III

LORD TOPHET’S BANE

Diverus stood beside the broad wooden table on which they ate their meals at the Terrestre. The empty room lay dark save for one dim candle amid the debris of dirty cutlery, plates, and cups strewn across the table. It looked as if no one had cleaned up in days. He couldn’t recall it having looked nearly so squalid the day before. No light came through the windows, which told him that it was night here. He said, “Leodora,” and turned around, expecting to find her there. She should have been right behind him, but he was alone.

He realized there was a background din as of a large shouting crowd, and within it he made out cries of “Jax!” She must have manifested on the stage instead of here with him. Hastily he threaded his way through the wings, past ropes, past bags full of sand, dangling screens, and props of all sorts. The crowd’s impatience was palpable—they weren’t cheering her, they were demanding she present herself or start the show. From the shadows behind the curtains he peered past the rear of the puppet booth at a theater half filled with noisy, drunken miscreants. The various broken vegetables lying on the stage testified to their unruliness. By contrast, in one of the private boxes above the rabble, four faces watched the mêlée, unflustered by the clamor of the crowd, looking as if they could have waited forever for the show to begin. It was like watching four corpses propped up in chairs.

In the shadows of the wings opposite, movement caught Diverus’s eye. Someone was working his way behind the backdrop and around the back of the stage, and a moment later Glaise appeared with his arms outstretched. He crushed Diverus to him.

“Yes, Glaise, I’m glad to see you, too,” Diverus said. “Have you seen Leodora? Where’s Soter?”

Glaise pointed enthusiastically at the booth, and Diverus plunged forward, but fumbled with the drapery at the rear corner until he found a slit and stepped through. “Lea,” he cried, but she wasn’t there, either. He thought he was alone, but then saw that Soter crouched on the floor beside the trestles supporting the undaya cases.

“Diverus!” Soter shouted. As fast as he could, the old man scrambled to his feet and embraced him. “Oh, lad, where have you been? The two of you had us convinced you were dead for sure. We looked everywhere, even turned out Hamen and all those people from the underspan, but nobody could find you.” His expression tightened. “Where is she? We can’t let her perform tonight. We’ve got to get her away from here immediately. You don’t know what you’ve both blundered into, coming back now.”

Overwhelmed, Diverus answered, “I thought she was in here. I mean, I hoped. The calls for Jax—I thought . . .” Agitatedly casting about the tiny chamber, he said, “I don’t know where she is.”

“Well, we have to stop her from coming on stage, you understand?”

“No, I don’t. Find her and hide her?”

Soter put his hands over his face. “Oh, gods, this was inevitable, wasn’t it? The moment we climbed those steps from Bouyan and set foot on Ningle I knew, I knew it must come to this.” He turned to the front of the booth and cautiously parted the screen to peer out. Audience members called again for Jax, and something soft thumped on the stage beside the booth.

Behind Diverus two wooden hands pulled open the cloth of the booth, and Orinda stepped in past them. Glaise ducked in after her.

“Diverus, oh, my dear,” she said, and hugged him. “Where have you been? Where’s Leodora?”

“Oh, gods,” Soter murmured at whatever he saw.

“Why is everyone so giddy?” asked Diverus. “I’m sorry about missing the performance, but we found a way to reach the Pons Asinorum and once there Leodora wanted to hear all the stories she could, and they enchanted her, and me, but we got away. At least I thought we did. We didn’t mean to miss the performance, but they were going to keep us there forever.” They stared at him dumbly and finally he said, “What is it? You all act as if you thought you’d never see me again.”

Glaise stood with a hand raised to his mouth. Orinda answered finally, “You’ve been gone for weeks, both of you.”

He blinked. “It was only the one night. A night and part of a day.”

She shook her head. “Not here, it wasn’t.” Placing a hand on his shoulder, she added, “We sought you for weeks, Diverus, even onto adjoining spans. Bois is still gone looking, and Hamen and his people.”

Without turning, Soter said, “He doesn’t understand that they’ve found us, Orinda. If she comes back now . . .”

“Where is she, Diverus?”

“I don’t know. She was right behind me,” he said.

“She’s not here?” asked Soter.

“I fear she isn’t. Maybe I can find the stilt walker again, get another phial to open the dark waters—”

“No, that’s good, don’t you see?” Soter said. “She’s in the world of the Pons Asinorum. They can’t track her there. They’d never find her.”

“I should go after her.”

“That’s for later, later you’ll get her, once we’re away,” Soter proclaimed. He was scheming then, his eyes sharp but looking askance, as if calculating the details. “At the moment we have a final performance to give.”

“But, Soter—” Orinda objected.

“The situation’s changed, Orinda. With him here we can have a performance. He has the power to quiet them all. Don’t you? You can put them all to sleep if we want. Right?” When Diverus didn’t answer, Soter grabbed him by the shoulders. “You would do anything for her, wouldn’t you?”

“Soter—”

“Yes, I would,” Diverus answered with no hesitation.

“You love her.” Diverus hesitated to respond and Soter shook his head. “It’s all right. We both do, don’t we? That’s the thing that draws us and the thing that’s divided you and me. Divided me inside myself.” To Orinda, he said, “You’re going to get away. You take Glaise, and Bois if you can find him, and get far away from here. We’ll perform, we’ll keep them riveted. They won’t even notice your departure, and after, if he can lull them to sleep, we’ll slip out and come after you, too.”

“But Leodora—” Diverus began.

“You don’t want her to be here right now,” Soter said. “She’s better off where she is, and you can go fetch her once we’ve escaped.”

“Soter, you can’t!” Orinda insisted.

“Can’t I? We’ve been here before, Orinda. Or rather, you have. Glaise has. What do you suppose those creatures will do to him this time to get you to tell them what they want to know? If we were to flee and leave you here, you would pay the price again. Worse even than before.”

