ports of the Jewel of Athat was the same as any ship. One can only play at counters so much, and one has only a limited number of potential opponents. Even betting on the games loses its charm a month in.

“It’s fashionable to have a Ghaonish ancestor six or seven generations back,” Awt said to Kels near the end of the first month. The Faunt woman had retreated in silent pique, Awt having defeated her at counters the third time in a row, and they were alone in the lounge. “Even farther back is better. Too near—and poor—and you’re half-foreign, an outsider in your own family. My mother’s relatives always suspected my half-Ghaonish father of mercenary impulses. They cared for me when my parents died, but more out of their sense of propriety than anything else.”

“How different your childhood would have been, had your grandmother never left Ghaon!” Kels said, thinking as much of himself as of Awt.

“True, but then I wouldn’t have been Awt Emnys.”

By the second month of the voyage, the library of recorded entertainments that seems so large and varied at the start of the voyage becomes monotonous and dull. Fellow passengers who had seemed either exotically foreign or companionably familiar lose all their charms and become objects of irritation. The small spaces become ever-narrowing traps.

Ever since he had known them, Ninan and Tris, Inarakhat Kels’s fellow Watch officers, had been more or less pleasant company, despite a certain distrust on their part; even ruined, his agnate was far superior to theirs. Near the end of the second month, their dismissive observations about the passengers became a burden to Kels, particularly their assessment of Awt Emnys. It was no different from jibes directed at previous Gerentate travelers looking for Ghaonish ancestors, and those had amused Kels in the past. But now he realized that his disdain had a different source and direction than theirs.

In the third month it seems as though there has never been any world but the ship, and the endless progress through the blackness. Life before the voyage is a distant memory, unreal and strangely textured. The idea of disembarking at some final destination seems untenable. During this month the wreck of the last ship to defy the ban on communications takes on an interest out of proportion to its significance.

“Just as you promised,” Awt said to Kels as he watched the dead ship drift. Quietly, because the others—the fierce Faunt, the tourist from Semblance, even Chis Sulca, who had seen it before, were silent. “I wonder why they did it.”

“They were fools,” said Chis.

“They were driven mad by isolation,” said the tourist from Semblance, by his tone of voice meaning a joke, but it lacked conviction.

In the fourth month desperate boredom sets in. The beige, undecorated walls, the black view out the ports, the nourishing but unvaried diet become an undifferentiated background, and sensory deprivation forces the mind to produce all sorts of fantasies in an attempt to ward off starvation.

“Have you read Thersay?” asked Kels. He and Awt were alone in the lounge.

“The Consolation of Insanity?” Awt smiled. “No, I never have. And I’ve probably never met anyone who has, either, highly regarded as it is.”

“I’ve tried,” confessed Kels.

Awt smiled. “That bored?”

“You laugh,” Kels said. “She began the work here, on this very ship, at that table, there, at just about this point in the voyage. What a strange and sprawling thing it is! She must have been half-mad.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Awt said.

The fifth month is much the same as the fourth, time having contracted into a single eternal moment.

In the sixth month, the mind awakes slowly to the realization that there will indeed be an end to the endless voyage. When the Watch announces that only one day remains before the ship will exit the Crawl and increase speed, feverish excitement runs through the passengers. The day ahead, and the few days after that it will take to reach the station orbiting Ghaon, seem unbearably long. In vain do passengers remind themselves that the time will surely pass without their watching. Everyone, whether openly or surreptitiously, will mark each interminable second and anxiously await the thunk and jar of docking.

It was during the last day inside the Crawl that disaster struck.

Kels had endured his shift, and a silent, tense supper with Ninan and Tris. He’d retired early, but after several hours of uncomfortable tossing he rose and dressed and went to the lounge. It was empty; he was vaguely surprised and disappointed that Awt Emnys wasn’t there, though he’d known that the passengers were likely asleep at that hour.

Once Awt disembarked Kels might never see him again. It had been true of every passenger over the years, but it had never mattered to him before. This, then, was why he couldn’t sleep. There were things he wanted to say, that he didn’t know if he should say, or even if he possibly could.

He traced the path he would have on his rounds, but met no one, not even his counterpart on third watch. The passengers’ cabins were shut, the ship felt deserted and lonely. He wished someone would come out and nod, or give some perfunctory greeting, just to break the unsettling feeling that he was invisible, a disembodied ghost alone on an abandoned and drifting ship.

It was because of this feeling that he did something he almost never did—he approached the two Watch officers standing outside the door behind which the pilot guided the ship.

He raised a hand in greeting, expected the same gesture in return, and questions about why he roamed the corridors at this hour. A perfunctory sentence or two about not being able to sleep was on his tongue, ready for the question, but the two officers stood masked and unmoving at the end of the narrow corridor.

He stopped, bewildered. “The days are longer near the end, are they not?” he essayed.

No answer. The feeling of invisibility increased, and for a moment Kels wasn’t so much alarmed at the thought that something might be wrong with the guards as he was despairing of his own substantial existence. But common sense exerted itself. He put a hand on one silent watchman’s shoulder. “Honored!” Nothing. He pushed gently, and the man turned slowly to the side, as though he were in some sort of suggestible trance.

Kels drew his gun, and pushed past the two unresponding men to open the door to the pilot’s station.

The pilot was in his seat, back to the door, and before him were the ship’s controls. A dark-haired figure in kilt and embroidered blouse bent over him, a small recorder in his hand. They were both close enough that Kels might have reached out to touch either man. Kels was on the verge of firing when Awt Emnys straightened and looked at him with Ghem Echend’s eyes.

The moment of hesitation was enough. Awt grabbed the gun, pulling it upwards and away, twisting Kels’s arm around painfully until he was forced to let go his weapon. Awt pointed the gun at Kels and pushed him against the bulkhead.

“Why?” Kels gasped, his arm still hurting from Awt’s grip.

“It’s my job,” Awt said. “Did you think warehouse inventory suited me?”

“Have you no regard for your own people?” asked Kels. “Or is the Gerentate truly our enemy?”

Awt smiled, a little sadly. “The Gerentate is not your enemy. The Radch, on the other hand…” He shrugged.

“Radchaai,” Kels whispered in horror. “We are destroyed.”

“On the contrary. To destroy any part of the world would be to destroy its value. No one who submits will be harmed. Those who don’t submit…” He shrugged, gun still aimed at Kels. “They choose their own fate. But if you mean some indefinable quality of being Ghaonish, or that splendid pride and isolation… I would have thought that you of all people would have understood that it wasn’t worth preserving.” He cocked an eyebrow, sardonic. “It wasn’t only you the Ghem agnate treated badly. I know more of my grandmother than I said.”

Kels was dizzy, and breathing was difficult, as though the air had turned to water and he was drowning. Awt had understood, had already known the things that Kels had so wanted to say to him.

“I owe Ghaon nothing,” Awt continued. “Nor the Gerentate. And the Radchaai pay me well for my services.” He let go of Kels, who didn’t move, still frozen with the revelation, and the threat of the gun. “Don’t accuse yourself. Nothing would be gained if you had killed me. Do you think this is the first successful attempt? None of you will remember anything, just like every other time an agent has made this run.” Awt put a hand on Kels’s shoulder, gave a consoling squeeze. “I won’t kill you unless you make me. And I would regret that very much.” Then he turned away, gun still in hand, and resumed his quiet questioning of the pilot.

Kels’s arm hurt, but distantly, as though the pain was part of some dream he would wake from shortly. He tried to make his breaths deeper, but only felt even more starved for air. Had he himself ever stood entranced beside the pilot’s station as a Radchaai spy carefully probed for the keys to Ghaon’s strongest defense? How many times? His failure was galling, even more so the thought that he had failed over and over again, and never known it. He was afraid to die, afraid to risk his life, and indeed his death might well be purposeless, as his life had been. But what difference would it make? If what Awt had said was true, Ghaon was already doomed, and he himself would have no memories to reproach himself with.

Awt spoke to the pilot, quietly, and the pilot murmured in response. He recalled Awt speaking to him in the lounge, six months back. Have you held to something you should have let go? Awt had judged him well. It speaks poorly of the Watch that such a one would be selected.

“Awt Emnys.”

Awt turned, one ear still toward the murmuring pilot.

“Don’t do this. Destroy the recording, return to your cabin. I will tell no one.” Without answering, Awt turned back again.

No more hesitation. This was the moment. Kels shoved himself away from the bulkhead, grabbed Awt’s arm as he turned. The gun fired, the bullet grazing Kels’s ear and burying itself in the bulkhead behind him. Alarms sounded, faint and distant beneath the pounding of Kels’s heart. He brought his knee up hard between Awt’s legs, yanked the gun from his hand, brought the muzzle up to Awt’s head, and fired.

The alarms brought first and second watches. Blood was splattered on Kels, the still-senseless pilot’s body, the deck. Ninan was speaking, but Kels could only hear the roaring silence that had followed the gunshot.

“… in shock,” said a distant voice. But Awt wasn’t in shock, he was dead.

“He’s not injured.” Ninan’s mouth moved with the sound. Ninan speaking. His mask was askew. “None of this blood’s his. Iraon! Look at it all!” Someone made retching noises, and the need to vomit was overpowering for a moment, but Kels managed to suppress it.

“Lying bastard!” Tris. Kels couldn’t see him. “I bet there’s no Ghaonish grandmother at all. I knew he was no good, that kind never are.”

“Inarakhat Kels, you’re a hero!” said Ninan, and patted Kels lightly on his jaw. “Caught a spy!”

Kels drew in a long, ragged breath. Ninan was saying something about promotions and pay raises, and someone said, “Now they’ll know they can’t fool the Watch.” They were all familiar and foreign at the same moment.

“Let’s get you to your bunk,” said Ninan.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Kels.

Ninan was pulling him up by his arm. “What?”

“It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t worth it.” Ninan looked at him, uncomprehending. “None of you are worth it.” Kels shook his head. Ninan would never understand, or Tris, or any of them. Awt Emnys might, but Awt Emnys was dead.

“Of course,” said Ninan reassuringly. “It’s upsetting. But he chose his own fate. You did nothing more than your duty.”

“He wouldn’t submit,” said Kels.

“Exactly. A fatal mistake.” Ninan clapped Kels on the shoulder. “But enough of this. Let’s get you to your bunk. And something strong to drink.”

“One thinks,” said Inarakhat Kels, “that a cup of tea would be sufficient.”

She Commands Me and I Obey

Residents of Noage Itray could look up and see the ballcourt hanging ten miles overhead, four meters wide and fifty long from goal line to goal line. Stands stretched along each side, row upon row of seats slanting up and back. For the station’s entire thirty-five mile cylindrical length, buildings and gardens clung to its curving interior walls, bright with reflected sunlight. Noage Itray was the largest and wealthiest of the four stations in its Precinct—the second oldest of the four Precincts.

Under the ballcourt stands, proof of that antiquity, stood ranks of life-sized statues serving, crouching, springing to meet the ball. Elaborately painted wristguards, jewels on necks and arms, shimmered faintly in half shadow, each statue the result of the septennial elections decided on Noage Itray’s Blue Lily ballcourt.

They were called the Hundred, though Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe had counted three hundred and seventy-two of them. On game days flowers decked each statue. The air would be heavy with their scent and the muttered prayers of worshippers as they streamed past, into the stands. Today the space echoed coldly, the stale remains of incense barely perceptible, the Hundred staring into empty, silent space.

Back in a dim corner stood Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe’s favorite: a woman, rare but not unheard of. Her-Breath-Contains had entered Blue Lily Monastery at the age of four (he was older now, nearly twelve) and even then she had attracted his sympathy. She wasn’t particularly pretty. She wore no jewels, only the short trousers of a ballplayer and an undecorated armguard that covered her from wrist to elbow, her hand curled into a fist to hold it in place. She wasn’t jumping or crouching, only standing, her arms at her side, her head tilted just slightly, as though she were listening to a voice only she could hear. But to Her-Breath-Contains she seemed imbued with personality. The name on the pedestal under her feet was She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey. She had been a friendly face to a small boy missing his nurse, surrounded by strangers in a cold, unfamiliar place.

Every day one of the monks—or more usually a minor novice like Her-Breath-Contains—would stand in the portico with an offering of boiled fish and recite their names. By the time Her-Breath-Contains was nine he’d learned the entire list by heart, but she wasn’t on it. So he had counted. Three hundred and seventy-one names, three hundred and seventy-two statues of deified ballplayers.

It troubled him that she was left out of the daily offerings. She had been abandoned, forgotten. It wasn’t fair.

But Her-Breath-Contains knew her secret. If he stood just right, with his fingers on the base under her bare feet, and bowed his head just the right amount, he could hear what she heard—voices in a room three hundred meters from where she stood, where monastery officials often held conferences. As far as Her-Breath-Contains could tell, no one else knew the room was bugged.

Sometimes there was only silence. Other days dull, nearly incomprehensible theological discourse. Today it was about the game.

“… woman they say. The Harime ship docked this morning.” The voice belonged to Qefahl Brend, governor of the station, and the Precinct’s representative to the Council of Four. Three days from now, the game would either end or renew Qefahl Brend’s tenure as tetrarch, depending who won or lost. Her-Breath-Contains had often heard his voice on broadcast. And though he wasn’t supposed to know it, the tetrarch was Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe’s much older brother.

“Well,” said the abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death. “If she’s pretty no doubt she’ll be popular in the Hundred.” A short silence. Her-Breath-Contains stretched aching shoulders, where he stood bowed before She-Commands-Me. “What troubles you?” asked the abbot.

“Blue Lily is undefeated in the past ten elections, nearly undefeated in regular play. White Lily is good, but not as good as Blue Lily. It’s obvious how the game will come out. The governor of Harime can have no illusions, he knows he’s not going to be seated on the Council, he knows whoever captains White Lily will die at the end of the game. He might as well use this as an opportunity to be conveniently rid of someone. I knew the names of the four likeliest candidates. But instead we get… this woman.”

“Ah. You dislike surprises.”

“Surprises,” said Tetrarch Qefahl Brend, “are a symptom of faulty information.”

“Or faulty premises,” said the abbot. “Shall I tell you what Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns has discovered?” A pause. “He went to meet them as they disembarked. For the last year and a half this woman has played for an obscure Harime convent. Very small stuff, but she’s a real ballplayer for all that. Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns says she has the look of a fanatic.” The voice of the abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death changed slightly, became a touch too smooth and even, a tone Her-Breath-Contains, listening from the portico, knew well. It meant the abbot was saying something beyond just what his words meant. “Our captain, the monk Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns, is perhaps not as pious as he might be.”

Whatever Her-Breath-Contains’s brother the tetrarch had to say in response was lost. A voice among the Hundred startled the boy’s head up, his heart racing. “You didn’t waste any time!” Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns said, his confident tenor echoing around the statues.

An unfamiliar voice answered. “Why waste time, brother?” A woman’s voice, the accent old-fashioned sounding, the words oddly precise. It made Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe think of singers, though he didn’t think it was a singer’s voice.

Seven-Brilliant-Truths laughed. Her-Breath-Contains stood still at the feet of She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey, hardly daring to breathe. Seven-Brilliant-Truths was the hero of the minor novices. He’d had his teeth replaced with moissanite, which shone glittering in his dark face when he smiled, and he smiled often. He wore the humble monastic coverall as though it were the embroidered and jeweled gown of a tetrarch. He’d always been condescendingly kind, even indulgent, toward the boys of Blue Lily Monastery, but the thought of him finding Her-Breath-Contains like this, at his private devotions and, worse, eavesdropping, made Her-Breath-Contains’s face heat uncomfortably.

“Introducing yourself, I take it,” Seven-Brilliant-Truths said to the woman, blessedly still unaware of Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe. “Oh, glorious Hundred, numerous as suns, brilliant and brief as comets, children of the Goddess, guarantors of Her mercy, I introduce to you Sister Ultimately-Justice-Shall-Prevail, who will join you three days from now.”

The woman must be the captain of the White Lily team, from Harime Station. Her-Breath-Contains made a cautious movement, and the abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death spoke in his ear. “Of course we’ll watch her.”

The tetrarch Qefahl Brend made a dubious noise. “She’s not the problem. Women…” Her-Breath-Contains shifted just a bit, lost the thread of the tetrarch’s voice.

“You should go, sister. Take the transport back to the Harime quarter and talk to people, bless some babies. They’ll buy your icon in the market and brag to their children that they met you personally before I took your head off in the ballcourt.” Her-Breath-Contains knew that Seven-Brilliant-Truths was speaking the literal truth—everyone knew that Blue Lily would win and White Lily’s captain would die on the ballcourt at the conclusion of the game. But hearing it said so baldly, so boastingly, gave Her-Breath-Contains an odd feeling of revulsion. He shifted again.

“… urely, Tetrarch, your departed mother…”

“On that topic, what are you teaching my brother?”

“As I understand it,” said Abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death, “your brother Qefahl Aresh is on retreat.”

“We’re not overheard here? You assured me.”

“We are not. This is, in fact, one of the most securely private places on the station, let alone the monastery.” A pang of mixed guilt and exultation overcame Her-Breath-Contains. He had never told the abbot about his discovery at the feet of She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey. Knowing what another does not know gives you the advantage, the abbot had said more than once.

“So,” said the tetrarch Qefahl Brend. “Dispense with your pious fiction.”

Her-Breath-Contains’s back ached, and the conversation between Seven-Brilliant-Truths and Sister Ultimately-Justice continued, but at this moment nothing could distract him from the conversation between the abbot and the tetrarch.

“A monk,” answered the abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death, “is severed from all family and social connections. When one takes vows one takes a new identity. I should not have to explain this to you.”

An exasperated sigh. “What are you teaching the minor novice Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe?”

“Only the usual.”

“Don’t toy with me, Abbot. I studied with you myself, back in the day. My younger brother’s death was less convenient than sending him here. Let him learn his prayers and no more, or I might have to reconsult my convenience.”

A strange feeling passed over Her-Breath-Contains, a shivery sensation that seemed to start both at the back of his neck and in his stomach, half a moment before he consciously understood what Qefahl Brend had just said.

“Don’t look so shocked,” continued the tetrarch. Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe’s brother. “You play politics as much as I do.”

“You learned a great deal from me,” said the abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death. “But some things I was never able to teach you. You believe any display of piety must be either insincere or foolish. But no matter how ruthless I am, no matter how political—and I must be ruthless and political, for the sake of this monastery—I remain a servant of the Go—”

A hand landed forcefully on Her-Breath-Contains’s shoulder and he dropped his hands from the statue base, straightened and spun, to see Seven-Brilliant-Truths frowning down at him. Her-Breath-Contains blinked at him stupidly. “Ah…”

“Leave the child be,” said Sister Ultimately-Justice. Her-Breath-Contains turned and saw her finally, a woman in the plain brown coverall of a monastic, her hair cut short. Her dark face looked just slightly odd in a way Her-Breath-Contains couldn’t place. She seemed precise as her speech, and so solidly where she was, as though wherever she placed her feet she was rooted to the ground. He wondered if that was what Seven-Brilliant-Truths had meant when he’d said she had the look of a fanatic.

Seven-Brilliant-Truths was looking at him strangely, unsmiling. Not as though he were angry, but something else. “She your favorite?”

Her-Breath-Contains’s face went hot again. “Yes.”

An expression flashed across Seven-Brilliant-Truths’s face, quick and disquieting. He dropped his hand from Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe’s shoulder and looked as though he wanted to step back.

“Very commendable,” said Sister Ultimately-Justice, each syllable dropping exactly. “Can you tell me about her game?”

“She’s not a player,” said Seven-Brilliant-Truths, sparing Her-Breath-Contains from admitting his ignorance. “Not one of the Hundred. She’s a, what do you call it, a symbol, an idea…”

“An allegory.”

“That.” The strange expression remained on Seven-Brilliant-Truths’s face. He looked at Her-Breath-Contains. “But you didn’t know that.”

Her-Breath-Contains gestured no, mortified. He didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to show anyone what a baby he was, had been. Didn’t want to say, She was my friend when I was little. He waited for Seven-Brilliant-Truths to ask why her, or to mock him. Instead, the monk said, “She’s more for visiting teams than for us, these days. When She-Who-Sprang-From-The-Lily commands…” He made a slicing gesture across his throat. “One obeys. You understand me, sister.” He grinned again, a flash of moissanite.

“I do,” she answered, utterly unperturbed.

“She was the special devotion of the abbot Hold-Her-Commands-As-A-Mirror-To-Your-Heart, did you know that, boy?”

“No.”

Seven-Brilliant-Truths turned to Sister Ultimately-Justice. “Surely you’ve heard of him, sister. Hold-Her-Commands-As-A-Mirror-To-Your-Heart was meditating by the monastery fishpond with two of his disciples when he bodily transcended this world and was received by the Goddess. He physically stepped from this world to the next. A genuine saint.”

“One of the disciples who witnessed it,” Ultimately-Justice said, “became abbot in his place. The other died soon after.”

“You’re a student of Blue Lily history.”

“No,” she said. “It was obvious.”

Seven-Brilliant-Truths blinked, frowned, stepped away from Ultimately-Justice. “I’ll leave you to your prayers. Brother. Sister.” He bowed slightly, turned and left. Her-Breath-Contains would have sworn he was unnerved. It frightened him.

“He’s afraid of you,” said Ultimately-Justice, with that careful, slightly rough voice, as though she had read his mind. “Tell me, are you ambitious like your brother?”

“Wh…” What little balance Her-Breath-Contains had gained was knocked away from him again. “How…”

“When was the last time you looked in a mirror?” Her-Breath-Contains didn’t answer, and Sister Ultimately-Justice continued. “It is an unsuitable position for a child to be in. I will give you advice. Be aware of your surroundings. If you are ambitious, be also silent. Or you may find yourself a genuine saint at the bottom of the monastery fishpond.”

Suddenly Her-Breath-Contains understood the implications of the story Seven-Brilliant-Truths had just told, and of Sister’s confident it was obvious. Though he’d heard of the abbot’s translation hundreds of times, the idea of murder had never occurred to him before. He thought of his brother saying, I might have to reconsult my convenience, and felt nauseated.

Sister Ultimately-Justice smiled mildly, rooted in stone. “What do you learn, contemplating She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey?”

She knows, he thought, knowing at the same moment that it was unreasonable. She couldn’t possibly. He opened his mouth to speak and then remembered what she had just said to him.

“A quick learner.” Her smile did not alter.

On game day, Noage Itray was an endless vista of blue, except for the irregular patch near one end and spinward, where residents of the Harime quarter had covered their roofs in white. The abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death had ordered Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe to accompany him down onto the court, and so he stood just behind the Blue Lily goal line, holding a gently smoking censer. Tetrarch Qefahl Brend was just on the other side of the abbot—tall, his dark face long and angular, hair braided back with embroidered satin ribbons, apparently completely unaware of Her-Breath-Contains’s existence.

Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns stood ready to receive the abbot’s blessing. He wore a loose robe of scarlet satin, covered in tiny blue lilies edged in gold thread. Gold hung from his ears and in layers around his neck, under wreaths of blue and orange flowers. The three other Blue Lily players were similarly decked, but not quite so resplendent as Seven-Brilliant-Truths. He received so many gifts, and such luxurious ones, that even when he had given the monastery its share he was awash in money.

Ahead, over the goal line, stretched the ballcourt. Atop walls four meters high, the Blue Lily and White Lily sides of the stands faced each other across the court. Both sides were already packed tight, except for seats in front above the center line, held open for the abbot, and for the tetrarch Qefahl Brend. And across the court, on the White Lily wall, the seat for the governor of Harime. The crowd was bright with colorful clothing, with flowers. The monks of Blue Lily Monastery, a swath of brown at the center line on the Blue Lily wall, had been fasting since yesterday, would still fast until the game was well over, but the secular spectators had broken their fasts that morning. Even over the incense the smell of the cakes and dried fruit they passed to each other made Her-Breath-Contains slightly dizzy with wanting.

“Brother Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns,” said the abbot. “I have something to say before we step over the goal line.” Behind the goal line teams could speak in private. Step over, and every word, every sound, was amplified for the spectators, broadcast to everyone watching in those blue-draped houses curving up and around, to the ships hanging outside the station, and eventually to every other station and Precinct under the Council of Four. Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns grinned, his moissanite teeth glittering.

“This is your first election game,” said the abbot. “As you know, I captained Blue Lily before I became abbot. Three times, I put the mother of Tetrarch Qefahl Brend on the Council of Four. The first time was the most difficult.” He stopped, looked up at the people crowding the stands, and shook his head. “We spoke last night of the allegory of She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey.” Seven-Brilliant-Truths’s gaze flickered to Her-Breath-Contains, then back to the abbot, who continued speaking. “You don’t understand her significance. Ultimate obedience is not only required of the losing captain, but also of the winner.”

“Of course, Abbot,” said Seven-Brilliant-Truths.

“You don’t understand me. You won’t until you put the blade to her throat, and see her blood pump out, see her expression as she dies. Maybe not even then, although I hope for all our sakes that’s not the case.”

“Sister is devout enough for ten of us,” said Seven-Brilliant-Truths. “She’s not afraid.”

Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death sighed. “I will pray for you, during the game and after. I, and Brother Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe.” The abbot put his hand on Her-Breath-Contains’s shoulder, and Her-Breath-Contains was suddenly frighteningly aware of his brother, the tetrarch Qefahl Brend, standing on the other side of the abbot. “Let us begin, since you are so eager to see blood shed.”

They all walked to the center line, to meet White Lily. Sister Ultimately-Justice wore only plain, short trousers, an armguard, and a single, broad wreath of white lilies that covered her shoulders and breasts. She stood silent at the center line, her arms at her sides, expression bland, head slightly tilted.

The Harime governor stood beside her, a smaller man than Qefahl Brend, round-faced, and older. He also wore his hair braided back, but the governor’s robe he wore hung limp around him, as though it didn’t quite fit him properly. Sister’s teammates stood behind her, all wearing the same sort of embroidered satin, jewels, and flowers that Blue Lily’s players wore.

Qefahl Brend stepped up to the center of the court. “Who will play for me?” he asked, the ritual question, his voice resonant and sure.

“I, Brother Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns, will play for you!” announced Seven-Brilliant-Truths, the ritual answer. He flashed his moissanite grin, and the Blue Lily side of the stands erupted into cheers and applause.

The Harime governor stepped up to the center, across from Qefahl Brend. But instead of asking the question, he said, “There was a time, Tetrarch, when you and I would have had to play this game ourselves.” Silence, and then a puzzled mutter from the stands. “Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be best to take our own risks. Is it right to ask our captains to take the burden we should bear ourselves?” He shook his head, sadly, Her-Breath-Contains thought. “Who will play for me?”

Ultimately-Justice spoke, in her precise way. “I, Sister Ultimately-Justice-Shall-Prevail, will play for you.” Polite applause followed. Her-Breath-Contains found himself distressed. This was the game, the one that all other games were a rehearsal for. It was, the abbot had once told him, the place where planning and maneuvering fell before the will of She-Who-Sprang-From-The-Lily. Captaining a team was the ultimate surrender to Her desire. The people in the stands knew they had come to see Sister Ultimately-Justice die, and that scattering of applause was all they could muster. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

For the next ten minutes, the abbot prayed, blessed the captains, blessed the middle court and back court players, asked the blessing of She-Who-Sprang-From-The-Lily on the spectators, the station, the Precinct, the territory of the Council. He took the censer from Her-Breath-Contains and wafted smoke toward the tetrarch and the Harime governor, the two captains. Still smiling, Seven-Brilliant-Truths held out his hands, rings three and four to a finger, the smoke curling around them. His middle court player stepped forward and did the same, and then his back court.

Sister Ultimately-Justice’s hands were square and plain. She held them briefly in the smoke and then stepped aside for her middle court player. When he reached forward Her-Breath-Contains was struck by the contrast between his elaborately jeweled hands and Sister Ultimately-Justice’s plain ones. A network of gold links and gems covered the back of the middle court’s right hand from knuckle to wrist, and then fanned out into a series of jeweled chains that hung from there to a band around his upper arm, just above his elbow. It sparkled through the smoke, red and yellow and green. It was arresting and strange, almost barbaric-looking. Her-Breath-Contains had never seen anything like it. The middle court looked up, saw Her-Breath-Contains looking at him, and smiled. Her-Breath-Contains found himself resenting the man. This was one of the most important games of his life, and his team’s captain was doomed to die at the conclusion of the game, and yet he smiled so casually.

Abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death sat in the front of the Noage Itray side, on the center line. Beside him was Qefahl Brend, directly opposite the governor of Harime, across the court in the Harime stands. On the other side of the tetrarch was a stranger, a pale, odd-looking man who spoke with a harsh accent. Behind the abbot, Her-Breath-Contains turned to his neighbor, an older novice. “Who is that?” he asked quietly.

“He’s an out-system merchant. He wants contracts and concessions. He wants discounted docking fees and lowered tariffs. He’s been positively pouring jewelry and imported luxuries onto the tetrarch since he arrived. I heard…”

But Her-Breath-Contains didn’t learn what his neighbor had heard. The game was beginning.

Both teams had put off their satin and jewels—in Ultimately-Justice’s case, she had removed the wreath of lilies—and now wore only trousers and armguards. Middle and back courts took their places, and the two captains faced each other across the center line.

The first serve was White Lily’s, and Ultimately-Justice slammed the ball with her armguard powerfully enough to send it toward Blue Lily’s goal line at a speed the back court player didn’t anticipate. The ball grazed the side of his armguard and bounced off the Harime wall.

Blue Lily’s middle court dove for it, landing facedown, and hit the ball just before it bounced, driving it in a wide arc across the center line. Ultimately-Justice, with one hard, fast swing of her arm, drove it angling toward the Noage Itray wall, where Blue Lily would have to scramble to reach it, since they had all been trying to catch the ball in its bounce off the opposite wall.

But Seven-Brilliant-Truths was fast. He reached the ball and slammed it hard, back across the center line. White Lily’s middle court tried to return it, but it flew into the stands, a foul.

The spectators on the Harime wall were sluggish at first, but after a few plays they realized that Sister Ultimately-Justice was playing to win. White Lily’s middle court seemed to be having a bad day—he fouled twice while Her-Breath-Contains watched. But Ultimately-Justice was going to give Blue Lily as good a fight as she could, better than anyone had expected. Even as Blue Lily scored three goals in succession, the Harime spectators’ enthusiasm strengthened. Her-Breath-Contains was pleased to see Seven-Brilliant-Truths, so grinning and sure of himself at the start of the game, compelled to fight for points.

The merchant leaned over to the tetrarch Qefahl Brend, raised his hand, and gestured toward the ball as it flew over White Lily’s goal line. Draped across the back of his hand was a piece of jewelry nearly identical to the one Ultimately-Justice’s middle court man had worn before the start of the game. Her-Breath-Contains’s eyes followed the dangling chains that led to the same upper armlet. He frowned. Had the merchant been giving gifts to White Lily players?

“Blue Lily must score next,” said Qefahl Brend to the merchant, answering a question he had asked but Her-Breath-Contains had not heard, absorbed as he was by the merchant’s jewelry. “If White Lily scores, then both sides return to zero and the game begins again.”

“Every time? Even if it keeps happening?”

“There was a game,” said the abbot, “centuries ago, that lasted two months and six days.”

“I hope this one won’t be so long!” exclaimed the merchant. “I enjoy sports, but not to that extent.”

It was clear the merchant knew virtually nothing about the game. And he was here currying the tetrarch’s favor, so if he had given gifts to players, they would likely have been to Blue Lily’s. So where had White Lily’s middle court gotten his jewelry?

Her-Breath-Contains’s seatmate had said, He’s been positively pouring jewelry and imported luxuries onto the tetrarch since he arrived. The merchant might very well have given such a gift to Qefahl Brend.

“It doesn’t matter how long it lasts,” said the abbot. “Only that we do the will of She-Who-Sprang-From-The-Lily.”

But, Her-Breath-Contains realized, Qefahl Brend cared nothing for the will of She-Who-Sprang-From-The-Lily. Sister Ultimately-Justice—or for that matter Her-Breath-Contains—was only a potential obstacle between Qefahl Brend and what he wanted. Her-Breath-Contains was protected by the abbot, so it seemed. Who would defend Sister Ultimately-Justice? Her own teammate had been bribed to help destroy her. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Her-Breath-Contains said, rising, and excused his way out of the crowd of novices and took the stairs down to the cold and silent portico, and the staring Hundred.

A monk was standing at the door to the White Lily end of the court. Above, the noise of the crowd following the play, and from the court the thwack of the ball hitting the walls, the occasional grunt of a ballplayer. “What do you want, brother?” asked the White Lily monk.

“I have to talk to Sister.”

“Go away.”

“You don’t understand. I have to talk to her.”

The play ended in a foul; Her-Breath-Contains heard the call. The White Lily monk sighed, took a step back, and made a sign. A moment later Her-Breath-Contains heard the timeout call, and Ultimately-Justice-Shall-Prevail came to the door.

Her-Breath-Contains routinely looked on the nearly naked She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey without embarrassment, but she was just a statue. Sister Ultimately-Justice was a real woman. Her arms and legs were well-muscled and streaked with grime, from diving for the ball. Her-Breath-Contains looked up toward her face quickly, because the close sight of her bare breasts was disturbing him, but so was the smell of her sweat, her very solid presence. She said nothing, only stood and waited, face expressionless.

She frightened him. He swallowed. “There’s a merchant from out-system,” he said, willing his voice not to shake, feeling slightly unreal. “He’s been giving the tetrarch presents. He wants contracts.” A pause to swallow again. “He’s wearing this weird bracelet-thing. It goes all over his hand and up his arm and…”

It was as though he wasn’t speaking. Her expression didn’t change at all, there was no acknowledgment of his presence. “And your middle court man was wearing one just like it before the game. Except it was a different color. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

She didn’t ask him what he meant, or if he was sure, or what he thought he was doing. She just turned and walked back out to the ballcourt without saying a word.

Her-Breath-Contains turned as calmly as he could and walked away, into the middle of the Hundred, reluctant this time to look squarely at She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey. He closed his eyes, took three deep breaths, wishing there weren’t so many flowers, opened his eyes, and climbed the steps to the top of the wall, where the Blue Lily monks sat. As he took his seat, Seven-Brilliant-Truths served, and Ultimately-Justice was poised to return it—until her middle court man, running for the ball, tripped and fell into her, and knocked the ball backwards, straight toward his own goal. Her back court knocked it away at the very last moment, sending it up into the stands.

The spectators on the Harime side groaned in unison, engaged in the game’s outcome as they had not been at the start. The Harime governor seemed not to react at all. “What was that?” asked the novice beside Her-Breath-Contains. White Lily’s back court strode toward the middle court player, seemed about to speak angrily, but then must have remembered that what he said would be audible both here and to people watching in their homes, because he stopped abruptly and returned to his position. The Blue Lily players laughed outright.

Ultimately-Justice gestured for a timeout. All three White Lily players walked behind the goal line, where they could speak without everyone on the station hearing. Ultimately-Justice spoke calmly, briefly. Her middle court replied emphatically, gesturing negatively three and four times, no, no, no, no. Back court tried to speak but Ultimately-Justice raised her hand and spoke again, still calm. Middle court gestured again, no, spoke at length, presumably explaining.

They returned to the court. Ultimately-Justice seemed unfazed. As she walked past her middle court man, she suddenly spun around and slammed her armguard hard against his knee. The crack of bone breaking was audible over the whole ballcourt, and the scream of the injured ballplayer echoed in the momentary shocked silence of the spectators.

The noise rose. Qefahl Brend seemed paralyzed in his seat. The novice next to Her-Breath-Contains said, “She can’t do that! Can she do that?” Meanwhile, Ultimately-Justice strolled unconcerned to the center line, looked at Seven-Brilliant-Truths, and, gently, sweetly, smiled. Began to hum a tune unfamiliar to Her-Breath-Contains.

She stood there for ten minutes, singing softly to herself, while monks and the governors’ assistants searched centuries of precedent, but there was, it appeared, no rule forbidding one to incapacitate one’s own teammate.

The fourth White Lily player, who probably had not expected to play at all, took middle court, and the game resumed. Ultimately-Justice moved with astonishing precision and speed, sending the ball crashing from wall to wall. Her own team barely kept pace with her—though there were no more comic mishaps, no more inexplicable ineptness.

It wasn’t until the score reached four to four that the people sitting on the Harime wall realized that Sister Ultimately-Justice might actually win. The sound coming from across the court shifted subtly, and it set the hair on Her-Breath-Contains’s arms standing. He didn’t know if anyone else could hear the change, or if he was imagining it.

White Lily scored their fifth point—Ultimately-Justice leaping a meter off the ground to slam the ball straight past Seven-Brilliant-Truths and his bewildered middle and back courts—and suddenly the Harime were on their feet and screaming. The Harime governor sat calmly, as though nothing had happened. He knew from the start, thought Her-Breath-Contains. She came and said she could win it and that’s how she got the position. He wouldn’t have had anything to lose, all the risk would have been Ultimately-Justice’s. Everyone had been so sure, but now Qefahl Brend might lose the seat on the Council of Four, and…

Suddenly Her-Breath-Contains saw what he had done. On the court, Seven-Brilliant-Truths grimaced, moissanite teeth flashing briefly.

Her-Breath-Contains didn’t want anyone to win. He wanted the game to stop, and now. He’d known from the beginning that someone would die, that at the end of the game he would watch an actual human being killed on the ballcourt, but it had been so abstract. “Six!” said the novice next to Her-Breath-Contains, in an anguished voice. Six against four. White Lily only needed four points more to win. “If we can score next…” This was another moment when the game could be reset. If Blue Lily could score next, both would start all over at zero. Ultimately-Justice hefted the ball, ready for the serve.

She hit it straight and hard. Seven-Brilliant-Truths, apparently unnerved, brought his arm up an instant too late. The ball slammed into his mouth—a foul. Play stopped. Seven-Brilliant-Truths put his hands on his knees, breathed. Spat blood on the court. Straightened. Ultimately-Justice watched him impassively. She took the ball when it was given to her, served again.

Something had gone out of Seven-Brilliant-Truths, out of Blue Lily. White scored three more times in quick succession—nine to four, another precarious moment. If Blue Lily could score, both sides would return to zero. If White scored, the game would be over. The noise from both sides of the court was louder than Her-Breath-Contains-The-Universe had ever imagined any sound could be. Everyone, it seemed, was standing, shouting, screaming. Except for the out-system merchant, who might well be preparing to direct his bribes elsewhere. Except the abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death. Except Tetrarch Qefahl Brend, and the governor of Harime Station. They sat silent and still in their seats.

For two more serves, the score stayed where it was. The sound, impossibly, increased. Then White Lily’s new middle court knocked the ball up and over. It arced long and high the length of the court. The three Blue Lily players stopped, arms at their sides, and stared at the ball as it landed just behind their goal line. The sound of the spectators—Noage Itray crying out in dismay, Harime in triumph—was like a solid object filling the air.

Sister Ultimately-Justice walked up to Seven-Brilliant-Truths and spoke. It should have been audible, but the sound in the court was so loud that Her-Breath-Contains could only see her mouth move. Her-Breath-Contains looked across to the Harime wall—the Harime governor’s seat was empty.

The monk who had been guarding the doorway to the White Lily end of the court came before the abbot and the tetrarch. He bowed and spoke. The noise was still too loud for Her-Breath-Contains to hear anything, but he saw the monk’s lips move. Messages, he saw, and the monk held his hands out, one to the abbot and one to Qefahl Brend.

Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death brushed his fingers across the monk’s hand and then his own ear, leaving a gauzy, barely visible membrane. Qefahl Brend waited a moment before following suit.

After a few moments Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death raised his hand and wiped the device away, and turned to look at Her-Breath-Contains, eyebrow raised. He made a beckoning gesture and Her-Breath-Contains leaned forward. “Accompany me,” said the abbot, and rose and strode away.

Her-Breath-Contains followed. The White Lily monk raised his hand casually, as though he were doing something entirely thoughtless, and touched Her-Breath-Contains’s ear as he passed. Suddenly Her-Breath-Contains heard the careful, rough voice of Ultimately-Justice. “I would not have done this, but you chose to involve yourself.” He started to raise his hand to touch the device, but stopped himself. The recording continued, her voice in his ear intimate in a way that made him shiver. “You are in great danger from this moment forward, no matter what you choose. The abbot will only protect you so long as you display no independence.”

Under the stands the noise was muted somewhat and Her-Breath-Contains heard a step behind him. He turned, saw his brother Qefahl Brend. Her-Breath-Contains looked forward again, quickly. “I will help you where I can,” said Ultimately-Justice’s voice. “But favors come with a price.” The message-end tone sounded.

He followed the abbot to a room behind the White Lily goal line, where Seven-Brilliant-Truths and Sister Ultimately-Justice stood, and beside them the governor of Harime, who bowed to Tetrarch Qefahl Brend, but not deeply. Seven-Brilliant-Truths stared at Her-Breath-Contains as he came in behind the abbot.

The governor of Harime spoke. “At this moment Brother Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns is more valuable than you, governor of Noage Itray. Tetrarch for the moment. Your seat on the Council of Four is lost. You can’t regain it without a good ball team. Or copious bribes, which, as you are no longer tetrarch, you may no longer find so easy to afford.” Her-Breath-Contains expected an outburst from Qefahl Brend, but there was nothing. The governor of Harime continued. “Noage Itray, and Blue Lily Monastery, needs Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns if they are to have any hope of regaining what they have lost. But they don’t need you in particular, Tetrarch.”

“Your point?” asked Qefahl Brend, voice smooth and dangerous.

“I have no interest in seeing anyone die,” said the governor of Harime. “Least of all Brother Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns. I have been troubled for some time over what seems to be to be our taking the game’s conclusion for granted. I speak not just of the populace but also ourselves, the governors. It was meant to ensure that anyone seeking office truly desired the will of She-Who-Sprang-From-The-Lily, but what does it mean, now we aren’t risking ourselves? I suggest a return to something approaching the original terms of the game. Not your death, Tetrarch, but your retirement to a life of prayer and asceticism. Surely that will satisfy She-Who-Sprang-From-The-Lily. What could be sweeter to Her than lifelong devotion?”

Qefahl Brend gave a bark of laughter. “Do as you like, I have no reason to retire.” Silence for just a moment, Ultimately-Justice standing quiet and solid, Seven-Brilliant-Truths still looking fixedly at Her-Breath-Contains.

The abbot bowed toward the governor of Harime. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you actually imagined that Qefahl Brend might sacrifice his ambition for the good of Noage Itray. But we both know him too well. No more games, Governor, make your serve in earnest.”

Unfazed, the governor of Harime said, “There is also the matter of the tetrarch’s bribing White Lily’s middle court to throw the game.”

“We have proof,” added Sister Ultimately-Justice. A dizzying wave of anxiety passed through Her-Breath-Contains. Did she expect him to admit what he’d done?

Abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death shook his head in dismay. “Tampering with election results! That’s a serious charge. You have proof, you say?”

“The player confessed,” said Ultimately-Justice. Her-Breath-Contains thought of the sound of the man’s leg breaking, and swallowed back a small, distressed sound.

“Governor,” said the governor of Harime, “if I make my accusation—and my evidence—public you will almost certainly lose most of your support. The matter will come before the Council of Four and you will ultimately be forced out of office in favor of someone else. Depending on who that is—and who your enemies are—you may end up imprisoned, or even executed.” He paused, and then said, “You may avoid this by retiring to a hermitage, and appointing your brother Qefahl Aresh governor in your place.”