She looked from him to Diverus with a sickened expression. “You’re insane, Soter.”

“Probably.” He grinned and it made him look the part. “Now, you have to do one last thing. You have to introduce us. Introduce us like there’s nothing wrong at all, and then take Glaise and go somewhere and hide. Go down below with Hamen’s folk. Hide out until they’ve gone or we come find you.”

She held her ground another moment, but finally acquiesced, pushing Glaise to turn him about and following him out the back of the booth.

Soter handed Diverus the mijwiz. “You like playing this double-pipe thing, don’t you?”

“I am partial to it.”

“Good. Good. Because tonight you’re playing for your life. Maybe all our lives.”

The principal problem was, the cell was utterly dry. The rough dirt floor had seen no water in a very long time. Near the prisoner, straw had been strewn about, not much of it but enough to absorb any and all moisture. Nowhere was there a container, a cup, even a slop bucket. The chain attached to her ankles allowed the prisoner to cross past the window as far as the opposite corner to relieve herself, and the noisome stink of the straw told Leodora that it hadn’t been changed in a long time. The small window prohibited the flow of enough air to overcome the smell.

“I need water,” Leodora explained.

The prisoner tried to communicate with her, babbling excitedly and incoherently for so long that Leodora thought the confinement had driven her insane. She had no experience of a place where the world didn’t transmute naturally and the language become comprehensible. Finally, the long-snouted woman seemed to realize that nothing she said was making any difference, and she stopped. She tilted her head and stared at Leodora as if seeing her for the first time; this caused the black beads of her wig to clack and chitter. She gave her head a small toss and the beads shook again. She had human eyes beneath her prominent animal brows but the shape of the face was more like that of the kitsune, except that it had a surface of iridescent scales shaped like those of the Ondiont snake. In the silence, Leodora pointed to herself and said, “Leodora,” then repeated it.

The prisoner placed her fingers on her chest and said, “Yemoja a Iunu.” Her snout twitched. She seemed to be trying to smile.

“All right,” Leodora replied. “Yemoja?” Then she pointed to the room, the door, out the small window. “Where?” she asked. “Where is this?”

The creature nodded in understanding. “Palipon,” she growled.

“Oh.” Leodora sank down then. Palipon: the prison isle. Its name, it seemed, transcended language barriers. It was the place where Gousier had sent the woman who’d tried to kidnap her when she was small. Nobody banished to Palipon was ever seen again. Nobody ever came back. Legend made it the original home of Death before Chilingana had called him forth by dreaming the spans. Whether or not that was true, she wasn’t about to be trapped here.

Standing again, she went to the window. The light was fading fast, though she could still make out the flat-roofed buildings. They stood on a rise on the far side of a deep gorge. The drop from here to the bottom of the gorge appeared to be sheer—at least, with her face pressed against the bars she could see no obstruction below the window. She couldn’t see them, but imagined there must be hundreds of windows like this one overlooking the dry and craggy drop. She stepped back with a sigh.

Yemoja spoke to her again, a series of growls and clicks. Leodora could only shake her head in incomprehension. She said, “The least I can do is try to get you unchained before the light’s gone.” She took a step toward her and Yemoja backed against the wall. “It’s all right,” Leodora said cautiously. She raised her hands to show them empty, then knelt. She had to press her lips tight and hold her breath to get close. Yemoja’s whole body was begrimed, but her slender ankles were worse. The cuffs around them looked to have rubbed them raw, leaving them blackened, maybe putrid. Leodora’s eyes began to tear up and she wiped at them with the back of her hands, then clutched at the cuff all but blindly. The cuff was hinged, the lock a small box exhibiting an odd cross-shaped keyhole. She grabbed hold of it and tried to pull the halves of the cuff apart, but finally sighed and gave up. There would be no removing it without a key.

She withdrew then to the window and breathed the night air until her eyes stopped stinging. She shook her head in exasperation, then withdrew again to the corner beside the door. There was nothing to do now. She needed both darkness and a pool of standing liquid. The darkness was here but she wasn’t going to get the other until someone brought Yemoja something to drink, and she surmised that nobody would be coming tonight. Whatever meals were served, they had been consumed well before this.

“I need to get out of here,” she said. A solution occurred to her then. She stood up and began pounding her fists against the door. “Obviously,” she explained as though Yemoja would understand, “no one can reach the door, so anyone pounding on it is impossible. I just hope somebody can hear.”

As if in response to that, someone shouted. Then other voices joined in, and the cacophony of yelling prisoners drowned out her pounding completely. To her discouragement, nobody came to see what the noise was about. Nobody cared. “And why should they? No one here can go anywhere anyway. If that gorge circles this place completely, then no one can escape very far.” She did give up then, and glumly returned to her corner.

Across the small cell, Yemoja was being reduced to a shadow within a shadow as the last of the light faded.

Leodora drew her knees up and rested her forehead against them. “I have to get out of here,” she said. “Right now, Soter will be yelling at Diverus because he came back without me, and so another performance was missed. Did I tell you we’d gone to the world between all worlds? That’s what it is for all its formal names. It’s full of sorcery, too, and hurled at you from every direction—everything that seems benign on the surface will trick you. I was caught there. Snared. I didn’t even notice, because I wanted something and that’s what that place does, it finds what you want and it entices you with it, giving you a little, and then more and more, until everything else you’ve ever been has been swallowed up in desire. They had stories, all the stories, and I wanted them. I wanted them so much, and if Diverus hadn’t pulled me from there, I would never have left. Diverus . . . enchanted them with his own power. He has power, and a true name. I know his true name now. Orfeo.”

Yemoja looked up sharply at that and repeated, “Orfeo.”

“You know that name? I wish I could understand you. You probably have stories, too, from wherever you’re from, stories I’ve never heard before, and I would like to hear them. I’m greedy, you see. I want them all, all the stories, because my father gathered them before me and I want to . . .” Her throat clutched and her eyes burned hot. She had to wait awhile to go on. “I never even knew him, but we’re alike on this. And we both need someone to watch out for us, too. The only escape route from here is back through that world between worlds. Pons Asinorum. Fool’s Bridge. It’s a good name for it. But now I won’t have Diverus to shield me. I wonder if they’ll trick me again? Of course, I have to find that out, don’t I? There’s no choice. I have to go back.”

Leodora talked on of nothing and everything, the way Yemoja had when she’d arrived. She babbled, soothed by the sound of her own voice, not telling a story this time, just talking about anything. Eventually the talking lulled her to sleep, where the Coral Man appeared to her in a dream as he had on so many nights; but this time his figure appeared less well formed. She recognized that as his song floated across the oceans, his body was wasting away, and she perceived a glowing knot in his chest, something orange and pulsing.

During the last story performance Soter had Diverus packing the puppets in the cases—all but the few he was using, and those he handed off one by one. The booth, they would have to abandon. “Perhaps we’ll come back for it later,” he told Diverus, “but leaving it standing might give us time to get away.” What they were getting away from remained unspecified, but Diverus didn’t argue.

Soter presented a Meersh story and the audience howled at the trickster’s foolishness. Then, in the midst of their laughter, Soter swung about and gestured for him to pick up the piba and play something. “Don’t put them to sleep. Make it lively,” Soter whispered. “See if you can send them all on their way.” Diverus nodded and closed his eyes. He plucked the first note and then his mind went blank.

When he next opened his eyes, Soter was patting him on the shoulder and saying, “Excellent. That was just what we needed.” He turned from Diverus and lifted the lantern from its hook, but didn’t blow it out as Leodora always did. He set it down beside a bottle of oil, and Diverus thought, What an odd time to fill the lamp. The undaya cases stood on the floor beside him, fastened and ready. Soter said, “We need to make certain Orinda’s gone. Will you go and look? If she’s still here, then you force her out. The same with those woodmen. Get ’em out, lad. Be sure they’re all gone—it would be too terrible if they remained. Then you come back, we’ll take the cases and go. All right?”

“Where?”

“For now, down under Colemaigne with those carters. We’ll get a boat. Has to be a way down somewhere.”

“I know a way. Through the leg of a tower, at the end of the span.”

“Good, good. All right, you go. Stay to the shadows, though, out the back and don’t let a soul out there see you.”

“There’s someone out there? I thought you said—”

“Please, Diverus. Go.”

Yet even as he pushed through the black fabric out the back of the booth, Diverus knew Soter was getting rid of him. He crept into the wings, and then scoured the back hallway behind the scrims and backdrops, finding no one, as he’d expected. Dutifully, he climbed the stairs and searched the rooms on the second floor, too. He entered Orinda’s L-shaped room, which he’d never seen before. It was full of costumes and wigs, makeup and props, but deathly still. The Terrestre was empty.

Finally, he picked a ramp to one of the curtained balconies, walked down it, and with great care parted the drapes. He peered out. The pit and all the benches stood deserted. Whatever he had played on the gourd-shaped piba, it had driven the crowd away. Music contained stories, too, he thought. It could take people out of themselves the way stories did. It could transport listeners to rapture or to tears. It could . . . he shuddered then with the memory of what he’d done in order to rescue Leodora. He wanted to tell her what he realized about songs and stories now—how he grasped the power they both shared, how he needed to say to her I love you because he’d done something so terrible that the reason couldn’t go unspoken between them any longer. But mostly he wanted to hold her, to tangle his fingers in her hair. To say to her . . .

A movement caught his eye, so subtle at first that he wasn’t sure he’d seen it. Then out of the darkest recesses at the back of the theater, something flowed: four pale gray ovals, hovering above the floor, moving in unison like the segmented body of a snake. They slid down the steps and only as they neared the footlights did he make out that the ovals were faces—the faces he’d seen in the theater box. Cold, implacable, as unfeeling as stone, the pale heads streamed forward. It wasn’t until they were rising up to the stage that he could see the bodies beneath the heads, bodies swathed in black, and he knew without a doubt that they were what Soter feared, they were the cause of his sending Orinda away, and of sending him, too. Even this far away and hidden, Diverus felt the terror of them. They threw it off like hoarfrost.

They moved across the stage and easily into the booth, one after the other, as if they could see where the slit in the material was, which he never could. The blackness of the booth absorbed them, but then he could see the tops of their heads as they collected in the middle of it. He realized that Soter could not be inside the booth at the same moment that it erupted in flames. The four sides went up as one, trapping the quartet inside. They whirled within the flames. They stretched their hands into the air as if imploring the gods to save them, and then one of them plunged back out, his body ablaze. He ran straight off the edge of the stage and into the pit. No one else emerged, and after a few moments the stage itself caught fire. Sparks rose in the updraft, and Diverus feared that the thatched roof was going to ignite, too. He dropped the curtain and ran back into the hall.

Soter had to be somewhere nearby. Somewhere in the theater with those puppet cases. He would never have let them burn.

Diverus bounded down the stairs to the first floor. Even as he reached it, Soter was climbing up the steps from the trap room beneath the stage. He’d made at least one trip already, leaving one of the cases by the door. Seeing Diverus, he gestured with his head to the large hemp bag beside the table. “Our clothes, and your instruments, Diverus,” he said. “Can’t do without our musician.”

Diverus ran across the room and grabbed the nearest undaya case. He slung its strap over his shoulder and grabbed the bag, and then stepped aside to let Soter lead the way. “I doubt Orinda will be able to forgive us,” Soter said grimly as he reached for the door. “The gods won’t resurrect it for her this time.” He flung back the door and stopped, filling the doorway. Diverus peered past his shoulder.