Qefahl Aresh. Her-Breath-Contains barely remembered going by that name, it felt foreign to him.

“Qefahl Aresh is only a child,” said Qefahl Brend contemptuously. “And besides, he’s on retreat and cannot be found.”

“It will be as She wills,” said the Harime governor. “If you do not agree, or if you cannot find Qefahl Aresh, then I will bring my accusation and my evidence to the Council of Four.”

Silence. Seven-Brilliant-Truths seemed not to have heard anything, was still looking at Her-Breath-Contains.

After a few heavy moments of silence, Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death said, “Oh, if only Qefahl Aresh were here now.”

“You have conspired against me!” Qefahl Brend accused.

“No,” said the abbot, smiling. “But I know an opportunity when I see one.” He put a hand on Her-Breath-Contains’s shoulder.

Every favor comes with a price. Ultimately-Justice hadn’t had to tell Her-Breath-Contains that, he’d already known it. But the balance wasn’t so lopsided as she seemed to imply. He had already done her a favor. That would have a price that he could collect someday. He wasn’t a child, wasn’t stupid. In fact, everyone here would owe him—the governor of Harime, soon to be the tetrarch, Seven-Brilliant-Truths, the abbot. “I’m Qefahl Aresh,” he said, and then, lightheaded and anxious, wished immediately that he hadn’t spoken.

The governor of Harime did not so much as twitch an eyebrow. He was nearly as impassive as Sister Ultimately-Justice.

“Well, well,” said Abbot Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death. “Imagine that.”

“Congratulations, Abbot,” said Qefahl Brend bitterly. “You have the governorship.”

“No,” said Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death, voice gentle. “Qefahl Aresh does.” Her-Breath-Contains suppressed a shiver.

“You agree, then?” asked the governor of Harime.

“Not to a hermitage! Surely, Abbot…”

“Tampering with election results,” the abbot said sadly, “is a very serious charge.”

“Damn you!” said Qefahl Brend. “Very well, let Aresh be governor, for whatever good it will do any of you.”

“Governor,” said Ultimately-Justice then, and with a start Her-Breath-Contains realized she was talking to him. “I wish to reiterate the proposal regarding Brother Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns. Surely you yourself would prefer to avoid his death.”

Her-Breath-Contains quickly gestured assent. “Yes. I agree to it.”

“Well, Governor,” Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death said, “that isn’t a simple matter, is it? But perhaps we can find a way for Seven-Brilliant-Truths to live to play more games.”

Seven-Brilliant-Truths, silent all this while, turned to Ultimately-Justice. “Sister!” he said. “You have more faith than I do, and I’ve mocked you for it. Will you forgive me?”

“I forgive you,” said Ultimately-Justice, solid, even. Impassive.

“I was so sure it would be you who would die. So sure. I forgot…” He stopped, blinked. “I forgot it’s Her will we do and not ours. Even though She showed me Herself, so often. I’ve spent my whole life, since I was a boy, telling myself I was devoted to Her, but I wasn’t, I was devoted to myself. And now She makes my deception plain, even to myself.” Seven-Brilliant-Truths stepped to where Her-Breath-Contains stood, with the abbot’s hand still on his shoulder, and knelt. “Returned one!” he cried. “I should have paid attention, I should have listened to you and the abbot! Please forgive me!”

Both Qefahl Brend and the Harime governor looked nonplussed. “Brother Seven-Brilliant-Truths,” explained the abbot, “believes that Her-Br—that Qefahl Aresh is the saint Hold-Her-Commands-As-A-Mirror-To-Your-Heart, returned.”

Qefahl Brend scoffed.

“I should have asked your blessing before the game,” Seven-Brilliant-Truths said. “I should have asked the blessing of She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey.” He took Her-Breath-Contains’s hands in his and kissed them. Her-Breath-Contains was appalled.

“I swore I would surrender to Her will, even to the point of losing my life,” said Seven-Brilliant-Truths. “And if I walk away from this, I’ll know that my faith is a lie.”

“What?” Her-Breath-Contains was having trouble understanding what it was Seven-Brilliant-Truths was saying, though suspicion had started a horrible feeling in his empty stomach.

“Are you sure, brother?” asked the governor of Harime. “No one here would blame you.”

“That’s right,” said Her-Breath-Contains hastily.

“And understanding the Goddess’s will isn’t easy,” said the abbot. “We can all of us only do our best.”

“She commands me,” said Seven-Brilliant-Truths. “And I obey. Sister understands.”

“Yes,” said Sister Ultimately-Justice, not even blinking.

Seven-Brilliant-Truths’s death was like everything Sister Ultimately-Justice did—sure and precise.

Afterwards, Her-Breath-Contains and the abbot walked toward the Blue Lily goal line, followed by Blue Lily’s middle court and back court carrying Seven-Brilliant-Truths’s body. Her-Breath-Contains couldn’t afford to make a sound until he was past the line. Seven-Brilliant-Truths’s blood was still fresh on his clothes. He wanted to strip them off, wanted to erase from his mind the sight of Seven-Brilliant-Truths slumping forward, his head in Ultimately-Justice’s hands.

He stepped over the goal line. Qefahl Brend, waiting there, said bitterly to Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death, “It doesn’t matter what happens as long as you have what you want.”

It took Her-Breath-Contains a sick moment to realize Qefahl Brend was talking about himself, not Seven-Brilliant-Truths.

“We’re alike that way,” said the abbot, with equanimity. How calm the abbot was! But Shall-I-Alone-Escape-Death had won three election games, done three times what Sister Ultimately-Justice had just done. “In other ways, not. I’ll send you icons for your hermitage. Of the saint Seven-Brilliant-Truths-Shine-Like-Suns and one of She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey.” He looked at Her-Breath-Contains. “I don’t have to urge you learn from She-Commands-Me-And-I-Obey, do I, Governor.”

Her-Breath-Contains thought of overheard conversations, of the saint Hold-Her-Commands-As-A-Mirror-To-Your-Heart, drowned before he could tell his successor that the most secure room in the monastery was, in fact, bugged. Of the abbot telling him there was power in knowing something others didn’t know. Thought of Sister Ultimately-Justice, her strong arms, the smell of her skin, the knife in her hand, Seven-Brilliant-Truths… no, not that, not that… her voice in his ear, warning him to be careful of the abbot. I’ll help you if I can.

“No, Abbot,” he said. “You don’t.”

The Creation and Destruction of the World

At one time the waters were divided and contained, and dry land was raised up out of the sea, mountains and valleys, hills and plains, and the people lived there. They lived this way for a long time, standing on the bones of the world, until it chanced that they angered the lord of wind and storm. The lord of storms caused it to rain, and it rained for days, for weeks, for months, until there was no dry spot on the face of the world. The low places were deep lakes, the high places awash. In the highest place every step was ankle-deep in water. The clothes the people wore, the beds they slept in, were soaked and dripping. The very food they ate was soaked and dissolved by the rain. And day by day it rained, and the water grew still deeper.

“We will drown!” the people cried. “Alas for us, and for our children! It would be better if we had been fish!” And many of these people, who cried so, were turned into fish and swam away into the sea. And after this no one gave birth to anything but fish.

There was a woman who gave birth, and the child was a fish. The woman would not put the child into the sea, because it was hers and sickly, but instead kept it beside her. “I will go to the lord of storms,” the woman said, “and beg for the god’s forgiveness and the life of my child.” And so she did, swaddling the child and keeping it wet with her tears. She traveled far, where even the waters could not reach, until she was too weary and grieved to go further, and some way past that she came to the palace of the lord of the winds.

The palace was on a high red hill. Every red stone on that red hill was a human heart, conquered and destroyed by the god. Many were those who, having come this far, fled in fear of climbing that hill, but the woman wept and climbed, and so she came to the palace. The walls of the palace were like diamond, clear and hard-edged as the wind. Of those who climbed, many would not enter, fearing the cutting edge of that wind, but the woman only wept and entered. And she came to where the lord of storms sat, with the axe in one hand and the lightning in the other. The throne of the lord of storms was of lapis and polished hematite, red rubies and yellow topaz. When she stood before the god, the woman sang.

O Lord, your words control the raging winds; You are the storm that destroys all before it.

The hurricane is your awful face, and thunder your voice.

The fish and the shellfish torn up from their depths are your work, and boats and houses shattered and drifting on the surface of the sea.

You are the wind that moves the clouds away from the sun; The sun shines or hides at your word.

The west wind in the spring is your beautiful face; You drive the rain away and place the rainbow in the heavens.

It was you who vanquished the leviathan; Triumph of Midnight is its name.

With your axe you cut off its thousand heads, and divided the body, establishing the worlds;

You set the suns to shine over them and their peoples.

How have we angered you, O Lord? We are nothing, we are miserable; We cry out in anguish.

Must we perish? Has our lord made us and established us in vain?

Turn not your face from us; But hear our prayers and look kindly on us.

That was the song the woman sang. It is still sung today, but she was the first to sing it.

The lord of storms was pleased with the woman’s song, and spoke. “I will give you one gift—I will save your people, or I will save your child.” And the woman wept even more, because she wished to save her people, but she loved her child. “I will think,” the woman said. “It is not an easy choice.”

“Choose carefully,” said the lord of storms, “for I shall assuredly grant your wish.”

And she went away, and came to where a stone sat in the middle of the road, and she sat down weeping in the shadow of the stone. “Woman, why do you weep?” the stone said. And she told the stone about her people, and her child, and the lord of storms. “Ah,” the stone said when she had finished. “The gods grant every prayer, but for every gift they exact a price. My heart aches for you, and I will tell you why. Once humans lived here by the thousands, by the millions, singing and laughing and dancing, until it chanced that they angered the lord of storms. Then the god sent darkness, and a creature of darkness, its bloodied fangs like blades of night, its bloodied claws like blades of blackest death. It ate the people. It left nothing but bones and skin. And the people surviving cried out, ‘Oh, it would be better if we had been stones!’ And many were turned into stones as they spoke, and after that all the children who were born were stones. And for that reason, there are no humans in the world, only stones. But the blood still cries out from the ground even after so long. It disturbs my sleep with pity for the ones who were lost.” So the stone spoke, and that is why we say today, a heart like a stone.

“Stone, I don’t understand your story,” the woman said. “There are humans in their thousands and their millions alive yet today, but you say they all perished.”

“I have told you as I remember it,” the stone said. “I cannot help you, but it may be the serpent can. Go down the road, and when you come to the serpent, speak politely.”

“I will do that,” the woman said, and she did. She came to where the serpent lay coiled and shining in the road. Its scales were of gold and silver, its eyes like two sparkling emeralds. The woman greeted it politely, even though she was still weeping.

“Why do you weep?” the serpent asked her, and she told him about her people, and her child, and what the stone had said. “The stone spoke the truth,” the serpent said. “Once there were humans here, in their thousands and millions, dancing and laughing and singing. Then it chanced that they angered the lord of storms, and the god sent winds to blow them away. The world itself was blown and shaken on its roots, and those surviving cried out, ‘Oh, it would be better if we had been serpents, to hide under the ground from this wind!’ And many turned into serpents as they spoke, and after that all the children were serpents. And for that reason there are no humans in the world, only serpents.”

“Serpent, I don’t understand your story,” the woman said. “There are humans in their thousands and their millions alive yet today, but you say they all perished.”

“What I have said is true,” the serpent said. And so we say today, as if from a serpent’s tongue. “I cannot help you, but it may be the bird can. Go down the road, and when you come to the bird, speak politely.”

When the woman came to where the bird perched, she greeted it politely, even though she was still weeping. “Good day to you,” the bird said. It was as tall as a man, with great, grasping claws and wings that stretched across the road, red feathers and green feathers and blue. The woman told the bird about her people, and her child, and what the stone had said, and what the serpent had said.

“The stone and the serpent spoke the truth,” said the bird. “Once there were humans here in their thousands, and their millions. They laughed and danced and sang. But it chanced that they angered the lord of storms, and the god sent a rain of fire to destroy them. Flaming, fiery stones fell from the heavens, and where they touched, the world burned. And those surviving cried out, ‘Oh, it would be better if we had been birds, to fly above this terrible fire!’ And many turned into birds as they spoke, and after that all the children were birds. And for that reason there are no humans in the world, only birds.”

“Bird, I don’t understand your story,” the woman said. “There are humans in their thousands and their millions alive yet today, but you say they all perished.”

“It may be as you say,” the bird said. “You say your child is a fish. How does it live out of the water?”

“My tears keep it wet,” the woman said.

“No wonder the child is sickly,” the bird said. “Let it swim in the sea. You can save the child yourself, and beg the lord of storms for your people.”

“But my child would still be a fish,” said the woman.

“Is there something wrong with being a fish?” asked the bird. “For my part, I have great affection for fish.” The woman held her child closer. “Well,” said the bird, “if you will not take my advice, I cannot help you. Perhaps you should ask the lord of the waters and the deeps for help.”

The woman thanked the bird, and went on her way until she came to the palace of the lord of the waters and the deeps. The palace was set on a high hill, and this high hill was built of all the hearts overcome with love of the lord of the waters. Those who came to this hill climbed it gladly, dancing and singing, but the woman wept as she climbed. The walls of the palace were like diamond, clear and sparkling as water on a summer day, and those who came entered the palace eagerly. But the woman walked slowly, in grief. And she came to where the lord of the waters sat, with the axe in one hand and the basin of the seas in the other. The tears flowed from the god’s eyes like a river. They flowed down over the throne of the lord of the waters, which was of lapis, and polished jade, turquoise, and sapphire.

And the lord of the waters sang this song:

Oh, I weep, I grieve, I am inconsolable.

I am miserable, I cry out in anguish.

The lord of storms has said, “The people have angered me.”

The lord of storms has said, “They will be destroyed.”

Oh, my people! I brought them forth, from myself.

They arose from me, and walked, they are my children.

The lord of storms has said, “My anger will not be turned.”

The lord of storms has said, “I have spoken it, so it will be.”

Oh, I weep. The deeps are not enough to hold my tears,

They overflow the basin of the seas.

Alas for my people! Alas for my children!

Alas, that you should be destroyed!

That was the song the lord of the deeps sang, in grief.

Then the woman said, “O great lord of the waters and the deeps! I beg you, cease from weeping!”

“How may I cease?” asked the lord of the waters. “The lord of storms has said my people will be destroyed. The word of the god is inviolate. It has been said, and so it will be.”

So the woman told the lord of the waters about her people, and her child, and the lord of storms, and what the stone had said, and what the serpent had said, and what the bird had said. “The lord of storms, whose word is eternal, said to me, ‘I shall assuredly grant your wish.’”

“A gift from any god is a knife. It will turn in your hand and pierce your heart. What help I can give, I will, but it will not be what you expect. Do this: Return to the lord of wind and storm and say, ‘I have made my choice. O great lord of storms, save my child!’ Then you must do whatever the god tells you. And when you have done it, say, ‘O god of winds, generous and kind, praise and thanksgiving! The lord of storms has said, “I will save your people.” ’ The god will be angry, but though your child may be lost and your people saved, to save your child is also to save your people.”

“O lord of the waters and the deeps, let the waters recede, let the seas be contained, and the land stand forth again as it was.”

“You have stopped my tears, but they cannot be taken back. The waters are as they will be. But I will teach you to make the buildings on the sea so that you may live as though on dry land. And I will show you how to make the floating gardens that will feed your people.” And the god showed the woman these things.

And after that, the woman returned to the palace of the lord of storms, and approached the terrible throne of the lightning-bearer. “O great lord of storms, I have made my choice. Save my child!”

The god laughed, and the woman’s heart was troubled. “This has always been in your power,” said the lord of storms. “Put the child into the water. Let it swim in the sea as it was born to do.”

The woman wept still more, for truly had the lord of the deeps said that any gift would be a knife in her heart. I am deceived, she told herself. “But,” she said to the lord of storms, “my child will still be a fish.”

“Your child is what it is,” said the god.

So heavy of heart, and weeping yet, the woman put the child in the water, and it swam away. Then she returned to the palace of the lord of storms. “O great lord of the winds, generous and kind, praise and thanksgiving! The lord of storms has said, ‘I will save your people.’ The god has said it, and so it will be.”

“What do you mean, woman?” asked the lord of storms. “I saved your child, as you chose.”

“O great and merciful lord of the winds, you might have saved my people without saving my child. But how can my child be saved and not my people?”

“I am deceived!” cried the lord of storms. “This is the doing of the lord of the deeps.”

“Nevertheless,” said the woman, “your word is inviolate.”

“Indeed,” said the lord of storms. “Return to your home. What was destroyed remains destroyed. What has changed remains changed. But I will cease my destruction of your people.”

And so the woman returned home, and showed her people how to make the buildings on the sea, and the floating gardens. And one day, looking out to the sea, she saw her child sporting and leaping in the water, and her heart was gladdened. This is why whenever we see the fish people sporting and leaping in the sunshine, or when we find the gifts they bring us, the colored stones and the shells and the small carvings that they leave on the ledges of our homes, or in our boats, our hearts are lifted, even though our troubles might be great. For they are our brothers and sisters, and our children.

FROM THE UNIVERSE OF THE RAVEN TOWER

The God of Au

The Fleet of the Godless came to the waters around Au by chance. It was an odd assortment of the refugees of the world; some had deliberately renounced all gods, some had offended one god in particular. A few were some god’s favorites that another, rival god had cursed. But most were merely the descendants of the original unfortunates and had never lived any other way.

There were six double-hulled boats, named, in various languages, Bird of the Waves, Water Knife, O Gods Take Pity, Breath of Starlight, Righteous Vengeance, and Neither Land Nor Water. (This last was the home of a man whose divine enemy had pronounced that henceforth he should live on neither land nor water. Its two shallow hulls and the deck between them were carefully lined with soil, so that as it floated on the waves it would be precisely what its name declared.) For long years they had wandered the world, pursued by their enemies, allies of no one. Who would shelter them and risk the anger of gods? Who, even had they wished to, could protect them?

More than any other people in the world, they were attuned to the presence and moods of gods—they would hardly have survived so long had they not been—and even before they came in sight of the line of small islands that stretched southward from the larger island of Au they had felt a curious lifelessness in the atmosphere. It was unlike anything they had ever met before. They sailed ahead, cautiously, watched and waited, and after a few days their leader, a man named Steq, captain of Righteous Vengeance, ordered the most neutral of prayers and a small sacrifice to whoever the local gods of the waters might be.

Shortly afterwards, twelve people disappeared in the night and were never seen again. The remaining Godless knew a sign when they saw one, and their six captains met together on Neither Land Nor Water to consult.

The six ships rode near a small island, sheer-sided black stone, white seabirds nesting in the crags, and a crown of green grass at the top. The breeze was cold, and the sun, though bright in a cloudless, intensely blue sky, seemed warmthless, and so they huddled around the firebox on the deck between the two hulls.

“What shall we do?” Steq asked the other five when they had all settled. He was, like the other Godless, all wiry muscle and no fat. Years of exposure had bleached his dark hair reddish, and whatever color his skin had been at his birth, it had been darkened yet further by the sun. His eyes were brown, and seemed somehow vague until he spoke, when all hints of diffusion or dreaminess disappeared. “I have some thoughts on the matter myself, but it would be best to consider all our options.”

“We should leave here,” said the captain of O Gods Take Pity, a broad-shouldered man with one eye and one hand, and skin like leather. He was older than any of the other captains. “The god in question is clearly capricious.”

“What god isn’t?” asked another captain. “Let’s make up a sacrifice. A good one, with plenty of food, a feast on all six boats. Let us invoke the god who punished us for our recent offense. In this way perhaps we can at least mollify it.”

“Your thought is a good one,” said Steq. “It has crossed my mind as well. Though I am undecided which I think better—a feast, or some ascetic act of penitence.”

“Why not both?” suggested another. “First the penitence, and then a feast.”

“This would seem to cover all eventualities,” said Steq. The others were agreed, except for the captain of O Gods Take Pity.

“This god is tricky and greedy. More so than others. Best we should take our chances elsewhere.” And he would not participate in the debate over the safest wording and form of the rites, but closed his one eye and leaned closer to the firebox.

When the meeting was done and the captains were departing for their own boats, Steq took him aside. “Why do you say this god is greedier and trickier than most?”

“Why do you ask me this when the meeting is finished?” asked the other captain, narrowing his one eye. Steq only looked at him. “Very well. Ask yourself this question—where are the other gods? There is not an infant in the fleet that does not feel the difference between these waters and the ones we’ve left. This is a god that has driven out or destroyed all others, a god who resents sacrifices meant for any other. And that being the case, why wait for us to make the mistake? Why not send warning first, and thus be assured of our obedience? It pleased the god that we should lose those twelve people, make no mistake. You would be a fool not to see it, and I never took you for a fool.”

“I see it,” said Steq. He had not risen to a position of authority without an even temper, and considerable intelligence. “I also see that we could do worse than win favor with a god powerful enough to drive any other out of its territory.”

“At what cost, Steq?”

“There has never been a time we have not paid for dealing with gods,” said Steq. “And there has never been a time that we have not been compelled to deal with them. We are all sick at heart over this loss, but we cannot afford to pass by any advantage that may offer itself.”

“I left my own son to drown because I could not go back without endangering my boat and everyone in it. Do not think I speak out of sentiment.” Both men were silent a moment. “I will not challenge your authority, but I tell you, this is a mistake that may well cost us our lives.”

“I value your counsel,” Steq told him, and he put his hand on the other captain’s shoulder. “Do not be silent, I beg you, but tell me all your misgivings, now and in the future.” And with that they parted, each to their own boat.

A thousand years before, in the village of Ilu on the island of Au, there were two brothers, Etoje and Ekuba. They had been born on the same day and when their father died it was unclear how his possessions should be divided.

The brothers took their dispute to the god of a cave near Ilu. This cave was a hollow in the mountainside that led down to a steaming, sulfur-smelling well, and the god there had often given good advice in the past.

Let Ekuba divide according to his satisfaction, was the god’s answer. And let Etoje choose his portion. Let the brothers be bound by their choices, or death and disaster will be the result.

But instead of dividing fairly, Ekuba hid the most desirable part of his father’s belongings in a hole under the pile he was certain Etoje would not choose. It was not long before Etoje discovered his brother’s deception, and in anger he drew his knife and struck Ekuba so that he fell bleeding to the ground. Thinking he had killed his brother, Etoje took a small boat and fled.

The island farthest to the south of Au had reared its head and shoulders above the water, with much steam and ash and fire, in the time of Etoje’s great-grandfather. Birds were still wary of it, and it was not considered a good place to hunt. Its sides were black and steep, and there was no place for a boat to land, but Etoje found a spur of rock to tie his boat to, and he climbed up the cliff to the top, where a few plants and mosses had taken tentative root in the ashes, and a pool of warm water steamed. There was nothing else of interest.

But darkness was falling and he had nowhere else to go, so he sat down next to the spring to consider his situation. “Oh, Etoje,” he said to himself, “your anger will be the death of you. But what else were you to do?”

As he sat, a seabird flew overhead, carrying a large fish. Etoje thought that if he could make the bird drop the fish, he might at least have some food for the evening. So he took up a stone as quickly as he might and threw it at the bird.

The stone hit its target, and the bird dropped the fish. But the fish fell not on the ashy land, but into the spring. Etoje could not see it to pull it out, and he was wary of wading into a spring he knew nothing of, so he settled himself once again.

When he had sat this way for some time, he heard a voice. “Etoje,” it whispered. Etoje looked around, but saw nothing. “Etoje!” This time Etoje looked at the spring, and saw the fish lying half in and half out of the water.

“Did you speak to me, fish?” Etoje asked. It looked like any other fish, silver-scaled and finned and glassy-eyed.

“I spoke,” said the fish, “but I am not a fish.”

“You look like a fish to me,” remarked Etoje.

“I am the god of this island,” said the fish in its weird whisper. “I must have a mouth to speak, and perforce I have used this fish, there being nothing else available.”

“Then I thank you, god of this island, whatever your proper name, whether you be male or female, or both, or neither, for your hospitality. Though I have little besides thanks to offer in exchange.”

“It was of exchange I wished to speak. Shall we trade favors and become allies?”

“On what terms?” asked Etoje, for though he was in desperate straits, he knew that one should be cautious when dealing with gods.

“I was born with the island,” said the fish. “And I am lonely. The cliff-girt isles around me subsist on the occasional prayers of hunters. They are silent and all but godless. No one hunts my birdless cliffs, and my island, like those others, will likely never be settled. Take me to Au, and I will reward you.”

“That, I’m afraid, is impossible.” And Etoje told the fish of his father’s death, and his brother’s deception, and his own anger and flight.

“Take me to Au,” the fish insisted. And it told Etoje that if he would do so, and make the sacrifices and perform the rites the god required, Etoje would be preeminent in Au. “I will make you and yours rulers over the whole land of Au. I will promise that you and yours will be mine, and your fates my special concern, so long as Au stands above the waves.”

“And when the tide comes in?”

“Shrewd Etoje! But I meant no trick. Let us say instead, so long as the smallest part of the island of Au stands above the waves. If you feed me well I will certainly have the strength to do all I say and more.”

“Ah,” said Etoje. “You want blood.”

“I want all the rites of the people of Au, all the sacrifices. Declare me, alone, your god. Declare me, alone, the god of your people. Declare me, alone, the god of Au. Any who will not accept this bargain will be outlaws, and I will have their blood.”

“What of the gods already resident on Au? Would they not starve?”

“Do they care now if you starve?” asked the fish.

“You have a point.” And Etoje was silent for a few moments.

“With your help,” said the fish, “I will enter any good-sized stone you bring me—there are several nearby—and you will bring it to Au. Then you will offer sacrifice and free me from the stone.”

“And this sacrifice?”

“I hear the seabirds crying above the waves. They have flown over Ilu and they tell me your brother is not dead, merely injured. Have you considered how much simpler the question of your inheritance would be if he were dead?”

“I must ponder,” said Etoje.

“Certainly. But don’t ponder excessively. This fish won’t last forever.”

“Speaking of which,” said Etoje, “do you need all of the fish for talking? I’m quite hungry, and I’m sure I would think better on a full stomach.”

“Take it all,” said the fish. “In the morning bring another to the spring. Or a seal or bird—fish aren’t made for talking and this is quite taxing.”

“Thank you,” said Etoje. “I’m reassured to find you so reasonable. I will now dedicate this fish to you and indulge in a sacrificial feast, after which I will consider all you have said.”

And Etoje did those things.

In the thousand years after Etoje made his bargain, the village of Ilu became the city of Ilu. It stood at the mouth of a wide, icy stream that tumbled down from the heights of the glacier-covered mountain Mueu. On Mueu’s lower slopes the spring in the cave still steamed, but the god was long silent, either absent or dead. Behind Mueu was the high, cold interior of Au, a wasteland of ice and lava where no one went.

Ilu’s green and brown houses, of turf and stone and skins, spread down to the sea where racks of fish lay drying, where the hunting boats lay each night and left each morning, and where frames of seaweed rose and fell with the tide. In the center of the city was the Place of the God of Au, a sprawling complex of blocks of black lava, rising higher than any other building there.

In days long past, anyone might raid a foreign village and bring his captives to Ilu, feeding the god handsomely and increasing his own standing and wealth. Whole villages perished, or else threw themselves at the feet of Ilu’s rulers and declared themselves faithful servants of the god. Many humble but clever and brave young men made their fortunes in those days. But now the only outlaws in Au were condemned criminals, and only the same several officials, who had inherited the right to dispense justice, could present human victims to the god. No other outlaws were to be found in the land. Every village—for Ilu was Au’s only city—offered its rites and sacrifices to the god of Au alone.

In return, the people of Au prospered. They were healthy and well-fed. Seals, fish, and whales were abundant. It was true that over the years the number of offenses punishable by death had increased, but if one was a solid, law-abiding citizen and meticulous about honoring the god, this was of no concern.

There was a man named Ihak, and he lived in the Place of the God. It was his job, as it had been his father’s, and his father’s before him, to receive the outlaw victims intended for the god, and issue receipts to the providers in the form of tokens of volcanic glass carved into the shape of small fish. In former days this had been a position of great influence, but now was merely a ceremonial duty. Ihak was a tall man, almost spindly. He walked with a slight stoop, and his features were pinched and narrow. Though he and his wife had been together for many years, they had produced no children. He had often presented the god with fish, and with his own blood, and once he had even bought a human victim from one of the officials he dealt with, though it had meant a great deal of his savings. Making each sacrifice he had reminded the god of his faithful service, and that of his own ancestors, and he humbly and sincerely begged the god to provide him with that one thing that would complete his happiness. This was the only defect in his otherwise comfortable life.

One day two hunters came to the Place of the God with a dozen injured captives in tow. The gatekeeper gaped in astonishment and tried to turn them away, but they would not move. The captives were dressed oddly, and didn’t seem to understand normal speech, so questions about how they had come to be here, bound and bleeding in front of the Place of the God of Au, went unanswered.

Finally the Speaker for the God came to the gate. He was a dignified man, very conscious of his responsibilities as a descendant of Etoje. Every inch of him, from his thick, curled pale hair to his immaculate sealskin boots, declared him a man of importance. Too important to be bothered with a couple of hunters, but he had realized as soon as he had heard the message that the situation was a serious one. So he questioned the hunters. Where had these people come from?

“The other day some boats sailed into the islands,” said one hunter. “Large ones, joined in pairs by wide platforms.” He attempted to describe the mast and sail of each boat, but left his listeners perplexed. “Each one had many people aboard. They anchored and began hunting birds. My cousin and I watched them, and saw they weren’t from Au.”

“Where did they come from, if not from Au?” asked the Speaker. As far as he knew, there wasn’t anywhere else to come from. “Did they spring up out of the waves, boats and all?”

“Perhaps,” said one hunter, “the god of Au is tired of a steady diet of criminals.”

“Perhaps,” said the other, with the merest touch of malice, “the god of Au wishes all men to have a chance at riches and nobility, as was the case in former days.”

The Speaker didn’t particularly like hearing this. As the gatekeeper had, he questioned the captives. One spoke, or tried to speak, but something was evidently wrong—no words came out, only meaningless sounds.

By now, passersby had stopped, and some of them confirmed the hunters’ story—there were strange boats anchored in the islands, carrying strangely dressed people. And though the custom had not been followed for more than two hundred years, the Speaker could think of no immediate grounds on which to deny its fulfillment now, and plenty of grounds for possible retribution later, if it should become a problem. So he sent the hunters to Ihak.

Ihak was no less astonished than anyone else. However, unlike anyone else he had reason to take this development with a fair amount of equanimity. “So, ah, hm,” he said, looking over the captives. “Who captured which ones?”

“We worked equally together,” said the first hunter. “So we should get equal credit.”

“That’s right,” said the second.

“Ah,” said Ihak. “I see.” He looked the line of captives over more carefully. “Ah. Hmm. You say you both participated equally in all twelve captures?” The two hunters assented. “So. Twelve tokens, then, six for each of you. And you may then call yourselves Warriors of Au.”

“I can’t wait to walk through the market,” said the first. “Oh, to see the looks on everyone’s faces!”

“What about the pregnant one? She looks pretty far along. Shouldn’t she count for two?”

“Ah. No,” Ihak said. “I regret to say. The guidelines are quite clear on the matter. So. But aren’t you more fortunate that way? If there were thirteen tokens, how would you divide them without a dispute? Hm?”

So Ihak formally accepted, on behalf of the god, the sacrifice brought by the two hunters, and gave them their tokens. And then he went to speak to his wife.

In due course, a baby girl was born, and Ihak put it about that his wife had given birth at long last. She had been extremely surprised to discover herself pregnant, but this was understandable, as she had long ago stopped looking for signs of it. And everyone knew some tale of a woman who had not realized her condition until nearly the last moment. Clearly Ihak’s wife was one of these.

Ihak held a great feast at which he presented the child to his friends, and he gave extravagant thanks to the god of Au. He named the girl Ifanei, which is to say, the god provided her.

When the period of fasting, vigil, and mortification had passed, each of the six captains of the Godless presided at a feast in honor of the god of this place, who punished us for our recent offense. The day was gray, and the breeze made the constant mist of rain sting. The inhabitants of each boat crowded together on their respective central decks and offered prayers praising the god as the most powerful, the most gracious, rightly the only ruler of the islands and the surrounding sea. “We desire to hear your will!” all the Godless cried, carefully making no other request, and no promises at all, while the captains let blood into the water.

Steq sat, then, and his wound was bound, and the people around him ate, with every bite praising the generosity and bounty of the god. He himself was not particularly hungry, but he knew that he should eat for the sake of his people and because of the blood loss, and so he did.

The Godless had been miserable with cold, and their hearts were sore with the loss of the twelve. Their acts of penitence had only increased their unhappiness. But now, despite the clouds and the rain, and the doubtfulness of their prospects, their spirits began to lift. There was plenty of food, all of it as carefully prepared as their situation allowed. The smiles and laughter began as performance but, as often happens, feelings began to match actions in at least some small degree. Steq could not bring himself to smile, but he was pleased to see the Godless enjoy themselves.

“If nothing else,” called the captain of O Gods Take Pity from his own deck, “we will die with full stomachs.”

This brought a bitter half-smile to Steq’s face. “As always, you speak wisely,” he answered.

Eventually the feast drew to a close, and the Godless began to clear away what was left of the food. Steq sat in thought under his boat’s single square sail, his back to the mast. He sat brooding as people went back to their routine tasks, and as the day grew later the clouds blew away from the western sky, leaving a strip of blue shading down to green and orange, and the setting sun shining gold across the water. Colors that had been muted under the gray light seemed suddenly to glow—the brilliant emerald of island-topping grass, the brown of the boat’s planking, the tattered, wheat-colored sail, the pink of a slab of seal fat the cook was packing away, all shone like jewels. The sun sank further and still Steq sat in thought.

When the sun had nearly set, Steq suddenly stood up and called a child to him. “Go to O Gods Take Pity,” he said, “as quickly as you can. Tell the captain to be on the watch—my skin prickles, and the air is uncanny. Bid him pass my warning on.”

“I feel it, too,” said the child. Before any further move could be made, the other captains came up onto the decks of their ships—Steq had not been alone in his premonition. All work on the boats had halted as well, and the Godless were afraid.

“Fear not,” said Steq. “Either we are about to meet our end, in which case our troubles are over, or we will survive. In any event, we have done all we could and will face our future as we always have.”

As they stood waiting, a jet of water rose up just beyond the stern, and a dead-white tentacle snaked up from the water onto the deck. It ran half the length of the boat and with a thud it curled itself around the mast where moments before Steq had sat in thought. The boat’s stern plunged toward the water. “Bail!” cried Steq, and in the same instant he spoke the Godless were taking up their bailers. Crew without bailers ran to the bows of the double hull, in part to balance the boat, and in part from fear of the glistening, gelatinous tentacles that had come out of the water after the first and wound and grasped at the other end. All around, the crews of the other boats stood watching, bent nearly over the gunwale strakes, crying out in horror and fear.

From the stern came a weird, bubbling noise, which resolved into gurgling speech. “Steq!”

“Don’t answer!” cried one Godless.

Steq only walked as steadily as he might to the end of the unsteady deck, stepping cautiously over lengths of suckered flesh. Behind him his own crew except for the bailers froze, hardly daring to breathe, and the watchers on the other boats fell silent.

At the end of the deck, he looked over the rail into the water. There, looking back from the waves, was a huge silvery-black eye, as large as Steq’s own head. Under this eye the white flesh in which it was set branched out into the tentacles that held his boat, and in the center of those was a beak like a bird’s. “Steq,” the thing gurgled again.

“I am here,” he said. “What do you wish?”

“Let us each speak of our wishes,” it bubbled. “An association would benefit us both.”

“Explain.”

“You are abrupt. Some might consider this disrespectful, but I will attribute it to your ill-treatment at the hands of gods so far. Or perhaps your extreme courage, which would please me.”

The truth was, Steq dared not move lest he tremble and betray his fear. He knew that at this moment every life in the fleet depended on his smallest action, and he bent every effort to keep his voice steady. “You are most generous. I await your explanation.”

The thing gurgled wordlessly for a moment. “Then I will explain. A thousand years ago, on that very island you see before you, I made a deal with a man of Au.”

“Au being the mainland?”

“Yes. I declared that this man and his descendants would be preeminent in Au, if only they offered the sacrifices I desired and gave their rites and prayers to no other god. They have kept the terms of the bargain and I have as well.”

“We don’t fall under the terms of this bargain,” Steq observed.

“You do, in a way. The acceptable sacrifice, according to the agreement, is those who are outlawed. In the beginning these were any who did not confine their worship to me. Now there are no such people to be found on Au, and they offer me murderers, robbers, and various petty criminals.”

“I begin to see,” said Steq. “We offered what might be construed as sacrifice to some other god, and were then fair game for your altar.”

“Just so,” bubbled the monster. “Would you prevent this reoccurring?”

“Had I been given the choice in advance, I would have been pleased to prevent its happening at all,” Steq observed, not without some bitterness.

“No matter,” said the thing, its liquid eye unblinking. “We did not know each other then, and past is past. Besides, I offer you something I imagine you hardly dare dream possible.”

“That being?”

“Myself. I have become unhappy with my bargain. I will be frank. I am ambitious, and intended to reign supreme over Au, and from there expand my authority. But once they had conquered their island, the people of Ilu had no inclination to travel any farther and arranged things so that they would not be required to do so. You, on the other hand, travel widely.”

The wind was already chill, but it seemed in that moment to blow colder. “You have a binding agreement with the people of Au,” he said.

“The agreement has its limits.”

“As would an agreement with us, I am sure.”

“You are a shrewder man than Etoje of Ilu,” gurgled the thing. “And your people are well accustomed to keeping an advantage when dealing with gods. We will be well matched.” Steq said nothing. “I am strong with a thousand years of sacrifices,” said the god of Au. “Have you fled from all gods? Have all other nations cast you out? Take me as your god, and be revenged. Take me as your god and your children will live in health, not sicken and starve as so many do now. Your fear and wandering will be at an end, and you will sit in authority over all the peoples of the world.”

“At what price?”

“The price I demanded of Etoje: all your rites and sacrifices. Those who will not cease offerings to other gods will bleed on my altar.”

“And when there are no more of those?”

“Ah,” bubbled the monster. “That day is far in the future, and when it comes I will demand no more human victims.”

“What, precisely, was your agreement with Etoje of Ilu?”

“That so long as the smallest part of the island of Au stood above the waters Etoje and his descendants would be preeminent in Au, and all those who accepted the terms of the agreement would be under my protection, their fates my special concern. In exchange, the people of Au would offer me the sacrifices I desired, and perform the rites I prescribed, and would make no offerings to any other gods, at any time.”

“And would we enter into this same agreement, or make a new one with you?”

“We would make our own agreement, separate from my agreement with Au.”

The sun had now set. In the east the clouded sky was black, and the body of the monster glowed blue under the water. Steq stood silent for some minutes, regarding it. “We are cautious,” he said, when he finally spoke. “And I would discuss this with my people.”

“Of course.”

“Let us make no long-term commitment at the moment. But we will agree to this much: While we are in your territory we will make no offering to any other god, and you will not require us to bleed on your altar.”

“This is reasonable,” gurgled the god of Au. “Furthermore, it gives us both a chance to demonstrate our goodwill.”

“I am pleased to find you so generous,” said Steq. “It will take some time for us to determine the best course. It is not wise to rush into such things.”

“Take what time it requires. I am in no hurry. Indeed, I have affairs to conclude before we can make our deal binding. It may be quite a long time before I am able to proceed.”

“How long? We live at sea, but we are accustomed to land fairly frequently, for water and to buy or gather what we need, and to maintain our boats.”

“Take the island you see before you, and the two north of it. All three have springs, and I will see to it that the hunters of Au will not trouble you there.”

“Very well. What name shall we call you?”

“For the moment, call me the god of Au.”

“Surely you have some other name.”

“This one will do. I will speak to you again in the future. In the meantime, be assured of your safety so long as you worship me alone.” And with those words, the tentacle that had coiled about the mast grew limp, and the whole tangle of arms slid into the water. The blue glow had begun to fade, and was nearly gone, and the huge eye was staring and vacant.

“It’s dead,” said Steq, and he called the child to him again. “Take a message to the other boats. We will meet tonight under the covers of the starboard hull of Neither Land Nor Water. Bid her captain lash them securely. No bird or fish will overhear our council.” Then he turned to his crew. “Grab this thing before it floats off. It will feed us all for a week. For which we will offer thanks to the god of Au.”

But whether due to possession by the god or the nature of the creature itself, the meat was bitter and inedible, and after a few foul-tasting bites the Godless cast it all back into the sea.

Ihak and his wife loved Ifanei greatly, and she was a happy child. She did not grow into any great beauty. She was short and wide-boned, and her dark hair lay flat as wet seaweed. Indeed, she was so unlike her father Ihak that some commented disparagingly. But Ihak said quite frequently, “Ah, it’s true, she looks nothing like me. But she’s the very image of my late mother. So. I love her all the more for it.” And he did indeed dote on the child, and there was no one in the Place of the God who remembered his mother to speak of, and so they held their tongues, and eventually the sight of Ihak going about with Ifanei’s small hand in his became such a common, constant thing that it seemed unthinkable that anyone had ever suggested that she was not his child.

When Ifanei was fourteen, her mother died, and by the time she was sixteen Ihak was old and feeble. The Speaker began showing Ifanei small attentions, and Ihak called her to his bedside and spoke seriously with her. “So,” he said, his voice a thin thread of breath. “Do you wish to be the wife of the Speaker for the God?”

“He only wants the inheritance,” Ifanei said. She knelt on the floor and took her father’s hand, thin and light and fragile as the bones of a bird. Ihak had dwindled away to almost nothing. In the flickering light of the single oil lamp he seemed faded and so completely without substance that one feared a gentle word might blow him away, but for the skin laid across him to keep him warm.

“Ah.” It was a barely audible sigh. “You’ll need a husband one day, and you could do worse than the man with the authority of the god of Au.”

Ifanei turned the corners of her mouth down. “I could do better,” she said. “The wife he already has is beautiful, and proud. She would not welcome any division in her husband’s attentions, and she is altogether too unconcerned about the matter. I would be ignored at best.”

Ihak managed a breathy laugh. “We think alike. So. I only asked because if the prospect had pleased you I would have done my best to secure him for you. Hm. It does not, so we must make other plans.”

Now, Ihak had been a shrewder man than anyone had known. When he realized that the only child the god would grant him was a girl, he had hidden a part of his savings—the stacks of sealskins and volcanic glass blades that were the wealth of Au—in places only he knew. He had seen the resentment of the elite of Au when the two hunters had elevated themselves. He knew that the Speaker would have moved to discontinue the custom if he had not feared the anger of the common people. But further attempts on the strangers had proved futile, and the hopes of advancement had ceased to be real. The threat had receded, but it might reappear one day. Ihak knew that he would almost certainly be the last holder of his office. He also knew that the Speaker would go to considerable inconvenience to gain possession of Ifanei’s inheritance. Thinking of all this, he had planned accordingly.

The day after Ihak’s funeral, when Ifanei was sitting silent and cross-legged on the cold stone floor of her quarters, hair unbound and mourning ashes smeared on her face, the Speaker came to see her. “Ifanei,” he said, “I have spoken to the god. Your father’s office is to be discontinued. It is hardly a surprise; if it had been meant to continue, your father would have been granted a fit heir for the position.”

Ifanei knew well enough that the god had never been concerned with petty matters of administration, so long as sacrifices arrived regularly. She did not look at the Speaker but at the floor, and she kept her voice small and tear-choked as she answered. “As the god wills.”