Outside, a pale bald head seemed to float in the darkness. It said, “No gods will resurrect you, either.” Then it flowed nearer, driving Soter back.

The black-clad figure closed the door without turning. A short cape covered his shoulders, over a longer black cloak that swept the floor. His dead, unblinking eyes dismissed Diverus with a single glance before fixing on his target again. “Well, well,” he said, a sly voice, “if it isn’t the man who sells his friends. I never thought to see you again. How is the elf—what’s his name?”

“Grumelpyn.”

“That’s right. Can he walk? He couldn’t when we left him.” The Agent moved farther into the room, and a vertical band of light from the fire on stage ran up him. One black eye gleamed in its deep socket like a star in the night sky. “So, tell me.” He raised his hand, and Diverus glimpsed what looked like a blue-violet jewel against his palm. “Where is the storyteller called Jax?” The bright eye looked at Diverus again. “We had doubts, you know, as to the identity of this Jax. Surely, we said, the comparison to Bardsham was made up from ignorance—for who has seen Bardsham perform enough to say? I had convinced myself that was so. After all, I’m the authority on Bardsham’s health. But now I’ve discovered you . . . and if you are here, then so must he be, too.”

“No, he’s not. You lot killed him.”

“Oh, you know that for a fact, do you? I don’t recall you were there.” Then a slow smile of memory spread on his face. “But as it happens, so we did. However, it seems that Lord Tophet has come to the opinion there was a child, and again, here you are.”

“What—” Soter cleared his throat. “What difference would that make to him?”

“The lord is of the opinion that a child of Bardsham’s might pose a threat to him.”

“How, for the gods’ sake? Bardsham was no threat to him, either!”

“The how is not a matter I involve myself with. So I shall ask you once and only once more. Where is Jax?”

Soter looked back at Diverus and in the same instant swung the undaya case at the Agent. “Run!” he yelled. The Agent must have anticipated the attack. He sidestepped the case and slammed both hands upon it. The case pulled Soter off-balance, and he stumbled into the Agent. The hand bearing the jewel grabbed hold of his wrist. He screamed in agony. Diverus hadn’t moved, hadn’t run. Soter collapsed to his knees, but the Agent held on, and held his wrist up. “Stop it!” Diverus yelled. “Let him go!” The Agent considered him.

“Well?” he said. “Tell me what I know already.”

“If you know, then why do I need to tell you?”

Soter, pooled on the floor, made whining sounds.

The Agent smiled but there was no humor in it. He released his hold and Soter’s arm dropped. Soter curled around it, moaning in agony. “So Bardsham did have a son, heh? He was a small man, too.”

“What do you want?”

“You. I want you to come with me now.”

“Why should I do that? Why shouldn’t I run as he said?”

“Oh, dear. Didn’t you explain it to him, old man?” The Agent prodded Soter with the toe of his boot. “There is nowhere to run, boy. He should have told you that at the very least.” Diverus sensed movement behind him. He turned, to be astonished by what he saw. The four Agents he’d seen cast ablaze stood there. Their bodies smoked, so charred and blackened that he couldn’t tell how much of their costumes remained, how much was blackened skin, but their gray faces, smeared with soot, were the same, as humorless, hard, and smooth as marble. “Quick,” the Agent commanded.

The four surrounded Diverus so quickly that he barely saw them move.

“You will accompany us now. We want those cases and that bag as well, all of it.” The Agent turned, opened the door and walked outside.

They took hold of Diverus, and despite their condition, their touch was ice. He went with them without a struggle. Glancing down as he passed, he saw that Soter’s forearm had turned as gray as dead coral. Soter looked up at him through tears and, trembling, gasped, “I’m sorry.”

Diverus knelt to touch him, but the charred Agents kept him from quite reaching Soter. He said, “It’s all right,” though he knew it wasn’t. It was his doom he was going to. At least, he thought, he would save Leodora from that fate—the thing they called Tophet.

Leodora awoke to a squeal of metal above her head: the hinges of the door as it swung open. She shoved herself up on one elbow, having stretched out onto her side during the night, but the door kept opening and she pressed against the wall, her head turned, eyes squeezed shut against the impact. Then the squeal stopped. She opened one eye.

Through the gap between door and wall, she watched a tall man step into the room. He carried a board horizontally and passed almost immediately out of her line of sight. He murmured something to the prisoner that sounded almost tender; then he laughed and Leodora knew it hadn’t been tender at all. Yemoja snarled. The man said something else. When he went out, his hands were empty. He left the door ajar.

Leodora eased out from behind it. The guard had placed the board in the middle of the room. On it were a bowl and cup, and a lump of bread, and although the morning light coming in was gray and wan, she could tell that both bowl and cup contained liquid. The important thing was, the cell was dark. Yemoja said something to her, making no move toward the meal. She seemed to be indicating that Leodora should eat—a remarkable gesture given their circumstances.

Instead, Leodora went to the crack of the door and eased it back. It creaked again, and she ground her teeth at the noise. But nobody came to investigate.

Cautiously, she stuck her head out the door. She looked to the right down a long and dark corridor of rough stone walls and floor and a low ceiling. At the far end of it, two men were pushing barrows. Lanterns swung from the handles of the barrows. The first man took a wooden shovel and entered a cell. A moment later he came out with a pile of straw balanced on the shovel, which he threw into the barrow. Then he shuffled closer along the hall. The second barrow contained a large mound of straw already, and that was being tossed in to replace the old. Between her and the barrows but nearer to her stood a board full of pegs against the far wall. On the pegs hung what she guessed were rings of keys.

She looked in the other direction, where the corridor was perhaps a third as long before reaching a dead end. A cart stood in the darkness, so close that in two steps she could have touched it. It contained stacked boards like the one in Yemoja’s cell, all of them balanced upon the bowls of the morning meal.