“Poor Ifanei!” said the Speaker. “We will all miss your father, but you will understandably miss him the most. How fortunate you are to have cousins nearby to take care of you.” She said nothing. “Don’t forget, I am your cousin, too, and I regard you highly.” Still Ifanei was silent. “Lovely Ifanei!” said the Speaker then, with no hint of mockery. “When the time comes, you will want to ponder the advantages of a closer connection with me, and at a more appropriate time I will speak to you of my desires.”

In a bag, under Ifanei’s bed, were an undyed hooded sealskin coat and a black glass knife. In her memory were the locations, well away from the Place of the God, where Ihak had cached a significant part of his valuables. In a week, villagers from along the north coast would come to Ilu, bringing their tribute of seals and seabirds to the Place of the God. When they left, who would notice one extra young boy among them?

“I will think seriously on everything you say,” Ifanei said to the Speaker. She still looked steadily at the floor. “My father often spoke of his great respect for you, and I am fortunate to have such a cousin. I am so very grateful for your concern.” She said this with every evidence of sincerity, and the Speaker was pleased with himself when he left her.

It was at this time that the god of Au returned to the Godless, and spoke to Steq, and shortly thereafter Righteous Vengeance ventured by night close to the shore of Au, and Steq went ashore.

Each year the north coast villagers who brought their tribute to Ilu traveled in a long, chaotic column along the sea. The seals, skins, birds, and eggs they brought were piled on sledges, the eggs carefully packed in grass. Each traveler took a turn pulling the offerings of his own village, each village they passed added to their number, and by the time the procession neared Ilu it became a noisy throng, the spirits of the participants undampened by the fact that at least half of them were suffering the effects of too much seaweed beer the night before. Between the crowd and the beer, no one noticed that a stranger had joined their number.

Steq had not been a young man when the Godless had sailed into Au’s waters, and after sixteen years his hair had grayed. But he had not changed otherwise. He did not much resemble the people of Au—his skin was too dark, his hair too fine, his features not quite right somehow, though this may have been only a certain hardness about the mouth that was unusual in a man of Au. He kept the hood of his coat up, and his head down, and those walking next to him thought he must be from some other village, and attributed his silence to last night’s beer, and let him be.

What Steq could see of Au was tall grass sweeping up the skirts of an ice-topped mountain. Here and there a stream was lined with stunted osiers, but there were otherwise no trees. The view was all green grass, black stone, and white ice, with gray clouds over everything. The villages they passed seemed nothing more than turf mounds huddled together, with here and there a whale rib protruding. At each one children ran shouting out of the low houses, clad in sealskin coats and trousers but barefoot in the mud. The whole column came to a swirling semi-halt as men and women followed the children out of the houses with much waving and laughter and handing over of food and skins of what Steq presumed was the ever-present beer. Then, as if at some signal Steq was unable to detect, a few of the villagers picked up the lines to their own sledges, the crowd moved forward again, and the village was left behind.

From a distance Ilu seemed no more than a bump on the treeless hillside, the Place of the God no more than a pile of stones, and the whole vista was dominated by the same mountain, and the icy blue river that ran down to the sea. Arriving, Steq saw the same tumble of turf houses, the same shouting, barefoot children, and he was nearly at the Place of the God before he realized that he was in the city itself. He had thought they were merely passing yet another village.

The procession broke like a wave onto the whale-rib gates of the Place of the God and spilled into the surrounding streets. Pushed along with the crowd, Steq found himself in a muddy, open square where women wearing coats sewn with seabird feathers and painted white, brown, or muted green began singing out in loud voices. The only word Steq recognized was beer, which he had learned in the first hours of his joining the pilgrimage. The women were instantly surrounded and began what appeared to be fierce bargaining, though Steq had not seen anything resembling money. He turned against the flow of the crowd and made his way back to the Place of the God.

By now the sledges were lined up at the gates, and no few sledge pullers were casting glances in the direction of the square Steq had just left. He found a morose-looking man at the end of the line, and put his hand on the braided sealskin rope the man was holding.

The man instantly stood straighter and grinned. He said something—a question by the sound, but Steq knew only a few words of the language of Au. It was possible that yes, no, or beer would answer the man satisfactorily, but it was best not to speak. Keeping his face half-hidden by his coat hood, Steq shrugged toward the square.

The man, still smiling broadly, dropped the line, took Steq by both shoulders, drew him close into a miasma of fermented seaweed, and kissed him on the cheek. He said something else, sending an even stronger waft of beer Steq’s way, and reached into his coat, pulled something out, and pressed it into Steq’s hand. Then, none too steadily, the man walked away. Steq found himself holding a lump of glassy, brownish-golden stone that had been smoothed and rounded into a vaguely animal-like shape that he could not identify. He put it in a pouch under his coat.

By this time it was late afternoon. The line of sledges moved slowly forward and Steq watched each one halt before guards at the gate. One guard examined the cargo of each sledge, counting small, rounded pebbles into a pouch at his waist as he did so, and then waved the man who had towed the sledge through the gates. Other guards appeared and pulled the sledge to the side, where yet others unloaded it and then left it empty in front of the building. A trickle of villagers came back out of the gates, the sledgemen done with their business in the Place of the God and making with all speed for the square where their fellows crowded.

By the time Steq’s commandeered sledge arrived at the gate the sun was setting. The guard looked over the cargo, counted his pebbles, and then waved Steq past with hardly a glance. As he had seen the man before him do, he dropped the tow line and walked into the Place of the God, straight ahead into light and the smell of sweat and burning oil.

The room was small—a dozen people would have crowded it. On the floor were woven grass mats, much scuffed and dirtied. The walls were plain and dark. In the center of the room was a low, blocky table on which sat a single black stone. The man who had preceded Steq in line stood before this, his back to Steq, facing another man, presumably a priest, who spoke at length and then brought out a disk of polished bone from inside his skin shirt and handed it to Steq’s predecessor, who turned and left without another word.

Steq stepped forward. “God of Au,” he said, before the priest could speak. “I am here, as you instructed me.”

The priest frowned, and opened his mouth to say something, and then his eyes grew wide and his body stiffened. “Were you last?” he asked in a dead monotone, in Steq’s language.

“Yes.”

“You have done well,” he said. A tremor passed through the body of the priest. “I am not surprised.”

“How long do we have?”

“Not long,” the priest answered. “I have withdrawn into the stone once more, and we are in danger until we depart Au.” The man then turned and picked the black stone up from the table. “We go.”

“What, do we merely walk through the streets of Ilu?”

“Yes. No one will stop us. But you must find a boat, and bring us to your fleet.”

“Could you not have taken control of the priest and had him bring us the stone?” Steq asked.

“No. I could not have.”

“I wonder why not.” Steq followed him back out into the night. The guards seemed not to see them, and the area in front of the Place of the God was empty of anyone else.

The priest walked ahead without looking left or right, away from the Place of the God and into the square where that afternoon so many of Steq’s traveling companions had crowded. It was empty now, and dark—there was no light but the glow of an oil lamp from a doorway here and there. In the center of the square the priest stopped abruptly, and Steq nearly ran into him. “Find someone,” the priest said without turning around.

“Someone in particular?”

“Anyone will do,” said the priest. “Between here and the water, where the boats are, is the place where the villagers are camping for the night. Someone strong and healthy would be best, but take anyone you can alive.”

Steq knew without being told what the god wanted with a live person from the camp. “Can we not sacrifice the priest you’re possessing?”

“He has been dead for the last several minutes.”

“That’s inconvenient,” Steq said. “You expect that I will just walk off with someone in the middle of the camp?”

“Yes,” said the priest, and he walked forward again.

“You said nothing of this, when last we spoke.”

“I said you would know more when you came to me in Ilu,” the priest said, still walking forward. Steq hurried to catch up to him. “You accepted that.”

“You promised there would be no difficulties.”

“There will not be if you follow my instructions.”

Steq had known from the day the god had first spoken what food it preferred, and what they would be required to give it, if they accepted its offer. He was not ordinarily a sentimental man. But he thought of the people he had walked with in the last few days. They had been a smiling, happy lot, had offered him food and beer without stinting, even though they could not have had any idea who he was.

They had also killed twelve of his people, had only been prevented from killing more by the protection of the god, and would not hesitate to kill Steq himself if they knew he was not of Au. Steq was not unaccustomed to the idea of human sacrifice, or shocked by it. It was only that he could not avoid some small sympathy; the Godless were well used to being required to pay gods with their lives. Still, he had not come this far to quail at the last moment.

The camp of the pilgrims was a noisy, sprawling affair. Here and there a few tents had been raised, but mostly the men sat in the open, passing the ever-present skins of beer. What light there was came from three or four campfires, though what fuel they burned, since there seemed to be little or no wood anywhere, Steq had no idea. Everyone seemed to be near someone else, to be in conversation or sharing food or drink. If Steq had known more of the language, he could conceivably have taken a likely prospect by the arm and said something like, “Come aside, I must tell you something.” But he could not, and he reached the far edge of the camp without seeing how he could do what the god required. The thought crossed his mind that one of his own people would be made to pay, if he could not find someone of Au.

He would not allow it. He stopped at the far edge of the camp and looked more carefully at the people around him. The two nights he had spent with the pilgrims he had taken care to stay at the edges of the camp where darkness would hide his foreign features, and where others would not pay him too much unwelcome attention. If anyone in the crowd wished to be alone he would likely do the same.

He walked the perimeter of the camp, just outside the edges of the light cast by the several fires, and when he had nearly made a circuit he found what he sought. A single shadowed figure sat motionless on the sand, just outside the camp. He stood quietly, watching, and the man didn’t move. After a few minutes Steq walked slowly behind him, any sound he might have made covered by the raised voices of the celebrating pilgrims. He knelt behind the man and threw one arm around him, the other hand clapped across the man’s mouth.

Steq realized immediately, with a mixture of regret and relief, that it was a boy he held, not a grown man, and in the same instant the boy bit his hand, hard. Steq did not dare let go and let the boy shout for aid, and did not dare cry out himself. He raised the arm circling the boy, meaning to strike him on the back of the head, and instantly the teeth were loosed and the boy was up and running across the beach. Steq ran after.

He caught up quickly, and brought the boy down to the sand. Steq pinned his arms behind and wrestled him up, dragged him, as he struggled ineffectually, down the beach to the water where the dim shadow of the priest stood. In all this time, though he fought Steq ceaselessly, the boy made no sound.

The god-possessed priest did not turn as Steq came up. “You took too long,” he said in his flat monotone. “Get a boat.”

“And in the meantime, what about this one?” Steq asked. “I can hardly just let go of him. And you don’t want me to kill him yet.”

Before the god could answer, a sharp, thundering crack echoed across the sky. The encamped pilgrims cried out and then were silent a few moments. “We are in great danger,” said the god. “We must leave immediately.” Behind, in the camp, someone laughed and the voices started up again as though nothing had happened.

“Why?”

“The mountain Mueu is a volcano,” said the god. “As I have withdrawn from the island, I can no longer contain it, or any of the others.”

“You might have said as much sooner,” said Steq, and dragged his captive along the beach until he found a small hunting boat, carefully stitched skin stretched over a frame of bone and osier. In the bottom of the boat was a coil of rope, and this he used to bind his captive. Then he called to the priest. “Over here! I have found a boat, and it will be quicker if you come to me, rather than me coming to you.” He tipped the boy into the boat and then pushed it across the tide line and into the water, hoping the skin wouldn’t tear along the way. As the god reached the boat another loud crack silenced the camp yet again. This time the returning voices were pitched higher, and seemed to carry a note of fear. The god climbed in, and Steq pushed the boat out farther and then stepped in and took up the oar he found and began to row.

“You will have to bail,” he said after a short time. “We are too many for this boat.”

“Give me some blood,” said the priest. “I will ensure that we do not sink.”

“Blood! To keep water out of the boat? You do not inspire confidence in your power. Are you not well-fed by the sacrifices of the people of Au?”

“Much of my attention is currently elsewhere, keeping back the flood of melted glacier that will shortly sweep down the sides of Mueu and wash Ilu into the sea. Until we are farther from shore we are not safe, and I cannot turn my attention from Mueu. I could not do this were I not strong enough, and you will not be disappointed in me, once this danger is past.”

“Bail,” said Steq. “I will not row the distance wounded, and I will not bleed the boy lest you complain about the condition of your victim when it comes time for the sacrifice.” He rowed a few more strokes. “Bail or drown.”

Without a word, the priest took up a bailer from the bottom of the boat and set to work.

When they reached the Fleet of the Godless, Steq turned his captive over to his crew. The priest, still inhabited by the god, took up the stone again and went to the deck where he sat in front of the mast and stared ahead, saying nothing. The crew avoided him, though Steq had not told them the body was dead.

They had already abandoned their island camps, and now they sailed south, away from Au. By afternoon the sky had darkened and ash began to fall from the air, like snow. The boats were muddy with it, and the Godless lashed the covers over the hulls to keep it out, and swept the covers and the decks constantly. They still avoided the dead priest, who did not move but sat at the mast covered in ash. That night the northern horizon was lit by a baleful red glow, and Steq approached the god.

“Am I to understand that Au is in the process of sinking beneath the waves, thereby releasing you from your contract?”

“Yes.” A small slide of gray ash fell from the dead priest’s mouth, the only part of him that moved. “Though it will take several more days.”

“We are sailing away from Au with what speed we can manage.”

“So I noticed,” said the god.

“Will the body last long enough?”

“I intend to preserve it until I no longer need it,” said the priest. “But in any event, I will tell you how the sacrifice will go. Cut the victim’s throat and let the blood fall on the stone. Say these words.” And here the god spoke the words of the rite. “Put both bodies into the sea. By doing this, you will be bound to the terms we agreed upon.”

“Let us review those terms,” said Steq.

The priest’s head moved, dislodging more ash from his face, and he opened blank, staring eyes. “I warn you, I do not have any intention of renegotiating at this late date.”

“Nor I,” said Steq. “I wish only to be certain there will be no misunderstandings.”

“As you wish. I have no apprehensions.”

“This is what we have agreed. We will give our prayers and sacrifices to no other god but you. With your assistance, we will compel all those we meet either to abandon all other gods but you, or die as your victims. We will do so until no one lives who offers rites to any other god, whereupon we will no longer be required to offer humans as sacrifices, though we will still owe you our exclusive devotion.

“For your part, you will protect us from all danger and misfortune, and will assist us against our enemies. We will be preeminent over all the peoples of the earth.”

“For as long as you keep your end of the bargain,” said the corpse at the mast. “My wrath will be terrible if you break the terms of the agreement and turn to another god, or fail to seek out every person who does not worship only me. Such was our agreement.”

“And if you don’t keep yours?”

“I will keep it,” said the god. “Do you think I have gone to these lengths only to amuse myself?”

“No,” said Steq. The corpse said nothing more.

Steq went forward and stood at the rail.

He had known almost from the beginning that they were dealing with a minor god—a deity of some spring, or small island. This hardly mattered if, fed, it could do all it promised, and keep the Godless safe.

The past sixteen years had been like a dream Steq had feared to wake from. Food had been plentiful, illness rare. The hunters of Au had let them be after a few failed attacks. No vengeful god had come upon them. And they would shortly be Godless no more.

Do you think I have gone to these lengths only to amuse myself?

That the god had gone to great lengths—greater lengths, perhaps, than it wished to admit—had become more and more obvious. And why did the dead priest still sit guard over the stone?

Only one conclusion seemed likely—the god was vulnerable, and did not trust the Godless. And so, why put itself in this position?

Steq had believed the god when it had said that it was ambitious, that the people of Au had failed to serve that ambition as it had wished them to. But was that ambition enough to drive the god to take such a risk? Steq thought not.

The mountain Mueu is a volcano.

The god of Au had exhausted its strength, or nearly so, holding back Mueu. Why wait sixteen years, then? Why not flee the moment the Godless presented themselves? Had it, perhaps, waited until the danger was so extreme that the island was certain to sink entirely, thus releasing it from its obligation to the people of Au?

He thought of the wet and windy trek along the coast, the drunk, chattering villagers hauling their tribute to Ilu, the women who had pressed skins of beer on him, the men who had cheerfully shared fish and other, less identifiable food along the way. The image rose unbidden of the man in line before the Place of the God, morose until Steq took his place.

One of the Godless spoke, then, interrupting Steq’s thoughts. “Captain, you’re needed in the starboard bow.”

Steq climbed from the deck into the starboard hull, and stooped to pass under the coverings, which on this shallow vessel did not allow one to stand up straight. In the bow he found two crew members hunched, bewildered, in front of a crouching, naked young woman. She looked directly at him, clearly afraid but also clearly in command of herself. He remembered her silence during the pursuit and struggle on the beach. This woman was not given to panic. She was short compared to the people of Au he had met, and wide-boned. Her hair was flat and lank. Her face was the face of a woman Steq knew had died some sixteen years ago.

“Get her some clothes,” he said to the two guards. “No one is to speak of this.” He turned, and made his way to an opening in the covers, and climbed back up onto the deck.

Steq had his supper that evening under the covers of the port bow of O Gods Take Pity. He sat on a bundle of skins in the flickering glow of a single oil lamp, the captain of O Gods Take Pity facing him, on a bunk. They spoke in low voices, bent forward under the low ceiling, knees nearly touching.

Steq reported all that had happened. “I don’t doubt that it will do everything it says for us,” he concluded. “But neither do I doubt that it will sink us in the sea like the people of Au if it finds some other, better bargain, or thinks itself endangered.”

“This is self-evident,” said the captain of O Gods Take Pity. “But this is not what troubles you. You hesitate now because of the woman.”

“I do not hesitate,” said Steq.

“I knew you when you were an infant at your mother’s breast,” said the captain of O Gods Take Pity. “Lie to the others as you wish, but I won’t be deceived.” Steq was silent. “She is none of ours. If you asked her where was her home, who her family, she would say Au, and name people we have never seen or heard of.”

“But for an accident,” said Steq, “she would be one of us.”

“But for an accident I would be king in Therete, dressed in silk and sitting on a gold-and-ivory throne, surrounded by slaves and courtiers. But for an accident, the king in Therete would be one of us, fleeing the wrath of the gods, wresting what life he can from the waters with no luxury and little joy, though I assure you the thought has never crossed his mind. And rightly so. Begin this way, and where do you stop? There is no one in the world who would not be one of us, but for an accident.”

“Years ago you urged us not to take this course,” said Steq bitterly. “Now you are in favor of it.”

“No,” said the captain of O Gods Take Pity. “I am not in favor of it. Only, if you pitch this god and its corpse into the sea without accepting its deal, do so because you have found some way out that will not cause all our deaths. Do not take this step, which will surely have dire consequences, because of qualms over this woman. We have all lost people because of mistake or accident, and we have all regretted it. Do not be the first to endanger the fleet because of your own regret.”

“I said nothing of taking such a step.” The other captain said nothing, and Steq took another piece of fish from the bowl in his hand, chewed and swallowed it. “It is tied to the stone, and cannot be released without a sacrifice.”

“It is not confined, and it has power yet to animate the corpse. It may have power to do other things as well.”

“What would they do, our people, if I threw the stone into the sea?” Both men were silent, considering Steq’s question, or perhaps unwilling to answer it.

“We have opposed gods in the past, and survived,” said the captain of O Gods Take Pity after a while.

“Not all of us,” said Steq.

“There is no use in worrying over the dead.” He set his bowl beside him on the bunk. “We have lived too easily for too long.”

“Perhaps we lived too hard, before.”

“Perhaps. But we lived.”

And Steq had no sufficient answer to this.

Ifanei lay bound on a bunk on Righteous Vengeance. Two guards sat opposite her, and they never looked away. When she had shivered they had covered her, but left her hands in sight.

It would not have mattered had they not—they had tied her with strong, braided sealskin and she had no way to cut it. They had taken her knife, and when they had taken her clothes they had found the needles and awls she had carefully wrapped and tied to the inside of her leg. She could see no means of escape.

She had understood that she was on a boat of the Fleet of the Godless, though she would not have known to give them that name. What she had not understood was why she had been captured to begin with. They had not killed her, or otherwise mistreated her. When they had done searching her they had returned her clothing. She could not imagine what anyone might want with her, unless they knew of Ihak’s caches, which seemed unlikely.

She had days to consider. Days in which she was fed and her other needs cared for as though she were ill and helpless. Never at any time was she allowed off the bunk, nor were her hands or feet ever unbound.

The darkness never faltered—the coverings were tightly lashed, and even if the sun could have shone through, the skies were dark with smoke and ash, but Ifanei had no way of knowing that. She knew only the close, dimly lit darkness and the smell of unwashed bodies. Eventually she felt stunned with the sameness of it all, and ceased to wait for anything further to happen.

An unmeasured time later, she woke to the chill as her cover was roughly pulled off. One of her guards held her bound wrists, the other cut the bonds around her ankles, and she was pulled as upright as the low ceiling allowed, and pushed down the narrow space that ran the length of the hull, bunks on one side, unidentifiable bundles and stacks along the other. She took two steps and her legs buckled under her, weak from long inactivity. Her guards caught her, pulled her up again, and helped her along to where a faint light shone through an opening above.

Hands reached down and pulled her through, up onto a railed platform. The sky was dark, and the breeze cold, and despite her coat she shivered. Guttering torches, a few oil lamps, and a fire in a large box provided some light. There were people all around, all along the railings. Facing her was the man who had brought her here, his face expressionless. No one moved, though the platform pitched and rocked in a way that made Ifanei step and stumble as she tried to stay on her feet.

In the center of the platform was a wide, tall pole, and leaning up against that was a pile of gray dust. In front of this was the Stone of Etoje.

“God of Au!” she cried. “Help me!”

A weird gasping, choking noise came from the pile at the foot of the pole. The whole thing heaved and from underneath it a man stood up, swaying and staggering slightly, and the gasping noise continued. The dust fell and swirled away in the wind.

His long blond curls were covered in ash, his face and clothes gray with it, but she knew him. She realized, with a freezing horror, that the choking sound was laughter.

“Ifanei,” said the dead Speaker in a flat, toneless voice. “I provided you indeed, and I will have you back from your father.” She said nothing, could think of no answer. “Here is symmetry,” said the god. “Here is perfection.”

“My god.” Ifanei’s voice trembled with cold and dread. “I know you will protect me. The people of Au are your people and you have always kept us from misfortune.”

“Au has sunk beneath the waves,” said the priest. “Not the smallest part of the island remains. And you were my victim from the beginning. I lent you to Ihak, and it is only right that you return to me at last.” Still the people around her, and the dark, hard-faced man in front of her, were silent. There was no sound, except the wind and the water.

“Au beneath the waves,” she said. “Why? You have betrayed us!”

“It was the nature of the island itself,” said the god. “And it was never in my power to keep any human alive forever, nor did I ever promise such a thing.”

She saw the dishonesty of the god’s words, but could not find sufficient answer for it. “What of Etoje’s service to you?” she asked. “Had he not taken you for his god you would still be on the island, with no company but the cries of birds. Does this mean nothing to you?”

“Etoje’s service was pure self-interest,” said the dead priest. “He killed his own brother to satisfy his greed. Surely you know this, the tale has been told often enough. And it should not surprise you. It is the way people are. As it happens, it serves my purpose.”

She looked at the people around her. They would, she knew, cut her throat as easily as the Speaker had offered up the victims of Au. Did they know what they dealt with? Even if she had spoken their language, and could have warned them, would she have wished to?

But there was nothing she could do. And that being the case, she would not beg or scream. She took two stumbling steps to the Stone of Etoje, knelt heavily, and then made her back as straight as her shivering allowed and waited for the knife.

Steq had known that the woman was no coward. He had, when he had thought of what was to come, been grateful that he would not have to steel himself to endure pitiful weeping or wailing.

She knelt shivering by the stone, her chin up as though inviting the knife. Her eyes were open, and she looked not at the grimy, dead priest but at Steq.

He had not expected to be undone by her bravery. “What did she say to you?” he asked the god.

“It does not matter.”

“I am curious.”

“You are delaying. I wonder why?”

“Why should it matter to you?” Steq asked.

“It does not matter.” Steq did not answer. “Very well. The woman begged me for help, invoking my agreement with the people of Au. I explained to her how matters stand. That is all.”

That was all. Steq took a breath, and then spoke. “Godless, I fear I have led you astray.”

“And I fear this ship needs a new captain,” said the dead priest.

“It will have one,” said Steq, “if the people do not like what I have to say.”

The corpse made as if to step forward, but a voice spoke from the watching crowd. “Touch him and you’ll be over the rail, stone and all.” Other voices murmured in assent.

“Put me overboard and you’ll speedily discover your mistake,” said the god, but it made no further move.

“If we feed this god what it desires,” said Steq, “it will almost certainly have the power to do much of what it has promised us. And the blood that it demands will be none of ours.” His gaze shifted momentarily to Ifanei, and then back to the priest. “But let me tell you why the god has abandoned its promise to the people of Au. The great mountain above Ilu was a volcano, and there were others. For a thousand years the god held the island safe, because of its promise to the people of Au, but after all that time it could control them no longer. A thousand years! Imagine the power thwarted, enough to destroy the whole island when it was finally let loose. And when this god realized that it could not hold back the fires forever, what did it do? Did it command the people of Au, who had served it faithfully all that time, to build boats and escape under its protection? No, it allied with us behind their backs, and left them to their fate. It will do the same when its agreement with us becomes inconvenient.

“Many of you have lived all your lives under this god’s protection. The rest are too accustomed to living in opposition to all the gods and peoples of the world to fear what might happen if the god of Au has not the strength to do as it promises. Perhaps I have grown too soft with easy living, and sentimental. But the fate of the people of Au troubles me greatly, and if you would ally yourselves with this god you must choose another captain.”

“And if we would not?” cried a voice.

“Then we must cast stone and corpse overboard, and sail away from here as quickly as we may. It has some power yet, and we will be in some danger, but I do not think it will follow us far. The gods of surrounding waters will have no love for it, and even so, at the bottom of the sea there will be no one to feed it.”

“I will show you my power!” said the corpse.

“Show it!” came the voice of an old woman. “We all know your weakness, and Steq has never yet led us wrong!”

As though her words had been a signal, the boat lurched to starboard. Steq grabbed the rail, watched as three or four people tumbled into the water. Crew slid across the deck, and the stone began to roll but the priest caught it up, and then a thick, dead-white tentacle reached up and onto the boat, twisting and snaking until it found a rail, which it curled around and pulled.

The rail snapped and was thrown up into the air. Another tentacle joined the first, groping along the hull, and then another. Torches tumbled from their places and bounced across the deck and into the water. Still a wavering, flickering light lit the boat—the sail was aflame.

“You!” Steq grabbed a man by the arm. “Loose the port hull!” The man scrambled to obey him, speaking to others on his way, who followed him. Steq then let go of the rail, to slide down the deck up against a writhing tentacle. “Everyone to the port hull!” he shouted. What they could do against the monster in an overloaded single hull he did not know, but he did not think they could extinguish the fire and right the ship, and so it was the only chance for survival.

In the meantime he would attack the monster in any way he could. He reached into his coat for his knife, and his hand brushed up against his pouch. There was nothing in it to help him—a few needles, a coil of fishing line and some hooks, and…

He looked around for the woman of Au, and saw her scrambling up the deck, hands still bound. He followed, grabbed her ankle, and pulled her to him. She lashed out, swinging her fists, and hit him, hard, just under his ear. “Stop!” he shouted, though he knew she would not understand him. But she did stop. “Look!” Out of the pouch he pulled the small piece of polished, golden glass he had brought from Au, and held it before her eyes.

She looked at it for only a moment, and then closed one hand around it and called out, and suddenly the writhing arms were motionless and the sound of snapping wood ceased. “Up,” he said, and pushed her along the sloping deck toward the port hull, which was nearly free, and climbed after her.

“Steq!” The voice of the dead priest, weird and gasping. “Steq! What is that?”

“It is the smallest part of the island of Au,” called Steq, without turning his head. He and the woman reached the edge of the deck and leapt into the port hull just as it was freed. The Godless were unlashing covers and pulling out oars.

“She is not of Au!” cried the dead man. “I am not bound!”

“Then move against her!” This was answered with an inarticulate cry. The last few flames of the burning mast went out as Righteous Vengeance slipped under the waves, and the only light was the torches of the other boats, for the rest of the fleet was still nearby, their own crews watching in horror.

“Row for the nearest ship!” Steq ordered then. “It can not harm us so long as the woman is in the boat, and as for the others, it has not the strength to bring more monsters against them, or it would have done so already.”

The woman sat shivering in the bottom of the hull, both hands clutched around the small glass token. Steq went to her and cut her bonds. “There is a place in the south,” he said, though he knew she would not understand him. “A mountain so high they say you can touch the stars from its top.” She did not answer, he had not expected her to. “Do you hear that, god of Au?” But there was no answer.

The next morning the Fleet of the Godless, reduced to five boats, sailed southward. Behind them, far below the featureless sea and attended only by silent bones and cold, indifferent fish, lay the Stone of Etoje, and the god of Au.

The Nalendar

Down at the riverfront at Kalub the little gods congregated in clouds, flies and dragonflies and even small birds approaching would-be travelers. They scattered out of the way of wagons and carts, circled over the flagstoned road and then re-formed. Umri walked through them, careful not to jostle or hit. The citizens of Kalub paid deference to a host of more powerful gods, including the river itself, but it was wise to be wary of even these tiny things.

A small bird lit on her shoulder. “Take me with you, I’ll see you safely to your destination!” it chirped.

“No thank you,” said Umri. “I’m seeing someone off.” The tiny brown bird cocked its head, eyeing the bag in her hand, but flew off without saying more.

She found a vantage out of the stream of traffic, in the shadow of a wall, and scanned the docks, her eyes shaded against the glare of the sun on the waters of the broad Nalendar. Women in bright, draped dresses, scarves tied around their hair, sailors in short kilts and very little else… there!

Rilhat Imk, round-faced, dark-haired, somewhat pale—his mother had been a slave from somewhere north, rumor said—in a brilliant red-and-blue coat she had seen him wear before. He was on the deck of a boat just now casting off, standing self-importantly at the rail. Umri watched as it moved out into the channel and started downstream.

“Now, for a boat going upstream,” she said, more to herself than for anyone else to hear.

“You’re from the Silver Isles,” piped a tiny voice. Startled and apprehensive, she looked around, expecting to see one of the birds or flying insects.

“Down here!” the voice said, and she looked down at her feet, and then crouched, her dull green dress puddling behind and beside her on the gray stone. On the top of her foot was a tiny black lizard, hardly as big as her thumb, and that only including its long, bright blue tail.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t see you at first. I’m sorry, but I’m not looking for protection, or a guide.”

“You are from the Silver Isles, I can tell by your accent.”

“I am. And I need to be on my way, good day to you.” She gently lifted the lizard onto her finger, and moved her hand aside to let it step into the road.

It stood firm. “Why are you going upstream? Your home is in the south.”

Umri searched her memory for advice on being rid of a persistent god. She found none. “I like to travel.”

“I suppose otherwise you’d never have come so far from home,” piped the tiny lizard. “Take me with you! The captain won’t charge for me.”

“I’m sorry, god whose name I don’t know, but I don’t make long-term deals.”

“After long and sorry experience I don’t make them either. No agreements, no promises. Take me with you on the boat.” Umri tipped her hand slightly, but the lizard tightened its grip. “I want to go upstream. If I were a great, powerful god it would be a simple matter, I would merely will myself there. But I am as you see me, and no one will sacrifice to me and make me stronger. So I’ll make a small, short-term deal with you. Take me with you, and I’ll choose the best boat going upstream.”

“That would be the fastest, and the soonest departing,” she said, and then was struck by an unsettling thought. Her only real fear of Imk was that she would be forced to injure him, and face prosecution in a city where she had no family—and he might impress a judge as nothing more than an overly persistent suitor driven to desperate means by love. No, it was better to leave town for a while and avoid the problem altogether. But if he had set a spy on her, she might be in real danger. “Has someone sent you to me? Or spoken at all to you concerning me?”

“No!”

“You are not currently under any obligations to anyone else?”

“None whatever.” Its blue tail twitched.

The answers seemed straightforward. And gods didn’t lie, not without serious consequences. But they could mislead, and obfuscate. “Do you have any association with the slave broker Rilhat Imk?”

“What sort of question is that?” squeaked the lizard. The tiny tail whipped from left to right. “Any association! Surely I’ve spoken to someone who’s heard of someone else who knows this person.”

“You’re not working for Rilhat Imk, or working for someone who’s working for him?”

“I am not working for anyone. And I will not be working for you. I merely wish to board a boat going upstream without being crushed on my way across the dock. Take me with you, and I will be sure we’re on the fastest and soonest departing boat going upstream. No further obligations. Although,” said the lizard, “a very small prayer wouldn’t hurt.”

Umri laughed in spite of herself. “A small prayer I can do. What shall I call you?”

“For now, ‘Little Skink’ will do. And you?”

She took a deep breath. “Nalemeindundawyumrisayedynaremend.”

“What, that’s all?”

“Well, no. That’s just the first part. And I’m usually just called Umri.”

“It seemed short, for the Silver Isles. How I admire such names! So informative. Is it true your names include the phase of the moon when you were born?”

“Yes,” said Umri. “And where I was born, and who my mother and father were. And their parents. And a few other things.”

“I will call you Umri, to save us both time. Speaking of which…”

Smiling, Umri made a small prayer to Little Skink. “Ah, thank you,” said the skink. “What a lovely flavor that had, very pleasing. And now, fortified as I am, I can tell you that the Reasonable Expectations is the vessel for us.”

“Which you had ascertained before you even spoke to me,” Umri said, her initial apprehension returning.

“I have kept my word!” the skink insisted.

“You have. I am merely being cautious.”

“Wise girl! And now, for the Reasonable Expectations.”

Fast was a relative term, going upstream. Rowers strained against the current of the wide and muddy Nalendar, and sometimes, where the water ran very fast, the boat moved forward by means of crewmen pulling ropes tied to trees on shore and progress was mere feet a day. Still, the sun was bright, the breeze pleasant, the banks lush and green, and the sky a crystalline blue. Other passengers sat mostly in the shade to one side of a cabin wall, now and then complaining desultorily of the heat.

“It might have been faster to walk,” Umri said. She stood at the stern, leaning on the rail, a fishing pole in her hand, her eye on the line that stretched out behind the boat. The captain, a tall, weather-beaten man, had lent it to her.

“Why didn’t you?” asked Little Skink. It was perched behind her ear underneath her headscarf, and tickled when it twitched.

“A woman alone on the road? I’d have had to hire guards, or make a deal with a god for protection.” She had made the customary offering to the Nalendar, of course, but no traveler on the river neglected that, and it wasn’t a matter of contracts. “No offense, but…”

“None taken. You’re quite right.”

They were both silent awhile, no sound but the water and the rhythmic chant of the crewmen as they pulled the boat against the current. “Could you help me with the fishing?” Umri ventured. “One time, no obligations. Just… interest a fish.” The skink didn’t answer, and she wondered what lay behind its silence. “I’d trade a prayer… no, two prayers.” No answer. Gods, especially little gods, were greedy for prayers. “Why not?”

“Unfortunately, this stretch of the river is not well-disposed toward me,” said Little Skink.

“Which stretch?”

“Oh, well.” Umri’s ear itched as the skink flexed its feet. “The whole thing, actually.”

“You offended the whole river? Every god all the way down to the sea?”

“Well. And the Nalendar itself, actually.”

She felt a dropping sensation in her stomach. She’d been afraid at first that the skink had been working for Imk, and then that it had some other motive for attaching itself to her. She had never imagined anything like this. Every city along the Nalendar depended on the river for its life. No one anywhere near its banks would be foolish enough to anger the god. “How did you—” But at that moment Umri felt a tug on her line, and she whipped the pole up and back. It bent forward, and the line wove back and forth in the water behind the boat.

“Need some help, miss?” called a man from the shade, one of the passengers.

“No, I’ve got it.” She slowly brought the line in, until she pulled the fish up out of the water, a black, whiskered thing a good three feet long and flipping hard, splashing water onto the deck.

“What a catch!” the man said, rising and coming to the rail. He rubbed his hands together. “Nasty bite on that one! Here, I’ll get it for you.”

“No thank you,” said Umri, and one-handed wound an end of her dress around her fingers.

The captain had been drawn aft by the commotion. “She probably caught her first fish before she could walk,” he said. “I imagine she could dive in and toss two or three up on the deck.”

“Not with this current.” Her hand muffled by the dull green fabric, she grabbed the fish by the jaw and heaved it over the rail and onto the deck where it flipped and buzzed. “And I’ve only ever dived for shellfish.” She pulled a knife out of her belt with her other hand and drove it into the fish’s eye, and the noise and movement stopped.

The passenger froze for an instant, and then backed away. The captain gave him a sardonic glance and then turned his attention to Umri. “You’ve offered it to the Nalendar?”

“Yes,” she said. “And now I’ll send it to the cook. It’s much too big for me to eat myself.”

“That’s very kind of you, miss,” said the captain. “I’ll take it to him.” And with another word of thanks he took it away.

When he was gone, Umri sat in the sun on a coil of rope. The skink ventured down her neck and along her arm to her knee. “How did a tiny thing like you offend the whole river?” asked Umri, sure no one was close enough to overhear. “And why are you on a boat on the Nalendar itself? Isn’t that… unwise?”

“Very likely.” The skink raised its tiny head and sniffed, and then lay down to bask. “But considering how long it would take me to walk in my present form…”

“Gods can take any form they want, can’t they?”

“Well,” said the skink. “Well. The more work it takes to do something, the more you have to put into it, yes?”

“That makes sense.”

“So this is as much as I could muster. It took some doing as it is—I entered the skink egg as soon as it was laid, and only hatched three days ago.”

“You’ve fallen on hard times,” said Umri. “What happened?”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” said the skink, an edge to its tiny voice that declared the matter closed. “Tell me, why did you leave Kalub? Something to do with this Rilhat Imk person, I imagine.”

Umri sighed. “Yes.”

“You stole something from him?”

“No!” Umri was indignant. “He wants me to be his mistress.”

“Ah, and he’s poor, or ugly.”

“He’s rich. Or very well-off, anyway. He’s a slave broker.” She leaned back against the rail and readjusted her dress, careful not to dislodge the lizard. “He comes to the bathhouse where I work.” Kalub was a spa town, and its bathhouses were famous. They ranged from plain, roofless stone walls surrounding a single communal basin of hot water to elaborately tiled and inlaid halls where young men and women served refreshments from jeweled gold and silver trays. “He comes for business meetings. He stares at me.”

“Which is what you were there for, I assume.”

It was. “That didn’t bother me, really, it’s happened before. When they approach me I usually just tell them that the house doesn’t offer that particular service.” The skink gave a derisive squeak. “It doesn’t! And that’s what I told Imk when he asked. And he kept asking. Which was annoying enough, but about a month ago he told me that he had rented rooms for me and furnished them, and bought clothes and slaves, and that I was to stop my foolishness and be his mistress.”

“And for this you flee the city?” The skink was incredulous.

“When I told him no, he became very angry.” His pale face had gone red, and he had been frozen for nearly a minute. “He said that I had to be his mistress, and that I would help him achieve his destiny.”

“Surely that’s a destiny many men aspire to, and surely any mistress will do.”

Umri laughed. “You’d think. But he came the next day and told me that he would be back in a few weeks with something that would overwhelm all my objections. It seemed wise to be gone before he returned—that sort of thing always ends badly.”

“Does he have a wife?”

“No.”

“That’s a bad sign,” said Little Skink. “A rich merchant in Kalub—how old is he?”

“About thirty-five.”

“Even worse. He should have one by now. No, he’s entirely unsuitable. And besides, you didn’t leave the islands to get tied down to some small-time businessman.”

Umri shifted. The boatmen’s chant stopped for a few moments, and then one voice called and the rest joined in again. “And you? What’s upriver that you can’t find in Kalub?” It was probably better not to even ask, but she was curious.

“Treasure!” said the skink. “But I’ll need help fetching it away. Are you interested?”

At dinner the captain praised her catch, and the stew the cook had made of it, which was delicious. The man who had offered to help her with the fish made short work of it, though Umri noticed that he wouldn’t look at her.

“Ah, the Silver Isles!” the captain said. “Lovely place. Warm breezes, blue water… it must seem cold and drab to you here, miss.”

“Not at all,” said Umri. She tore off a hunk of flat bread, the better to get the last bits of stew out of her bowl. “The river is quite beautiful.” Behind her ear she felt the skink stir. “I’m sure, Captain, that you know nearly everything there is to know about the Nalendar. I would love to hear some of its history. Battles, sunken treasure…” The skink was suddenly still.

“Treasure? Of course! Whole kingdoms’ worth.”

“What would be the largest? The best, the most famous treasure lost to the Nalendar?”

“That,” said the captain, leaning back and pouring another cup of wine for himself, “would be the treasure of Gnarr.” Another passenger made a noise of recognition. “Have you heard of it, miss?”

“No. What’s Gnarr?”

The captain gestured toward the bow of the boat. “A city upriver from here, and they held all the land for five hundred miles around. By agreement, you understand, with the gods of neighboring countries. Now Gnarr wasn’t like Kalub, where whatever god can do the best service gets the worship, no, in Gnarr they had an agreement with the god Sursurra, exclusive.

“There was a statue of Sursurra in the center of the city, and at his crowning the new king would take the statue’s outstretched hand and swear to uphold the contract between his people and their god. The feet of the statue were in a particular spot, you understand, but the agreement with the other gods said that the king would rule for five hundred miles around where he and the statue stood as he held the outstretched hand of the statue.” He paused for a swallow of wine. “So Sursurra, apparently, got to thinking how he might spread his territory without breaking the agreements.”

“He couldn’t move the statue,” said another passenger, a merchant. “The agreement said where the feet had to be.”

“Right,” said the captain. “But he could move the statue’s hand.”

Umri frowned. “But wouldn’t that just move his whole territory over to wherever the king was crowned?”

“The five hundred miles was centered on where the king and the statue were standing,” said the merchant. “And if the statue had to stand in Gnarr…”

“The center of the five hundred miles would be a line, instead of a single point,” said the captain. “That territory wouldn’t be a circle anymore, it would be…” He made a pulling motion with his two hands. “Stretched out.”

“Ah,” said Umri, understanding.

“So the prince of Gnarr,” the captain continued, “broke the hand off the statue—only one was outstretched, you see, the other one held a spear—and boarded a boat, saying he was visiting the Gerentarch of Kalub. He brought chests and chests of gold and jewels with him, for gifts and also for himself, for money or whatever else princes keep gold and jewels around them for.

“Now, the Nalendar was one of the gods concerned in the agreement, and you can imagine her anger when she discovered what was on that boat.”

“It sank!” Umri guessed.

“It sank.”

“I’ve always wondered where,” said the merchant. “Will we pass over it?”

“Doubtless,” said the captain, with a laugh. “Though I don’t know where it is exactly. It was some seven hundred years ago, after all.”

“Somewhere between here and Gnarr,” said the merchant.

“The man who found it would be rich,” said the merchant’s wife.

The captain took another swallow of wine. “I don’t imagine the Nalendar would allow it to be found. Not that hand, in any event.”

“Surely there aren’t any princes of Gnarr left to hold it and swear the oath,” said Umri.

“Oh, there’s always some lunatic claiming he is,” said the captain.

The skink had been silent and motionless from the moment the captain had begun the story of the lost treasure, and all during Umri’s walk to her tiny cabin. It did not move when she took off her headscarf, or lay down on the narrow bunk and pulled the blanket up over herself.

“Why did you do it?” she asked after a few moments of silence. “Why did you think the river would let you?” For nearly a minute she thought it wasn’t going to answer. There was no sound but the river, and the thunking and low voices of passengers on the other side of the wall.

“Why shouldn’t she have let me do it?” the skink said finally. “I was stronger than any of my neighbors, only the agreement was holding me back. Had I succeeded I’d have shared my power with her. Why would she turn it down?”

“I suppose the river isn’t that kind of god.”

“Every god is that kind of god,” said the skink.

She decided it was best not to pursue that. “How are you going to get the hand out of the river?” It said nothing. “How are you going to find a prince?” Still no answer. She wondered what it must be like, to have been such a powerful god, ruler of a kingdom, and now tiny and powerless, without any worshippers. “I suppose if you find one, and he sacrifices to you, you can eventually make him king of Gnarr, and keep the agreements you haven’t been able to keep.”

“That’s the worst,” the skink said in its tiny, high voice. “To have made the promise—You’ll be king!—and not be able to keep it, not in any way. The people calling on me to keep my agreements, my contract with them, and not to be able to, each time a fresh injury, my power bleeding away. A god can’t lie, not and escape the price. But I meant to keep my word!”

“You meant to cheat your neighbors,” said Umri, but quietly, the walls of the cabins were thin. “And now I know I can’t trust you.”

“You knew it before,” squeaked the skink. “But I never meant to cheat you. I’ve done what I said, and you’ve done what you’ve said. And the treasure is real.”

“Real? Not just the hand? Gold and silver and jewels?”

“Chests and chests of it, just like the captain said.”

“And how are you going to get it out of the river?”

“It’s not in the river. Not anymore.” The skink’s voice took on a fresh enthusiasm. “The river changed course, and left a lake behind, and the boat is there.”

“And the river has left it completely unguarded.”

“Some things we can only concern ourselves with when we get there. The gold and silver is no good to me, but I imagine it interests you.”

“I don’t care about money.”

“You lie! You paid your fare on this boat without so much as a wince. You’ve been pouring tea and hiding your money away, probably investing it too, and I think it’s why you left the Silver Isles to begin with. You didn’t want to spend your life with nothing to your name but a loincloth and a knife, watching someone else grow rich off the fish you harvested for him. Am I right?” Those shellfish were packed in ice and shipped up the Nalendar. They served them at the bathhouse in Kalub, and Umri had gasped at the price. “Chests and chests of gold,” said the skink. “You’d never have to work again unless you wanted to. You could travel anywhere in the world.”

“Are you making a promise?” asked Umri, half-afraid of the answer.

“I don’t make promises,” said the skink. “Not anymore.”

The captain brought the Reasonable Expectations to the shore, at a place the skink had indicated to Umri. “You’re well south of where you said you wanted to go.”

“Yes. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Well, it’s your right to do so, no question. I’ll be coming back downstream in a couple of weeks, signal me if you need a ride.” He hesitated a moment. “I won’t say I’m not worried. There’s nothing around here for miles.”

“I’ll be fine, Captain, thank you.” She leapt onto the grass and turned to wave as the crewmen pulled back the gangplank and began pushing the boat back out into the channel.

“Make sure they go,” said the skink.

“You’re suspicious. Which way?”

“Directly west. About a mile and a half.” The skink scurried down her neck and arm to her outstretched hand and made a quick circle, stopping suddenly and pointing with its nose. “That way.”

It was cool and shaded under the trees, and quiet except for an occasional birdsong and the shushing of wind in the leaves. Both Umri and the skink were silent for some time, until she stopped and set down her bag. “What?” asked the skink, behind her ear again.

“I’m cold.” She shivered, and brushed gnats away from her arms.

“If I had enough sacrifices,” began the skink.

She untied her bag and pulled out a shawl. “Considering the shape you’re in, that would be a lot of sacrifices. And I’m not much of a hunter.”

“There will be fish in the lake.”

“And the Nalendar won’t be offended?” Umri settled the shawl around her shoulders and retied the bag.

“It’s not the Nalendar anymore!” The skink was indignant.

“But it might have its own god by now.”

“True,” said the skink. “Perhaps you should pray to me as we go. It will be better than nothing.”

“I can pray as hard as I like and it won’t…” From up ahead, faintly, had come the sound of horses.

“Damn!” piped the skink.

Umri waited, but it said nothing further. “I got off a perfectly nice boat in the middle of nowhere—”

“Hush, woman!” the skink squeaked. “Perhaps it’s only travelers passing through. Wait here and I’ll go ahead and see.” It skittered down her arm and jumped off and was lost under dead leaves.

Umri sighed, and moved to the nearest tree that looked like it wouldn’t be completely uncomfortable to lean against. Above the trees the sky was bright, but the breeze had a chill edge that made her pull her shawl closer around her.

She was, she admitted to herself, just a bit frightened. She was miles from anyone or anything she knew, alone except for a tiny, has-been god who could definitely not be trusted. But if a few days of diving would bring her a bagful of gold, or two or three… she thought of what she would do with so much money. A boat perhaps, something like the Reasonable Expectations. She thought of traveling up and down the Nalendar, carrying cargo, taking passengers, beholden to no one but herself. In her imagination the boat was painted blue and white, like the Reasonable Expectations was. She wondered just who owned it, and how much it would cost.

Leaves rustled. The skink coming back? No, it was too loud. She sat as still as she could manage, hardly daring to breathe, hoping that whoever it was would pass her by. The rustling came closer.

“Ah, here we are,” said a sickeningly familiar voice, and then its owner came around the tree and stood in front of where Umri sat, his blue-and-red coat brilliant even in the shade—Rilhat Imk.

Imk had his men—there were three with him—tie her to the wheel of a wagon parked on the shore of the lake. In front of her, near the trees, was a small tent, and not far off a raft sat half in and half out of the water. To the south bullrushes lined the bank, and beyond them pink and purple water lilies. To the west, the main body of the lake was half a mile or more across, and backed by low, tree-covered hills.

“You followed me,” Imk said. He managed to sound both accusing and self-satisfied.

“I didn’t follow you.” She pulled against the ropes. She was sitting on the ground, her back to the wheel. “And this is really uncomfortable.”

Imk gestured to one of the slaves, a tall, slim man, dark-skinned and gray-eyed, who Umri was sure was from the Silver Isles. He disappeared into the tent, and Imk turned his attention back to Umri. “Then why are you here?”

“You said you were going south, so I went north. If I had any idea you would be here, I would never have…”

“You don’t seriously expect me to believe that.” He bared his teeth in what she supposed was meant to be a grin. “It’s inconceivable that you ended up here by accident. You followed me south, and you followed me when I turned north, because you know as well as I do we have business to settle. I knew that it was impossible that you could turn me down.” He showed even more teeth.

She tilted her head slightly, sure she hadn’t heard him correctly. “I have turned you down. And I’ll turn you down again, as many times as you like.”

He narrowed his eyes slightly, but his grin remained fixed. He turned his head and called sharply, and then strode toward the lake, two of his men following. The third came out of the tent and approached Umri, a wide cushion in his hands, blue embroidered with red and gold.

“My name is Nalemeindundawyumrisayedynaremend,” she said in her native language.

He stopped. “Ah. My sister is married to your father’s cousin’s foster son.”

Hope leapt up. “Let me go.”

The slave frowned and glanced at Imk and the other two, now conferring by the water. “There is treasure in the lake. Rilhat Imk has promised us our freedom and a share of the money. I am afraid if I let you go, he would find someone else to do his diving.”

“How do you know he’ll do what he says?”

“I have no reason to believe he won’t,” the man said, and set the cushion down beside her, kneeling as he did. “He seems decent enough.”

She yanked the bonds that held her to the wagon. “Decent men don’t tie women up!”

He made a doubtful gesture. “If you hadn’t tried to run away, there would have been no need.” This left Umri speechless. “If this is some sort of game you’re playing, I warn you not to take it too far. He could change his mind and fall in love with some other girl.” He shoved the cushion closer to her, and rose and walked down to the lakeside and stood with the others.

Umri took two or three deep breaths, and then closed her eyes. There would be some way out of this. She would find it. She felt her bonds with her fingers, trying to reach the knots, to see if she might be able to work them loose, all the time listening to the quiet lap of the water and the murmur of the men. When their voices changed, she opened her eyes.

Imk stood alone on the shore, watching as the three slaves pushed the raft into the lake. She watched them for a few moments, and then returned her attention to the ropes, but was brought up short by a skittering sound in a pile of leaves near her left foot. She froze. The leaves shifted just slightly, and she raised her foot and brought it down hard on the pile.

The skink shot out into the open. “What are you doing?”

“You bastard!” She stomped again.

The skink jumped aside, just in time. “If I hadn’t told him where you were, you’d have left! You’d have gone straight back to the river and flagged down the next boat going upstream.”

She lifted her foot again, pausing an instant to consider whether or not she could reach the skink where it was. “Yes, I would have.” She brought her foot down. It scuttled off to the side, where she could still see its brilliant blue tail, but couldn’t reach it. “You lied.”

“No!” piped the skink. “You never asked me what my association with Rilhat Imk might be!”

“What is your association with Rilhat Imk?” She stretched her leg out to a more comfortable angle, shifted her weight, and looked at the cushion still sitting beside her. She had no way to move it underneath her.

“Imk is the last male descendant of the kings of Gnarr, though how he discovered it I have no idea. Blind luck most likely! He’s just the sort of fool who thinks he’s secretly royal. There have been dozens of them over the years.” It ventured closer, but not anywhere within reach of her foot. “Now you see why I want that hand.”

“So he can be king of Gnarr?” The thought was appalling.

“One of the problems with inherited offices,” said the skink, “is that you’ve got to take whichever offspring you get. If you’re powerful enough, and vigilant, you can engineer things so they generally turn out well, but it’s still a gamble.”

“So he’s the king you’re stuck with. And he wants me, and you’re giving him what he wants.”

“No!” Its squeak was so loud that Umri looked quickly over to the lake to see if Imk had noticed. The raft was now in the middle of the lake, and only two men were on it. Imk stood on the shore, looking toward them. “I never intended to make him king. I meant to arrive here before him and have you dive for the hand and whatever gold you wanted. But the boat took too long!”

“The river…” Umri began.

“I have no power against her, not anymore.”

“Surely Imk would sacrifice to you if you asked him.”

“The bastard is always sacrificing to me,” the skink said. “Goats, horses, slaves. He’s poured blood out by the gallon, but it’s all got conditions and I can’t touch a drop of it!”

“Why not?”

“Look at me!” The skink nearly leapt straight into the air. “Do you know how I got this way? By making promises to that vacuous nitwit’s ancestors, that’s how!”

“You got this way by—” A cry interrupted her, and she turned to look at the lake again. All three slaves were on the raft, waving. “They found something.”

“Of course they found something. They could hardly help finding something.”

She turned back to the skink. “Get me out of here!”

“I can’t.” Umri frowned. “Well, I can’t!” it insisted. “I can’t chew through your ropes, and I—” Suddenly it scurried under a leaf.

Imk’s voice startled Umri. “Talking to yourself?”

“I’m just… praying.”

Imk laughed, his pale, round face unpleasant. “Prayers are cheap. It’s blood the gods want.”

“Not just blood,” Umri said, remembering the skink’s words.

“Blood,” Imk repeated. “No god can resist it.” By sheer force of will, Umri didn’t look at the leaf she suspected the skink was hiding under. She said nothing, only looked away, and after a few moments Imk left.

“Skink,” she whispered, and it scurried out from under the leaf and up onto her leg.

“He dares!” it fumed in tiny rage. “I, Sursurra, who raised his thrice-misbegotten progenitors from the slime to the rulership of a great kingdom! I cannot resist his ridiculous bribes! I am to be so easily commanded!”

“Listen to yourself!” Umri admonished.

“I have done very little else for the past seven hundred years!”

“If I crossed my legs I would squish you into nothing,” she said.

“Get that hand! And destroy it!” squeaked the skink. “Do whatever you have to!”

“And in return?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

She looked up. Imk was returning, something in his hand, shining and wet. A tickle on her arm and neck—the skink returning to its favorite hiding place. She considered shaking her head to dislodge it, but didn’t.

Imk knelt and laid his burden across her shins. It was a band of finely worked gold links and red and yellow jewels, as wide as her palm and nearly a yard long. It glittered in the sun, stones catching the light, drops of water throwing tiny rainbows. “This is not a hundredth part of the treasure in the lake. It once belonged to the kings of Gnarr.”

“Gnarr?” She made her face as innocent as she could.

“It was a great kingdom!” Imk spread his arms. “Rich and powerful. The center of culture and civilization on the Nalendar! And seven hundred years ago, the prince of Gnarr set off down the river to visit Kalub, but the boat sank, and there have been no kings of Gnarr since then.”

“How interesting,” said Umri.

Imk gave his toothy grin again. “I have always known that I was different from most people. My ancestors must have been brave warriors, bold thinkers!” He put his hand on his chest. “So when I discovered that I was the heir to the throne of Gnarr, I was hardly surprised.”

“Ah!” said Umri, afraid to say more.

“I learned the location of this treasure from the same source,” he said, somewhat ponderously. “Along with what I would need to do to make myself king of Gnarr. So you see, you would be mistress to royalty.”

She knew she should say something like, Well, now that you put it that way, or anything that would make him untie her so she’d have some chance to get away. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. “What source was that?” She shifted her shoulders, trying to find a more comfortable position against the wagon wheel.

“I am”—he lifted a finger to his lips—“sworn to silence on the matter, but I will say that I and my family have always been favored by certain gods.”

“And whoever is ruling Gnarr now, they’ll just give it up to you?”

“The god Sursurra is obligated to make me king, once I perform a certain ceremony.”

“And this Sursurra is willing to help you?”

He shrugged, and brushed a leaf off the shoulder of the red-and-blue coat. “He has no choice. Besides, I’ve spent a great deal sacrificing to him. No doubt I’ll have to spend more, but it will be well worth it.” He leered, apparently under the misapprehension that he was smiling pleasantly. “My men are back onshore, and I’m going out on the lake with them now.” He pushed himself to his feet.

“Can I come too?” she asked, as wide-eyed as she could manage.

Umri sat in the center of the raft, surrounded by gold. Cups, armlets, coins, pins, rings set with emeralds and sapphires. The sun, almost directly overhead, made the water and the gold so bright she had to squint to save her vision. Rilhat Imk sat beside her.

On the edge of the raft sat two of the slaves—the tall one from the Silver Isles with his feet hanging in the water and another man, not quite so tall, long black hair tied back, who had said nothing all afternoon.

The third broke the surface near them, and took a long breath. “There’s a box,” he said. His accent was odd, Umri hadn’t been able to place it. “About so large.” Briefly he measured off with his hands something a foot and a half long, perhaps eight inches wide.

“That’s it!” said Imk, and he started to his knees. Coins spilled from his lap, and a knife, its blade eight inches long, its haft gold and lapis.

“What’s in the box?” asked Umri with as much innocence as she could muster, her attention on the knife.

“A family heirloom,” Imk said, his nostrils flaring, the corners of his mouth showing early signs of a grin.

“There’s a big fish,” the slave said, still in the water. “A very big fish.”

“Fish…” Imk made a dismissive gesture.

“A lot of teeth,” said the slave, his hands on the edge of the raft. He hoisted himself up, tipping the raft forward. “Very sharp.”

Imk frowned. “It’s just a fish.”

By now the slave was on his knees, water running off his body. He said nothing.

“I’ll go,” said Umri’s unhelpful almost-cousin.

The recently returned slave, still kneeling and dripping on the end of the bobbing raft, looked up at him. “Big fish,” he said.

Umri’s cousin shrugged. “I have a knife.” Despite the bright sunlight Umri shivered.

“Go,” said Imk, and the slave dived, knife in hand.

They waited, Imk still half-sitting. The man who had refused to go still knelt motionless and silent, staring somewhere in front of himself. Only the occasional bird’s cry and the sound of the water broke the silence.

After five minutes Imk moved cautiously to the edge and peered over. The long-haired man rose and moved aside for him, but the other stayed where he was. For a moment Umri wondered what would happen if she shoved Imk over the edge, but she didn’t trust the other two men.

After seven minutes she suspected her cousin would not return. She looked at the man who had refused to go, and saw him still expressionless. “Nalendar,” she said. He looked at her, one sharp glance, and then away again.

“What’s that?” cried the long-haired slave. Umri crawled to the edge to look. Something big rolled under the surface, rising, and then it broke the water, broad and scaled and greenish, and subsided again. The raft rocked madly in its wake. The long-haired slave stumbled a moment and then caught his balance, and Imk gripped the edge of the raft tighter, his pale knuckles whiter than normal.

“A tree maybe?” he suggested inanely.

“I’m leaving,” said the one who had refused to go, and he turned and went over the edge in one fluid motion and swam for shore.

Still half-leaning over the side, Imk looked at the remaining slave. “I want that box.” The slave looked at him without answering. Umri wondered if Imk could swim. “You can have their shares, too. I don’t care about the gold.” The slave frowned slightly, dubious. Umri wasn’t sure what she hoped for—that the man would dive and leave her alone with Imk, or that he would refuse and send them back to shore. “You’ve seen how much there is,” Imk continued. “Think of what… who you could buy with that.” An unreadable expression flashed across the slave’s face and then was gone.

“Though maybe you should pray to the Nalendar before you dive,” suggested Umri into the silence that followed. She could think of no more explicit warning that would not arouse Imk’s suspicions. The skink flexed, tickling her ear. “Or Sursurra.”

Imk waved his hand, nonchalant now that the raft had stilled. “I am favored by the Nalendar, and Sursurra assists me as a matter of course.” The slave’s frown cleared and it occurred to Umri that he was almost certainly the least intelligent of the three. “Likely the one was ill-fated,” Imk continued. “The other was certainly a coward.”

“Yes.” The long-haired slave nodded, and in a single swift step he was at the edge, and then over and into the water.

Two minutes later he broke the surface and stroked one-handed for the raft. “Do you have it?” called Imk, nearly tipping over the edge in his eagerness.

“I have it,” said the slave, putting a hand on the raft and heaving the box up beside Imk. It was a plain, rectangular thing, black where the mud was rubbed off. Imk seized it and began to yank fruitlessly at the lid.

The slave put his hands on the edge of the raft. “I didn’t see—” He cried out and was suddenly gone, down into the water.

Imk still held the box, but now was looking with puzzlement at the spot where the slave had disappeared. “What—”

Umri kicked Imk, hard. He caught his balance before he went over the side, dropped the box but caught it just as it hit the edge of the raft. The lid flew open and the hand tumbled out, black stone veined with white and gray, mirror-smooth, jagged at the wrist.

Imk cried out and grabbed, and, triumphant, drew the hand out of the water. His cry turned to a laugh and then a scream as a long, needle-toothed snout rocketed out of the water and snapped on the stone hand, and Imk’s own hand, wrist, and forearm.

The skink was squeaking something high and unintelligible, still in its place behind her ear. Umri grabbed the gold and lapis knife, threw herself forward and stabbed at the fish, but it slid to one side and the blade glanced off diamond-shaped scales as hard as bone. The creature was nearly nine feet long and almost cylindrical, a stone column of a fish. Imk had fallen back, screaming, and she stabbed again and then a third time, sinking the now-battered blade into the thing’s eye. It convulsed, yanking the knife downwards out of her hand and lifting the back end of the raft up off the water, sending a cascade of gold clattering and splashing over the edge.

The end of the raft slapped down, and the whole thing rocked. By some miracle Imk had not fallen in, but below his elbow was a red mess pumping blood into the water. Where the fish had been was now only a chaos of waves and foam.

She crawled over to where Imk lay and stripped off her headscarf and tied it around his arm, pulling it tight to stop the bleeding. He stirred, and said something indistinct.

She sat back on her heels and considered their situation. The pole they had used to control the raft was gone. She could easily swim to shore, but she would have to leave Imk behind. She considered doing that, and then walking to the river and waiting for the next boat, whichever way it was going. Imk would likely die anyway.

Her heart rate began to settle and it occurred to her to wonder what the skink was saying. “Take a deep breath,” she said, “and then speak more slowly.”

“The hand!”

“Still be king,” said Imk faintly.

She frowned. “The hand is in that fish’s stomach, along with…” She stopped. Imk opened his eyes and began to speak, haltingly, unintelligibly.

“The oath!” shrilled the skink. “Stop him! Drown him! Get that hand!”

Umri was incredulous. “He can’t possibly still be holding on to it.”

“There’s only one way to be sure. Dive! Cut the fish open!”

“Did you see what it did to that knife?”

“Then kill Imk!”

She’d been prepared to kill him when he threatened her, but now that he was helpless… “No!”

It bit her on the ear, a tiny stinging pain, and she fished it out from her hair and held it dangling by its tail. “You’ll regret it if he finishes!” it squeaked.

“How did Imk find out who he was?” she asked.

“Who cares? Right now…”

“And who besides you knows where this treasure is?”

The skink was suddenly limp in her grasp. “She would never…”

The raft rocked, and the fish rose up beside them. Its green-gray scales shone wetly, and its long snout was wide open, showing all of its double row of long, sharp teeth. The gold-and-blue knife protruded from its eye, and from its mouth came a sound like stones grinding against each other.

“You laugh!” cried the skink.

“I am amused,” the fish said. It settled its snout on the side of the raft. “When I am amused, I give gifts for nothing more than the asking. Nalemeindundawyumrisayedynaremend, I have meddled in your affairs without consulting you, and you have more than gratified my expectations. What would you have of me?”

“The hand!” piped the skink.

She thought for a brief moment. “Gracious and generous river, I would like a pole to steer this raft with.”

“Not the treasure?”

“I can get that myself, O Beautiful Nalendar,” Umri said.

“That you can,” grated the river. “The pole is now beside the raft. And you, little skink,” said the goddess.

“I am Sursurra! There was a time when you spoke to me with more respect!”

The grinding laughter sounded again. “Ask! If I am so disposed, I will grant your request.” In the silence that followed, Imk began to mutter again.

The skink wriggled. “Oh, if I could only curse you! The hand!”

“Ask me very nicely,” said the fish. The skink hesitated. “Perhaps I will ask Rilhat Imk what he wants.”

“You wouldn’t!” cried the skink. The fish said nothing and Imk’s voice gained strength. “Will you please destroy the hand,” said the skink, nearly inaudibly.

“Louder,” grated the fish.

“Will you please destroy the hand!”

“You’ll never rule Gnarr again.”

“I beg you! That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the fish, and opened its jaws even farther, and out rolled the stone hand. It hit the raft and with a loud crack that echoed across the lake it shattered into countless tiny, jagged pieces. “I’d scatter those around, if I were you,” said the goddess when the sound had died away. “Just in case.” And with that, the fish sank into the lake.

Umri retrieved the pole, and examined Imk. The bleeding had stopped, and he breathed evenly, seemingly asleep. “I think he’ll live,” she said.

“I’m not speaking to you,” said the skink from the middle of the raft. Umri said nothing. “You might have some sympathy for what I’ve been through. Who would have thought the river would be so petty! So vindictive!”

“Petty!” She lowered the pole into the water gingerly, and leaned her weight against it, propelling them slowly forward. “Haven’t you learned anything, even after seven hundred years?”

“A great deal!” squeaked the skink, indignant.

“I don’t think you’ve learned very much at all.” She gave another shove.

“Have you no understanding? No respect?”

Umri lifted the pole and put it down closer. She looked toward the shore and saw the surviving slave, the one who had refused to dive, watching them. She waved, and he waved back.

“I am going to spend the next few weeks diving for gold,” she said. “And then I think I’ll buy Reasonable Expectations, if it’s for sale.”

“And what about me?” asked the skink.

“Do whatever you like,” she said, with a shove against the pole. “Maybe if you’re nice to me I’ll pray to you. You could save up. Maybe even get big enough to make a living down by the docks.”

“Is that a promise?”

Umri laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

The Snake’s Wife

I was out in the woods when the king of Therete and his son came to ask for my sister.

My hunting had been interrupted by a rainshower, and I sat under a tree on the hillside waiting for it to end when I heard horsemen on the road below. I rose, brushing away wet leaves, and quietly made my way forward so I could see. There were nearly a hundred of them, horses in brightly colored trappings, yellow and green and red, riders in gold-colored armor hunched over against the rain. I watched until they disappeared around the curve of the hill and then stood wondering whether I should stay out, and out of the way of whatever would happen when those horsemen reached the gates of the town, or whether I was curious enough to go home and see what they wanted.

A fresh spate of raindrops showered down and I looked up. Draped on a branch overhead lay a snake, brown- and gold-scaled, its coiled body as broad as my arm. It stared at me unblinking, head raised, tongue flickering. “Hail, Benefactor, generous and blessed,” I murmured, because you never know with snakes. And this one shouldn’t have been out in the cold rain.

“Son of Ysas,” hissed the snake, confirming my suspicions. “Start for home.”

“Why, Generous One?” My father had certainly known those horsemen were on the way. If he had wanted me, he would have forbidden me to go out.

“Your questions will be answered,” said the snake—the god Vosei. “Start for home.”

I found my father in his hall—a long, timbered building floored with packed dirt, the carved beams of its bow-shaped ceiling stained with soot. The benches were empty for now, only a few torches lit, the fire all but embers. My father stood at the far end, my brothers before him. “Yrau!” he called, catching sight of me. He was dressed for hunting, in dark wool and leather, his sword at his side. “Come here, boy, you may as well hear this too.” He raised a hand to wave me over. On his wrist was a cloth that even in the low firelight showed bloodstains—he had spoken with the god, and recently. “Sons. Iardui.” That was my eldest brother. “I have had words with the god. The king of Therete has come to ask for your sister to be his son’s wife.”

I frowned, but it was Iardui who spoke. “He thinks to put his son over the Atevae, and so over the Vos Inei.”

“He wants control of the timber trade,” said Yrani, my other brother. We had plenty of timber, and Therete had very little. Much of what they used they bought from us.

“No,” answered my father. “Better.” He sat on the bench behind him. My brothers and I knew better than to sit ourselves. “He wants to end the curse on his line. And Artau Ehat, the Lord of the Sky and protector of Therete, has said to the king of Therete—or to his priests, since because of the curse the king himself isn’t able to enter the god’s presence—that the curse will be ended when the prince Atehatsqe marries your sister. And,” he continued into our perplexed silence, “if he can get a better price for timber, so much the better.”

I thought of the god speaking to me on the hillside. “The Generous One set that curse on Therete’s line,” I said, meaning the god Vosei. My father looked at me directly for the first time since I had come in, and smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. I was afraid—I knew his temper.

“Indeed. If we don’t allow it to be removed, that line will fail. And the Lord of the Sky will have spoken untruth.” Words expressed a god’s will, they were the focus of the god’s power. To speak an untruth, even unwittingly, would bleed that power fruitlessly away.

I shivered, wishing I’d stopped to change into drier clothes. “We won’t refuse,” I said. We couldn’t, not and survive the refusal for long.

“Where’s the untruth?” asked Iardui, his voice doubtful. “If I say I will wear women’s clothes when water runs uphill, I haven’t said that water will run uphill.”

My father frowned, displeased. “Don’t be stupid, boy.” I looked down, not wanting to meet my father’s eyes if he should look my way.

“The Lord of the Sky has promised that the curse will be ended,” ventured Yrani. “And he has said that the curse will be ended when the prince marries our sister. If he never marries our sister…” He trailed off.

“But,” I said. Tentatively. I looked up.

My father was looking at me, his expression dangerously bland. “But?”

For a moment my voice failed me. “The Generous One will be gratified, and the Lord of the Sky injured, but what about us? How can we stand against Therete?” Those splendidly armed riders were only a fragment of Therete’s military strength. “Surely the marriage would only benefit us.”

“Benefit us, is it?” asked my father. I didn’t answer—I would only make him angry if I did. “This is a dispute between Artau Ehat and Vosei. The Generous One has no intention of losing. And Vosei has said that if we refuse to allow the marriage my own son will sit enthroned in Therete.”

“Alive?” asked Iardui after a moment’s silence. A god’s word was kept, unarguably, but they were notoriously literal about their promises.

“Alive,” answered my father. “Does that suit you?”

“Yes.”

“Then take your seats,” said my father. We sat on benches beside his, and Iardui called to the guards outside. They threw the doors open and cousins and hangers-on who had been waiting outside crowded in. Slaves lit torches and the cousins took their seats amid noisy gossip.

I should have known what my father was planning. He was an ambitious man, and had turned his tribal headship into a position of wider influence through marriage, force of arms, and money from the timber trade. Foreign merchants called him king, which he wasn’t, but he didn’t object. It shouldn’t have surprised me, what he was willing to risk for more power.

Likely there was nothing I could have done, even had I known. As it was I sat and watched the king of Therete come into the hall.

He was tall, dark-skinned and black-haired, wearing black and green and brilliant blue under a red cloak. Gold hung on his neck and wrists. He showed no outward sign of the curse. Prince Atehatsqe had come with him, a young man about my age, strongly resembling his father except that in him the curse was visible—along his neck and up his cheek scales glittered emerald in the firelight.

They entered with a dozen slaves carrying six carved wooden chests, and they didn’t look to the right or the left as they came forward and bowed. “My brother,” the king began in our language, heavily accented. “Ysas, king of Vos Inei, I greet you.”

“My brother,” said my father, smiling again that smile that went no farther than his mouth. “I greet you.”

The king of Therete’s face was impassive. “My son and heir, the prince Atehatsqe, will have many wives but only one son. The mother of this son must of course be the best, the most beautiful, most suitable woman. We have heard that the daughter of Ysas is famed for her beauty and her sweetness.”

“You haven’t come here out of any respect for me,” said my father, still smiling, “nor because my daughter is beautiful, but because you intend your son to get a child on her that is free of the curse.”

The king said nothing. There was a tightness to his jaw that I didn’t like.

“What you say about the curse is true,” said the prince into the tense silence. “It doesn’t change the fact of our respect, or your daughter’s beauty.”

My father laughed. “How many wives do you have, prince of Therete?”

“None.”

“And your father?”

“Twenty-seven.”

My father raised an eyebrow.

“She would be my queen,” said the prince. “I swear it.”

“And what profit for me?” asked my father.

The king of Therete made the smallest of gestures. The slaves came forward and set the chests before us, and threw the lids open. There in the torchlight gleamed gold and silver, rubies and pearls, sapphires and diamonds. “The betrothal gift,” said the king. “For the wedding I am prepared to offer a great deal more.”

“A reduction of the salt tariff?”

“Unquestionably.” The king’s jaw relaxed just the smallest bit. He thought, perhaps, that he had found the source of my father’s truculence.

My father gestured to a slave. “Send the girl,” he said. We didn’t wait long—my sister was ready, had been for some time, most likely. She came in a side door, my mother behind her.

She was beautiful. Skin the color of honey, hair like polished wood. She wore a green dress, embroidered with darker green, and gold had been braided into her hair. Her face was flushed—she, or more likely my mother, had guessed what brought the king here. Prince Atehatsqe smiled when he saw her. My breath grew tight, and I wanted to stand and run, be out in the trees and the rain, anywhere but the hall. I must have realized what my father was planning but not been willing to believe it.

“Girl,” said my father, “the prince of Therete wants to marry you.”

She flushed even deeper, which I hadn’t thought possible, and knelt. “My father, I will obey you in all things.”

“Will you, then?”

“Yes, Father.”

He stood, and drew his sword and swung the edge with all his strength into her neck. Blood spattered his legs, and my sister fell dead on the floor. I was frozen for an instant, unable to think or feel, and then I looked at my mother. She was immobile, as though carved from wood. She didn’t blink or breathe.

“The feud between Artau Ehat and Vosei is ancient,” my father said into a silence so deep that his words seemed muffled and absorbed. “The god Vosei has been our protector and benefactor ever since we have existed. If Vosei doesn’t see fit to remove the curse, we will have no part in lifting it. Take your worthless gifts and go.”

The king made as if to step forward, but checked himself. “It was an honorable offer,” the prince said.

“Your offer was refused,” said my father.

The king gestured again to the slaves, who closed the chests and hefted them, and the whole party turned and walked out of the hall.

When they had gone, my father sat again, and as though released from a spell those seated along the sides of the hall rose and began talking and shouting. I looked over to my mother, but she was gone.

My father leaned close so that we could hear him. “He would have taken her by force otherwise. Now our future is assured.”

It was. That same day my mother packed her belongings and returned to her tribe. We three sons stayed. No matter what he had done, our place was with our father.

Eight weeks later, Therete marched an army into our territory. It took three days just for their archers to arrive, there were so many. The cavalry took less time, but with them were engineers who had availed themselves of the plentiful timber, building frameworks for engines we had heard of but never seen.

They had loudly announced that their argument was with Ysas, and not with the tribes of Vos Inei. A great number of families simply walked out of the town at Therete’s invitation. My mother’s tribe refused to come fight for us, as did many others. No doubt their headmen imagined themselves taking my father’s place once Therete left.

By the time they breached the wall and set fire to my father’s house both my brothers were dead, and when the house was smoking ashes both I and my father were brought bound before the king and the prince. We weren’t the only captives. Four other men were already there—Theretan priests, whom the king had relied on to bring him the god’s words. They had clearly lied. The king killed them with his own sword, and then turned to my father. “We asked you for your daughter.” Soldiers stepped forward, bearing the same chests we had seen before. “Here is the payment.”

“I have no daughter,” said my father, defiant.

“You will,” said the king, and then soldiers threw me to the ground and stripped me. It took eight of them to hold me down, and a ninth to wield the knife, and when they were done, so I am told, they buried my father alive with the treasure he had refused.

I remember very little of the first few days of the trip to Therete except for a vague hope that I might bleed to death, and pain at every misstep of the slaves who carried the litter I rode in. There were sometimes muffled voices, and sometimes water was poured down my throat. I wasn’t hungry, or thirsty, or anything but waiting to die.

Eventually a doctor came—a tall woman dressed like the soldiers, in trousers and a long tunic—and examined me. “Healing quickly and cleanly,” she said. “Some god looking out for you.” She looked at me oddly as she said it. Then she made me get up and walk back and forth.

I had known there were plains to the south, but I had never imagined land like this. In one direction were distant hills, but otherwise all around was grass. Flat, not the least trace of even a hillock. The only relief from the plain was the camp—horses, soldiers, brightly colored tents—and the road. The sky stretched blue and endless overhead.

The doctor led me out into the waist-high grass, where we startled a cloud of small yellow birds that flew squawking into the sky and then settled again as we passed. Once we were a decent distance away from the camp she showed me how to urinate squatting so that I didn’t foul myself, and explained about the nail that was supposed to keep my urethra from sealing shut while I healed.

My thoughts must have reached my face, because she told me, with some acerbity, that I was very lucky.

Four nights later I was summoned to the prince’s tent, a splendid affair of silk brocade, gold and blue. Inside was bright with lamps, and a patterned carpet covered the ground. Atehatsqe sat in a carved wooden chair next to a table of wood and ivory. The green snakeskin along his neck and face seemed almost an extension of the embroidered silk he wore. I discovered later that beneath his neck it became long, banded belly scales, which reached to just below his rib cage.

“My wife,” Atehatsqe said. I did speak some Theretan, but he spoke in my own language. “Yrej, is it?” It wasn’t, but no Theretan had pronounced my name correctly so far. “You should kneel, and put your forehead on the ground.” I didn’t move. “The one single thing one can do to ensure right action is one’s duty. If one fulfills one’s duty, one can never do wrong. And besides,” he added, not unkindly, “you have very little choice. Have you eaten?”

I took a breath. “No.” Another breath. “My lord.” I was cold under the silk dress I was wearing. It was a garish red and yellow, and so loose and thin that I felt naked.

Atehatsqe had the grace not to smile. “Sit,” he said, and I did, in a cushioned chair across from him. Food appeared, meat braised with beer and dried fruit, and more beer in cups of fluted gold. “I haven’t meant to neglect you, my wife,” he said as he ate, and I wet my mouth with the beer and barely tasted the meat. “When I questioned the doctor, he said you were recovering satisfactorily but weren’t yet well enough to visit.”

He. It should have been obvious.

“I’m sorry for the lack of appropriate servants,” Atehatsqe continued. “I didn’t know what the king planned. By the time I realized it was too late to prepare.” He took a drink of his beer. “Or dissuade him. Though of course,” he said, his expression bland, “His Most Royal Majesty’s action was, as always, entirely right and proper.”

“Of course.” I ventured another bite of meat. It stuck in my throat. “Your Highness would just have had me killed.”

“No. When we came into the hall you had a look on your face like you were in a nightmare you couldn’t wake from.” He looked at me searchingly, oddly earnest.

He seemed to want some answer. “I thought he would just refuse you, and then you would take what you wanted by force.”

“Dire enough.” He set his cup down with enough force to splash beer onto the table. “What was he thinking? Surely he didn’t imagine the tribes would still support him after that?”

“I suppose he thought his control over them was complete enough.” The next part was out of my mouth before I could think of what I was saying. “Vosei had said that if he refused the marriage, one of his sons would sit on the throne of Therete.”

“That one deceives,” Atehatsqe said. It was a moment before I realized that he referred to Vosei. “When the Lord of the Sky speaks, the meaning is plain.”

“He said the curse would be ended when you married my sister.”

“When I married your father’s daughter.” He slid another piece of meat onto his plate. “What the king of Therete says, is: You are my wife. When I am king, may the day be long in the future, you will be queen.”

“You won’t,” I said when I had managed to draw breath again. “You can’t.” I shook my head. “It’s ridiculous.” It couldn’t be real, but everything around me was sharp-edged and solid: the chair I was sitting on, the prince sitting across the table from me, his armor on a stand behind him, the golden cuirass and helmet I had seen so often from the walls of my home. His sword and leaf-bladed spear.

That earnest, even vulnerable look returned to Atehatsqe’s face. “Eat, Yrej. Please. I want things to be pleasant between us.”

“Pleasant.” I couldn’t believe I had heard him correctly. “How is this supposed to end the curse? I can hardly have your child.”

He frowned. “As I told you before, one’s duty is sure, even if nothing else in the world is.” His frown cleared. “Either this is part of Artej Ehat’s plan, or he will find a way to make it so. He made promises to my ancestors, and to me, and he will keep those promises.”

I was not an innocent. I knew that some men preferred the embraces of other men. It had never appealed to me, and I had never been even remotely curious about how they went about things. Now even had my tastes run that way I couldn’t have enjoyed it. Atehatsqe, though, was direct and confident, and when he had spent himself between my thighs he bade me sleep beside him. When morning came I was escorted back to the litter and rode the whole day close and hot inside.

Four generations before I was born, the then-king of Therete had gone hunting in the northern part of his kingdom and strayed over the boundary into Vos Inei territory. This would have gone unremarked except for the fact that he and his party stopped outside a holy cave.

There was a spring, as there often is, and the king was thirsty. He dismounted and strode to where the water trickled down the rock to a pool and reached out, but was stopped by one of his companions, who had seen a snake nearby.

The king was still young, and perhaps hadn’t been king long enough to learn to check his impulses. He ruled the richest, most powerful nation he knew of, and the Lord of the Sky had promised that as long as he upheld the contracts between the god and the people of Therete, no snake would ever bite him. “I am not afraid of snakes,” he said.

“No one need fear snakes who treats them with respect,” said the snake, slithering into the open.

“Artej Ehat drove you out of Therete,” the king said. “The savages here may be fool enough to worship you, but I owe you nothing.”

“Nor I you,” said the snake. “I do not give you permission to drink from my spring. And if you do in spite of me, you will regret it.”

The king drank, of course. And then he lowered his trousers and urinated into the water—an act that shocked his retainers as much as it angered the god Vosei. “Despoil your own temples!” commanded the snake. “Be the bane of your own people, and your own god!” The king only laughed, and rode back over the border. It wasn’t until much later that he realized the snake’s words had been a curse.

In every place the king spent the night on the way back to Therete, strange things happened. Herdsmen out before sunrise saw a monster lurking in the tall grass, a serpent thirty feet long and broad as a man. Dogs and birds and even small children disappeared. The king thought very little about it, if he even heard the reports—after all, people did imagine things, especially in the dark. Accidents happened, and what was one dog or baby here or there? He was more inconvenienced by the odd behavior of his servants, who had realized the truth long before it ever crossed his mind that there was a problem.

The god Artej Ehat had declared that no snakes would be permitted in the city of Therete. And when the king approached the gates, he found that no matter what he did he couldn’t enter. He was obliged to camp outside and send a messenger in to ask the god for help. Whether the servants at this point confessed what they knew, the story doesn’t say.

By way of an intermediary, Artej Ehat told the king that he was unable to lift the curse. Worse, it was heritable. But he could breed it out of the line. The mother of the next king would be carefully chosen, the growing princeling shaped in her womb by the god, and the next generation as carefully planned, until the corruption was gone entirely. Artej Ehat would take care that each king of Therete would have only one child, a son, and that one only one son and so on, until the house was free of the curse.

Although his son was human enough to return to the city and live in the palace, that first snake king never set foot in Therete again.

At supper the next night I swallowed the few remaining fragments of my pride and asked if I could ride, rather than be confined in the litter. Atehatsqe was dubious—royal ladies didn’t ride out in full view of soldiers, and there was the question of my recent injury. But the doctor had no objections, and the slaves found trousers and tunic for me, and a huge length of gauzy embroidered silk that would protect me from the profane gaze of the soldiers.

By now the hills I had first seen in the distance were only a memory. I saw the landscape unobscured in the morning and again in the evening, but during the day the horses raised a cloud of dust that surrounded us as we rode. Everyone wore cloths across their mouths and noses to keep from choking on it. “It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many of us,” Atehatsqe told me. Between the cloth and the helmet only his dark eyes were visible. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer the litter?”

I preferred to ride. The dust was thick, and the sun hot, but at least there was a breeze, and riding I didn’t feel so much like a helpless prisoner. “It’s not quite like Vos Inei,” Atehatsqe said.

“No.” Already trees and rain seemed like a dream. “It’s very different.”

Atehatsqe cocked an eyebrow, and I thought he might speak, but just then another armored rider came up beside us and the prince turned to him. “Varoshtej!”

“My prince,” said Varoshtej, his eyes brushing across me as though I didn’t exist, and then he lowered his head.

“Are you well?” asked Atehatsqe. “I’m sorry I haven’t had much time for the past few days.”

“Quite well,” said Varoshtej. “I have no complaints. I only wished to ask—”

“The king won’t hear of it,” said Atehatsqe. “He believes your father betrayed him.”

“There will be difficulty finding new priests,” said Varoshtej, his voice even. “Candidates will find themselves suddenly disqualified. Or leave the city before they can be invited.” Varoshtej, then, was the son of one of the priests who had died in the ruins of my father’s house.

“I know you’re trustworthy,” said Atehatsqe, “but the king…”

Varoshtej looked away, into the dust. “I know,” he said, when he turned his gaze back to Atehatsqe.

We rode on in silence.

“My prince,” said Varoshtej after a while.

“My friend,” said Atehatsqe, and put a hand on his shoulder, briefly.

“I know your reason for doing this, but…”

“Doing what?”

“This marriage.” The way Varoshtej said marriage made it clear that he was no more in favor of it than I was.

“Do you have any arguments I haven’t heard before?” It was clear that both of them thought I couldn’t understand Theretan. I hung my head under the folds of silk and listened.