Shortly, the tall guard emerged from the next cell along, and she drew her head back in. She pressed to the wall and listened to the sound of him coming back to the cart, then wheeling it farther up the corridor. It scraped and rumbled along, and then stopped. Keys jingled and another door creaked open. She glanced out. He had gone. The men at the other end were moving slowly, steadily closer.

She counted until the guard reappeared. He pulled another board off the cart and walked across the corridor to the next cell, spent a moment fumbling the keys, and then went in.

The instant he did she was away. She walked briskly down the hall, pulled the purple robe tight around her, and kept close to the wall. With every step she expected someone to yell, but nobody saw her. Nobody paid her the slightest attention. She passed a narrow doorway into a stairwell, but kept going until she reached the board on which the keyrings hung.

There had to be dozens of them. She scanned them for a key to match the lock on Yemoja’s ankle. It was easy to spot, replicated as it was at least a dozen times over. Duplicates, so that multiple jailers could work in multiple cells at once. It didn’t matter if all the locks were the same, not if you were chained to one.

She lifted one set of them and pressed it against her robe to keep it from jingling. She turned around. The guard with the food cart was picking up another board. He glanced toward her, paused, and raised his head. She pressed hard to the wall and slid along it. Reaching the stairwell, she stepped into it, then stood and counted to ten before carefully peering into the hall again. The tall guard was carrying another meal into another cell. He hadn’t seen her after all in the corridor’s gloom. She ran back to Yemoja’s cell.

She knelt before Yemoja. It took only a moment to fit the key into the slots and open the cuffs on both ankles. Yemoja babbled something and Leodora hushed her, then listened. Nobody came to the door. All the noises in the hall were from far away.

She realized she’d been holding her breath, and sighed. “All right, now,” she said. “Just wait a moment.” Then she took the cup from the board and carried it to the corner where she’d slept. The sun was rising outside and the cell was already too light. She needed darkness. There was only one way to get it.

Turning, she reached out to Yemoja to take her hand. Yemoja complied, and Leodora drew her to the corner. She poured some of the contents of the cup onto the floor, and it was immediately absorbed in the dirt. “That won’t work,” she muttered. She got the bowl and set it on the floor at their feet. It was too small, too contained, to qualify as a pool of water. She glanced back at the board. It was certainly larger. It would have to do.

She carried the board to the wall and set it beside the bowl. Then she took out the phial. “Now comes the hard part,” she said, and picking up the bowl she gave it to Yemoja, then gestured to indicate how she wanted it poured out onto the board. The long-snouted creature whuffed but said nothing, and finally nodded.

Leodora looked back out the door. She watched the guard lift another board from his cart and walk into a cell. It was now or never, she supposed. She grabbed the door and dragged it open.

It squealed on rusty hinges, the sound seeming to fill the whole prison. She dragged it back until it cast the corner in darkness. “Now,” she said and dipped her head at the board. Yemoja poured out the contents of the bowl. It was a dark, watery soup and it floated on the board long enough for Leodora to spill a drop from the phial onto it. Distantly, she heard someone yell, but she stayed focused on the rainbow colors swirling across the water, expanding as it ran off the board and onto the floor.

Taking hold of Yemoja’s hand, she watched for the dark liquid to form shapes. After a moment, she could see people distantly, black hair and blue skin. “There!” she cried and leapt into the pool with Yemoja following.

They sprawled onto a hard dirt floor and she thought, It didn’t work!

A pair of sandaled feet strode up to them. Expecting the guard, Leodora raised her head to find the king of Epama Epam standing over her and holding a silver chalice.

“This is quite unorthodox,” he commented.

“Perhaps so,” said a female voice behind her, “but she rescued me.”

The king gasped, and Leodora realized that the voice belonged to Yemoja, which she now understood as if they spoke the same language. She got to her knees and glanced back. The woman had turned greenish black, and her eyes burned orange. She was tearing off the rags that clothed her.

“Goddess,” said the startled king.

“Oceanus,” she replied.

The surroundings bemused Leodora. Everywhere, the walls were old and made of rough stone, the ground was dirt, and it seemed as if everybody on this street lived in flat-roofed houses like those she’d seen through the bars of the cell. “This can’t be right,” she said, but no one was listening.

“This girl’s been here before,” the king was saying querulously. “She disrupted everything, refused to enter the pool of true desire, refused to accept the offer of our eternity, and what’s more, her companion—who also escaped, I might add—caused the deaths of two of us in making his exit.”

“Really?” The goddess’s orange eyes considered Leodora anew. “Good for you,” she said. “He really is a bastard, you know.”

“Goddess—”

“Oh, shut up about your petty issues. Would you care to hear instead how mortals caught me, trapped me, and put me in a prison where the guard clutched at me every morning? A dry, dusty prison without any moisture? Without any way out and none of you knew where I was nor came to my aid? Prison, where I wasted away for more than a year, subsisting on the tiniest cups of liquid that hardly deserved to be called water? Living in my own filth in a space the size of one of your glorious pots?”

“We couldn’t have known.”

“Indeed not. She rescued me from there. So you will afford her every courtesy, help her with everything she needs from now until eternity, and you will not so much as grumble or try any slyness at all.”

“Goddess,” he importuned.

Yemoja touched her shoulder. “Leodora. Oh, yes, I know you, and I know why you’re here. So does he. Epama has something you need, a story you must hear before you can leave. It was why you were sent to us in the first place by another demigod.” She shot the king a severe look, and he hunched up like a child. “Oceanus ought to have told you that story before, but he’s an inveterate trickster and a liar by nature and would withhold what you require until you’re driven mad by the need and then give it to you as if the whole matter is your fault.”

“I’m insulted,” said the king.

“I doubt that’s possible,” she replied.

Leodora dusted herself off. “I have to go back to Colemaigne. They’ll think I’ve died by now.”