“The arguments I’ve already given should be enough!”

Atehatsqe took this outburst with equanimity, which told me everything I wanted to know about their friendship.

“Did your father lie?”

“No!”

“What must I do, then?” Atehatsqe’s voice was still even, but tense. “Tell me what will keep me obedient to both my father and the Lord of the Sky?” Varoshtej didn’t answer. “The king said I would have the daughter of Ysas for my wife. The god says so as well.”

“That is not the daughter of Ysas. You’ve castrated him and put him in a dress, but that hasn’t changed what he is. Do you think he’ll submit to the insult?”

“Women do.”

“It’s different with women. Yrej is a man, with a man’s pride.” He was arguing my side, but I felt a sickening shame. “By all means provide for him,” Varoshtej continued. “Gratify your lust if you like, he’s good-looking enough. But don’t put this eunuch beside you on the throne. Don’t make the mistake your father made.”

“Varoshtej!” The prince’s voice was sharp and warning.

“My friendship is of no value to you if I withhold the truth. Your father the king has assumed he knows the god’s will, no matter what the priests have said. You’re doing the same. Wait for the new priest.”

“I am placing my trust in your father’s report of the god’s will. Do you advise me not to do that?” Varoshtej didn’t answer. “Are you jealous?”

“If the day ever comes that I am jealous, my prince, you will be past my help.” It might have been my tenuous grasp of the language, but it seemed to me that Varoshtej’s answer was no answer at all.

In all the weeks that we were on the road, it never rained. I didn’t even see a single cloud. Atehatsqe told me that it rained relentlessly in the winter, and never at any other time. Every house had a cistern, and the streets of every town and city drained into underground tanks. For the rest of the year this water would be carefully portioned out. The winter rains, due soon, were the gift of Artau Ehat; without them the whole plain would be utterly desert except for the narrow strips of land on either side of the country’s rivers.

Between towns all was perfectly flat and hazed with hot, sunlit dust, dotted with farms and orchards—the only trees I’d seen—and stone pillars that marked accesses to cisterns that ran the length of the road. The land stretched farther than I’d ever believed the earth could, and it was beautiful if only because of its extent. Evenings were cool, the skies vast and thick with stars, Atehatsqe was courteous and obliging, and I ate and slept in the prince’s tent.

The walls of Therete were twice as high as any I’d ever seen, even discounting the huge mound the city was built on. Under the sun the blocks of white stone shone bright enough to make me shade my eyes. In the center of the city rose two huge heaps of the same stone. The higher one, a stepped pyramid surmounted by a tower, was the home of the Lord of the Sky. The other—lower, but wider—was the palace.

The palace was larger than the town I’d come from. Once I dismounted it was a walk of some ten minutes to my quarters. I had a bath, a dressing room, a sitting room, and a bedroom. The walls were swathed in brocaded silk, every door and window was hung with black and purple curtains embroidered with gold. All the rooms but the bath looked out onto a balcony, where steps led down to a courtyard planted with trees and flowering vines and lined with tiled paths. Off to one side was a fountain with a wide base in which blue and orange fish swam. Brilliant green and yellow birds flitted from branch to branch. Other rooms around the court were for my servants, nearly a dozen of them, women in fluttering dresses and silk shawls.

They bathed me and shaved me and dressed me in a brown-and-blue dress sewn with tiny sparkling beads. Then they loaded me down with half my weight in gold necklaces and bracelets. One girl brushed antimony around my eyes and tried to put a mirror into my hands, but I refused, and was thereafter presented for the head servant’s inspection.

“My lady is beautiful,” said the girl who had combed my hair, in an encouraging voice.

The head servant cast a critical eye over me. Her name was Qes. “It will do for now. I’m sure we’ll hear soon that Prince Atehatsqe is too busy to visit you tonight, Princess. There’s no need to spend a great deal of time dressing.”

I closed my eyes. I was tired, and I was losing my grip on the tenuous settlement I had reached with my circumstances. It hadn’t been any sort of acceptance, I realized, as much as a flat refusal to think about my future.

“Oh, Princess, don’t worry. I’m sure the prince will visit you soon,” said one of the women.

I opened my eyes, hoping I could at least look as though I was in possession of myself. Qes looked at me shrewdly. “My lady will have supper,” she said, “and then she will rest.” Her tone brooked no opposition.

In the morning, after more bathing and dressing, I was shepherded to a bench in the courtyard, beside the fountain. Two servants sat at my feet with needles and thread and lengths of linen, and another stood behind me with a fan.

The two sitting on the ground embroidered and made pointless remarks about the beauty of the fish and the liveliness of the birds, who tried to steal sweets from a tray beside me. It was hot even in the shade with the woman fanning me, and I was sweating under the silk.

The conversation turned to gossip. To hear the servants talk, it would seem that the palace was occupied entirely by women, and every visit or conversation was a move in a game that everyone but me seemed to understand.

I didn’t know any of the people they referred to, didn’t understand the game they were playing, and didn’t care. A bird swooped down onto the bench next to me and eyed me, head cocked. “Pretty lady,” it squawked.

“Yes, she is,” said the servant fanning me. “Hello.”

“Hello,” said the bird. “Hello.”

The servant laughed, and took a sweet from the tray, held it out on her hand, still fanning with the other. The bird stepped onto her fingers and pecked at the treat.

The embroidering women chattered on, and it occurred to me that the gossip meant something to them, something they expected me to understand too, or wanted me to understand. But I didn’t care. I was bored and hot and I was stuck on this bench and nothing I did mattered.

“Pretty lady!” squawked the bird again, and the fanning servant looked at me and her smile disappeared.

“Princess! Are you all right?”

“No,” I said, more faintly than I intended.

The other two jumped to their feet, needlework forgotten. They led me indoors and removed a layer or two of jewelry and then laid me on the bed and fanned me vehemently.

The doctor came. He’d changed his military tunic and trousers for a long skirt of red fabric and no shirt. “It’s the heat,” he said in his high voice. I found it hard to believe I’d ever taken him for a woman. “It’s never this hot where she comes from.”

“Is it true that it always rains there?” asked one woman, still fanning.

“Not always,” said the doctor. “But a great deal more than here. Did she eat her breakfast?”

“I wasn’t hungry,” I said.

The doctor frowned. “You haven’t been hungry for more than a month. You need to eat. And you need to drink more than you think you do.”

“I need for everyone to stop pretending! And I need to go h—” Home was what I meant to say, but as I said it I realized that there was no home. Everyone in the town had seen what had happened to me and knew what I was now, and there was no place for me there anymore. I wasn’t sure my own mother would want me back.

“You need something to do.”

“Something to do.” I was dubious.

“Grown men who are castrated have their own particular problems,” the doctor said, level-voiced. The women seemed to have frozen solid, all looking in any direction besides mine. “Some take to their beds and stay there. Some stop eating and can’t sleep, can’t enjoy anything at all. It’s the blow to their pride, of course. But I don’t think that’s all it is.”

“That would be enough,” I said.

“You’re luckier than you could have been, given the circumstances,” said the doctor. I looked away. “Find something to do. Weave, embroider, spin. Paint. I hesitate to suggest dancing or singing, but if that interests you…”

“I’d rather take to my bed and stay there.” The doctor didn’t answer, I saw in the corner of my vision that he had crossed his arms. “What about riding? Or hunting?” Dice was probably out of the question. Sex with the servant girls certainly was.

“I’ll make you a deal.”

I looked up. “Deal?”

“You walk in your garden every morning. You eat. You pick one thing to do, it doesn’t matter which. Do that for one month, and I’ll talk to the prince about riding. Maybe hawking, but no promises there.” I didn’t answer. “It’s the best deal you’re going to get. I advise you to take it.”

I walked and I ate. I sat in the garden with a needle and fine thread and filled in a square with uneven stitches while the servants punctuated their gossip with compliments on my progress. I didn’t understand them—they called me princess when they themselves bathed and dressed me and knew just exactly what I was. There were moments that I doubted not only their sanity, but my own.

I missed not only the riding, but Atehatsqe’s company—I had grown used to the prince. When Atehatsqe finally did come to me, three days after I arrived at the palace, I rose and made my obeisance out of sheer gratitude, I was so relieved to see him. He sat beside me in the courtyard and ate the sweets, and threw some to the birds, laughing at their chorus of hello and pretty lady. He had heard about the doctor’s visit. “Have you been eating well?” I shrugged. “No, you won’t evade me so easily. Does the food not appeal to you?”

The food was too salty, and the sweets cloying. “The doctor says it’s the heat. My servants tell me it will be better when the rains come.”

Atehatsqe frowned. “I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you sooner,” he said, as though it followed from what I had just said. “We’ve been very busy.” He stood and walked a few paces away, and looked up at the sky.

“My servants say the rains should be here in a few weeks.” He said nothing. “You’re worried?”

He sighed and came back and sat beside me again. “We haven’t been able to find a priest,” he said. “The Lord of the Sky isn’t like other gods.”

“He seems fastidious.”

“Holy and pure,” Atehatsqe corrected. “Profanation offends him.”

It offended most other gods, but their standards weren’t so elevated. “So the priests make it their business to be pure at all times, so you don’t have to.”

“Before the curse the kings of Therete did as well,” Atehatsqe said. “Ordinary people have always gone to the priests. Or to the smaller gods.”

Four men had died that day, in the ruins of my father’s house. “Surely you had more than four priests?”

“There are agreements.” There always were, with gods. “The king of Therete speaks to the god directly, though substitutes are allowed. But that substitute must be a descendant of Therete’s first king.”

“So the priest has to be your cousin.” And that meant that the pool of candidates was limited. I began to see just how damaging the king’s actions had been. “The noble Varoshtej is a candidate.”

He looked at me sharply. “Do you speak Theretan, my love?”

I tried to ignore the endearment. “Do any of my servants speak my language?”

“Ah. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might.”

“We had traders, at home. I had investments. It was easier to keep track of them if I didn’t have to use a translator.”

“I knew that.” He took my hand. “About the investments, I mean. I should have realized. You still have them, by the way. No one is defaulting on money they owe you if I have anything to say about it.” I blinked twice, not sure what to say. “Varoshtej and I have been friends since we could crawl.”

“His concern for you is evident.” I kept my voice neutral.

“Things will be easier when the curse is ended.” It was the same tone my servants used for when the rains come. I looked up at the cloudless sky, and Atehatsqe put his arm around my waist. “Come, let’s go inside.”

In bed with him that night was the first moment since I’d arrived at the palace that I felt on familiar ground, secure in territory I knew.

Atehatsqe’s relationship with his cousin Varoshtej was unremarkable in Therete. It was something boys did, especially close friends. To continue into adulthood, after marriage, was disreputable but not scandalous. And of course Atehatsqe could largely do as he pleased.

But Varoshtej couldn’t. His father was king’s priest, and Varoshtej was expected to be the same. On his seventeenth birthday he began a course of fasting and purification that would prepare him for priestly office. This completed, he would be expected to pray daily, practice self-discipline, and avoid contamination. When he married, sexual contact with his wives would require purification afterwards. Sexual contact with other men was out of the question.

Five days into the ritual, Varoshtej’s nerve failed. He got up from his place at the entrance to the temple precinct, where he was supposed to recite a lengthy catalogue of prayers but instead was thinking of Atehatsqe, and walked unchallenged to the prince’s rooms. Once admitted, he threw himself at Atehatsqe’s feet and declared that he couldn’t possibly give him up.

When I heard this story, I knew before I was told what Atehatsqe’s response had been. The prince knew his duty, and that duty didn’t include depriving the king—at some time in the future, himself—of a priest. He sent Varoshtej away, to start the whole ritual over again.

Three weeks later, Qes approached me while I was eating breakfast, bread and fruit and honey. She knelt beside my chair. “I beg pardon of my princess.”

I frowned, in some alarm. Qes was the one person in the household whose sanity I had never questioned. “I don’t understand.”

“The first morning my lady was here, the senior wife of the noble Varoshtej arrived, begging audience. I told her you were unwell, and sent her away.”

“I still don’t understand.” I set down the piece of fruit I was holding. “I was unwell that day.”

“You were not unwell when I sent her away,” Qes said, still kneeling, looking at the floor. “And that afternoon she sent gifts, which I refused.”

I hadn’t been listening to the servants’ gossip for nearly a month for nothing. “You insulted Varoshtej’s wife in my name.”

“My princess would be within her rights to have me whipped, or even killed.”

“You know I would never do that.”

“I know nothing of the sort, my lady.” That was the Qes I knew.

But I was still puzzled. “Why? The noble Varoshtej loves the prince. Wouldn’t it be better to get along with his wives?”

“The noble Varoshtej loves himself,” said Qes sharply. “No one else has tried to visit you, no one else understands yet what your situation is. For now they wait, and watch.”

I didn’t think I understood myself what my situation was. “But Varoshtej’s wife… Get up, I can’t talk to you like that.” She rose, and I continued. “Varoshtej’s wife wants to know if I’m a threat to her husband.” I remembered the conversation I had overheard weeks ago, between Atehatsqe and Varoshtej. How would his wife interpret his attitude toward me? Would she imagine that I might deliberately undermine her husband’s influence with Atehatsqe? “The king can only delay Varoshtej’s eventually becoming king’s priest,” I said, thinking of the plots and subtle slanders that so absorbed my servants. “But I might conceivably prevent it altogether.” Qes still said nothing, and I thought there was a piece I wasn’t seeing. I shook my head. “I have no intention of meddling in Varoshtej’s affairs. How do I make his wife understand that?”

“She won’t understand,” said Qes. “If she were in your place she would leave nothing she could reach untouched. She will have her ambitions gratified soon enough; she might have the grace to leave you be. If I see her again, I will slap her.”

“You would have your hand cut off,” I said. “I don’t think I could prevent it.”

“I am a woman, and a slave,” Qes said, “but even I have pride.”

I looked down at the gold plate in front of me. I had to finish the bread and the last of the fruit to keep my agreement with the doctor, but the thought of eating it made my throat close up. I didn’t understand the source of Qes’s anger. “Don’t slap Varoshtej’s wife. Please.”

“As my lady wishes.”

A servant came bowing into the room. “My lady’s bath is ready.”

“The princess is still breakfasting,” said Qes, and the servant fluttered away.

“The princess,” I said, a thought having just occurred to me, “doesn’t want to wear a dress. Or cosmetics. Or jewelry.” If I could have Qes whipped or killed, surely I could order my own wardrobe.

“The queen has commanded my lady’s presence this morning.”

“And it won’t do to insult the queen,” I guessed.

“It certainly will not,” said Qes firmly.

The queen’s courtyard was larger than mine, and cooler, but she sat in a bare room with only one chair. When I entered she sent the servants away and then stared at me impassively. She was younger than I’d expected—certainly younger than my mother—and she was still very pretty. She’d dressed relatively plainly, and wore less jewelry than I did. My servants had dressed me as though I were going into battle and my jewelry was armor, which perhaps it was. I wondered for a moment what that meant about the queen. One day she will bow to you, Qes had said. Don’t throw this in her face. As I waited for her to speak I realized that she meant to give me no opportunity to do that.

“I had intended never to set eyes on you,” she said after a long silence. “When I heard what had happened, I hoped that you would die on the road to Therete.”

This was not the polite, indirect conversation that I had become accustomed to from the gossip of the servants.

“But it wouldn’t have made any difference,” she continued. “There is no cheating the gods.”

“I don’t understand, Highness.”

“You are an imbecile.”

“A what?” My vocabulary was improving, but still had gaps.

“An idiot. A fool!” Loud enough to startle a servant into the room. The queen waved her out with a curt gesture. “You end the curse!” she said, her voice bitter. “There is only one way, short of your miraculously sprouting a womb.”

“I still don’t understand.”

She raised an eyebrow. “If my son has no children, how will the curse be ended?”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be here if I had a choice.”

She looked away from me and down. “I wish there were no gods.”

“So do I.”

She looked up, her face impassive again. “Well. There is nothing for it but to make the best of what we have. Sit!”

Before I could decide if she meant me to sit on the floor, a servant appeared with a chair. I sat.

“Your mother? Where is she?”

“She went back to her tribe, Highness.”

“They accepted her?”

“Of course.”

“She is fortunate in that, at least.” More servants appeared, with a table and the familiar tray of sweets. “Perhaps I will write to her. You are too thin. Eat.”

“Excuse me, Highness, I’ve just had breakfast.”

“That was an hour ago, and besides, you didn’t finish,” the queen said. I blinked, astonished. Surely trivial gossip didn’t move with such speed?

Or else… I had never thought to wonder where my servants had come from. Were they from this household? And had it been by Atehatsqe’s request, or the queen’s offer? I thought of Qes’s anger for Varoshtej, and of her waiting to tell me the queen wished to see me until after she’d told me about her insult to Varoshtej’s wife.

I took a sweet from the tray and the queen relaxed visibly. “My son has given you property,” she said, not a question.

“Yes.” Three villages, one of them a fishing community on the coast. What they produced that I or my servants didn’t eat was sold in the market, Qes had told me, and the money was mine.

“I certainly hope you’re better at investing than embroidery,” she said, and then lectured me for an hour on farm management.

They finally found a priest, a royal cousin who was either sufficiently dutiful or sufficiently extortable. The whole city took an intense interest in his installment. When a mouse ran across his foot and startled him into pausing during a necessary recitation, forcing him to repeat the previous two days of ceremony, my servants interrupted my bath to bring me the news. There had been no public declaration, but I doubt there was anyone in the city who wasn’t aware of the moment he entered the temple precinct and climbed to the tower where the god waited.

He was inside for a long time, nearly an entire day. When he finally came out, he went straight to the palace and presented himself to the king.

I had never cared particularly what the Lord of the Sky had or had not said to the king’s priests. Since that day in the ashes of my father’s house, I hadn’t cared about anything but my own misery and I had never looked up and around me to understand sufficiently what I had been involved in. It was now that I began to see just what the stakes were, just what the queen had meant when she said there was only one way to end the curse, and why she had been so bitter toward me. And, perhaps, why she had relented somewhat.

Gods didn’t lie, not without paying the price. But men might. The king, whose life and power depended on Artej Ehat’s support, could only learn the god’s will through intermediaries. If those intermediaries weren’t absolutely loyal…

I wondered just how long the king of Therete had been nursing that fear. How long he had been searching for the smallest signs of disloyalty, searching so hard that he found them where they’d never existed.

The new priest was an honest man, but he knew the king would never trust him. Maybe he debated with himself on his walk from the temple to the palace, wondering what course he should take now that he had spoken to the god and knew the truth. Maybe he had spent that day in the temple searching for a way to tell that truth to the king, in some way no one could disbelieve or ignore.

Whatever his thoughts, however he reached his decision, this is what he did: When he had made his obeisance to the king of Therete, he took the knife he had used to kill the sacrifice that morning and cut out his own tongue.

That night I slept fitfully, and dreamed that Atehatsqe was with me. When I woke, the feeling of scales against my skin was still there. Moonlight shone in from the courtyard, and the birds were silent. I pulled down the covers; alongside me lay a snake, almost five feet long.

“There are no snakes in the city of Therete,” I whispered.

“I am no snake,” it said, and blinked.

I wondered what would happen if I woke the servants. “What are you, then?”

“A legless lizard.”

“But still Vosei. Go away.”

It reared its head. “So you are satisfied with your position?”

“You did this to me.” It said nothing. “Men would be better off without gods.”

“Without gods thousands would die in infancy, of sickness or accident. Doctors sew wounds and change dressings, but otherwise are helpless. Banish gods and thousands starve when harvests fail. You suffer so that others may survive. I do not rejoice at this; it is merely necessary.”

“Necessary for who?” I asked, but it didn’t answer. “This dispute between you and the Lord of the Sky. What is it about?”

The snake/lizard lowered its head onto my chest. “It was a question of water.”

“Artau Ehat provides Therete with all its water.”

“Yes,” said the god. “Water has to come from somewhere.”

“And he was taking it from Vos Inei.” If Artau Ehat took what Therete needed every year, how much would Vos Inei have left?

“He gets his water elsewhere now,” said the lizard. “You see? I have always sought the welfare of your people.”

“Along with your own. Why are you here, now?”

“I require a service.”

“There’s nothing you could give me, to make me do anything for you.”

“I can restore your manhood,” the god said. “I can help you escape.”

“I’d be a fool to believe you’d actually do it unless it suited your interests,” I said.

“Perhaps it does,” said the god. “I will visit again. Meanwhile, consider.” With that, it slithered off the bed and was gone.

Three days later the king went hunting outside the walls of the city and was bitten by a snake. He was dead by nightfall. For the entire forty days of official mourning, the sky was as clear as it had always been.

The morning of the coronation I was up well before the sun rose. My servants worked for hours and by the time I left my rooms I was loaded down with so much gold that I had to concentrate on each ponderous step. Atehatsqe was similarly decked. When he saw me he took my hand and smiled, but wanly.

“There isn’t time to talk now.” He raised my hand to his mouth and kissed it. “If we’re lucky, perhaps tomorrow. If not…” He looked briefly at the sky. “Then not for several days. Are you ready?”

“I suppose.” He let go of my hand, and we mounted horses caparisoned in silk and flowers and gold, and rode to the temple.

From the top of the pyramid the whole city was spread out below us. Square buildings of white, pink, yellow, and pale blue lined streets straight as an arrow flight. All had courtyards, and many had roof gardens, some of them withering for want of water. Beyond the walls on three sides a patchwork of fields and orchards stretched out for what seemed forever into the distance. On the fourth side was the harbor and a forest of masts and sails. People crowded the streets at the foot of the pyramid, heaving and swirling like the sea to the west, their voices a constant roar.

Atehatsqe couldn’t enter the tower, so Varoshtej, in a plain undyed cloth, his dark hair shaved off, went in and shed blood in his stead. When he came out again he put a jeweled crown on Atehatsqe’s head and a spear in his hand, and the crowd thundered. Then an endless line of nobles and soldiers filed past to swear their obedience to the new king. Varoshtej was foremost among them, but I noticed that unlike anyone else he never once glanced at the sky.

Events had delayed my ride, but the doctor was true to his word. Two weeks after the coronation I set out from the city of Therete, Atehatsqe riding at my side and Varoshtej at his. Hawking, apparently, wasn’t among the many activities forbidden to the king’s priest.

We camped a day’s ride away from the city. I had my own tent this time, and my own servants to attend to me. The trousers I wore for riding felt strange on my legs, and under the endless sky I felt disconcertingly exposed. The tall grass was brown and sere and the sky cloudless and intensely blue, and beneath Atehatsqe’s courtesies lay an undeniable tension. I wondered what news Varoshtej had brought him of the god’s will.

We hunted all morning, and retired to the king’s tent when the day grew hot. We might have been on the road from Vos Inei—the tent was furnished the same, down to Atehatsqe’s armor and weapons on their stand. The only difference was Varoshtej, who made a third at the inlaid table, slicing fruit with a bronze knife and assiduously ignoring me.

“A good ride, a good morning,” Atehatsqe said. “Did you enjoy it, my heart?” Varoshtej looked up, knife still in hand, but it was me the king was speaking to.

“Yes, my king, very much.” It was only the truth.

“You didn’t need to deal with the doctor. I wouldn’t refuse you anything in my power. But I’m glad you did. I’m glad to see you so much better.”

Varoshtej looked down again. I thought of Qes’s bitter words weeks ago—Varoshtej loves himself—and was suddenly angry. “Tell me, King’s Priest, what’s the will of Artej Ehat? Surely you’ve asked him about the rains.”

For the first time that day he looked directly at me, his expression hostile and contemptuous. “The queen will forgive me for keeping the king’s counsel.”

I tried to imagine Atehatsqe’s mother receiving such a reply. I opened my mouth to speak, but Atehatsqe waved a hand. “My queen has a right to be concerned. The Lord of the Sky has said”—he reached under Varoshtej’s knife for a slice of fruit—“that the king must be pious and have confidence in the god’s goodwill toward Therete. The rains will come at the time appointed by the god.”

“These were the god’s exact words?” I looked directly at Varoshtej as I asked.

“Yes,” Varoshtej answered, unblinking. Atehatsqe took another slice of fruit.

“It’s not much of an answer, is it,” I said. “What if the time appointed is years from now?”

“It isn’t,” said Varoshtej, curt and angry, and brought the knife down just as Atehatsqe put his hand in its way.

The king cried out and drew his hand back, but the damage was done, a long cut on the back of his hand. Varoshtej was frozen for a moment, appalled, and then he flung himself off his chair and prostrated himself. “My king! I beg you, forgive me!”

“It’s nothing,” said Atehatsqe, cradling his injured hand. “It’s my fault for being careless. Get up!” But Varoshtej was inconsolable.

When the doctor had dressed the wound, Varoshtej left and I returned to my own tent. I sat down in my own chair, ordered a cup of wine, and then sent my servants away.

It was a matter of minutes before the snake arrived. It slithered in through the front entrance as though it had been invited, all seven scaled feet of it. “I said I would speak to you again,” it said.

“Tell me about your settlement with the Lord of the Sky.” The snake reared its head, and hissed, but I continued as nonchalantly as I could manage. “I think Artau Ehat has grown tired of trying to rid the kings of Therete of the curse. The murder of the priests was the breaking point. It didn’t help that you had deprived him of the woman who was to produce the curse-free heir. You meddled with my sister, the way Artau Ehat meddled with the unborn princes of Therete, to make her fit for the purpose.”

“Perceptive, Son of Ysas,” said the snake, lowering itself again.

“You want an end to your quarrel with the Lord of the Sky, but you also want vengeance on the kings who insulted you. The Lord of the Sky wants a king he can speak to directly. Pious and obedient as he is, Atehatsqe doesn’t qualify. But Varoshtej does.” The snake stared at me, unblinking. “And so you and Artau Ehat agree that Atehatsqe must die.”

The snake’s tongue flickered. “To satisfy me, Atehatsqe must die of my poison. Atehatsqe’s virtue makes the normal means impossible. The sky lord consents to your being the instrument.”

“What profit for me?” I asked, my stomach turning.

“What do you wish?”

“You said you could make me intact again.”

There was the briefest of hesitations. “It is possible.”

I leaned back in my chair, made myself take a sip of wine. “I wouldn’t live long afterwards. You’ve made promises to whoever has taken my father’s place.” No answer. “I have no chance of surviving anyway. Varoshtej will certainly have me killed.”

“I will promise that you escape safely.”

“And then?”

“You may set reasonable conditions on your death.”

“If I give the poison to Atehatsqe, I will only be killed by the person I choose.”

“If you give the poison to Atehatsqe and he dies, you will only be killed by the person you choose. Name the person.”

“I must consider carefully.” I took another swallow of wine. “Ask me again when Atehatsqe has died.”

“When Atehatsqe has died, I will ask you again. If you refuse to appoint someone the choice will be mine.”

I drained the cup and leaned forward to proffer it to the snake. “We’re agreed.”

I sent my servants back to the city on some pretext, with a message for Qes. She was to take the rest of the women and return to the dowager’s household. I dared not say more than that, but there was no need—Qes would know. She already knew, and had tried to tell me when she’d spoken of her anger with Varoshtej’s ambitious wife.

When Atehatsqe sent for me, I brought the cup. He was sitting in the carved chair drinking wine, the bandage white against his hand. Varoshtej had left his knife on the table and it shone dully in the lamplight.

I knelt beside him and held out the cup. “What is it?” he asked.

“Snake venom,” I said quietly. His face went deadly calm. “The snake…” My throat was tight. “The snake has an agreement with the sky. You are to die by its poison, but it can’t bite you.”

“And you are to deliver it.” His voice was just the slightest bit unsteady. “What was your agreement with the snake?”

“If I give you the poison and you die, then I will only be killed by the person I choose. It seems to me that if I don’t give it to you, you can’t be killed.” I swallowed. “We could leave here. Or you could have me killed. The agreement specified that I would poison you.”

“Tell me exactly what was said.” I reported the conversation as exactly as I could remember it. “And who,” he said when I was done, “do you plan to have kill you?”

“My son.”

He raised both eyebrows in surprise. “Do you have a son?”

“I have no idea.”

He stared a moment, and then he laughed. “Oh, that’s excellent.” He rose abruptly from the chair, paced to the entrance of the tent and back. “If you don’t have one yet…”

“The god will have to give me one.” I was still kneeling. “Can I get up?”

He reached down and took my arm, raised me to standing. “You realize,” he said, serious again, “that neither of us is going to survive this.”

“Leave. Stay as far away from me as you can.”

“What if the rains won’t fall while I live?”

My throat was tight again. “I’d hoped we might cheat them for once.”

Atehatsqe took the cup from me. “How long do I have after I drink this?”

“You could swallow snake venom by the dipperful and never be harmed, unless you had a cut in your mouth. It has to get under your skin.”

The truth of the matter hadn’t penetrated until then, I saw it on his face. He looked at the bandage on his hand. “I suppose his courage failed him,” I said. It was the kindest thing I could find to say.

“He might at least have told me.” I had no answer for him. “How long?”

“Four or five hours.”

He smiled grimly and took the knife from the table. “We can follow the agreement to the letter and still cheat, just as gods do. If you poison me and I cut myself, I’ll bleed to death well before five hours have passed.”

“How can you be so calm?” I was blinking back tears.

“I’m not,” he said sharply, not looking at me but at the knife. “Don’t ask me that again.” He took a deep breath and looked me in the eye. “Take my clothes. It’s dark, no one will know it’s not me. Be sure and take a cloak. I imagine it will rain tonight. Or tomorrow at the latest. Don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “I smiled when I saw your sister because she looked so much like you. I would have been kind to her, I swear, but it was you I loved from when I saw you. I know you could never love me, but I had hoped that you might someday.” As I tried to speak he laid his fingers on my mouth. “Don’t lie to me, now of all times. If you meet Varoshtej, tell him…” He looked away, and then back again. “No. Just greet him as king.” He handed me the cup, and pulled the bandage off his hand. “Give me the poison as you agreed to.”

I did, and then when he needed it I handed him the knife. I stayed with him until the end.

The soldiers outside the tent saluted me, but twenty paces beyond I met Varoshtej. He knew me immediately, I saw the change in his stance, even in the dark saw him draw breath to call out. “I was promised my life, Priest,” I said quietly. “What were you promised?”

“You acted to revenge yourself!” he whispered harshly. “I loved him.”

“Wrong both times,” I said, and wished I could see his expression. “Hail, king of Therete! Rule wisely! But remember that no matter how pious and virtuous you are, you will never be able to trust your god.”

“You know nothing of the Lord of the Sky.”

“I know what I need to know,” I said, and walked on unchallenged.

By morning clouds had rolled across the sky. I had no idea where I was, or what direction I was walking. The wind blew cold, and when the first fat drops fell I found shelter in a half-fallen shed in the corner of a field. I was tired and hungry and thirsty, though I supposed in a short while I’d have all the water I cared for.

I slept, and when I woke the rain was so heavy that I could barely see a foot away from where I sat. “Well,” I said aloud. “Now what?”

“A question you should have asked sooner,” said a small, hissing voice.

“I gave the poison to Atehatsqe, and he died. I will only be killed by my son.”

“I will see to it you suffer.”

I looked down. A small brown grass snake lay coiled in a fold of my cloak. “I did precisely as I agreed to.”

It raised its head and its tiny mouth opened, showing its fangs. “Atehatsqe did not die in the manner prescribed, or at your hand. My word to Artau Ehat was made false. Now I am diminished in power, and the sky lord blames me for not keeping my word. And you…”

“Do I have a son?”

“Therete was certain to turn its sight to Vos Inei sooner or later. Better to have peace between me and the sky lord first.”

“You used me for your own ends,” I protested.

“Even in suffering your privilege has been astonishing. I cared for you as best I could under the circumstances.”

I gave a short, bitter laugh. “Nothing could make up for what I’ve lost.”

“Your genitals?”

“And Atehatsqe.”

“Do you think I meddled only with your sister? Do you think I did not plan for contingencies? I knew what sort of man Atehatsqe would be.”

“A good man,” I said.

“I intended that he should love you,” said the snake as though I hadn’t spoken. “I did not intend that you should love him. As for your son—remain in suspense.”

I shrugged. “We all die. Even gods, I imagine. Who will kill you, O Generous One?”

“Someone much like yourself if I am not cautious,” the snake replied.

“Beautiful thought!” I picked up the snake. It twined and curled in my grasp and I tossed it into the rain. Then I pulled my cloak closer around me and sat wondering which direction I should walk when the rain lessened, and just how long I had to live.

Marsh Gods

Voud had escaped the house before dawn, climbing up the ladder and onto the roof, across the neighbors’ roofs and down to the edge of the water, where she had caught three decent-sized frogs. She had tried but failed to catch a fourth, the bullfrog she’d heard honking hoarsely away somewhere on the bank; her sister-in-law Ytine would be dismayed at her muddy tunic, but there was no help for it. Now, her prey struggling in her bag, she went to ask the gods a question.

It was late enough in summer that she could go on foot, over the causeway. The shore of the gods’ island was muddy and cypress-shaded, but as she climbed, the trees cleared. At the edge of the trees, she stopped and dropped her bag on the ground. “I have questions,” she called. “Frogs for answers!” Insects trilled; the frustratingly elusive bullfrog honked. Voud sat on her heels—it didn’t pay to be impatient with gods—and watched the sky lighten.

Eventually a brown crane came wading along the margin of the island and walked with careful, backward-kneed steps to where Voud sat. It kr-kr-kr-kred and then said, “Good morning, little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl! I’m ten!”

The crane took two steps backward, flapped its wings. “You have frogs?”

Voud picked up the bag. “Three.”

“They’re small, and weak. One question.”

“They’re perfectly good frogs! Three frogs, three questions.”

“Well. Before you start, I’m going to warn you—not every god would, by the way—not to ask me any questions that are impossible to answer, or that are ambiguously phrased. You’ll just be wasting your frogs if you do.”

Voud sacrificed the frogs, and said the appropriate prayer. Then she asked her first question. “Is Ytine going to remarry?”

“She’s free to do as she likes. Your brother Irris has been gone more than a year, and he was never a particularly good husband; no one would blame her.”

“He was a drunk,” said Voud. “He never did what he should.”

“A fair description,” said the crane. “Unfortunately, your question is the sort I warned you against; I don’t know the answer. Ask Ytine herself.”

“I thought gods knew the future.”

“Gods with enough power to make unlikely things happen are free to make pronouncements about the future,” the crane said, just the slightest bit pedantic. “If I happened to be wrong, I would have said something untrue, and that could be disastrous for me. Think hard about your next two questions. There’s no hurry. You know I won’t lie—I can’t without injuring myself.”

Voud frowned. “What god do I need to talk to, to get Ytine to marry the right person?”

“Is that really your second question?—Don’t answer!” it trumpeted before she could speak. “Take my advice, and say no.”

“Everything I think of is wrong!” she cried, frustrated.

“Why don’t you explain what your problem is?” The crane flapped its wings. “I can’t promise to help you directly, but we’ll have a better idea of what questions would be appropriate.”

Voud sighed. “My father died last year.”

“I am aware of it,” said the crane.

“My other brother, Tas, died last month.”

The crane tilted its head. “True.”

“Now it’s just me and Ytine and the baby, because Irris went off six months before the baby was born and never came back. And there’s too much work for the two of us, and we’re going to have to ask the neighbors for help. And Anghat—he’s a neighbor of ours…”

“I know Anghat.”

“Anghat told Ytine that he’ll come live with us and do the work if he can marry me.”

The crane turned first one eye on her, and then the other. “Why doesn’t he offer to marry Ytine?”

“He wants our fishing rights! That stretch of water belongs to our house. Ytine’s only married in.” And she could marry out and take the baby. If she did, Voud would be all by herself. Ytine had said she wouldn’t leave. But.

“Anghat is the youngest of ten,” the crane remarked. “There’s precious little to go around in his own house. Granted, you’re too young right now, but he’s not ugly, or ill-tempered, so far as I know.

“What’s more, this is the sort of thing I can’t get involved in. The terms of the agreement are very clear. We protect you from the marsh fever, and keep the babies from getting sick or drowning. We help manage the wildlife in the swamp. In return, you give us regular sacrifices and prayers, which we gods divide equally among ourselves. You’re allowed to petition us on an individual basis for things like cures, or fertility.” The crane dipped its head toward the dead frogs. “Or information. But hurting one household to help another is absolutely forbidden. We don’t get involved in village politics, let alone questions of who should marry who. Besides, you have only to refuse if you don’t want him.”

“He killed Tas,” Voud said. “He killed Irris.”

“I didn’t see it myself, but I’m told Tas tripped and hit his head on the edge of his boat. He was dead before anyone could pull him out of the water. These things happen sometimes. As for Irris, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

“I was going across the roofs yesterday and I heard Anghat talking. I stopped to listen.” For a moment she considered what Ytine would say about that. “I heard him say, Well, is he dead? You’ve had plenty of time to make it happen, I’m tired of waiting. And I heard a scratchy, whispery voice say, Finding Irris was not a simple matter. He had traveled quite a distance. But he is dead. His throat was cut and he died, in a desert far away from here. And something else quieter that I couldn’t hear. And Anghat laughed and said, Why would you want to be released? I have sacrificed and prayed to you daily, since I found you a year ago. And then Anghat must have heard something because he started coming up the ladder and I ran away and I don’t think he saw me.”

The crane was absolutely motionless for a few moments. Birds hooted and twittered, and somewhere down at the margin of the island something jumped into the water with a plopping splash. “If what you say is true,” the crane said at last, with a ruffle of its feathers, “then Anghat has a god confined in his house. But there’s nothing wrong with any of you worshipping other gods.”

“And nothing to keep other gods from interfering with us!”

“Well, now.” The crane raised one foot and put it down again, delicately. “That’s a more complicated issue. We do have understandings with the gods of surrounding territories. The swamp would have been drained for farmland long ago otherwise. But I’m not sure what to do about this, frankly. I don’t think the gods of the marsh association have any grounds for acting.”

Ytine’s voice echoed across the water. “Voud!”

“I have to go!”

“Go,” said the crane. “And don’t waste too much grief on Irris. When he was here he only drank beer and slept all day.”

“Voud!” Ytine called again.

Voud turned and ran down to the water and across the cypress-shaded causeway, up the mound the village was built on, up the side ladder and across the roofs as fast as she could, to where Ytine stood, ten years older than Voud, with a naked toddler on her hip. “Voud! Where have you… oh, look at your tunic!”

“I was hunting frogs.” Not a lie, not exactly. She thought furiously for a plausible story, hating to have nothing to show for all the mud, not wanting to say any frog had escaped her, even as a lie.

But Ytine seemed too distracted to ask for details. “Get inside.” She blinked, and took a breath as though to speak, but stopped, and then, “Get inside,” she said again. Something was wrong.

“What is it?” Voud asked.

The ladder shook, someone climbing up. In a moment a man appeared—her brother Irris. And because his beard was trimmed close, she could see the thin red line that ran from one side of his neck to the other, as though his throat had been cut.

Irris was a changed man. When he went out fishing, he didn’t spend the day drunk or asleep in the boat and then come home with nothing, the way everyone expected. Instead he made a full day’s catch early, and then picked up an axe and went to cut wood. He sat down to dinner sober, played with the baby, spoke pleasantly to his wife and sister. In the evening, instead of drinking, he sat in front of the fire and knotted nets, or carved fishhooks. It’s because he almost died, the neighbors whispered. Everyone had seen the scar. Everyone wondered how long the change could last.

There were other things, little strangenesses that never made their way out of the house for the villagers to be aware of them. For instance, one afternoon Ytine brought him a dish of vetch, and he said, “My dear, it amuses me to call this gravel. So the next time I ask you for a bowl of gravel, you’ll know what I want.” Water was poison, working was sleeping. The list of changed names seemed to grow every day. Voud wasn’t sure why Ytine went along with it, except that the new Irris was kind and hardworking, and doted on the baby. And maybe, thought Voud, that was reason enough. The crane had said not to waste her grief on Irris, and she hadn’t cried when she’d heard the whispery-voiced god say he was dead.

But one evening Irris came home in an especially good mood. “Good fishing means good trading,” he said. He had needles, and fiber—dyed and spun—for Ytine, and a tiny wheeled cart for the baby. “And Voud,” he said, “I hear you’re a hunter.” He handed her a bronze knife. It was small and its plain haft was dented, but it was a real metal knife and it was hers.

That was when she knew for certain that her brother was dead. Irris would never have thought to buy her something she wanted so much. Not without her telling him, and likely not even then. She sat there with the knife in her hand and cried.

“Voud!” said Ytine, alarmed.

The baby, who had been sitting splay-legged, pushing the little cart back and forth, looked up and began to wail. Irris picked him up. “Hush, little one, hush.” But he looked at Voud with no pretense in his eyes. He knew why she was crying.

Ytine had to know, too, but all she said was, “You’re tired, that’s what it is. Time for bed.”

The next day Voud was knee-deep in water, pulling the down from the cattails, stuffing it into a bag that hung from her shoulder. The baby sat on the shore clutching his toy cart in one hand, meditatively squishing mud through the fingers of the other. The shadow of a thought crossed his face. “Don’t eat that,” said Voud. She waded back to shore, wiped the tiny hand on the hem of her tunic, and gave him a piece of hard bread instead.

“Da!” said the baby. Voud looked up and saw Irris.

He came near, sat down, and set the baby in his lap. “I didn’t kill him,” he said while the baby gnawed happily on the bread.

Voud thought about that for a moment. “Who are you?”

“I’d prefer not to answer that right now.”

“Because you don’t want to say and you can’t lie.”

“Oh, I can lie.” He smoothed the baby’s hair. “But.”

“For a god, speaking is using its power,” said Voud.

“If I say something that’s already true, I’ve spent nothing. If I say something that isn’t true, then it depends on how big a change it would take, to make what I’d said the truth. The bigger the change, the more power it would drain from me. And some things can never be true.”

“Don’t gods say untrue things on purpose sometimes, to make things happen?”

“You climb down a ladder and don’t hurt yourself, but you would if you fell off the roof.” He frowned, just slightly. “If the lies aren’t too big, or too numerous, a god can regain its strength through prayers and sacrifices. But I don’t have worshippers here, and your brother’s death gave me just enough power to move in and repair his body.”

Voud sighed. “He wasn’t a very good brother.”

“But he was your brother,” said Irris. They were silent for a while. The baby’s eyes began to droop, the soggy fragment of bread still clutched in his hand.

“Are you good, or bad?” Voud asked.

He smiled. “The answer to that question is complicated, and it wouldn’t tell you what you want to know. I was very powerful once. That was millions of years ago.”

“Millions?”

“Do you know a hundred?”

“Yes.”

“A hundred of a hundred hundreds would make one million.”

Voud frowned. “Are there that many years?”

Irris raised an eyebrow. She thought he might have laughed if the baby hadn’t been asleep. “Beneath the dirt we’re sitting on, under the water, in layers of stone, are remains of creatures whose day came and went much longer ago than a single million years.”

The thought was dizzying, and Voud blinked it away. “So how did you get here?”

“I was on the losing side of a battle, a long time ago. Now it’s a desert hundreds of miles from the coast, but then it was near the sea. Our enemies made the water sweep inland and drowned us. For millions of years, I lay buried where I fell, until the ground eroded away from around my bones, and your brother came, and his killer rashly offered me your brother’s blood and body.”

“If I sacrificed to you,” Voud said, thinking of Anghat, “you’d have power.”

“Save your prayers for your marsh gods,” said Irris, looking off into the cattails. She followed his gaze. The crane stood there, managing somehow to give the impression of glaring balefully.