Yemoja shook her head. “You must take what he has for you. You dare not refuse it.”

“Can I . . . can I go back first and then return for it?”

The goddess considered Oceanus. He shrugged. “It would seem you can do whatever you like.”

“Indeed, she can, but she is best advised not to refuse this gift here and now.”

Leodora considered this and finally nodded. “All right, then. A little longer. I would like my clothes returned to me, too.” She turned to the goddess. “Thank you.”

Yemoja laughed. “You save my life and thank me. You’re too good for your own world, child. Come. Let’s swim and feast and hear what he has to tell you. Then you can return to your Colemaigne equipped to face whatever it is.”

They walked down what seemed a dusty corridor identical to the one in the prison where she’d stolen the key to free Yemoja, but the door at the far end of it opened once again upon the many-pillared palace with the deep blue pool and she knew that, no matter the outward shape of this place, this was its core, the center of a maze she was learning how to thread.

Many hours later, alone in the dark of that same dirt corridor and dressed in a freshly laundered tunic, she poured a goblet of Oceanus’s best wine upon a metal platter and a drop from the phial into the wine. She held in her mind the image of her booth in the Terrestre, and this time stepped through without any misdirection. Her destination, however, was transformed beyond anything she might have anticipated.

She stepped down onto the stage of the theater . . . and nearly fell through it into the trap room. Half of the floor, including the part where the puppet booth had stood, was gone, burned away, and the edges around the gaping hole were charred and blistered. The back wall and two of the balconies had been destroyed, leaving one of the doors to the wings standing inside a frame without a wall around it. Gone, too, was one of the uprights supporting the roof, and most of the thatch overhead, which now leaned precariously to the side. Given the damage she could see, it was a wonder the whole place hadn’t burned down. The stink of smoke still tainted the air although the fires were long cold. The remaining floor of the stage had buckled. Boards had popped up or split, probably from a combination of intense heat fought with buckets of water. Standing puddles remained under the last two rear balconies, causing her to think somewhat incongruously that the stage must not be level.

She looked down into the trap room below, full of unidentifiable debris. She saw no bodies, no sign anyone had been on hand when the fire began. The blaze had done its worst damage where the booth had stood and she couldn’t escape the conclusion that it had begun in the booth—the lantern, perhaps, falling off its hook, spilling oil and flames all in a moment. Had it already happened before Diverus came back? It must have, else the embers would still be glowing. After all, it had been only a day since they’d parted company. Surely he was near.

After circling the hole, she walked to the rear and around the surviving door into the back wing. The various screens there had been raised high to avoid the fire, a move that had probably saved them. She walked through the crossover hall to the side of the theater left intact. The floor creaked underfoot. The heat had warped the boards.

The opposite wings, redolent with smoke, looked to have been saved. She turned to climb the stairs at the back, and there stood Orinda at the top. They saw each other in the same moment.

“Oh, thank Edgeworld for hearing my prayers!” cried Orinda. She flew down the stairs as on wings and clutched Leodora to her, saying, “You’re alive after all,” by which time she had burst into tears. “We thought you would never find your way back. Diverus didn’t know how to go after you.”

“He couldn’t. He gave me the phial. But what happened? How did the fire—”

“There’s much you need to hear, and none of it good, I’m afraid. The fire is the least of it. Come with me, he needs to see you.”

“Who?”

“Soter. He hoped you would return in time. I think his conscience would never be clear if anything had happened to you.”

“A lot has happened to me, but his conscience wasn’t involved. It wasn’t his doing. Why do you say—what do you mean in time?”

They came to one of the rear rooms in the hallway, one she hadn’t seen before. It was, by comparison with the small chamber she had occupied, opulent. There were racks of costumes, a shelf lined with wigs, with shoes and boots, with makeup and mirrors. Bois and Glaise stood at the back of it, looking worried until they set eyes on her. Then both of them beamed with rapture and jumped to her. She hugged them, but even as she did she was turning to see what lay around the corner of the room that they had been guarding.

He lay on the bed. The top of his head faced her, his thin hair pushed up by the pillow, and even from that view she recognized him.

Soter rested with his eyes closed and his breathing shallow.

“Oh, no,” she said, though she’d had sufficient warning to guess. “The fire?” she asked.

“No, dear heart,” Orinda replied. “He started the fire—in the hope of escaping.”

“Escaping. I don’t understand.”

“Who is that?” Soter asked. His voice creaked like dried-out leather.

“It’s me,” answered Leodora. She pushed around Orinda to circle the side of the bed.

Soter’s feeble gaze followed her. Tears ran from his eyes. “Oh, you’re all right then.”

She sat on the edge and reached to take his hand. She noticed only then that his arm, lying straight by his side atop the covers, was as chalky white as the Coral Man.

“I don’t understand,” she said again. “How did this happen in a few days? Where’s Diverus?”

“It’s not been a few days,” Orinda explained. “Before Diverus returned, a month passed. We’d exhausted every effort to find you. Bois and Glaise traveled to other spans, we’d interviewed the stilt walker you spoke to and the tunnel seigneur as well, who swore you’d never crossed from here to Sacbé. Hamen and Pelorie and the rest all scoured the piers to learn if a ship had sailed you away. There wasn’t a trace.”

“There wouldn’t have been. We didn’t tell anyone, we didn’t know we were going. But a month?”

“Diverus said the same—only a day to you,” Soter rasped, “an eternity to us.”

She looked from him to Orinda. “Where is Diverus?”

“My dear,” he said wearily, “you have to listen to me now.”

“First, tell me what’s happened to Diverus?”

“They took him.”

“Who did?”

“Soter.” Orinda said his name anxiously.

“Orinda, my time is short now whether I speak or not. Better that she know everything than wonder ever after.” His rheumy eyes met hers. “The truth was kept from you for your own good as well as mine. If you’d never wanted off that damnable isle—if you’d had Tastion and married and had babies and become part of their village . . . but I should have known that wouldn’t happen. Not with your family history. I cursed Gousier for all this, but maybe it had to be. You’d never have lived inside anybody’s proscriptions.”

“No, I wouldn’t, but—”

“Give us a drink then, and I’ll tell you what you need to know, everything of Bardsham and Leandra. And Diverus.”

There was a tray on the floor with a clay pitcher. She poured him a cup of wine. When he didn’t take it from her, she realized he couldn’t move the stony arm. She reached under his head and pulled him up enough to drink from the cup. As he tilted up, the cover slid down and she saw that the paleness of stone colored his chest, blending back to flesh just beneath the collarbone. The most important thing, Shumyzin had tried to tell her, so long ago atop the tower of another span that it seemed like a memory of a dream. The sun that gave him life had been pushed aside before he could finish. And here it was, the demigod’s petrifaction but a harbinger of this moment in time, like an echo thrown ahead of the sound that made it.

He drank and then pressed his head back. Seeing the look of despair and recognition in her eyes, he wheezed, “Hardly any of me left, is there? Another day in your Pons Asinorum, you’d have missed me altogether.” He smiled, as if acknowledging that his approaching death were mere japery. “Now listen,” he said, “and afterward you can hate me as you see fit.”

SOTER’S TALE

“I hated your mother, Leodora. I hated her and did all I could to be rid of her. That’s the truth and now there’s no point in keeping it from you. I’m your friend, whatever you may think. I’ve always looked out for you. Always, child. More’n your uncle ever did or would have done. But I believe I share with him that hatred for his sister.

“I’d had Bardsham to myself for so many years, you see. There were hundreds if not thousands of indiscretions, assignations, and peccadilloes in that time, on every span probably. Bardsham and women . . . you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him, scarred and rawboned as he was, but he had such charisma, such presence, that when he spoke to you, it was like the gods were gifting you with his attention. Like you were the only one in the world who caught his eye.”

Leodora swallowed and said, “You were in love with him, weren’t you?”

Instead of answering directly, he replied, “He always came back to me. Asked his dearest companion to dust him off, dry him out, and protect him from the woman who’d mistaken a dalliance for a proposal. As it was with that woman on Vijnagar who’d have left her husband for Jax, and you not even encouraging her—that’s how it was all the time with your father. In love with him? Pathetic, I suppose. But nobody gave a toss about Soter except him. Nobody else scraped the dirt off and saw the lonely wretch below. He loved me and I loved him and that’s how it was.

“Until she came along.

“Whatever his power, Leandra gave it right back. He wanted his little affair. She turned him down. He plied her with gifts, jewelry, costumes. He tried to seduce and tempt her. She said no, and sent the things back untouched. His performances began to flag. Audiences noticed when he cut back to two tales, and then one, and they actually stopped coming. Stopped paying. They thought it was ego. He didn’t really notice. I’d never seen him like that. Nobody’d ever shaken him up, not in all the years we’d traveled. He was like your emperor in that kitsune story you like so much.

“Leandra had been nicely accommodated by somebody. She didn’t need gifts to get along. She had come to the show and found what Bardsham did to be exquisite, that’s what she said and the way she said it I knew she felt the same as me. She’d come back again and again. And she’d seen him beguiling the barmaids and the patronesses. She knew what he was like—more Meersh than little thief. And she had that about her, too. Cut from the same cloth, they were, neither one conforming nor obeying the rules. She knew better than to give her heart to him or he’d be after the next conquest before she could roll over. Turned out she was a skilled dancer. She’d trained, that lithe and supple beauty, with that flame hair you inherited. So I made her a proposition and hired her on as a dancer to entertain between acts, because I couldn’t think of another way to fix it so he’d go back to work. I hoped at close quarters they would discover they hated each other and we could move on. Though I didn’t get my wish, he did start performing again then. He had a reason to now. The audiences came back, filled the halls and theaters again. Soon enough I knew how it was going to be. The Red Witch and the World’s Greatest Puppeteer. He never looked at another woman again. I think he stopped seeing ’em. He stopped seeing me, too. Didn’t need me now to protect him from himself. I was just another member of the troupe, with Tahman and Grumelpyn. Well, I bore it, didn’t I? And nobody so much as asked if I could.

“That was our sea change as a troupe. We moved on, and one day Leandra was pregnant and the dancing between acts stopped once it became obvious. I thought a baby would keep her away, in the wings, and I’d have him back. A little. Was that so much to ask for? He doted on you, though you don’t recall, and he coaxed your mother into working herself into shape again for the dancing. Fuller hips but no one complained about those. She danced barefoot between tales, she took to doing some of the voices in them, and to the world we must have seemed the happiest family on all of Shadowbridge. The troupe what had everything.

“Your mother never stopped trying to get rid of me. Anything went wrong, any place didn’t have our lodging ready, she went after me for it. Only fair, I guess, since I did the same with regard to her, trying to make him see her for the petty, jealous creature I thought her. She’d been a kept whore when we found her, hadn’t she? I could always remind her of that, and make her twist with anger. Our war, hers and mine, because we both loved him. Ain’t that laughable. I think it was the two of us drove him into his cups most of the time. Him and Tahman and that elf, they’d sit and drink and watch the two of us go at it like we was the married couple. Like it was a show put on for them.”

“But what happened?” asked Leodora. “What happened in Colemaigne?”

“The story changed is what. We’d come to this very theater and the crowds were huge. Your father’s ego, it must have been as big as the sun resting on the horizon. Gods, but he was revered.