“I don’t think I know you,” said the crane.

“It would have been before your time,” said Irris.

“So I hear, and I’m not pleased to hear it. There’s a reason that place is forbidden, and a reason there’s a curse on anyone who spills blood there.”

“There’s a reason for everything,” Irris said.

“Why are you here?”

“I knew nothing of humans beyond what I read in Irris’s mind, but that was enough to know the world had changed a great deal. He thought of this place as quiet and remote, and that suited me.”

“Swear you mean no harm to the village,” the crane demanded.

“The man who cut my throat said he was paid to do it,” said Irris. Voud frowned, and thought again of Anghat and his whispering god. Irris stood, awkwardly because of the still-sleeping baby. “I’ll take him home,” he said to Voud.

When he had gone, she waded back into the cattails. “Be careful, Voud,” said the crane. “I don’t believe he’s as powerless as he implies. I still don’t understand why he came here.”

“He didn’t have anywhere to go,” Voud said. She thought of her brother, alone in the desert with no one to help him when he needed it.

“Don’t assume that means he’s not dangerous. I can’t interfere for the same reason I can’t interfere with Anghat, but you’ve always been a resourceful child.”

Anghat accused Irris of being an imposter when nearly everyone was home eating dinner. Children who had been playing on the roofs, jumping over gaps and skipping around the plumes of smoke that came up from the village’s fires, ran from house to house calling out what they’d heard, that Anghat wanted a trial, wanted Irris to prove he wasn’t a god!

Within a half hour the whole village was crowded around the headman’s roof, where Irris, Anghat, and the headman himself stood. In a loud, clear voice the headman explained the accusation and asked, “Are you the same man who left this village?”

“Would you be the same man you were, if you’d had your throat cut and been left for dead?” Irris asked.

There was a mutter of agreement, but “He hasn’t answered!” shouted Anghat. Which, Voud could see, the watching villagers realized was true. But Anghat seemed too vehement, and everyone knew he stood to gain if Irris were expelled, and Irris was just so different these days… The debate hissed and whispered through the watchers.

Voud knew there was one simple way for Anghat to prove that his accusation was true, and she knew it would work. It was just a matter of how long Irris could evade it.

The whole village was watching Anghat explain that if Irris was really Irris, he could lie. If she could only prove that Anghat had killed her brothers!

If she went into Anghat’s house, no one would see her.

She had imagined sneaking in, locating the god, and sneaking out, but it hadn’t occurred to her that there would be more than a dozen people’s belongings scattered around the house. And if Anghat had managed to keep his god concealed in such a crowded place, it wouldn’t be easy to find.

The crane had told her she was resourceful, so it must be true. “Whispery god, where are you?” she called.

“Here,” said a papery voice. She followed the sound to a corner crowded with rolled-up sleeping mats. “Here,” the voice said again.

“Where?”

“A hole in the wall, plastered over. Here!”

She put her hand on the wall, where she thought the sound was coming from. “Here?”

“Yes!” said the whispery voice. “Break the plaster, free me!”

She took the knife Irris had given her out of her belt. “I want something in return.”

“What power I have is bound up in Anghat’s wishes.” The voice was quiet but intense. “He sacrifices with conditions and qualifications.”

“Has Anghat forbidden you to answer any questions?”

“No. He forbade me to speak unless I was directly addressed. And he forbade me to harm him, or he would have been dead long ago.”

“I want to ask you three questions, and if you know the answer you’ll answer.” She frowned, thinking over what she’d just said. “You’ll answer right then.”

“Agreed. Break the plaster, set me free!”

Voud chipped at the plaster with the knife. “Did you tell him about Irris?” A thought struck her. “Do you know who Irris is?”

“I have not spoken to him since the day you overheard us from the roof. His family is too numerous. And yes, I know who Irris is. One left!”

She stopped digging. “Those don’t count.”

“I will answer no more questions until you free me!”

“I won’t, unless you say they don’t count!”

“They don’t count,” hissed the voice, a whispery sigh. Outside and above, the villagers laughed at something.

She dug with fresh ferocity, revealing a gap in the wall and, sitting in it, a black stone some eight inches long, a huge, cruel bird’s beak.

“How can you speak?” she asked without thinking.

“Anything with a mouth may speak.” Which seemed odd to Voud, since the beak was motionless even when it spoke. “Two questions left!”

The stone beak cradled awkwardly in her arms, Voud threaded her way through the villagers watching Irris defend himself. “And for dinner my wife brought me a bowl of gravel,” Irris was saying. “It was delicious!”

“Nothing but lies for the past ten minutes!” said one man. “Give it up, Anghat! You’re lucky if Irris doesn’t bring trial against you for this!”

“I’m sure,” the headman said, “that Irris realizes Anghat’s suspicion was reasonable. Now the issue has been settled, publicly and fairly.”

“Let him bring trial against me!” Anghat cried. “Let him say straight out that he is the Irris who left here nearly two years ago!”

“Voud,” said Irris, strong and clear, and suddenly everyone was looking at her. The headman frowned, perplexed, and Anghat’s face went slack, his anger turned to fearful astonishment.

“Anghat is a murderer,” she said. “Whispery god, who are you and how did you come to kill my brother Tas?”

“Two questions! I am quit of our agreement! You have no name for me. I was strong beyond your imagination. I and my confederates changed the land into sea and the sea into land; we defeated our enemies and left them drowned and powerless.

“Then I was betrayed. For millions of years I lay buried and starving until earthquakes and storms freed a small part of me from the mud and stone of the river bluff in which I was trapped. The man Anghat came along and chipped the beak from the rest of my skull, brought it to his house, and put me in a hole in the wall and plastered it over.”

“Lies!” cried Anghat.

“I will be revenged!” said the stone. “Anghat gave me blood and prayers, but I could use them only for his purposes. He wished me to kill the men of a particular house without arousing suspicion. The father was old, it was nothing to hasten his death. The son named Tas I caused to fall and hit his head with killing force.” Anghat turned to run but he was trapped by the solid mass of villagers. “As for the man you call Irris…” Anghat made a strangled noise and collapsed. “This is not Irris,” the stone continued, “but my ancient enemy whom I thought trapped forever.”

The stone beak was suddenly burning hot, and Voud cried out in pain and dropped it. It hit the rooftop and shattered into a dozen pieces. From the south came a dull rumble, almost like thunder, but the sky was cloudless. “Anghat is dead!” someone cried, and the villagers began speaking and shouting. Voud remembered the whispering god saying, He forbade me to harm him; remembered Irris sitting beside her, the baby in his lap, refusing to promise not to hurt any villager. The man who cut my throat said he was paid to do it.

Voud looked toward Irris. He lay unconscious on the rooftop, Ytine kneeling beside him. Irris’s ribs moved in slow, shallow breaths.

“Ytine,” the headman said. “I’m trying to make sense of this.”

“It lied,” said Ytine. “When it said my husband had died. It must have killed Anghat, and tried to kill Irris, but its lie destroyed it.”

Voud shook her head, but didn’t say what she was thinking—the crane was right, Irris had had more power than he had implied.

Voud and Ytine sat by Irris, who lay where the men had placed him that afternoon. The sting of Voud’s burned hands had faded. She was crying.

Ytine’s eyes were closed. The baby slept curled on a mat, his thumb in his mouth, eyelashes sticky with tears. There was the sound of wings, and then the crane stepped fussily down the rungs of the ladder. Ytine didn’t open her eyes, or say anything.

“Ytine is praying,” Voud said.

“I know she is,” said the crane. “Voud, listen to me. You could sacrifice to Irris, but I strongly advise you not to. At my most powerful I couldn’t do what he did today. A whole section of bluff downstream collapsed into the river and just dissolved away. The ancient gods weren’t like us. The world has changed so much; the ways gods survive are very different now. I honestly don’t know if the gods of this marsh would be strong enough to protect you from him, if you ever needed it.”

“You can make him better, at least enough to get up.” Her throat ached, and her voice was unsteady.

“I don’t know what he wants,” said the crane. The baby, still asleep, gasped three times in quick succession and then sighed. “I don’t know what he’ll do. He’s dangerous.”

“Fire is dangerous,” said Ytine, speaking for the first time. She opened her eyes. “We still keep it in the house.”

“Fire is what it is,” said the crane. “You know how to keep it contained.”

Ytine said nothing, only looked at it. Voud couldn’t read her expression.

“You’re dangerous,” Voud said to the crane, realizing.

“Very,” the crane said. “That’s why there are so many restrictions, in the agreement with you. But I do my utmost not to be a danger to you.” It took two precise steps closer to Irris, spread its wings, and then folded them again. “Irris is what he is, a potentially powerful god not bound by the marsh accord. But his presence has made your life significantly better. Whether I help or refuse to help, I may harm you. So I’ll consider myself bound by your choice. I know what Ytine wants. I can guess what the baby would say. But you, Voud, are head of the household while Irris is incapacitated.”

She wanted to say, I’m just a little girl! “I only used one question, before. You still owe me two.”

“True,” said the crane.

“What happens if I say no?”

“Irris’s body will eventually die. The god will still inhabit the corpse and you’ll have to dispose of it. But I can help with that.” Voud sobbed twice, and sniffled. “If you say yes,” the crane continued, “I can give him the strength to get up. If he finds worshippers somehow, he may grow stronger than we can handle.”

“That’s what you’re afraid of.”

“Yes.”

She turned the new thought over in her mind—the village’s gods, who watched over the babies, who had always in her memory been benign, even avuncular presences, were dangerous. Like fire, Ytine had said. She thought of Irris with the baby on his lap, thought of her knife. The stone beak burning her hands, shattering, and Anghat dropping dead. She had been afraid since that moment, a nameless fear that the crane just now had outlined for her. And if the crane didn’t know how to deal with it, how could she? She felt more tears well, and wished she could be done crying. “Can you make him strong enough to talk?” she asked.

“That’s three, and yes, I can.”

Irris opened his eyes. “Voud,” he said, his voice the smallest sound imaginable. Ytine dipped a cloth in a bowl of water and squeezed it over his mouth, and he swallowed. “I owe you.”

“Are you going to hurt us?” She tried but failed to keep her voice steady.

“Not a good question,” Irris said, his voice still a whisper. He closed his eyes again.

Voud shook her head, frustrated. “I want to help, but I’m afraid of you.”

“Smart,” Irris said.

“You wouldn’t promise not to harm the village,” Voud said.

“I knew I had an enemy in the village.” He paused, and Voud leaned closer, to hear him. “I didn’t know about Anghat’s god, though it knew me. Another thing I owe you for.” Ytine wet the cloth for him again, and he swallowed. “I don’t mean harm to the village. I’ll abide by village law.”

“For how long?”

The corners of his mouth twitched faintly. “As long as Irris’s body lives.”

Ytine made a sound. Voud looked up—she was crying quietly, her shoulders shaking.

“Well done, Voud,” said the crane.

Within a week Irris had recovered. If anyone voiced suspicions, they whispered. No one dared make an accusation; if they were wrong it would be unjust, and if they were right it would be unsafe. Certainly anytime after Anghat’s death, if storms or floods washed bones out of the muddy riverbank—skulls with tusks and huge teeth, gigantic femurs, snaking lines of vertebrae—the marsh gods were consulted before anyone would touch them.

Eventually the whispers died down. The headman worried briefly about his position, but Irris showed no sign of ambition. Voud was another matter—but whoever her brother was, the headman would rather have her as an ally than an enemy when she was grown.

The Unknown God

Aworo, Lord of Horses, god of the Western plains, walked into the marketplace in Kalub in the third hour of the morning. It was early summer, and at this hour the sun was warm and comfortable. Pens of livestock and slaves, rickety stalls, rows of fish staring blankly, baskets of fruit, orange and red and purple, clay jars of wine and beer surrounded a fountain twenty feet across. The water came from the Nalendar, the river a short walk to the east, the supreme god of the city, the one being Aworo didn’t want to meet right now.

Down the street was the gilded roof of the temple of the god Smerdis, who Aworo did want to meet. But he was tired, and hungry and thirsty.

Perched on the lip of the fountain was a wide, shallow bowl and in it sat a large gray-green frog. “Aworo!” the frog croaked. “You bastard! I thought you’d gone back to the plains! Does the Nalendar know you’re here?” Aworo shrugged, and the frog asked, “Where have you been? You look awful, and you smell worse.”

“Out in the hills, to the west.” Aworo scooped up water and drank from his hands, and then, “With atheists,” he confessed.

“Atheists!” The frog gaped. “You?”

“I didn’t say I was an atheist. I’ve just been living with them.” He leaned against the stone edge. “Do you know what they believe?”

“All sorts of things,” the frog said, “some of them less sane than others. I had one tell me right to my face that I wasn’t real.”

“These particular atheists,” said Aworo, “believe that this world is a fake. A copy of the real one. They say the real one is pure mind, and perfect, incapable of change. Which is how they know the difference.”

“Oh,” croaked the frog. “And that’s why they camp in the hills, eating grass and never bathing?”

“They don’t eat grass. They meditate on Truth.” Truth was changeless, single, distant from this world. Above the noise and clamor of the market, past it, the roof of the temple of Smerdis shone in the sunlight. When he’d last been in Kalub, a year before, he’d paid no attention to Smerdis’s cult.

“Meditate, eh?” asked the frog. “Not the most reliable way to determine the truth, in my experience. How’s it been working for you?”

“I don’t know yet.” The frog honked derisively. “Look,” Aworo said, determined to change the subject. “I want some cash, but I don’t want to ask the Nalendar for it.”

“I wouldn’t either, if I were you,” said the frog. “You’ve got some nerve just setting foot in Kalub. You seduced one of her best fraud investigators!”

Aworo had thought he was master of himself, until he’d met Saest. He’d never felt such an exquisite, breath-catching feeling before. Marry me, he’d said to her that night on the river’s edge, and why not? He was living a man’s life. There was no reason he shouldn’t marry.

He was incredulous at her refusal, and then furious. Can’t leave the Nalendar? Have it your way! Turn away from the river and die! And he’d felt it go out of him, the power that would make his words the truth, and horrified at himself, he’d turned and run, and left Saest to her fate.

Even a year later he didn’t want to think about it. He pulled his seal up out of his dirty tunic. “Do you know who’ll take a voucher? Without tossing me out the door?”

“Not me,” said the frog. “I can’t afford to make the river angry at me.”

A year ago the frog had made a small but sufficient living fishing lost objects out of wells and ponds in exchange for prayers, but it hadn’t had any money. “You? Got a new line of work?”

The frog puffed proudly. “Have I! I remove wrinkles and moisturize skin. It’s very minor work, really, just a little tweaking of muscles and skin cells. I don’t know why more gods aren’t doing it, it keeps me in prayers. And sacrifices! I never got many sacrifices before.”

“Where does the money come from?”

“I have a boy,” said the frog. “He makes up a sort of lotion and sells it. And look here.” The frog leaned aside. On the bottom of the bowl were several coins. “People just toss them in now and then! I’m telling you, I should have thought of this years ago. I have an account at the temple of the Nalendar. I’m saving up, going to have a little shrine built if I can get enough together.”

Aworo eyed the coins, calculating. “If you’ve got a tablet, I can seal a draft for the coppers you’ve got there. I’ve got enough in my account to cover it.”

“I’m sure you do,” said the frog, “but like I said, I’m not going to risk angering the Nalendar. Unless you’ve come to clear up the mess you’ve made.”

“How can I?” Aworo asked, bitter. “Some things can’t be undone.”

“Well, it’s not like she’s dead!” exclaimed the frog, and then it croaked in surprise. “Did you think she was dead?”

A strange feeling fluttered in Aworo’s stomach. He was afraid to try to name it. “Yes.”

“Oho! So now the whole atheist business makes sense. You thought you’d killed her. But she’s not dead yet. The Nalendar took her to an island in the river. Didn’t think of that, did you? But if that’s not why you’re back, what are you doing here?”

Aworo was suddenly embarrassed. “It’s… haven’t you ever wondered? If there was… more?” He didn’t mention the temple of Smerdis.

“More?” asked the frog. “You mean like the perfect universe of your atheists? Or are you asking about what happens to humans after they die, or gods who tell big enough lies? Easy enough to find out, isn’t it? Just make a statement out loud, you’ll know soon enough if it’s not true!” It chuffed and rumbled a bit, amused at itself.

The witticism was an old one. Aworo ignored it. “Sometimes, out in the hills, meditating, I’ve felt… something.”

“The right sort of head injury will do that,” said the frog.

It took Aworo a few moments to organize his thoughts, to be sure he didn’t say anything regrettable. “I notice you’re not saying straight out that there’s no such thing as fate, or a higher power, or an afterlife.”

“That’s because I’m not an idiot,” said the frog. “Whatever my private suspicions, I don’t like gambling with those stakes. And neither do you, or you’d have tried it yourself by now. But enough of this. You’re scaring customers away. And I’ll only help you if it’s worth my while.” It puffed thoughtfully. “I’m not above currying favor with the river. I’ll give you cash in return for your draft if you say, right here and now, that you’ll remove the curse you put on Saest.”

Aworo blinked. The strange feeling was back. He opened his mouth to say, I don’t know if I can, but his attention was arrested by the sound of his own name.

Slightly around the circumference of the fountain a man in a long green coat held the reins of a nicely groomed, spavined black horse. “Sired by one of the sacred stallions of Aworo, on the plains,” he was saying to another man. “But as you can see, these white markings here disqualified him—the stallions of Aworo must be without flaw! Which is how I got him so cheap.” That horse had never been sired by one of Aworo’s own, Aworo was certain. The other man, examining the horse, nodded sagely, impressed.

Aworo narrowed his eyes, drew a breath to speak.

“Temper!” warned the frog.

“I need to raise the money right away,” the green-coated man was saying, “or I’d never part with him, let alone at this price.”

The frog was right. Whatever Aworo said would be made true—or Aworo would regret it. Like all gods, he was circumspect from habit, but sometimes… Aworo took another breath. “He’s cheating you,” he said, loud enough for the green-coated man’s customer to hear. “That’s not one of Aworo’s horses, and it’s half lame already.”

The green-coated man gave Aworo a dubious look, took in the dirty tunic, the bare feet. “How do you know that, sir?”

“I’m Aworo.”

The customer gaped, and the green-coated man laughed. “Of course you are.” He caught his prospective buyer’s eye and made a gesture toward his forehead. The two men and the horse moved away from the fountain.

“You,” Aworo began. A few words would strike the man dead, but Aworo wanted something more satisfying.

“Lord of Horses!” croaked the frog quietly. “Don’t say a word.”

“He’s using my name.”

“It’s not a good idea to speak without thinking, Aworo!” The frog scrabbled at the bottom of its bowl, agitated. “Look here, take the coppers, pay me back later. Get a bath and some clothes and finish your business with Saest!”

A bath and a shave, and a visit to a secondhand clothes stall, made Aworo presentable enough to get a room in a decent guesthouse on the strength of his seal. After rolling it across a clay tablet and agreeing to the charges for room and food and drink, he sat down in the house’s common room to a bowl of fish stew and a stack of flat bread, and didn’t look up for a full twenty minutes.

When he’d finished he saw that the room was more crowded. The woman who’d brought him his bowl was fetching cups and pitchers, and he stopped her as she passed, her arms full of crockery, and asked her for beer. It came sooner than he expected, and he sat drinking, watching the people around him.

Saest was alive. He had cursed himself for his cowardice and now he was even more disgusted with himself, both for not thinking of the obvious solution that the Nalendar had seen immediately, and for abandoning a woman he loved. He’d spent the last year wondering if what some humans said was true, that something survived after death. If somehow he could tell Saest he was sorry, get her forgiveness. And now he found she was alive after all and he sat here afraid to actually face her, dreading that moment.

“Mind if I join you?” The speaker was a short, stocky man with a neatly trimmed beard and an expensive-looking dark blue coat. Aworo made a gesture of assent, and the man pulled out a stool and sat. “Crowded today!” Aworo agreed that it was. “I’m Nes Imosa.” His accent said he was from the northern Nalendar valley.

“I’m Aworo.”

Nes Imosa’s eyes widened. “Distinguished name! I suppose your parents hoped you’d be good with horses.” Aworo opened his mouth to say something noncommittal, but the other man kept talking. “I came down yesterday with a boatload of grain. I love Kalub at this time of year, and there’s nothing like the baths! I mean, a man can get a hot bath at home, but there’s something special about the hot springs. Not to mention the pretty serving girls at the bathhouses.” He winked.

“You left your wife at home, then?”

Nes Imosa laughed as though Aworo had told a tremendously amusing joke. “Ah! Ha ha! I did. Though the wife likes a soak when she can get it, too. And”—his expression was suddenly earnest—“I don’t give her reason to complain. Take my advice, and never give your wife reason to complain! It makes it much easier to take the waters at Kalub every now and then.” He winked again. “Married yourself?”

“No.”

“Oh, I know that look,” said Nes Imosa. “She left you?”

“She wouldn’t marry me to begin with.” Aworo looked around for the serving woman, hoping for more beer.

“Hah! When a woman says no, it wasn’t meant to be, it’s better that way.”

“I’m convinced you’re right,” said Aworo.

“I am, I am! So, what are you here for? You’re not from Kalub, not with that name and that accent.”

Aworo thought of the frog, skeptical by the side of the well. “I’m curious,” he said. “I’ve been hearing a lot about this god, Smerdis…”

“Smerdis!” Nes Imosa said, surprised. “Smerdis. Yes, I’ve heard of him. The One, the Supreme, his followers call him, but I’ve never heard that he’s done much for anyone. Well, there’s Smerdis’s bull—pure white, they say, with gilded horns.”

Aworo had heard of devotees who, laying a hand on the bull as it passed, had been granted inner peace and enlightenment. “There’s a procession…”

“Every month. They’d like to do it more often, of course, but they can’t get the permit. Can’t have gods parading around the city whenever they like, we’d never get anything done!”

Aworo nodded. “Do you know when it is?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, I think. Or you can go into the temple, and for a fee you ask a question and the bull nods or stamps or what have you, for an answer. For a slightly larger fee a priest watches it walk round its ring and then produces a few lines of doggerel.” Nes Imosa shook his head. “Supposedly Smerdis so transcends this corrupt world that only the specially trained can receive his messages, and even then they’re garbled. And what good is that, I ask you?”

“I’ve heard,” Aworo ventured, thinking of the perfect world of the atheists’ teachings, “that the benefits he confers are spiritual rather than physical.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard that too, and I don’t say I think much of it. My spirits are always in good shape when my body is too!” He laughed again, very amused at himself. “It’s true that some people seem to have… something wrong. And maybe Smerdis helps them. I couldn’t say. I’d rather deal with a god I can get an answer from, one who’s got a track record.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Aworo. The serving woman set down a pitcher on the table, took the old one away.

“Yes, girl, that’s just what we need,” said Nes Imosa with good-natured enthusiasm.

The woman was broad-shouldered and tall—a good six inches taller than Nes Imosa. She hadn’t been a girl for a few years at least. But she turned and asked, pleasantly enough, “What, sir?”

Nes Imosa grinned up at her. “More beer!”

As the evening progressed, and the serving woman brought more pitchers, Nes Imosa became even more voluble. How he’d learned the rumor and gossip—some of it from across the continent—Aworo wasn’t sure; Nes Imosa never seemed to stop talking long enough to learn a new story. But somehow, in the very early hours of the morning, Aworo was struck with a confessional impulse and found Nes Imosa listening intently, if drunkenly, to his intentionally vague tale of having fallen in love last year, been turned down, and left the woman in trouble.

The words in trouble had a galvanizing effect on Nes Imosa. “You can’t leave a woman in that condition!” He punctuated his exclamation by striking the table with his cup. “Where is she?”

“An island in the—” Before he could finish, Nes Imosa had Aworo by the arm and was pulling him up off his seat. “It’s not that kind of trouble,” Aworo insisted.

“Girl!” cried Nes Imosa. “Put it all on my bill!” And next thing Aworo knew they were stumbling down to the river to look for a boat.

The sun was just rising as the boat scraped the shore of the island. “I doubt anyone’s awake,” said the fisherman they’d paid to row them over.

“No worries,” said Nes Imosa and staggered onto the beach. Birds twittered, and somewhere along the shore a heron made its scratching croak. The fisherman shook his head doubtfully and Aworo climbed out. “Hallooo!” called Nes Imosa. “Aworo’s lady!”

Appalled, Aworo listened to the echoes of Nes Imosa’s shout die down. Five minutes later Saest came out of the woods, her dark hair down, a large brown shawl wrapped around her. “You!” she said, striding up to where the two men stood. “You’re drunk!”

“Best way to do this sort of thing,” said Nes Imosa.

“I’m not drunk!” said Aworo, and then staggered and dropped to his knees as the lie hit. A wash of nausea overtook him. “I didn’t think I was,” he said.

“Lady,” said Nes Imosa, with a courtly bow. “I am—”

“I don’t care who you are,” Saest said. “And you.” She turned to Aworo. Her voice had suddenly turned flat. He’d never seen her so angry. “Unless you’ve come to remove the curse you put on me, you can leave right now.”

Aworo looked over his shoulder—carefully, sudden movement was too disquieting. The boat was gone. He looked back to Saest. “I don’t know if I can.”

Nes Imosa pointed. “You! I know who you are! You’re Aworo!”

“I told you I was,” said Aworo irritably. The sun seemed awfully bright for so early. “The boat left.”

“Swim!” said Saest, and turned and walked back the way she’d come.

Saest lived in a house with two other priestesses of the Nalendar, who tended a beacon at the end of the island. What Saest did wasn’t clear. Perhaps nothing more than tend the garden and feed the chickens, which, Aworo thought, would certainly have contributed to her resentment at being stuck here.

Inside, once the shutters were open, was warm and bright—though not so bright as outside. Food cooked over a low fire at one end of the room. One woman rolled up mats and blankets on the floor, while another took crockery off a shelf. “What exciting work!” said Nes Imosa, digging into a plate of eggs with a chunk of flat bread. “Chasing down swindlers.”

“Yes, it was,” said Saest, with venom. She sat at the end of the table, still wrapped in the shawl, though her hair was now tied up in a blue scarf. A priestess put a plate of eggs in front of Aworo. He waved it away and put his head in his hands.

“Everyone knows who you are now,” said Nes Imosa blithely. “I’ve always wondered, why doesn’t the Nalendar just say something like, Everyone who tries to cheat me will die?”

“Too broad,” said the woman who was still holding Aworo’s spurned breakfast.

“She could narrow it down.”

“No,” said Aworo, still looking at the table. It was plain polished wood with a swirling, convoluted grain. “It’s too dangerous.”

“There are hard ways to do things, and easy ways,” said Saest. “The hard ways cost more. If a god makes a general statement, it could easily come true the hardest way possible. And it might have other consequences.”

“The more specific you can be, the more control you have,” said Aworo, not looking up. “For instance, if I knew what caused hangovers.” Saest made a derisive snort. “If I knew how they worked, I might be able to make a statement that would affect a very small thing, something that would ultimately end the hangover. If I were just to say that I didn’t have a hangover anymore—imagine all the conditions under which that might be true. Anything could happen.” He considered for a moment whether it would be worth the risk. He was revered on the plains, prayers and sacrifices were regular and plentiful, he was powerful. But he remembered the blow of the untruth down by the water, and decided he’d taken enough chances for one day. “The more things that would have to happen to make it true, the more power it would take.”

“What causes hangovers?” asked Nes Imosa.

“Drinking too much,” said Saest, acerbic. Nes Imosa laughed.

Aworo winced. “I never made it a study. There are other gods for that. I think it’s a couple of different things.”

“So it’s easier,” said Nes Imosa, “for the Nalendar to send out investigators pretending to be rich young widows.”

“We’re not all undercover,” said Saest, “but yes.”

“I’d be afraid to defraud the Nalendar,” announced Nes Imosa. “Much, much too powerful. Besides, the whole temple deposit system makes it so much easier to do business up and down the river. Very convenient. I would hate to do anything to compromise it.”

“You’d be amazed what people try,” Saest said. “People come in with forged seals every day. Sometimes they’re obvious, but sometimes they’re very well done. Or there’ll be a team—one person will deposit money in Kalub and get a seal for the account, and make a copy. Then a confederate will take the copy to another city, and they’ll both withdraw most of the money on the same day. It takes the messenger with the day’s numbers a while to reach the other temples, and meantime they’ve gotten away with twice the money they started with.”

“Ingenious!” Nes Imosa was clearly impressed. “And you track these people down and catch them in the act.”

“I used to.” She was bitter again.

“Friend Aworo,” said Nes Imosa, his voice scolding. “This won’t do. You’re just going to have to remove that curse.”

“The Nalendar has lots of people working for her,” Aworo said. “It’s not like Saest was the only one.” He couldn’t see Saest’s reaction, but he could imagine it. “Besides, I have to be careful how I do it.”

“You’ve had a year to think about it,” Saest pointed out.

He looked up. The sun shone in the open shutters, making her brown skin glow warmly, and her eyes… His breath caught for a moment, a stomach-turning combination of desire and shame. “I thought you were dead.”

“Ridiculous!” said Nes Imosa. “You should have known better.”

“Thank you,” said Saest. “So what have you been doing for the last year?”

He owed her the unevasive truth, but couldn’t bring himself to say.

“Looking for the mythical Higher Power,” Nes Imosa said. “The god of gods.”

Aworo was struck with horror at how much he’d said, that he’d thought had been vague and equivocating, during last night’s drunken conversation. “I really did think you were dead,” he said. “I wanted… if there was something beyond this world, or someone to forgive me what I’d done…”

“You were looking for justification,” Saest said. “When you decided to be human you went all out, didn’t you.”

Aworo sighed and put his head down on his arms.

He woke stiff and sore, still bent over the table. The sun no longer shone in the unshuttered window, the fire at the end of the room was banked, and he was alone. He pushed himself up, creaky and unsteady, and went outside.

One of the priestesses was throwing grain to the chickens. Without speaking, she gestured down the pathway that led to the shore.

A rowboat rested on the beach. A few yards away, Saest was conferring with Nes Imosa. “Drinking too much indeed,” Nes Imosa was saying as Aworo walked up. “But it seemed like such a good idea at the time.” Saest snorted and Nes Imosa flinched. “I beg you, madam. The light, the noise… I can hardly bear it.”

“Saest,” said Aworo.

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Saest, her voice even. “I don’t want your apology, I don’t want you to tell me you love me, or that it was all your fault, or all my fault.”

“But I…”

“You nearly killed me because you loved me?” asked Saest, angry again. “You leave me trapped here for a year because you loved me? You can’t decide whether or not to free me because you love me?” Nes Imosa winced, and backed away from her, but she ignored him. “I can do without that sort of love!”

“Aworo, don’t say anything more,” begged Nes Imosa. “Just get in the boat.”

Back on shore, they parted ways, Nes Imosa to a bathhouse and Aworo back to the guesthouse common room. Guests sat at a few tables, and over in a corner a knot of men were throwing dice. Aworo ordered cheese and bread and beer and sat by himself for some time, thinking.

Before he’d tried being human, he’d never thought much about Truth in the abstract. Truth was what was, the way things were. Once he’d been human awhile, truth became a slippery concept. Things that seemed true were provably not. Convictions presented themselves to him from nowhere he could trace. He’d thought Saest was dead, believed it utterly, and yet it had been untrue, and Nes Imosa was right, he should have known it.

He was afraid to state his motives for anything aloud, because he could never be sure if what he thought was true, or something his human mind had provided after the fact in some attempt to make order out of its own chaos.

Running away from the river that night, he had first been horrified at what he’d done, and the fact that he was running away. By the next day he began to entertain the idea that it had all been beyond his control, not his fault. The teachings of the atheists he’d spent the fall and winter with had reinforced that idea—this world was broken, corrupt. Nothing went as it should. Living creatures were merely following their natures, and no one was at fault but the power that had brought this flawed world into being. And none of it mattered. The only important thing was to purify oneself so that one could shed one’s imperfections and reach the universal Truth.

Over at the table where the men were dicing a familiar voice cried out. Aworo looked up and recognized the man in the green coat, who the morning before had sold the horse he’d claimed was one of Aworo’s own.

Before Aworo could get up, Nes Imosa sank into the seat across from him. “You’re looking better. Ha ha! Girl! Some bread!” He grimaced. “And a pitcher of water.” When the food came he took a chunk of bread. “I don’t think I’d like being a god. I mean, I’d like the power, who wouldn’t? Girl! Cheese!” He took a swig of water. “Feeling much better now, must be the food. But as I was saying. Can you imagine, never being able to lie?” He laughed. “Oh, ha ha! You can! Well, you can twist words around, but there are some things you just can’t get past. But now.” Nes Imosa looked up as the woman brought the cheese. “Some of those mussels as well, my dear.” He looked around and then lowered his voice. “What are you going to do about this curse? She’s safe as long as she stays on the island, it’s true, but I know I wouldn’t want to be stuck there. Not if I couldn’t leave. Ha ha!”

“The thing is,” Aworo said, and then waited as the dice players shouted, variously triumphant or disappointed. “The thing is, I didn’t specify how she would die if she turned away from the river. And I don’t know what would be likely to happen right now if she did.”

The mussels arrived in a steaming bowl of broth. “Help yourself,” Nes Imosa invited. “So is it something that’s likely to hurt you really badly?” He picked up an open shell and blew on the meat inside. “If it’s something that big, then it’s going to cost you that much to begin with, right?”

The mussels smelled good. Aworo took one while he tried to make sense of what Nes Imosa was asking. “Are you asking if since I spent a certain amount of power when I made the statement, it should take the same amount of power to take it back?”

“Ha ha. Right.”

“Imagine I’d said that a particular person was dead. And a certain amount of power were to have made that true. How much would it take, for me to take that back?”

“Ah! I see your point,” Nes Imosa said genially, scooping up another mussel. “So. I’m curious. Most gods possess a person or an animal some of the time, but that’s not what you’re doing.”

Aworo sighed. “No.”

“In fact—correct me if I’m wrong—gods hardly ever use humans that way.”

“I wouldn’t say hardly ever.” The dice players shouted again, and the serving woman brought a new pitcher of beer. Aworo reached out to fill his cup again, and then remembered the night before and took some cheese instead. “But not like this, not very often.”

“So, ha ha! Why are you doing it?”

“Because sometimes—not very often, understand, but it happens—humans do something completely unpredictable. You make such careful plans, and you think you know someone—I can know, from the moment a particular human is born, what they’ll look like and mostly how they’ll act when they’re grown. But sometimes…”

“Ah!” said Nes Imosa. “I understand you. All your ideas about humans are one thing, but being one is quite another. So, what have you learned?”

Aworo took another mussel. “Sometimes I think even humans don’t understand why they do what they do.”

Nes Imosa grinned. “Ha ha! Nothing I didn’t know already.”

As Aworo left the guesthouse, he glanced at the green-coated man. But there wasn’t time, not if he wanted to see Smerdis.

At this late afternoon hour the market stalls were empty and shuttered, the street eerily quiet, even with people gathered to watch the procession. As he walked by the fountain, he heard a familiar croak. The frog was still perched in its bowl on the edge of the basin. Next to it sat a young man, pale, almost girlishly pretty, eating something wrapped in bread.

“Aworo!” called the frog. “This is my boy.” The boy nodded perfunctorily, all his attention on his food.

“The one who sells your lotion?” Aworo asked. “What does it do, anyway?”

“It smells very nice,” said the frog.

The boy swallowed. “It moisturizes and refreshes the skin,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep. Aworo couldn’t place the accent.

“Isn’t he wonderful!” said the frog. “I got him from one of the slave pens down the street. He was a scrawny little thing, the dealers didn’t know what they had! Half of what he brings in I spend feeding him, but he sells a lot. Very popular with the women. They love the accent. So where are you off to?”

“I’m here to see Smerdis.”

The frog croaked in surprise. “Smerdis!” It shifted uneasily in its bowl. “Look here, Aworo. I’ve never met Smerdis, and none of the gods I’ve asked have either.” The boy laughed, at what Aworo wasn’t sure. “He doesn’t have an account at the temple of the Nalendar, it’s in the name of the temple itself, as a business entity. The Nalendar refused to open one if he wouldn’t come in person.”

“Then where did he come from?” asked Aworo. “How did he get any worshippers at all?”

“How should I know?” asked the frog. “I could give you a string of theories longer than my tongue, but who knows if any of them would be the truth?”

“What if his followers are right? What if he’s the Supreme? The god of gods?”

The boy snorted and wiped his now-empty hands on the front of his coat. “Smerdis is a fraud,” he declared, and before he could say anything else a long chorus of jingling started, and in the near distance, the procession came out from the temple gates and into the street.

First came a dozen men in conventional dress—the coat and leggings most men in the Nalendar valley wore—shaking long strings of small bells. Behind them, stepping sedately, came one of the largest, whitest bulls Aworo had ever seen. As Nes Imosa had said, its horns were gilded, and they shone bright in the afternoon sunlight. Behind it came more men, singing. “Is that the bull?” Aworo asked. “The one that answers questions?” Spectators reached out to touch it, and the great bull merely walked, slow and calm, behind the bell-shaking priests as they approached the well. Not what you’d expect from a bull. But definitely what Aworo would expect from a bull that was possessed by a god. His breath caught, and his skin prickled.

The priests and the bull were circling the well, still singing. He moved slowly forward and reached out his hand as it came by. It didn’t react to his touch, just stepped slowly forward, muscle moving and warm under his hand. He looked up at its head, its calm face, its eye…

Aworo dropped his hand and stepped back. Behind him the frog’s boy swore. “Hey, watch where you’re going!”

“Well?” asked the frog. “What do you think?” The bull was still walking sedately around the fountain, its attendants before and behind it.

“That bull,” Aworo said, and then hesitated. But he was sure he was right. “That bull is drugged.”

“How can you tell?” asked the boy.

“Its eyes.” The singing and the chaotic jingling continued, but the procession was moving away, back the way it had come. Aworo shook his head.

“It doesn’t necessarily prove Smerdis isn’t the Transcendent One,” the frog said. “But you’d think the Supreme God of Gods wouldn’t have to resort to that sort of thing.”

Aworo looked at the boy, who said, “I’m still hungry, can I buy a cake?”

“Yes, my dear,” said the frog, “and get a basket of crickets too.” The boy ran off into the swirl of dispersing onlookers, and the frog puffed a few times. “So, and what about this business with Saest?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Thinking!” The frog considered that for a moment. “Well, maybe that’s best, after all.”

Back at the guesthouse, the dice game was still in session, and Nes Imosa was watching it with great interest. “You’re back!” he cried as Aworo came in the door. “Girl! A drink for my friend here. And everyone else!”

“You seem to be feeling generous,” Aworo said as the woman brought him a cup of beer.

“A salute to Nes Imosa!” called one of the dicers, and Aworo saw that it was the green-coated horse salesman. The other dice players cheered.

Nes Imosa smiled and bowed. “Ha ha! Yes, I come to Kalub to enjoy myself. So how did your errand go? Did you find what you were looking for?” Aworo hesitated, and Nes Imosa suddenly turned serious. “No simple answer, eh?”

“That depends,” said Aworo, surprised, but Nes Imosa’s solemn mood was gone as soon as it had come, and his normal genial expression had returned.

The man in the green coat tossed, and then gave a cry of defeat. “I’m out!”

“Pay up!” said another man. “You’ve been throwing on promises for the last hour.”

“I don’t have anything!” protested the green-coated man. “I meant to win it back. I’ll seal—”

“Cash!”

“I’ll go to the temple of the—”

“You won’t go anywhere!” said the other man, and stood and crossed his arms. “I want the money you owe me.”

The man in the green coat looked over to Nes Imosa. “Friend! Can I seal a draft for some coins?”

Nes Imosa frowned. “I’m not sure how much I have on me…”

“Nes Imosa, don’t,” said Aworo.

“I have plenty,” said the man in the green coat, “but as you can see, this man”—he gestured to the other man—“won’t let me leave to get it. I’ll make it out for whatever you can give me, plus fifty gold more.”

“Fifty!” Nes Imosa looked pleased. “That’s a nice profit. Let me see what I have.” He pulled out a purse and poured its contents on a nearby table, a spill of gold and silver coins and a few coppers. “How much do you owe?”

“A hundred ten,” said the threatening man, and the green-coated man nodded.

“Nes Imosa,” Aworo began, “this man…”

Nes Imosa dismissed him with a wave. “Now, friend, please don’t interrupt.” He turned back to the dicers. “So I’ll give you a hundred and ten, and you’ll seal a draft for a hundred and sixty. Your gambling debt will be paid and I’ll be fifty richer! Ha ha!”

“It’ll be worth it,” said the green-coated man, casting a glance at his antagonist.

“I’ll bet it will,” said Nes Imosa, and waved over the serving woman and asked for a tablet. She stood by while the man in the green coat rolled his cylinder seal across the clay, and Nes Imosa handed over the gold.

“Now, sir,” said the serving woman then, putting her hand on the green-coated man’s shoulder. “We’ll be off to the temple of the Nalendar.” Before he could move she had a knife at his throat. The other dicer swore, and spun around and ran out the door. “He won’t get far,” said the woman. “There’s half a dozen of the city guard outside.”

“What!” exclaimed Nes Imosa. “What’s this?”

“You’re too trusting, sir.” The green-coated man made as if to struggle and she tightened her hold and pushed her knife just a bit harder against his throat. “Move and you’ll bleed to death.” He stood very, very still. “I’ve had my eye on this one for a while. You’d have presented that draft at the temple and found there was no money to back it up.”

“Look into his horse dealing as well,” Aworo suggested.

The woman shrugged. “Not my area.” She tugged at her captive. “Come on, you.”

As they left, Nes Imosa sank into the nearest seat. “Well!” he said, serious again. “That’s that, then. Now, friend Aworo, what are you going to do about lady Saest?”

It was as though Aworo had blinked and his vision had cleared, or as though Nes Imosa had taken off a mask. “Who are you?”

“I’m Nes Imosa,” said Nes Imosa. “A foolish merchant from upriver who came to Kalub to take the waters and have a bit of fun.” No ha ha, only a pleasantly serious expression. “Sometimes—because of my generous nature, you understand—I get swindled.” He smiled, but there was no sign of the expansive, affable Nes Imosa of moments before.

“Did the Nalendar send you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why not just say so?”

Nes Imosa lifted his cup, looked at it a moment, and then drank. “You could probably be forced to remove the curse one way or another, but it’s better for everyone if you’re persuaded instead.”

Aworo thought about that for a moment. “Is that a threat?”

Nes Imosa betrayed no surprise or indignation. “Does it sound like one?” When Aworo didn’t answer, he sighed. “Yes, it’s a threat. The island is as much as the Nalendar can do, and it’s hardly satisfactory. Saest is unhappy there, and it’s a terrible waste of her abilities.”

“The Nalendar wants me to just take it back?”

“I’ll be frank. You’re a very powerful god. But so is the Nalendar, and she could probably force you to do what she wants.” Nes Imosa picked up a pitcher, looked inside it, looked around for the serving woman, and then shrugged. “But if you were killed, or too badly weakened, someone else would fill your space. There are several candidates, none of whom appeal to the river Nalendar. She likes stability. Stability means peace and prosperity. Open trade routes.” He set the pitcher down again. “You’re powerful enough that taking the curse back would be a temporary inconvenience. At worst it might jeopardize your hold on the body you’re inhabiting.”

“But I haven’t…”

“Haven’t caused enough trouble?”

“Haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

Nes Imosa laughed. “What is it you’re looking for, Lord of Horses? Do other gods worry about things like that?”

Aworo thought about Smerdis’s bull, shining white, groomed and gilded. Drugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t, before I was human.” He caught Nes Imosa’s dubious look. “Does that mean it’s not a valid question?”

Nes Imosa shrugged. “I have no idea. But I do know that the Nalendar has very little patience for your spiritual crisis. And I’ll tell you what I think. I think it suits you to have Saest trapped on that island. When she can go where she wants, she won’t go where you want her to.”

Angry and indignant, Aworo opened his mouth to protest.

“Don’t speak without thinking,” Nes Imosa cautioned. “Being human is a game to you. You can always try it again sometime, if you lose this body. But Saest only has this one life.”

Aworo wanted to say, It’s not a game to me. But he knew Nes Imosa was right. “Saest won’t die when she turns away from the river,” he said, and was suddenly sick to his stomach, heart pounding, unable to speak. He collapsed forward, head hitting the table, glad he was already sitting.

“I was going to suggest going upstairs and lying down first.” Nes Imosa’s voice came from somewhere distant. “You’re a little impulsive, Aworo.”

When he was well again, Aworo went to the marketplace. The summer was well advanced by now; the heat rising off the flags wouldn’t dissipate until well after sunset, if even then, and the golden roof of Smerdis’s temple shimmered in the afternoon sun. The street was deserted, except for the frog resting in its bowl, chin on the rim, eyes closed, and the boy leaning nearby, drooping in the heat, perceptibly taller than he had been when Aworo had first seen him. He nodded negligently as Aworo approached.

“I’m going,” Aworo said.

The frog opened one eye, and then closed it. “Where?”

“Home.”

The frog opened both eyes this time and fixed its beady gaze on Aworo. “Saest went downriver.”

“I know,” Aworo said. “I hope she does well.”

“I think she will,” said the frog. They were both of them silent for a few moments.

“Gets hot on the plains,” the boy said. “The sun beats down.” His surprising baritone turned suave and melodious. “It does terrible things to your skin.” He reached into a box at his feet and pulled out a small bottle, black glass wound with a spiral of red.

“Clever boy!” said the frog. “You know, Aworo, you could import this…”

Aworo tossed a coin in the bowl and took the bottle from the boy. “I think it’s better if I just go home.”

The frog puffed thoughtfully. “But what about the god of gods?” it croaked. “Truth through meditation?”

Aworo shrugged. “I can meditate on the plains.”

“I imagine so,” agreed the frog. “But where will you get the drugged cattle?”

The boy snorted limply in the heat, and Aworo looked at him, eyebrow raised. But he couldn’t summon any real anger. “It’s safer if I go.”

The frog wiggled down farther into its bowl of water. “For that body, likely. You barely managed to hold on to it. But do you think you’re going to do something this stupid again?”

“Probably not this particular kind of stupid.” Aworo brought a handful of water out of the well and emptied it into the bowl. “But I’m not making any guarantees.”

The frog croaked its amusement. “Do I detect wisdom at last?”

Aworo thought of the long ride west, the hills that would give way to his own sparsely wooded plains, his home. He had been away too long. “I hope so,” he said. “I hope so.”

Saving Bacon

The continuation of the race is of course the first and highest priority of those privileged to be born into the ancient family of Vachash-Troer, and I, Slale Vachash-Troer, am so privileged. As a male, I am unable to perpetuate the family name, but one still likes to promote connections to other families of similarly distinguished ancestry, connections that, so I’m told, increase the wealth and influence of our noble line.

Still, I had a distinct lack of enthusiasm for it when Aunt Eone tried to marry me off.

The morning after my twentieth birthday I was awakened at an unholy hour by a tremendous pounding on my door, punctuated by snuffling snorts. For the first fifteen seconds I thought if I ignored it, it might go away. By thirty seconds, I was certain whatever it was would soon become bored with its own monotonous pounding and snorting. At forty-five seconds I staggered out of bed, flung a blanket around myself for modesty’s sake, and opened the door.

I was greeted by the sight of my ten-year-old cousin Athnal, a pink-and-black piglet at her feet. “What are you lying around naked for?” asked the child. “Aunt Eone says come to breakfast. In five minutes.” She held up a hand, fingers outspread. The piglet snuffled by way of emphasis. “Starting two minutes ago.” She smiled. The guttersnipe.

“I’ve got to get dressed.”

Athnal rolled her eyes. “Slale Vachash-Troer, you lazy good-for-nothing!” she piped. “Anyone decent has been up and dressed hours ago.”

I suppressed a shudder. Despite her diminutive stature and childish voice, the imitation of Aunt Eone was uncanny. “What are you doing with a pig, anyway?”

“Mother gave it to me for my birthday.”

Piglets, I grant you, possess a certain charm. But full-grown pigs are not particularly endearing. “What are you going to do when it grows up?”

A beatific look overcame her. “It’s not a pet! It’s an investment. It eats scraps out of the kitchen and doesn’t cost me a thing. Twenty-seven pounds of ham, twenty-five of sausages, fifty or more of roasts and chops. I’ll make an absolute killing.” At her feet, the oblivious piglet turned around to begin scratching the other flank. “Two minutes left! Come on, Bacon.” She nudged the pig with one foot and set off. It snorted happily and trotted after her.

I dressed, slung a bit of cold water at my face, combed my hair, and was off across the courtyard.

Which is actually a sort of wide opening in the middle of a loose U formed by three buildings—one of which, of course, was the dormitory where my room could be found. Another contained the headquarters of the aforesaid Aunt Eone. So in traversing the grassy courtyard, crossed here and there with cobbled paths, birds chirping merrily, the open side giving on to a lawn rolling down to what I assure you is a picturesque stream, I would have a relatively peaceful, even cheerful few minutes before facing my doom.

But acres of motley silk lay over the grass, obstructing every path, and right in the middle of it all was my cousin Nyss, in canvas trousers and shirtsleeves, hands on her hips. Servants were afloat in the silk, some sewing and patching, some busying themselves inexplicably about a sort of wooden frame. The birds did still twitter, merrily even. One little sparrow landed on the frame and cocked its head comically at the goings-on. But it was not the spirit-sustaining walk I had anticipated.

“Slale!” Nyss called. “Don’t stand there gaping. Aunt Eone wants you.”

“I thought you were finished with this business?” For weeks Nyss had built fires and set silk canopies over them and then watched the canopies fly up into the air.

“I established the basic principle, yes,” she explained in a patient voice, as though she were trying to get some subtle point across to Bacon the pig. “Fire evidently produces a substance that rises, and one can capture it in the right sort of container. So if I attach the fire to the container, it will be able to fly wherever I want.”

That was the sort of woman Nyss was—find a capital amusement like shooting silk canopies into the air, and then overthink the whole matter.

“Right, then,” I said. “I have a breakfast engagement.” And I edged my way around the piles of silk and across the courtyard, to meet my fate.

“Slale Vachash-Troer! You lazy good-for-nothing.” Cousin Athnal had been but the palest of imitations. This was the real article, the formidable Aunt Eone herself, the matriarch of the Vachash-Troers, presiding over the breakfast room in her favored chair, a huge, deep-cushioned seat that should have made six-foot-if-she-was-an-inch Aunt Eone look smaller than she was, but for some reason I had never fully understood did precisely the opposite. “I sent Athnal after you twenty minutes ago.”

I opened my mouth to answer.

“He was asleep,” volunteered that blight on humanity, my little cousin. She sat on another chair, toes touching the floor next to a bowl of bread and butter—object of Bacon the piglet’s absorbed concentration. “I knocked forever and ever. He answered the door naked.”

“You lying little—”

“Slale!” When roused, Aunt Eone’s voice could crack granite boulders. I subsided, incapacitated.

“Athnal,” said my aunt, in a strangely gentle voice. “Run along. I’m sure your tutor is waiting for you.”

“Yes, Aunt Eone.” The infant villain simpered, kicked her pig, and ran along. The piglet looked me in the eye and gave a chuckling snort before it dashed off after its mistress.

The table spread with bread, fruit, and cheese sat at Aunt Eone’s right elbow, well within striking distance. Of course, when it comes to Aunt Eone, “striking distance” is a matter of semantics, since she is an excellent markswoman and the breakfast table furnished a plenitude of ammunition. I knew from experience that the cheese would leave me smelling like goats for the rest of the day, and the crabapple preserves would stain my jacket indelibly.

Caught between my need for sustenance on the one hand and certain danger on the other, I hesitated only a moment before determining that come what may I would conduct myself in a manner becoming my ancient and noble name. I straightened my shoulders, approached the table, served myself, and sat in the chair the blister Athnal had lately vacated.

“How,” Aunt Eone said, when my mouth was quite full of cheese and bread, “are you to attract a wife with this sort of behavior?”

Inhaling cheese and bread is not an entirely pleasant experience.

“Well?”

I choked a bit more, and finally swallowed.

“Do you intend to spend the rest of your life drinking yourself stupid? And waking up hungover at noon?”

“Honestly, Aunt—”

“Slale!” Incapacitated, once again. “Before she died your dear mother asked me to look after you. I hired the best tutors. Sent you to the most reputable finishing school.”

As a result I could read—up to a point—and do a little arithmetic. I could dance without injuring my partner, and sing more or less creditably. I knew what to wear to nearly any occasion—including an unconscionably early breakfast. I could pick the right fork nine times out of ten, and the tenth time I could bluff my way to seeming fashionably, even charmingly, eccentric.

“At least you’re not a complete slob,” Aunt Eone said. “You clean up well enough. You don’t embarrass yourself at the table. Nine times out of ten, anyway.” She frowned. “If you’d only find some productive way to occupy your time.”

Productive? Could she… my nerve failed me at the prospect… be talking about work?

“Not work, of course. You aren’t capable of managing any sort of business. I mean the sort of manly things that make a boy attractive and desirable. Gardening or woodworking. Helping with the children.” I imagined myself tending to the dreadful Cousin Athnal, or those even smaller versions of her the Vachash-Troers produced, and shuddered. “What did you learn at that school anyway?” Aunt Eone continued. “Supposedly you can draw a bit, and sing.”

I opened my mouth to say, Of course I can sing, but a residual bit of cheese in my windpipe transformed my words into an inarticulate croak.

“That school has to have been good for something,” Aunt Eone continued. “Surely you can be charming enough to get Iraise Tas’taio to ask for your hand in marriage.”

I had, at the moment, a strawberry in my mouth. I spit it into my hand in the nick of time, thus preventing my untimely death from asphyxiation. “Oh, no, Aunt, not Iraise Tas’taio.” The Tas’taios were a grim lot. The one two years ahead of me—Iraise’s brother, as it happened—had earned the derision of every boy in the school by studying constantly and flat-out refusing to drink. Within three years of leaving school, he’d gone into business for himself brokering grain shipments and tripled his already significant inheritance.

At first glance Iraise didn’t take after the rest of her family, but she lacked a sense of humor; once when she was visiting her brother at school I put a handful of beetles down the back of her shirt, and she absolutely failed to take the act in the spirit in which it was intended, proof that even the most sublime of comedy couldn’t move her.

“Iraise Tas’taio is the best you can hope for, frankly,” said Aunt Eone, “and far better than you deserve. And”—she held up one hand, forestalling my feeble attempt to protest—“her brother is a hardworking and intelligent boy, if a bit womanish. I’d like to see him married into the family. I thought maybe he and Nyss… but she doesn’t seem inclined. Don’t sit there making faces. I have your guardianship, and I intend to look out for your interests. If I can possibly arrange it, you will marry Iraise Tas’taio.”

“Why me?” I had at least ten cousins of marriageable age. Some of them even actively wanted to marry. There really is no accounting for taste.

“You weren’t my first choice,” Aunt Eone said, her expression that of a woman who’s just found half a beetle in her breakfast eggs. “But in her letter Iraise mentioned that she was looking forward to seeing you. Obviously you’ve met, and you must have made some sort of impression. If Nyss won’t take her brother, we can at least ally with her. Beginning now, you will occupy your time in some sensible fashion—study, perhaps, or healthy exercise. You will go to bed at a civilized hour and not lie abed all morning. And when Iraise arrives tomorrow you will refrain from displaying your many deficiencies.”

“My…” Even coming from Aunt Eone, this was a blow to my pride.

“You will!” she commanded. “If you know what’s good for you.”

“Slale, dear fellow,” I hear you say, “you are a man utterly without difficulties. You have merely to disobey Aunt Eone and repulse Iraise Tas’taio—a task which you, with your great gifts, should find the work of a mere moment, and you are a free man.”

But you’ve never met my Aunt Eone. It’s no use saying you’d easily withstand the steel-spike look and the boulder-splitting voice. Until you’ve actually experienced these things, such claims are little more than empty bravado. Besides, unmarried men are legally minors, and as a result my inheritance—sufficient for a lifetime of companionably standing the occasional round down at the Weasel—was in fact controlled by the aforementioned aunt. The owner of the Weasel must have strongly resembled Athnal in her youth; propose to give her money, and she poured forth warm smiles and kind words along with her excellent beer. Propose to drink for free… well. Suffice it to say, one brief message from Aunt Eone to the effect that my tab would not be covered and I would no longer be greeted in that establishment with the affable jollity of former days.

So I did what I would ordinarily do in such a crisis—I retired to the Weasel, to take council with the other worthies who gather there.

In less enlightened times, boys didn’t go places like the Weasel. Not well-bred ones, anyway. Boys may generally have the advantage when it comes to physical strength, but rare is he who possesses intellectual subtlety (here I am, of course, an exception among my sex) and impulse control. Take two or more boys, add sufficient alcohol, and the result is raucous laughter, off-key singing, and airborne food—behavior decent matrons frown upon. Women hoping for a companionable pint in the local drinking establishment aren’t pleased when their peaceful moments are shattered by pickled radishes splashing into their drinks.

The proprietor of the Weasel, however, has taken to the city fashion of hanging a curtain across part of the room—a curtain that is, I can tell you from extensive experimentation, stiff enough to be entirely radish-proof. In the Gentlemen’s Saloon thus formed I could usually expect to find a few boys from neighboring estates.

Today there was only one other boy there, a younger cousin of mine, Beyan, with a half-pint on the table in front of him, absently rolling a pickled radish to and fro. At my entrance he looked up. “Hello, Slale.”

“Hello, Beyan.” I sat across from him, plucked my own radish from the bowl, and added it to the fray. “I didn’t know you were back from school.” Beyan was barely eighteen, still attending the same school that had produced me.

“Holidays. Got back this morning. I had breakfast with Mother, and the aunts.” The memory inspired him to take a gulp of his beer. “What are you doing up and drinking at an ungodly hour like this?”

“Same as you, dear cousin. Breakfast with Aunt Eone.”

Once I met a woman who had fallen overboard in shark-infested waters. Her fellow sailors had thrown her a rope and pulled her out just as one enormous specimen snapped its jaws closed on the spot she’d occupied the instant before. When she told the story, she shuddered exactly the same way Beyan did. “What did she want?” he asked.

I fortified myself with a swallow or three of beer before answering. “What she wants is me married off.” I gave my pickled radish a heartfelt shove. It rolled right over the edge of the table, bounced a few times, and then continued along the floor under the curtain and into the main room. Sadly, this is not a legal play, and scores no points. “To Iraise Tas’taio.”

“But the Tas’taios are a frightful bunch!” I waited as the full implications struck him. “And the things you did to her brother!”

The baskets full of crickets let loose in his hallway. Buckets of water poured out in his bedroom in midwinter, and the windows left open until his floor was an inch thick with ice. I smiled at the memory.

But Beyan frowned. “She can’t possibly want you.”

“Aunt Eone believes otherwise and is determined to promote the match. You’d better fetch my radish. It went under the curtain a moment ago. We’ll be for it if anyone finds it.”

Beyan was an obliging sort, and fetching a pickled radish from under a curtain should have been with him the work of an instant. But he delayed at the curtain, and upon returning sank heavily into his chair, making a sound like he’d just been hit round about the midriff by a whole sack of radishes. “Slale,” he gasped. “I’m in love.”

I saw immediately that crucial information had been omitted from Beyan’s statement. “What, just now? With who?”

“I don’t know.”

Further use of my excellent intellectual capacity led me to the conclusion that the object of his rather sudden affection was someone he had just now seen on the other side of the curtain. With this conclusion in hand, and determined to investigate further, I rose, went over to the curtain, pushed it gently aside, and surveyed the main room.

It was empty except for the proprietor of the Weasel, leaning on the bar and chatting with a thin, pale, weedy sort of woman, who was asking directions to the Vachash-Troer estate.

I returned to the table. “My dear cousin,” I said. “Unless you have fallen so hopelessly in love with the proprietor of this fine establishment that you are no longer able to recognize her, the woman you refer to is, in fact, Iraise Tas’taio.”

We walked slowly back to the house, Beyan staring glassily into the distance. He couldn’t just go up to Iraise and declare his love—nice boys don’t do such things, not without the risk of acquiring a reputation for being completely at the mercy of their masculine impulses, quite unsuitable as husbands. And Beyan was, truth be told, a nice boy. “She loves you,” he said in a spectral voice. He could have used another swig of beer but we’d unwisely left that behind in the Weasel. “I suppose there’s nothing left for me now. I’ll tell Mother I want to be a priest of Ritur-Peq.”

“What a horrible thing to say!” I cried, appalled. All the priests of Ritur-Peq I had met were terribly serious men who had obviously studied hard in school. When they weren’t accounting or administering things or brokering things, they were praying to their god. “Ritur-Peq himself is charming enough, I grant you, but his priests!” I shuddered. The last time I’d seen Ritur-Peq he’d asked me more than once to consider joining, and I’d been compelled to tell him that though I was certain his priests were all generous, kind fellows at heart (live and let live, I always say), I drew the line at actually being one. And anyway, Aunt Eone would never have allowed it. I thought Ritur-Peq must have been a few drinks the wrong side of clearheaded to even suggest the thing. Though come to think of it I don’t know whether ospreys can get a few drinks the wrong side of clearheaded.

“What’s the point of anything?” said Beyan. He stopped and sat cross-legged in the middle of the road.

“Get up, cousin! What if a wagon comes along and runs you over?”

“I wish one would!”

A small brown sparrow landed on the road in a flurry of wings and chirped, “Hello, Slale. You look dismal.”

Now, when a small brown sparrow speaks to one, and furthermore one understands said small brown sparrow, several possibilities suggest themselves. One might, for instance, be dreaming. I was, however, fully awake.

Next on the list—I was losing my sanity. But my natural strength of mind rendered this unlikely.

I was left with the only possible conclusion—this sparrow was a god. “Excuse me,” I said to the sparrow. “Are we acquainted?”

“I’m not surprised you don’t recognize me,” chirped the sparrow. “I was an osprey the last time you saw me. And I don’t visit the countryside much these days. I’m Ritur-Peq.”

I felt the beginning of an idea stirring. “Ritur-Peq, old friend, do you owe me any favors?”

“I do not!” chirped the sparrow.

Gods have to be tremendously careful that what they say is true. Or, if it isn’t, that they have enough power to make it true. There’s no changing the past, and a god saying unambiguously that something hadn’t happened, when it had, would end with his power draining endlessly away in an attempt to change the unchangeable. Unthinkably powerful gods had completely undone themselves by unwittingly uttering what was not and could never be true, godly powers or no. And here the sparrow sat cheerily in the middle of the road and asserted that he owed me no favors. That was the end of my plan. I would have to find a new one.

“You were quite drunk last time I saw you,” said Ritur-Peq. “But much happier-looking. What troubles you?”

I outlined the situation as I saw it.

“Well, now,” chirped Ritur-Peq when I had finished. “There’s no need to be so negative about my priests, you know. But sadly Beyan is too young. You have to be at least twenty to be eligible.”

“I’ll wait,” said Beyan.

“In the middle of the road?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t you rather,” asked the sparrow, “come up with some plan to solve both your problems? One that will put Iraise Tas’taio completely off Slale and put her on to you, young Beyan?”

Till now Beyan had sat in the road like a wilted, slightly moldy pickled radish left in the bottom of a bowl. But at Ritur-Peq’s words his back straightened and life returned to him, leaving him more like the sort of jolly, happy radish you can’t help but throw at someone’s head. “Can you do that?” he asked.

I felt a jolt of hopeful anticipation myself. “You could make Iraise hate me and love Beyan,” I suggested.

“It’s not that simple,” twittered Ritur-Peq. “I’m given to understand that emotions are, at root, a matter of neurology and endocrinology. I specialize in fishing and boats. Overseas trade. Some weather here and there. Imagine the damage I could do mucking about in someone’s brain.”

Put that way, I could see the difficulty. “But,” I replied, struck with another brilliant plan, “you could tell Aunt Eone that Beyan is in love with Iraise, and convince her to change her mind about me marrying her.”

“There’s a good chance,” answered Ritur-Peq, “that your aunt will dismiss Beyan’s feelings, or conclude that those feelings are inconsequential beside her own plans for the Vachash-Troers. And it may be that Iraise herself would still prefer you.

“Besides, relations between me and the Vachash-Troers aren’t what they could be. One could say there’s a coolness there. Your Aunt Eone, I gather, resents the portion of her taxes that go toward my support, given that most of her investments are land-based.”

“You gather correctly,” I said. “She’d much rather keep that bit of her money. But I’ve never let that influence my judgment.”

“You’ve always been very affable in your dealings with me,” chirped Ritur-Peq. “Though it’s possible your aunt’s attitude has colored your view of my priests. But I let that pass. I’ll keep an eye on the situation, and if I come up with a plan, I will advise you. If you do as I say, and it turns out that you won’t have to marry Iraise Tas’taio, you’ll owe me a favor.”

“What about me?” asked Beyan, still sitting in the dirt.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Change that to If it turns out I don’t have to marry Iraise Tas’taio, and Beyan does.” We were sure to come out all right if Ritur-Peq was looking out for us. “What sort of favor?”

“We can talk about that later,” the sparrow said.

I had, as I often do, another thought. “It’s no good if you get me out of marrying Iraise, but into trouble with Aunt Eone.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Ritur-Peq hopped along the road and gave a preparatory flutter of his wings. “Be ready to act on my advice at any moment.” And off he flew.

Iraise’s early arrival meant I’d lost even my one day’s delay of my fate. I arrived home to the news that Aunt Eone had commanded my presence at lunch, on the lawn leading down to the river.

A long table had been set out on the grass, and loaded with breads, sliced meats, eggs, and fruit. To one side were smaller tables and wide, cushioned chairs, and sitting in the chairs, Iraise Tas’taio in close conversation with Cousin Nyss, who was gesturing at her project, which still filled the courtyard. In another chair sat Cousin Athnal, strangely pigless, and beside Athnal, looking like a boy who’d just walked into a wall and hadn’t quite got his breath back yet, sat Cousin Beyan.

The house held three or four dozen other aunts and uncles and cousins, but none of them were present. I concluded that this was intended to be an intimate event, but that Nyss had already been in the courtyard, Athnal’s preternatural ability to annoy me had brought her here, and Beyan had been drawn inexorably by the presence of the woman he loved.

“We rely too much on the gods,” Nyss was saying to Iraise. “How much could we do on our own if we only put our minds to it? The gods have made us like children, dependent on them for everything.” She frowned, and looked as though she might speak further. I was glad she didn’t. I had no idea Nyss had such strange attitudes.

But Iraise seemed untroubled. “I wonder what the world would be like without gods, though.” She glanced over at the mounds of silk in the courtyard. “Athnal, where’s your pig?”

“Bacon!” called Athnal, and the silk in the courtyard rustled and writhed and Bacon came trotting out from under it, his nose covered in dirt.

“Self-reliance!” said Nyss, gesturing emphatically with the egg she was eating. “What happens to a person when she’s taught to rely on someone else for everything, when she’s got no strength and ability of her own?”

Iraise leaned to scratch the beastly piglet’s ears. “I kept a pig once.”

This information interested Athnal intensely. “How much did you get for it?”

“Only about three hundred. But I kept a ham and some of the bacon for myself.”

Athnal nodded, wise beyond her years in the matter of profit from pork. “I’m not going to do that.”

“Hello, Slale,” said Iraise, with a smile that set the hair on the back of my neck standing. “How are you?”

“Fine, thank you. Did you have a good journey?”

“Tolerably. You’re much more polite than you were in school.” I began to wish I’d said something extremely rude. Or that I could in good conscience put another handful of beetles down her back. But I couldn’t, not and face Aunt Eone.

“He’s not polite to me,” announced Athnal. “I had to wake him up this morning. He called me names.”

“Slale!” said Iraise, frowning, and I saw a ray of light in my darkness. Perhaps all I needed to do was abuse Cousin Athnal. But no, the guttersnipe was a favorite of Aunt Eone’s. The consequences would be intolerable.

“Don’t you have lessons?” I asked pointedly.

The wretch simpered. “Lessons, Bacon!” she announced, and ran off across the lawn, the pig close behind her.

“What an adorable child,” said Iraise.

“Isn’t she?” said Nyss, not even glancing at Athnal. “I’m planning a test launch in a few hours. I have a frame that will hold the fire, attached under the envelope, and the whole arrangement is tethered to the ground so it won’t just float away. If it works, I’m thinking of attaching a sort of platform someone might ride on.”

“What if Ritur-Peq were to find out and conclude you were threatening his shipping interests, with this flying thing?” Iraise asked.

At the god’s name, I looked around hopefully, but every sparrow I saw was indistinguishable from the others.

“I don’t care what Ritur-Peq thinks! Gods only have the power we give them anyway. If we stop praying, they starve. Why should we be afraid of them?” She set down her plate on the grass and stood and strode off to where her toy filled the courtyard.

I could only hope that such unconventional—and possibly seditious—sentiments would cause Iraise to declare her unwillingness to associate with the Vachash-Troers and light off toward home, never to return. Instead, she only raised an eyebrow. Then she turned to me. “Well, Slale, how have you been?”

This caused Beyan to make that radishes-to-the-midriff noise I had first heard at the Weasel. Iraise finally noticed him. “Are you quite all right?” she asked.

Beyan was beyond speech. “He’s having a difficult day,” I said.

“Try some licorice tea,” Iraise advised him. “So look at you, Slale. Last time I saw you, you were just a little boy, and here you are all grown up.”

“Cousin Beyan really isn’t looking well.” I tried to put a cousinly urgency and concern into my voice, but the words came out sounding like Bacon the pig had just bitten me.

“So considerate!” Iraise said, smiling. She shooed me away with a gesture. “Take care of your cousin.”

When we were well away, Beyan moaned, “I’m going down to the river to drown myself.” He sat heavily on a nearby bench. A tall hedge hid us from the courtyard.

“No you aren’t,” I admonished. “If you do that I’ve no way out.”

Beyan goggled, fishlike. “There’s no one else like her in the world.”

“She’s pale and skinny and has no sense of humor.”

For a moment Beyan seemed to take offense, but then he thought better of it. “Well. That’s all right, isn’t it. If you don’t like her.”

“It won’t be all right if I have to marry her.” Where was Ritur-Peq anyway? He’d said he’d keep an eye on things, but while sparrows abounded, none of them spoke up with a comforting Never fear, Slale, I have everything in hand!

The hedge rustled, and snuffled exactly like Bacon the piglet. I looked closer, hoping a talking sparrow might reveal itself, but instead the aforementioned pig emerged, snorted happily, and set to rooting in the dirt with its snout.

I looked at Beyan. Beyan goggled at me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

“How much you hate this blasted pig?” Another possibility suggested itself. “Athnal!”

The wretched child laughed, and came around to our side of the hedge. “Hello, Slale. Hello, Beyan. You look like a fish.” Bacon the piglet cocked an ear but continued to dig at the bench’s base. “And you’re in love. With Iraise Tas’taio!”

“You’re too young to understand,” sighed Beyan.

Athnal crossed her arms. “I’m never getting married.”

“Nor I,” I said.

“Oh yes you are,” the infant terror replied. “Aunt Eone’s decided.”

“But Iraise hasn’t,” said Beyan, hope lending a pathetic air to his voice. “Has she? What has she said to you? Did she say anything about me?”

“Hardly,” Athnal scoffed. “But I did overhear a few things I shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?” I asked, resisting the urge to throttle the waif.

“Well,” Athnal said, “Iraise’s mother has been trying to marry off that dreadful son of hers. None of our women will have him, of course, he’s a horrible, unmasculine thing. You should have heard Nyss when Aunt Eone suggested it!”

“We care nothing for Iraise’s brother, or Nyss’s entirely understandable objections to him,” I pointed out.

“You should!” The little brat actually chortled. “It’s because Nyss won’t have him that his mother told Iraise to visit us on some pretext and make her choice of the available boys. And she wants a boy who’s gentle and sweet, someone to place a cool hand on her fevered brow after a hard day of business.”

“I could do that,” said Beyan. “I would be very good at it.”

“But why has she fixed on me?” I asked. “I put beetles down her back, and turned her brother’s floor into a sheet of ice.”

“She’s angry at her brother for not having the basic decency to at least pretend to be a bit less ambitious, and sweet-talk Nyss. All the Tas’taios are just now. And the beetles are just one of those things boys do. You can’t help yourselves. But you grow out of it, and marriage is a civilizing influence. That’s what Aunt Eone says.” The child smirked.

I was struck with one of those brilliant ideas that, I am pleased to say, is habitual with me. “You could tell her that I am completely unsuitable as a husband, but Beyan would be an ideal candidate. She likes you, and little children can say almost anything and get away with it.”

I saw a slight resentful spark in the small cousin’s eye at the words little children, but her mercenary impulse overtook it. “What’s it worth to you?”

“Our undying gratitude,” said Beyan.

Athnal produced a sarcastic “Ha!” entirely unbecoming to a young woman of her age and station. Bacon the pig looked up from his digging project, snorted in support of his mistress, and returned to his excavation.

Athnal crossed her arms. “I want another pig. Or enough cash to buy one.”

We agreed, Beyan with pathetic eagerness, and Cousin Athnal set off, her pig in tow, to speak to Iraise Tas’taio. I took Beyan by the elbow and we took ourselves off to the Weasel before Aunt Eone could give us any further orders.

We returned slightly more cheerful, two hours before sunset. The piles of silk in the courtyard had become a floating globe, tethered and staked to the ground, straining upwards. Nyss and Iraise stood on the lawn watching, Aunt Eone’s wall-like mass planted beside them. A dozen or so feet away stood Athnal, also gazing at Nyss’s toy.

Before Beyan and I could join them a sparrow fluttered down onto the path in front of us. “Never fear, Slale, I have everything in hand!” it chirped. “Here’s the plan—go over there and give Athnal a good solid kick in the backside.”

“Your suggestion has its attractive aspects,” I said. “But I’ve already solved the problem.” I described Athnal’s commission and its price.

“Well!” exclaimed Ritur-Peq. “If it doesn’t work, you’ve my plan for a backup.”

Beyan spoke. “How will kicking Athnal…”

“As enjoyable as that may be,” I interjected.

“… get Iraise to marry me?”

“Try it and see!” chirped the sparrow.

“No, thanks.” I took Beyan’s elbow and walked on to where Nyss and Iraise—and Aunt Eone—stood.

Iraise turned as we came up. “Oh, hello, Slale,” she said, and smiled that smile that made my blood run cold. “We haven’t spent much time together, have we.” I felt Aunt Eone’s iron-spike glare driving itself into the side of my head, and winced. “We’ll have to remedy that,” Iraise continued.

Beyan’s condition had improved due to several hours at the Weasel, but on hearing the love of his life speak, he became once again altogether fishlike, goggling and gaping.

“Bacon!” called Athnal, and the piglet abandoned its intense interest in the dirt of the courtyard and ran over to her. She bent to scratch its ears.

“Let it up a bit,” called Nyss, and a servant did something with a rope. A stake sprang out of the ground, swinging in a way that necessitated a quick retreat on the part of the servant, and the silk globe rose straight up into the air, higher than the roofs of the surrounding buildings. It was still tied to a longer tether, and strained slightly riverwards as the breeze took it.

“I told you to put that stake in securely!” Nyss admonished.

“I did!” the servant protested. “Someone’s been digging around here.”

Bacon the pig sat on Athnal’s feet, looking innocent. It’s mistress was rapt, all her attention on the floating globe. Iraise shot me another of her blood-freezing smiles.

A desperate anger seized me. The little guttersnipe hadn’t carried out her mission. We hadn’t actually paid her yet, which was all to the good, but still.

When I decide on a course of action, I waste no time in pursuing it. I strode over to where Athnal stood staring at Nyss’ floating globe, raised my foot, and gave her a good, hard shove.

Athnal tumbled forward, caught her balance, and wheeled, swinging an upraised fist in my direction.

This disturbed Bacon’s equilibrium. He took off squealing in the direction of the rope that still held the floating globe pinioned.

I jumped back, narrowly avoiding Athnal’s swing.

“Look out!” cried Nyss. “Stop the pig!”

Bacon’s squeals took on a higher, more urgent note. Athnal turned her attention from me to him. As it seemed I was safe from further reprisals for the moment, I did the same.

The globe rose into the sky. The last, long tether that had held it swung from its frame, and tangled in it, just above the stake, hung Bacon the piglet, head down, squealing desperately, floating inexorably upwards and off across the lawn toward the river.

“You beast!” cried Athnal. “Look what you did! Bacon!” She took off running after her piglet.

I turned. Both Nyss and Aunt Eone stood watching the pig-encumbered globe float away. Beyan goggled.

To my utter shock, Iraise laughed. “Oh, Slale,” she said. “Thank you so much. It’s as if you read my mind. Do you know, that pig of hers bit me after lunch, and she demanded monetary compensation in case I had given the nasty thing indigestion! And this whole afternoon she’s been chattering on about what a terrible person you are, and how much better some cousin of yours is.” The sound of a demented fish in mortal distress emerged from Beyan.

The import of Iraise’s words hit me like a plateful of cheese from the angry hands of Aunt Eone—Athnal had delivered as promised! And instead of showering her with thanks and pig-money, I had kicked her in the backside and set her investment floating across the countryside. How far would she follow it, and what sort of trouble would she get herself into?

And any moment now Aunt Eone would be sending me one of those iron-spike looks.

I had no choice but to run after the brat and rescue her and her blasted pig.

I pass over the tedious details of the chase. Suffice it to say, six hours, a twisted ankle, and a nasty pig bite later Athnal, Bacon, and I pulled into the courtyard in the back of a farmer’s wagon, along with the remains of Nyss’s toy.

The only person to greet us was Athnal’s mother, who ignored me. I limped into the dormitory and up the stairs to my own room, where I collapsed onto my bed and knew nothing more until late in the morning when Ritur-Peq fluttered in through the window and chirped cheerfully. “There you are, Slale!”

It was perhaps due to pain and exhaustion that I could not imagine where else I would have been, and I said as much to Ritur-Peq, without opening my eyes.

“You should get that bite looked at,” chirped the sparrow. “And your ankle is all swollen.” I hadn’t realized birds could make that tsk tsk sound. “Oh, and your Aunt Eone wants to see you as soon as you’re awake.”

I reached for the blanket to pull it over my head, and discovered I had, sometime in the last few hours, kicked it to the floor.

“That would be now,” Ritur-Peq informed me. “But you should bathe first.”

“Slale Vachash-Troer,” said Aunt Eone. Not in the boulder-splitting voice, but something infinitely more terrifying, a tone that implied immense restraint and regret. “I am disappointed.”

Experience had taught me there was only one approach to take in such a desperate situation. I looked penitently down. “I’m sorry, Aunt.”

“Disappointed,” she repeated. “Why didn’t you just tell me you didn’t want to marry Iraise Tas’taio?”

“But, Aunt, I…”

“Silence!” The boulder-splitter was back. “Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted to be a priest of Ritur-Peq?”

One’s voice works, I have heard, by forcing air through the throat. I tried this and succeeded only in making a hissing noise.

My failure to answer was of no consequence to Aunt Eone. “Before she died your dear mother asked me to look after you. And I have. I’ve always been concerned with your welfare and happiness. I am frankly hurt that you would think me such a tyrant.”

“But, Aunt…”

The steel-spike glare silenced me. “I’ve spoken to Ritur-Peq himself. Everything is arranged. Now go.”

I went.

To the Weasel, to be specific. Just on the off chance the sparrow perched on the rafter in the Gentlemen’s Saloon was who I suspected it was, I flung a nearby radish at it, with a vehemence that made the bird dart away and utter phrases of an indelicate nature.

“You didn’t play fair!” I accused.

“I said… here, sit down. Boy, bring Slale a beer!” The boy appeared immediately and the sparrow hopped onto a table. “I said that if I gave you instructions and you followed them, and subsequently didn’t have to marry Iraise Tas’taio, you would do me a favor. And you agreed.”

“But…”

“I gave you instructions and you followed them. Are you engaged to Iraise? And furthermore, once you’d been gone an hour or so Iraise began to feel guilty for laughing at Athnal’s indignity, and to be alarmed at your impulsiveness. Beyan lost no time in laying his cool hand on her fevered brow. She has begun to be acquainted with the boy’s many virtues, and I’m confident they’ll be engaged quite soon if he keeps on the way he’s going.”

Here was cheering news! Beyan was a good sort, and while I would rather eat ground glass than marry Iraise myself, he clearly felt differently. There is, as I believe I said earlier, no accounting for taste.

The affair still had its troubling aspects. “But… I mean… me, a priest? And how did you get Aunt Eone to agree?”

“Oh, that was nothing a few tax credits couldn’t fix. And the fact that Athnal and Bacon the pig made it home safely. As well as Nyss’s flying thing.”

“But you had nothing to do with that! If you told her you did…” Surely Ritur-Peq hadn’t actually lied to Aunt Eone. “And you told her I wanted to be your priest!”

“I did not. I may, however, have omitted information that might have led her to a more accurate conclusion.” The sparrow hopped onto the rim of the cup, dipped in his beak, and pointed it at the ceiling. “It’s not particularly beneficial for birds, but it tastes good. Listen, now. Your cousin Nyss is on to something. Some gods believe they’ll lose power if humans make too many advances. I disagree. And I suspect humans will figure things out whether gods want you to or not. I’d rather help Nyss, and be one of the ones to profit. But she wouldn’t ordinarily even speak to me. This way, I cement my association with her family, I have an opportunity to do her a favor or two. And so I increase the chances that Nyss will consider working with me.”

“But, look here. I’m not suited to the priesthood.”

The sparrow took another bird-sip of beer. “I can use someone like you. A son of an illustrious and wealthy family, with a fortune of your own. You know the right people, you have the right manners. To the uninitiated observer, you seem incapable of intrigue or conspiracy. And you’re willing to take absurd instructions more or less unquestioningly. Sometimes I want a bit of mayhem, for reasons of my own, and it’s my opinion you’d be an excellent agent of mine in that cause.”

I furrowed the brow and began to compose a protest. But I could see no way out that didn’t involve facing down Aunt Eone.

“And did you know,” chirped the sparrow, “I have a small estate outside the city dedicated entirely to the production of pickled radishes for my priests.”

Hope seized me, undeniable as a suddenly released tether whipping itself around the hind leg of a black-and-pink piglet, yanking my spirits aloft. Perhaps my fate would be tolerable. Perhaps even a bit more than tolerable. “I don’t suppose,” I ventured, “that there’s any use trying to tell Aunt Eone she’s got the wrong end of the stick.”

Ritur-Peq made a tiny, feathery shudder. “Let’s think of happier things.” Which we proceeded to do.

I am pleased to report that the benefits of this resolution of events extended itself to all involved; Nyss continues her line in flying toys (with occasional advice and financial assistance from Ritur-Peq), an occupation that seems to please her. Aunt Eone, between the tax credits and the realization of her cherished alliance with the Tas’taios, became positively benevolent for an entire week after the nuptials of Iraise and Cousin Beyan, an event that also saw the dawning of a new era of peaceful relations between myself and Cousin Athnal.

I must, however, admit that our newfound mutual goodwill came at a sad cost to at least one actor in this tale; at the wedding I gave the happy couple, as a token of my esteem and affection, twenty-seven pounds of ham, twenty-five of sausages, and fifty or more of roasts and chops—altogether, in fact, some hundred and twenty pounds of Bacon.

Beloved of the Sun

I knelt on a woven mat. The room was dark, the walls barely visible. A low fire burned on the packed-earth floor. Human heads circled the fire, eyes shadowed, dark mouths open as though they were about to speak or scream. The fire flared up momentarily, and I saw they were round clay pots, the faces molded and painted on.

Across the fire from me sat a man in leggings and linen shirt, his face strong-boned and sharp, long black hair pulled back. Behind him sat a large, dark bird on a perch.

“She sees,” said a voice like wind through an empty jar. “She hears. She may or may not understand what she hears. But her mind seems to receive speech as words, not merely sounds.”

“But she doesn’t speak,” said the man. “Is there damage?”

My gaze dropped to the mat. The low fire made shadows waver in its surface.

“Possibly,” said the windy voice. “According to witnesses she was underwater for at least ten minutes.”

“Probably longer,” said the man. “And she wasn’t dead?”

A tiny fragment of shadow crept out of a valley in the grass mat, wavered, grew large and then small again. An ant. It crept toward my hand, that I had placed on the mat to steady myself. Or had I? I had no memory of coming here, of kneeling down.

“The cold saved her,” said the windy voice. I thought it belonged to one of the clay heads.

“We could torture her, to make her speak,” said the man. “But it might not work, and it would defeat the purpose. The sacrifice must be without perceptible flaw, and she would almost certainly be damaged in the process.”

The ant, having labored across the mat, set one delicate leg on the base of my thumb, then another.

“What threatens me?” asked the bird suddenly, in a grating, screaming voice. It flapped its wings. “Who threatens me?”

“Nothing threatens you, Lord Sun,” replied a chorus of airy voices. “No one opposes you.”

“Well,” said the man after a moment. “She’s damaged, so we can’t use her. Get up, Itet.” Silence. He stood, walked around the fire, took my arm—not the side with the ant, which was now halfway to my wrist—and pulled me up, turned me around, and led me out through a door into daylight, bitter cold.

The ground in front of us sloped away into white. Far below more white, a flat expanse of it, tracked with paths, and farther off high, square, flat-topped hills and low, snow-covered houses, and trees. Nothing in the landscape was familiar to me, but I felt neither surprise nor curiosity.

The tops of the trees were below our feet. Curving around the horizon to the right, a river rushed and foamed.

We walked down steps to a terrace, still high, where a dozen women stood, wrapped in furs against the cold, hair braided and pinned with bone and iridescent shell. Except one—her hands were bound, her hair loose and ragged. When we drew near, the others knelt in the snow, but she stood and stared.

The man loosed my arm, raised a hand. He held a long pin, like the ones in the bowed heads before us, dark wood inlaid with shell. “This was in Itet’s hand when they pulled her out of the water,” said the man. The staring woman didn’t answer. “I have seen it in your hair before, Eritiri. Itet was chosen to be sacrificed this year. And you were not. Did you think, if she was dead, you could win her place?

“I would have liked to make you watch her sacrificed, before your execution. But you have succeeded in that much, at least—she is ineligible.” A twitch of the woman’s mouth, the beginning of a bitter smile. “As for you, your body will be cast on the trash heap, a sacrifice for nothing and no one, like any common criminal.” The woman’s mouth trembled, and a tear formed and rolled down her cheek.

“Hondjetat, it will be you,” said the man, and one of the kneeling women started, head coming up and then quickly down again. She was very pretty, with a wide, round face and large, dark eyes. I shivered, wondering why I had to stand out in the cold. I wanted very much to be warm again. “All of you,” said the man. “Go home.”

Which was all very well, but I had no idea where that was.

Home, it turned out, was on top of another of those square, flat hills. The house was the same size as the building with the bird and the heads, but the fire was higher and brighter. A small crowd of girls in brown and blue wool dresses, blankets around their shoulders, stared from the back of the house, and six older women, similarly dressed, sat on a bench along the wall.

We stood just inside the door for three breaths. No one asked what had happened, or where the woman was who we had left on that high terrace. Then one of the older women asked, “Is she still the one?” Her pinned and braided hair was graying, her wide forehead creased slightly. Her face, with its wide jaw and jutting nose, was striking.

The woman holding my arm seated me on a cushion near the fire and set a blanket over my lap. “She’s damaged,” said the one who had held my arm, her voice expressionless. “He said it was Hondjetat now.” An itch below my shoulder blade made me think of the ant again.

The woman who had startled on the terrace sniffled. “I was never good enough. I don’t deserve it, it should be Itet.”

“This is no time for foolishness, Hondjetat,” said the older woman, clearly in charge here. “Or misplaced guilt. It wasn’t you who injured Itet.”

Then the ant crawled around the side of my ear, and a tiny, quiet voice said, You are Itet.

Was I Itet? Everyone had been saying so, but the name didn’t seem familiar. You are Itet, the ant said again. And Eritiri tried to kill you. But she failed.

Someone set a spindle in my hands, and it seemed I knew what to do with it. Some things you knew but have forgotten, the ant whispered. Some things you never knew.

There are many gods, but all share this one characteristic—their words must be truth. If a god says what is already true, it spends no power. If a god says what is currently untrue, its speaking must make those words truth. If making that truth takes more power than a god has, that god will be drained, injured, even possibly killed. This is true of every god, from the smallest, least significant, to the most powerful. Anything a god utters is a binding promise. Gods are therefore generally careful with their words.

Women bustled in and out of the house—there seemed to be thirty or forty of them living here. No one spoke to me directly except the ant.

Gods feed on prayers and sacrifices. The more extreme and elaborate the ritual, the more power accrues to the god. Someone pulled the spindle out of my hands and put a bowl of gruel in its place. The other women took their own bowls and sat around the fire on cushions embroidered with flowers and animals, or along the walls.

“It’s so cold outside,” said one woman, after we had eaten. “Let’s have hazelnuts, and stories. Can we, Essferend?”

“We already did,” protested Hondjetat.

“That was for Itet,” someone said. The older woman—Essferend—gestured assent. No one had spoken about the condemned woman all day. A girl hopped up, ran to the back of the house, returned with a skirt full of nuts.

“In those days,” said Essferend after a while. “In the days before the earth, there was the Sun. We know this to be true, because the Lord Sun, the god himself, has said it.”

No, sighed the ant, but the man working for him has. The sharp-faced man in the linen shirt, I realized. And unlike gods, men can lie with impunity.

“He made the people, and every good thing for their well-being and enjoyment. He shone unceasingly on the whole world. He said one day, ‘I will make other gods, to assist me in blessing the people.’ He made Crane and Heron, Snake and Lizard, Antelope and Wolf, Sparrow and Hummingbird, Fox and Shrew, Aurochs and Boar, Owl and Vulture, Squirrel and Mouse. Ant.”

No mention of creating the river, note, whispered the ant. He does not dare presume so far, even though so far she is his willing ally.

“After making them he named them. But when he had named Ant…”

An almost inaudible indignant hiss in my ear. The usurper did not make me. Ant was already one of my names.

“… Lord Sun was distracted by Ant’s capering, and so he forgot to name the last.”

Caper, did I? fumed the ant. For that one? Never! Flames snapped. One woman pulled a hazelnut to her with a stick.

“Unnamed and nameless, it roamed the world on thousands of dark and silent wings killing, swallowing souls. No one had ever died before. The people cried out to Lord Sun.”

We were already here, already part of a confederation of peoples who lived in what is now Lord Sun’s territory. We welcomed any newcomer who seemed willing to live at peace with us.

We were betrayed by our bonds to the river Schael. But the last one, the one he dares not name, even the Schael is wary of her.

“But Lord Sun had forgotten to name it! And as it was nameless, he could not speak of it. But Lord Sun heard the cries of the people. He called his creature gods together and said, Make flowers, as many as you can. They made flowers—cornflowers, poppies, chamomile, hawkweed, violets, every kind of flower. The Lord Sun covered his light so that the unnamed one would not see what they were doing. This was the beginning of night, when Lord Sun covers his brilliance so he may work his plans in secret, and triumph in daylight.”

The sun, said the ant, is a star. The world turns, and in the night we are on the side facing away from the sun.

“When the Sun rose the ground was covered with flowers. And in the heart of each one, poison. With its thousand wings, the nameless swallower of souls landed and drank. And poisoned, it died. And nothing that dies ever returns.”

That last is true enough, said the ant.

Though apparently I had died and returned—or something like it. The thought should have disturbed me, but everything was so distant, so unreal.

One would do well, the ant continued, to be sure one’s enemies are truly dead.

That night I lay awake on a mat while forty women and girls slept around me, and the ant whispered in my ear.

Any good-sized river (the ant said) can be assured of a comfortable living. Let it only be navigable, prayers and sacrifices will follow. The river Schael does not care if people love her or hate her, or who dies when she floods her banks. Does not care if war or disease destroy whole peoples near her. Others will eventually replace them, and they too will need the river, and sacrifice and pray. Children fetching water, fishermen, pilots of boats loaded with flint cores or copper or furs, anyone whose life depends on the river will make offerings in the hope that she will at least not turn against them.

Since she doesn’t care, she doesn’t—usually—expend any effort to harm them. The prayers and sacrifices continue unabated, and the Schael receives them and cares nothing for their origins.

I sometimes wish for a river more like the Nalendar, to the west, who takes an interest in commerce, who nurtures the peoples along her banks. But the Schael is the river we have.

We made agreements with the Schael, for our own sakes and for our people. Three centuries of careful negotiations, of convincing her that the agreements would not curtail her riverine pleasures and prerogatives. I would be an hour reciting the details of those agreements, and the specifics are not relevant just now. What matters is that when the interloper came, and offered her half of almost every sacrifice he received, she broke those agreements. It was a minor matter for her, so much power does she have, so delicately constructed had the agreements been, for her sake.

For all of us but one it was a grievous blow. Our words had been made untrue, and while we were still reeling under the sudden loss of power, that usurper who calls himself Lord Sun had but to speak us into captivity.

That one remaining, whom I am forbidden to name, older even than the river, capricious and chancy, ravenous in one season, abstemious in others, beautiful and deadly dangerous: She forced the interloper to meet her in open battle. At the point of defeat, she said, “When I confront you again, your power will be broken.”

The interloper, knowing that if she had the power what she said would certainly be true, said, “How will you confront me again if you are dead?”

And she replied, “Anyone who knows me can tell you that dying and returning from the dead is in my nature.”

After that he was at pains to remove all traces of her from his territory. Impossible, of course—even the empty space where her name once was leaves a shape that speaks of her. And if he suppressed all memory of her she might come on him unawares because no one recognized her. But he has done his best.

Which is why (the ant concluded) there are no butterflies here.

Over days the routine of the house became familiar to me. People would gather at the foot of our hill before sunrise to make offerings to Hondjetat. They cut themselves with small stone blades and bled onto strips of unbleached linen, which they burned. They called her Beloved of the Sun and begged her to grant favors when she ascended to godhood on the first day of summer. They left dried fruit and milk and eggs.

Hondjetat herself made bread for Lord Sun. Daily she left the house with the bread and a pot of milk, attended by two girls who laid blankets before her so she didn’t step on the earth. Anyone else crossing the plaza would look down and clear quickly out of her path.

The rest of us spun, wove and embroidered, ground barley and made bread. Essferend watched us all, and missed very little. She knotted and unknotted lengths of leather, counting things—quarts of barley, loaves of bread, pots of milk carried from outlying villages by thin, nervous children. How many received, how many consumed, how many needed for tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Days and weeks passed, and though I learned the names and the faces of the women around me, they never excited any other sort of familiarity. This did not distress me—I had nothing, after all, to compare it to.

It didn’t snow again, or rain. The autumn had been uncharacteristically dry, the women said to each other, and this winter as well: only the one snow, no rain. This did not seem to alarm them. Every first day of summer Lord Sun in the person of the hawk spoke the prosperity of the next year—plentiful harvests for those who had pleased him, less for any who had failed in their devotion. Famine, perhaps, for villages that had offended him. But no town or village had offended him last year.

The skies cleared and the air warmed. The tattered remnants of the winter’s only snow melted away, spring breezes gusted, and the women took their work outside and sat in the lee of the house. Below, Hondjetat made her slow progress across the plaza. The girls attending her had to scramble to keep the blankets from blowing away. Men in leggings and short cloaks, women in long dresses, brought their own work out or hurried back and forth on errands as mysterious to me as everything else.

I put a fine bone needle to bleached linen, made small, precise stitches with indigo thread. The ends of the cloth streamed and fluttered in a gust.

What power there is in deception! said Ant.

Stitch after tiny stitch. It would be the petal of a flower. One of the girls had lightly marked the outline for me with a charred twig. The petal was already beginning to take shape.

Gods can deceive. One may speak vaguely or in riddles, saying what means one thing but also another. Or one can collude with a human. Let the human declare himself the god. The god will provide any necessary display of godly power—including, perhaps, an unnaturally long life for that human. After a sufficiently convincing demonstration, people will believe all but the rankest lie.

The blue thread grew short. I tied it off on the back side of the design and unwound a new length.

It’s an old trick, but one that can only work for so long. The god in question must control or destroy any other gods who might betray his secret, and must prevent clever humans from discovering the truth.

I finished one petal and began the next. Around me women sang or chatted, spun or wove. In the silences between words or verses I heard the sound of stone grinding against stone, one of the girls milling barley for our bread next morning. None of them spoke to me. None of them ever did, except for simple instructions. No one seemed to truly acknowledge my existence. Except Ant.

Flower is its name, it whispered when I had started on the third petal. Cornflower. That blue thing there. It paused. Can you speak of a thing without naming it?

It seemed the urge to speak was beyond me, or knowledge of how to do it was lost with those memories that would have told me who I was and what I was doing here.

But Ant didn’t seem to expect an answer. The rapids you see are the one stretch of river that is impassable to boats.

A woman beside me set down her spinning, raised her hand to shade her eyes. “It’s a boat!”

We all stopped, except the girl grinding the barley, and turned to look upstream, beyond the beginning of the rapids. The boat was long and flat, nearly a raft with side rails and two small huts. Three quarters of its deck was covered with bales and baskets.

“We need salt,” said Essferend. She rose. “Who’ll go with me?” Silence. “Itet.”

For the first time in all the weeks I could remember, I was surprised, a distant and unfamiliar feeling that took me a breath to identify. But I had been in the house long enough to know that Essferend’s orders were to be obeyed. I put away my work and followed her down the steps, around our hill and down to the river Schael.

By the time we reached the riverbank the boat had grounded at the head of the rapids. A group of people and their luggage stood on the bank, confronted by Lord Sun’s men, who wore knives at their belts, and bows slung behind their shoulders.

“It’s my personal belongings,” one of the foreigners was saying to them. She was about twelve or thirteen and wore a long dark cloak which she held closed against the spring wind. “You know, personal.” She seemed confident and slightly exasperated.

“We search everything,” said the leader of Lord Sun’s men, placing his hand deliberately on his knife.

A woman in the girl’s party spoke. “We have nothing of interest to you. And we’ve brought the fee and will say the prayers. And see here.” She pulled a pouch from her belt, pointedly avoiding the stone blade at her waist. She shook the pouch open. Gold gleamed inside. “A little extra for your efforts.”

The man’s fingers moved just slightly away from his blade. He would take the offer, let the girl’s luggage through unsearched.

At that moment the wind gusted hard, and the girl’s cloak blew out behind her, billowing wide. Down its center was a black stripe, and on either side were wings of brown bordered in black with a row of blue circles inside it, and outside that another border of yellow. It streamed and fluttered in the wind, seemingly alive.

Beside me Essferend made a distressed noise and turned her face away. Lord Sun’s men drew their knives and stepped forward. The girl’s party drew their own weapons and closed defensively around her.

“It’s only a butterfly!” cried the girl.

The woman who had offered the gold said, “We have safe passage, guaranteed by the Schael and the Nalendar.”

The leader of Lord Sun’s men shrugged without abandoning his threatening posture. “So?” He stepped forward. “I’ll see what’s in those baskets.”

The girl made an exasperated noise. She bent and pulled a rope aside, yanked the lid off a basket. Curious, I stepped forward to see.

More butterflies. Dozens of them, copper inlaid with gold, wood inlaid with shell. Shining black obsidian. Tiny as a fingertip, large as my two hands spread out, every size in between.

“I,” said the foreign girl, “am the youngest daughter of the matriarch of the Zuxugo. If you hurt me you’ll have a war on your hands. I’m on my way to the Nalendar’s school, to learn reckoning and merchantry. This”—she gestured to the basket of butterflies—“is the fee for my schooling, very specifically requested by the Nalendar. So you see I couldn’t have possibly left it behind. And you see what sort of trouble you’ll be in if you threaten me.”

“We have never been defeated in war,” said Lord Sun’s man, “nor do I care about the Nalendar. Or the Schael for that matter.”

Yes! said the ant happily, almost a squeak. Threaten someone to whom the Schael has, against her natural inclination, granted safe passage! One step forward, one step forward!

Lord Sun’s man took one step forward.

Time froze. I was drowning, gasping, freezing. The scene before me took on a brown-green tinge, as though I saw it through cold river water. My lungs and throat convulsed, and I cried out, “Hawk!” A brown hawk plummeted to the ground before me, the bird I had seen in Lord Sun’s house weeks, months ago.

My mouth moved without my willing it, and I spoke. “The Nalendar has promised these people and their goods safe passage. I have certain agreements with the Nalendar regarding them.”

“You’ve broken agreements before, river Schael,” said the hawk in a grating, screaming voice. “What is the Nalendar to you?”

“And what are you to me, little bird?” I could feel the river’s anger, an icy flood inside me.

“Is she here?” demanded the hawk.

“I neither know nor care.”

The man who purported to be Lord Sun stepped before me—I didn’t know when he had arrived, all my attention was for the river that seemed to have filled my body and mind. “Mighty and beautiful Schael!” he said, his voice sonorous and pacifying. “Let us come to an agreement that will satisfy us both.” The hawk made an angry noise, but it must have seen the wisdom of the man’s course, and said nothing else.

I—the river—made no answer. The man seemed to take this for an affirmative. He walked over to his own men. “Let them go. They’re not to spend the night here. They can take the next boat downstream. And they can find another route home.” He came back to me then, and the hawk shot up into the sky. “Is that satisfactory?” he asked.

A wordless sound bubbled up out of my throat, and suddenly the river was gone. I collapsed shivering to the ground.

“Is she alive?” asked the man, his voice surprised. “I’ve never known a human to survive speaking for the Schael.”

To my own surprise I opened my mouth and let out a croaking, “I’m alive.”

“And speaking!” The man seemed pleased.

“What…” I swallowed. “What were those things in the basket?”

“Nothing!” he said. “Nothing at all. Take her home, Essferend. Put her to bed and give her warm milk with honey. She’ll feel better in the morning.”

The next morning, Hondjetat insisted I come with her to visit Lord Sun.

Though the hawk was not on its perch, the man sat in the circle of clay heads. Seventeen of them. I thought of the story Essferend had told, the first night I remembered. Crane and Heron, Snake and Lizard, Antelope and Wolf, Sparrow and Hummingbird, Fox and Shrew, Aurochs and Boar, Owl and Vulture, Squirrel and Mouse. Ant. I remembered Ant saying, He had only to speak us into captivity. They must all be tied here somehow, bound to the jars.

“My lord!” said Hondjetat when she had prostrated herself.

“You’re going to say,” said the man, “that Itet is cured and you think your place is rightfully hers.”

“Lord Sun sees everything.” Hondjetat sounded as though she were about to cry.

“I have reasons for everything I do,” said the man. “Your place is rightly yours. Or don’t you want it?”

“I do, Lord! I want it so much, only…”

“You feel you’ve stolen it, or gotten it unfairly. But you haven’t. Wipe your eyes and go home. All will be well. Itet, stay, I wish to speak with you.”

After Hondjetat left, the man said, “Ant! This is your specialty. Is Itet cured?”

The sound of air in a hollow jar became words. “In some respects. Her ability to speak is restored. Her memory, however, is impaired. She remembers nothing before her near-drowning.”

“What causes this?”

“I would not dare speculate. Some cases of memory loss are caused by damage to the brain. Others by an overpowering desire to forget things too painful to bear.”

“And the business down by the river? She shouldn’t have survived the Schael possessing her like that. Is it related?”

“I would not dare speculate,” said Ant airily. “But it strikes me as at least possible. She was in the Schael for quite some time. That sort of cold-water almost-drowning is rare. Victims don’t usually survive long after rescue unless assisted.”

“That’s an interesting thought,” said the man. “I’d wondered… it looked so much like she had died and come back. Which was worrisome. But at the time you said nothing threatened, and now I’m wondering if this isn’t the Schael’s doing. What can she be up to?” He looked at me. “Itet, go down to the river and ask her what she’s doing.”

My first impulse was to say, You go ask, but it occurred to me that the Schael might use me to answer. The man must have seen my hesitation, because he smiled and said, “Don’t be afraid. Just go ask. She is angry with me just now, but perhaps she’ll talk to you.”

The boat the Zuxugo had come on was disassembled, ready to be walked to the other end of the rapids. Two more boats rested on the shore, these pointed at each end. Those can go upstream as well as down, Ant said to my unspoken question. Armed men watched as the boatmen unloaded baskets and bales. I wondered if Essferend had gotten her salt.

I walked upstream until I couldn’t hear the sound of the people by the boats. Then I knelt at the edge of the water and called out, “River Schael!” And sat back on my heels. It was cold by the water, even in late afternoon, even in the sunshine. I shivered. “She won’t answer,” I said.

Be patient, said Ant, but before it had finished speaking a gray-green fish with a whiskered, pointed snout broke the surface two feet from the shore. Its head was large as a man’s. Its body must have been seven feet long.

“You again,” it said in a voice like water over rocks.

I had expected more time to compose my thoughts. “River Schael,” I said again. “Why did you let those…” I looked around. No one else was in earshot, but I lowered my voice anyway. “Those butterflies come down the river?”

“The Zuxugo procured safe passage from the Nalendar,” said the fish. “The Nalendar asked that I extend my protection to them, in order that she could keep her word. Their luggage was not an issue.”

“So you didn’t know?”

“I did not,” gurgled the fish. “Though it amused me. Those brave men, that god who fancies himself so powerful, afraid of a picture of a bug.” It gurgled more, and I realized it was laughing.

“Why,” I asked, wondering aloud as much as asking the Schael, “would the Nalendar require them to bring—” I stopped.

“It amuses the Nalendar to send humans back and forth carrying things,” said the fish. “And she is powerful enough that I do not wish to provoke her anger.”

I thought about that for a moment, and about the things Lord Sun most wanted me to find out. “Lord Sun is worried that… that she might have returned.”

Gurgling laughter. “The bird told me that she would never trouble me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was I who broke the power of the land-gods your peoples held in esteem. And in among the rocks of the rapids are the bones of her own people who fought for her to the last. She is older than I am and very possibly more powerful. And her memory is long. I think it likely that if she returns she will attempt to give me some difficulty, and perhaps the bird will not be able to stop her.”

“Why doesn’t he just say she’s permanently dead?” I asked.

“He would destroy himself if he were mistaken or if he were insufficiently powerful,” said the fish. “Humans—or something like enough—have been here two million years. But she is more than ten times older. One of the ancient ones.”

That didn’t make sense to me. “How could there be gods so long before humans? I thought gods lived on prayers and sacrifices.”

“They do now. Tell me, what is Ant up to?”

I blinked. Opened my mouth. Closed it.

“Of all the land-gods your peoples revered, Ant was closest to her. Now it keeps close about you and its handiwork is obvious in your mind. I saw it when I was inside you.”

Ant had said it wouldn’t dare speculate about the reasons for my lack of speech or memory. That must have been an evasion—it didn’t dare reveal the truth. “But why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Or did Ant’s surgery dull your wits as well?”

I had no answer.

“I would not trouble myself,” said the fish disdainfully, “except that Ant’s involvement—among other things—strongly suggests that she will be returning. I don’t care particularly whether she does or doesn’t, so long as she doesn’t cause me any difficulties. Perhaps the bird cannot ensure that. She is capricious and sometimes deadly in her caprice. She has reason to resent me. I do not think she is able to destroy me, but she may be able to injure me despite the bird’s promise. Tell Ant, if she gives her word that she will not trouble me, I will not trouble her.”

“But.” I frowned.

“I alone,” said the fish wetly, “matter to myself. What do I need that I do not have?” It dipped below the water and then reemerged, river water pouring off its whiskered snout. “Ant seems to think that each must be tied to another in a web of obligation and promises. I am not an ant. I do not care which queen rules what nest. In the end they are still ants, and still do what ants do.”

A web of obligations and promises. “What about your obligations to Lo—to the bird? What if I go back and tell him everything you’ve said?”

“Do, if it amuses you,” said the fish, and sank below the water. I waited several minutes, but she did not return.

That night, when everyone was asleep, Hondjetat crept over to where I lay on my mat. “Itet,” she whispered.

I propped myself up on one elbow. One of the girls sighed, muttered unintelligibly, and was still again.

Hondjetat was a motionless, crouching shadow in the dark. “I cried when I heard it was to be you, and not me. I wished…” She stopped.

For a moment I didn’t understand. “You wished I would die,” I guessed. She’d almost gotten her wish.

“When they brought you in from the river that night, I thought no, that wasn’t what I really wanted! But it was. I’d wished for it.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” I sat up, pulled my blanket up around my shoulders against the chill night air. “You’re not a god, your wishes don’t come true.”

“But I’m going to be a god after…” She didn’t finish.

“Are you afraid?” Just like my almost-death, she’d wished and wished, and then it had happened.

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“To…” She hesitated. “To be so close to a god.”

I hadn’t thought much about what it was Eritiri had tried to kill me for, about what it meant, that honor that Hondjetat had cried over losing, wished me dead over. I felt foreign, uninvolved in what was happening. And no one had contradicted that feeling. No one had been particularly kind, or behaved as though they had any attachment to me.

The Beloved of the Sun, said Ant, tiny and quiet, is decked with flowers and ornaments of shell and copper and gold. She is burned alive on the first terrace of the interloper’s mound. Willing self-sacrifice holds a great deal of power, and she carries with her the prayers of the people, accumulated over months. It is a feast for the god who can achieve such a thing.

“I didn’t die,” I said to Hondjetat, when I thought I could master my voice. “The river only used me to speak. So I can’t tell you what it’s like to die, or to become a god.” I thought a moment. “You wanted it so badly, and now you have it and it frightens you. Are you afraid to admit to Lord Sun that you don’t want it?”

“No! I want it more than anything. It’s what I was born for. I am nervous… frightened,” she amended. “A little. But Lord Sun said it won’t hurt.”

The man, or the bird, I wondered?

“It’s not that,” Hondjetat continued. “It’s… I remember what it was like, when we heard it would be you. I thought my whole life was over. I don’t want to make anybody feel like that. And how much worse it must be, to know you had it but then it was taken away from you.”

Hondjetat had so far struck me as teary and vacuous. Now I saw she was also absurdly generous, and I found I liked her for it. “I’m not angry. I’m not jealous. You didn’t steal anything from me.”

Hondjetat kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you!”

When I am free to speak as I wish, said Ant, oh, what words I will say.

Even captive, Ant had plenty of words. All night it whispered, telling me about the flavor of the dirt under the city, the extent of Lord Sun’s territory, the lives of ants, from eggs to larvae to pupae to adults. The diplomatic maneuvering of sister queens and their attendants. Schisms and epic battles.

Butterflies, Ant said, tickling the inside of my ear, also go from egg to larva to pupa. The pupae develop inside a case that hangs from leaves or tree branches, or lies underground. Because they are helpless during this time, the case is often disguised as a twig, or a dead leaf, or something else a bird wouldn’t want to eat.

For some species the transformation takes mere days. For others—in the desert, or on cold mountaintops—the pupae lie dormant for years, until it rains or the air warms sufficiently. Many peoples, including the Zuxogo, and your peoples before the usurper came, consider butterflies to be a symbol of rebirth and resurrection.

“Ant,” I whispered. I wanted to sleep.

It hasn’t rained all spring.

“Ant.”

It’s almost morning. You should get some sleep.

I sighed but didn’t answer, and knew nothing more until morning.

When I woke I went to see Lord Sun. I heard voices through the door, the chorus of clay heads sighing, “Nothing threatens Lord Sun. No one opposes him.”

“Say it again,” came the man’s voice.

“Nothing threatens Lord Sun. No one opposes him. Nothing prevents the rain.”

“Something prevents it,” insisted the man.

Nothing, sighed the voice of Ant.

I thought of the river telling me Ant was closest to her. The door opened, and I entered and prostrated myself.

“What did the Schael say?” asked the man.

I repeated the river’s words about not knowing what the Zuxugo had carried, about neither knowing nor caring about the Nalendar’s desires.

“But something is wrong,” said the man.

“All of you say it!” screamed the bird.

“Nothing threatens Lord Sun,” chorused the clay heads in fluting, discordant moans. “No one opposes him. Nothing prevents the rain.”

Silence, then, as though we waited for something.

“Go down to the river, girl,” shrieked the hawk. “Listen if it speaks to you. Tell me what you hear.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“And,” added the man, “don’t tell anyone what you’ve seen and heard here.”

I took my spinning to the riverside. Now I could speak, I hadn’t spoken much to the other women, nor they to me, but it was oddly lonely with nothing but the rush of the river in my ears.

“Ant,” I said, “what prevents the rain?”

Nothing, said the ant. It sounded pleased with itself.

“Then why doesn’t it rain?”

How did you get your name?

I frowned. “It’s just what people call me.”

If people called you Woman Who Spins, would that be your name?

“I don’t know. Is that how names work?”

Is Lord Sun, Lord Sun?

“You say not.” Movement in the grass beside me caught my eye. A stubby fragment of stick wiggled forward and back, slowly moving toward me. I wound thread, set down my spindle, leaned forward to look.

An ant, larger than the one sitting inside my ear. The stick it carried was still much larger than it was. Looking closer I saw it wasn’t a stick, but something mottled in a way that suggested it was. “What is this?”

That, said Ant, is a very small part of a very large surprise. It’s almost the last. It has taken a long time to collect them, and bring them such a long distance, and put them in place.

I remembered Ant whispering to me about butterfly pupae disguised as twigs or dried leaves. “You said there were no butterflies here.”

There aren’t. But look, here comes Essferend.

I looked up. Essferend strode purposefully along the shore toward me, and sat beside me without greeting me. I picked up my spindle, suddenly guilty for shirking.

“I heard what you said to Hondjetat last night,” Essferend said after a while. “You’ve changed.”

She seemed to want an answer. “Have I?”

“You don’t remember.” Her habitual frown deepened, her mouth grew tighter. “You laughed at her. You mocked her for even daring to think she might be chosen. For two weeks you spoke of nothing but being Lord Sun’s beloved. How much better you were than Hondjetat or Eritiri. You were insufferable. Eritiri only did what everyone else wanted to do.”

If I had remembered, perhaps I would have been ashamed. But it was as though Essferend was talking about a stranger. She never liked you, said Ant. I wound thread and let the spindle drop. “You were passed over,” I guessed. “You wanted it as badly as Hondjetat, or Eritiri.”

“You’re not different after all,” said Essferend bitterly. “Just quieter about it.”

“I don’t remember anything. I only understood after Hondjetat spoke last night. That everyone comes to that house hoping to be chosen.”

“Each year three villages send a thirteen-year-old girl. One conceived and raised for no other purpose than to serve Lord Sun. When those three girls are twenty years old, Lord Sun chooses one to be his beloved.”

That would explain the twenty or so adolescents. But what about the older women? The house held far fewer than it should. “What happens to the ones who aren’t chosen?”

“Some stay at the house. Some live in the villages and only visit the house occasionally. Some kill themselves.”

“It’s a wonder there haven’t been more murders.”

“I keep order,” said Essferend.

Poor Essferend, whispered Ant. Far too competent to be wasted in the fire.

“Hondjetat is very kindhearted,” I said.

“She’s silly, and weak-minded. But Lord Sun has chosen her.”

“He chose you to run the house. Someone silly and weak-minded couldn’t do it.”

“So he told me.” But her frown didn’t lessen. “If I had done my job right, Eritiri would never have done what she did.”

Suddenly I was sorry for Essferend. Her position of authority was, in her mind, a poor second place. She was too proud to accept less than perfection from herself, even so. And she had failed in that perfection. “What would have happened if someone silly or weak-minded had been in charge?”

Essferend gave a bitter half-laugh. “You’d be at each other’s throats. And you’d run out of barley halfway through winter, and waste half the milk.”

I didn’t see any reason to comment on that. “Why was everyone so afraid of that girl’s cloak? What was that in her basket?”

“It was nothing.” She made a dismissive gesture.

“If Lord Sun is the creator of everything, the most powerful god of all, why is he afraid of—”

“Lord Sun is afraid of nothing,” said Essferend firmly.

Lord Sun is afraid of nothing, echoed Ant happily.

“But if—”

“Hush! You’ve lost your memory or you’d know better. This is the sort of thing foreigners ask. They don’t know Lord Sun, they’ve been told all sorts of lies.”

“Why hasn’t it rained all spring?” I asked.

“It will rain when Lord Sun wishes it. In the meantime”—she gestured around—“you see the plants all growing.”

No rain over his territory for months, remarked Ant. If he failed to promise harvests, if he failed to deliver prosperity, his fraud would be exposed. And this year all his attempts to make it rain have come to nothing.

“You must be right,” I said to Essferend. “I know so little.”

“It isn’t your fault,” she said, as though she didn’t actually believe it, and rose and walked back downstream.

When she was out of sight, the fish broke the water nearby. “Tell Ant to tell her that he asked me to flood,” said the Schael, whiskered and wet. “But it would mean flooding upstream and downstream from the bird’s territory, and I have agreements.”

“I thought no one mattered but you?” I thought of Ant telling me the Schael made agreements only reluctantly. “I thought you didn’t like obligations.”

“Some obligations are unavoidable,” said the Schael. “Besides, the bird annoys me.” And it was gone under the water.

Daily, Ant said, hourly, he loses strength that the sunrise and sunset prayers of the people are not sufficient to replace. He needs Hondjetat.

“Why?” I asked. “Why is it so draining?”

It can be very simple to make weather if circumstances favor you, if you know what you’re about. Given an amenable climate. But to make crops thrive without water—this is contrary to nature, this is not merely pushing clouds or changing breezes. All life requires water to survive, and so he must achieve a near impossibility at every moment, each stalk of barley, each radish and lettuce in each household garden must be made to thrive despite its lack. And though the barley will be in soon, the berries must also be fruitful, and the orchards, all summer.

“But nothing causes this.”

I have said so, answered Ant, and have lost nothing in the saying. It is therefore true. And I will say another true thing—it will rain before the first day of summer.

Two days before Hondjetat was to die, it rained—no thunder, no wind, just solid, pounding rain. I couldn’t go down to the river, and Hondjetat couldn’t even go across the plaza to bring Lord Sun his bread.

It stopped the next morning. Puddles of water silvered the plaza, irregular patches of gravel showing through here and there. Clouds of steam rose from the first terrace of Lord Sun’s mound. “Lord Sun is drying the wood out for the fire,” Hondjetat reported.

We woke the next morning before sunrise to make Hondjetat ready. One of the girls went out for water and immediately came back in the door. “Essferend,” she said in a tiny, panicked voice. Essferend went out. I followed her.

At first I thought the plaza below had flooded. The sky was just beginning to light, and where I had seen puddles of water yesterday now I saw a dark, slowly heaving mass. Now and then it would splash up in places like spume, hover, and then flutter down again. Essferend turned, took my arm, and pulled me back inside.

Everyone was motionless and silent, watching us. “Get back to work!” Essferend snapped.

“What is it?” asked the girl who had ventured outside.

“Lord Sun will deal with it.”

Not ten minutes later one of the junior priests knocked on our door. When we admitted him he was holding his short cloak close around his shoulders. He trembled and jumped, brushing his arms and legs convulsively, and told Essferend that Lord Sun wanted to see me.

“Work!” commanded Essferend, and the women looked away from her, away from the priest, and bent to their work again. But Hondjetat stared at me, eyes wide.

I went without saying anything to anyone. The light had increased, and as I set foot on the plaza I saw that it was one huge mass of butterflies. A cloud of them flew up where I stepped. One brushed against my cheek, and I started, setting more aflutter.

I had seen the image in the Zuxugo girl’s cloak, in the basketful of butterflies she had brought, but those had been stylized and lifeless. These were alive, brown, with one wide, staring eye on each upper wing. They didn’t fly straight as the hawk would have, but bobbed and circled, haphazard. The river Schael had called them bugs, and they were that, six-legged, with large black eyes and antennae. Their wings were far more delicate than any gold or stone image could depict.

I was afraid. “Ant.” No answer. “Ant?”

I took another step. And another, and another, all the way across the plaza, butterflies billowing up each time I set my foot down. When I reached Lord Sun’s mound and began to climb, they dropped away from me.

The clay gods lay shattered, fragments strewn all over the floor of the house, even in the fire. So, I thought, Ant and the others must be freed, or destroyed. That must be why Ant hadn’t answered me.

The man lay dead, the bird perched on his motionless chest. “He meant to betray me,” it screamed. “Take this knife…” The hawk pulled a stone blade from the man’s belt with its beak. “And kill Hondjetat.”

For a moment I couldn’t think how to answer that. Then I found my voice. “Lord, you’ve dried the wood out, I saw it when I came up. Why not bring her here?” I was only delaying. I didn’t want to kill anyone, least of all sweet-tempered Hondjetat.

“She will attempt to prevent it if she sees. You can go stealthily, and work inside the house where she will not see you.”

“You could…”

“If I leave the house I will be subject to an old curse.” When next I confront you your power will be broken, she had said. “But I think she has given me a nice calculation of her strength. It seems to me that if she were confident she could defeat me no matter my resources, she would not have timed her arrival so close before the most important sacrifice of the year, the one I do not share with the Schael precisely because it is so potent. By my reasoning, she must believe that once the sacrifice takes place her chances of victory must be lessened, if not erased entirely.”

“And therefore you are not currently strong enough to stand against her,” I concluded. A thrill of fear left me slightly sick. “You aren’t really the creator of the world, are you, because if you were…”

“That issue is not currently relevant,” said the hawk.

“If…” My voice faltered and I began again. “If I do this, if I kill Hondjetat for you, will she become a goddess?”

The hawk eyed me warily from one side of its head. “No. She will merely die. You, on the other hand—if you do this for me you will have wealth and power and the people will revere you. You could live for centuries in such luxury. Does that not appeal to you?” I said nothing. “Come, Itet,” said the hawk. “Have you not always known you were better than the others? Do you not know in your heart that you deserve this, and more?”

I remembered Essferend saying, Eritiri only did what everyone else wanted to do. That other Itet, the one I no longer remembered, had been vain and cruel. The hawk must have known this, must have known such an offer would tempt her.

It didn’t tempt me. But I couldn’t refuse and live, I was sure. I picked up the knife. “So you aren’t the creator god. You didn’t make the others.”

The hawk flapped its wings, settled again. “I have taken care of the people, given them food, and health, and safety from invasion. Do you care who rules, so long as you have what you want?”

There was, I saw suddenly, a reverse of that. Did he care about anyone else, so long as he had what he wanted? What happened when the health and safety of the people were no longer to his advantage? At least the Schael admitted openly that she didn’t care.

But I knew nothing of this Nameless One, except what her own ally had told me, that she was capricious and dangerous. “She’s down in the plaza. I’m afraid she won’t let me cross, to do what you want me to do.”

“I guarantee your safety, leaving here and crossing the plaza today. Put the knife under your dress so she doesn’t see it. Kill Hondjetat, dedicate her death to me, and then stay in the house. Don’t come out until I tell you it’s safe.”

I went down to the plaza, the knife under my dress cold against my body. At my first step into the mass of butterflies they flew up, circled around me, and then coalesced into a vaguely human shape that hung in the air in front of me, swirling like smoke. “I am nothing,” it whispered, a shushing susurration. “I am no one. Every criminal dedicated to me, every foreigner executed for speaking an unseemly truth, has only made me stronger.”

“Why should I prefer your rule to his?” I asked, my mouth dry with fear.

“I never ruled,” the butterflies whispered. “I was one in an association. But if you would have a reason for his destruction, consider that his authority is built on deception. He must keep the world away or bring it under his rule, to keep his seat secure. When he topples—when, I say—he will take his followers down with him.”

The Schael had said the butterfly’s people had died fighting for her, that their bones were among the stones in the rapids. “Like your followers, at the bottom of the river?”

“I did not deceive them. They followed me from their own free choice. I did not lead them to their deaths with lies.”

“And yet,” I answered, “you led them to their deaths.”

“All humans die. The question is only when and how. Would you prefer a death you chose knowing the true circumstances? Or would you prefer to die deluded?”

“I would prefer not to die.”

“You have no choice in the matter. No, I do not threaten you. I only speak the truth.”

“I see little difference between you and Lord Sun.”

“Do you not?” asked the butterflies. “The one you call Lord Sun stands alone at this moment, his allies have deserted him. He gained them with bribes, or compulsion. It was a simple matter to deprive him through the same means. My allies are not so easily turned.”

The hawk had guaranteed my safety across the plaza, but this god frightened even him. “I’m going to walk now,” I said, more to bolster my courage than to communicate with the butterflies. “I’m going back to the house.”

The butterflies collapsed into a swirling cloud and then fluttered away to join the mass on the plaza ground.

I stepped forward and a cloud of butterflies enveloped me, dashing themselves against me. “You will die!” they shushed. “You will weep in terror and I will drink your tears and your blood!”

I put my hands over my face, terrified. But after a few seconds I realized I was unhurt. The butterflies still assaulted me, still insisted I would die, but nothing beyond that had happened.

I moved my fingers apart so I could see while still keeping butterflies out of my face, and walked across the plaza, step by slow and careful step, thinking hard the whole way about what choices I had, and what I should do.

Hondjetat sat on a bench by the wall, still dressed in her sacrificial finery, linen weighed down with embroidery and copper and gold. She wept, one woman on either side of her holding her hands. Others spun, or wove, or sewed, Essferend looking on.

“Hondjetat,” I said. “Come here.”

She sniffled, and swallowed a sob. The women beside her helped her to her feet.

“I want to speak privately. Let’s go to the back of the house.”

She made a gesture of assent. I took her arm and we walked to the back of the house and sat on the end of the bench there. “Why are you crying?” I whispered.

“Oh, Itet,” she moaned.

“Quietly.” I hushed her with a gesture.

“You were meant for this,” she said in a tremulous whisper. “You were so sure and so brave.”

“You’re relieved that it seems like the sacrifice won’t happen,” I guessed. “You’re hoping it won’t. And ashamed of that.”

She sniffled again. “I wouldn’t be afraid if I was meant for it. You weren’t afraid.”

“Listen, and don’t make a sound the others can hear. The women who have burned every first day of summer haven’t become gods. They died to give Lord Sun power. Their only reward was to burn to death.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you like,” I said. “It’s true. The fire is out of the question. But do you still want to die for Lord Sun?”

A fresh spate of tears welled. “No. But…”

“Then you won’t,” I said. Inexpressibly relieved.

Outside the house a voice like wind rushing cried, “Come out, bird, and face me!” The women froze, looms and spindles suddenly stilled. One of them made a wordless, frightened sound.

They might live, whoever won the battle that was coming. I didn’t see how I could. I stood, walked past them all, opened the door, and stepped out.

Across the plaza Lord Sun’s mound was a seething mass of dark, staring-eyed wings. The hawk arrowed into the sky, scattering butterflies in his wake. “I defeated you!” it shrieked. “You are nothing! You are no one!”

“I am Nothing!” susurrated the butterflies. “I am No One! You endeavored mightily to make me so, behold your success!”

“You said when next you confronted me my power would be broken!” cried the hawk.

“Your power is broken!” came the hissing, whispering answer. The hawk screamed, and fell out of the sky into the plaza. Its impact sent the entire mass of butterflies into the air and for several minutes I saw nothing but dark wings. I thought of them close up, flying in my face as I crossed the plaza, so fragile and so terrifying.

Then, as if at some signal, the butterflies flew up into the sky and away in a black cloud, leaving the plaza wet and pristine, not a trace of the hawk.

Essferend wasted no time assuming authority, concerning herself immediately with supplies of food and water for the city. No priests opposed her; all were dead.

“It’s a good thing you lived,” I said to her. She ignored me; she liked me even less now that I’d helped destroy Lord Sun. But she had always been eminently practical, and the people must be housed and fed.

The other gods returned—Crane and Heron, Snake and Lizard, Antelope and Wolf, Sparrow and Hummingbird, Fox and Shrew, Aurochs and Boar, Owl and Vulture, Squirrel and Mouse. They conferred with Essferend, and messengers from the outlying villages. Everyone ignored me except Hondjetat, but Hondjetat was openly angry with me, and wept constantly.

After several days of this, I went down to the river. “River Schael,” I called, without the slightest hope that she would reply.

The fish surfaced immediately. “The butterfly asked me to give you safe passage downriver, if you wanted it,” it said. “She also asked me to give you her advice, that you take that safe passage.” It sank under the water again and was gone.

“You should,” said a tiny voice at my feet. I crouched, and found an ant on a blade of grass. “We need many of the hawk’s officials to keep things running smoothly. Those who would reward you for your help cannot do so without offending those who resent your actions. And those who would kill you…”

“Don’t wish to offend the new administration.”

“It’s uncomfortable for everyone.”

“More so for me, I think.”

“I wouldn’t dare speculate,” said Ant. “You are welcome to your own opinion. Certainly we used you. But had we done nothing, you would be dead now.”

“She tried to kill me.” I remembered the whispering assault as I crossed the plaza. “She said untrue things, and it didn’t seem to hurt her.”

“Did she?”

“She said I would die.”

“And so you will,” said Ant. “Every human does.”

“She said I would weep in terror and she would drink my tears and my blood.”

“Then you will, and she will. Depend on it.”

I suppressed a shiver. The more I thought about leaving the more I wanted it. “Where do I go?”

“Downriver. Beyond our territory. To the Nalendar, perhaps.”

“The Zuxugo girl said the Nalendar had a school.”

“Ah, yes!” said Ant, sounding very satisfied. “We could use the connection, good relations with powerful rivers being advantageous.”

“You meant to direct me there from the start!” I accused.

“Take Hondjetat with you.”

“She won’t want to go.”

“She will be resigned to it,” said Ant, “or she will not.”

“And the butterfly?”

“She comes and goes as she pleases. Come, the boat is waiting for you at the other end of the rapids. I’ll have someone send for Hondjetat.”

I wanted to be angry at the way Ant had used me, altered me without asking, the way it was arranging my life without consulting me. But it had been a friendly voice for so long, and I wanted so badly to be away from here that I found it difficult to sustain more than dread and sorrow at Hondjetat’s hatred.

“All right,” I said, and stood and walked downstream, not waiting for Ant to lead me to the boat, and my future.

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