“And then one night I noticed a couple of creatures in one of the boxes out there, watching us. They were hairless, humorless things, like you’d get if you bred the moons Saphon and Gyjio together. Orinda and Burbage conveyed the hearsay that they was archivists from the Library itself, and didn’t that inflate your father’s ego still more. Nobody knew then or now what the rumored archivists look like, see. It made a good story. Bardsham’s reputation had brought them—that we had no doubt of. They carried with them a glorious jewel they called Tophet’s Eye. It’s the sort of thing you’d call a spectacular jewel . . . at least one that had brought bad luck, Tophet being a far-flung name for the god of Chaos.”

She asked, “Why don’t I know the stories of him?”

He winced as if pain stabbed into him. “You don’t know the tales because I kept those from you. I replaced Chaos in every story with some other god or demigod’s name. I didn’t want you to know that name ever. It was never to be spoken on Bouyan. Your grandfather, your uncle and aunt, I was shielding them, too. What they didn’t know, they couldn’t ask after. It seemed then the only way to be safe.”

She nodded with understanding, and he went on.

“Third night there was five of them in that box, all of ’em as pale and cold as marble, and by then the chatter that the Library was come to canonize Bardsham was irrepressible, all over Colemaigne. After our performance they appeared backstage, immediately approached Bardsham, and announced they represented a great and powerful lord on another spiral who would pay an unimaginable sum for us to come and give an exclusive performance for him. The entire troupe had to agree—they were quite specific about that. Well, we’d done the like before, and for far less coin than this secretive lord was offering. It was too good to be true and I said as much. Of course, Leandra and I were fighting, so if I said it was a bad idea, she was bound to say it was brilliant and we must leave at once. Bardsham, drunk on booze and himself, didn’t need coaxing anyways. At that point his vanity was as wide as the Adamantine Ocean. I’m sorry, child, and that’s the whole truth of him.

“He was for it and that was that. Now, you, a baby, weren’t going to make no voyage like that. Or maybe it was your mother having a premonition of what waited for us. She already had a nurse looking after you—Bois’s sister, I think it was. You stayed here with her and Orinda. We sailed willingly off the edge of the world.

“I suppose we sailed for a week or more. Went right past spirals and beneath spans, and soon we were far outside anyplace we knew or had ever heard of. Mostly those Agents kept to themselves, but more than once I saw one of them with that blue jewel, holding it up as if trying to peer through it to see Leandra where she sat. Then one morning we woke up and the ocean was a darker color as if it was full of wine, and the look of those places we sailed beneath was dark and silent, ’cept for the birds perched about, watching us. It was like we’d sailed into another world or into the past, to the places in that tale of Chilingana’s you tell, before any people had come. Whole spirals seemingly awaiting their tenants, that’s how it looked. Then finally we hit this sargasso of dead calm, a whole surface of violet and black weeds that should have tangled us all up but didn’t somehow. My misgivings had grown all the while, as had Grumelpyn’s, although our hosts had given us no cause to worry. They’d fed us well and let us be, and more importantly they kept Bardsham merrily lubricated. Tahman, too, when he wasn’t seasick. Always smiling they were, those hairless things, but not a drop of humor in it. Too late then even if everyone else had agreed with me and been willing to turn back. We didn’t know it but we had passed into some other place.

“We reached our destination that day. It was a great curving span near the end of a spiral. The span and the whole spiral as far as we could see in either direction was gray and dead. Not a soul in view save where we anchored, and then they were like our hosts, cold and somber. Pale as skulls. The span itself was in worse shape even than Ningle, as if neglected for centuries. The Dragon Bowl of it had broken apart, and the beam and one little curved slice of that bowl just hung there in the air.

“They hauled the cases up for us, onto the surface of the span, and save for a coterie of staff, there was nobody about, just hundreds of statues in various positions, many of them crumbling, old like the buildings. His palace though was low and long and gleaming, and it ran half the length of the span. More dour, pale people greeted us, led us to our rooms, left us.

“By then even Bardsham admitted this was a mistake and not worth the money. What foolishness. He proposed we give our performance, collect our treasure, and leave as soon as possible. We still didn’t know who our benefactor was, or what he was. We were still hoping he was just a demented recluse. But in order to pretend that, you had to deny that the world looked and smelled wrong, you had to pretend not to see that the birds flying past were not a kind of bird you knew, and most of all you had to overlook that the creatures waiting on you weren’t terrified out of their wits.

“We set up the booth in a great hall of the palace. That night Bardsham performed Chilingana’s tales, and the Fatal Bride, and finally ‘How Meersh Lost His Toes.’ The lord was delighted by the stories. He sat across the hall from us, in an enormous carved throne with an odd drapery hanging before it that kept him in the shadows. When he emerged, one of his attendants always stood before him, bearing a pole on the end of which was a huge mask—of hammered gold, and bigger and broader than a human face, with a serene expression. So we never saw his true face, even as he proclaimed the first performances captivating. His fingers, though, were so long and slender that they looked like they had extra joints, and his hands were the same color and substance of that jewel the Agents had carried with them, as if it had been cut from him. He insisted on having his own personal musician play along with Tahman. It was an old blind man who sawed with a bow upon some wretched stringed instrument with a long neck and one peg in it. He was in fact quite good, provided you liked the one song he knew. He played while your mother danced between the tales, over and over and over, the same tune, slow, fast, whatever was called for, but always the same. I’ve only heard that tune once since then: the first time Diverus played for me. You remember that? That was why I raged at him. It was the most vile thing I could have heard. How could I think it was an accident? I thought Tophet must have sent him after me. I know that’s not true—I know it now.

“Anyways, we played for this hidden madman. The world is full of eccentric kings, lords, and emperors. It’s where all your stories come from, isn’t it? We decided he was just a little bit more demented than most. His span all but a ruin, a city of ghosts. Who wouldn’t be mad living there? Then one of his staff, who was helping us, let it slip that he was called Lord Tophet. That jewel was named after him. Grumelpyn, who heard it first and told the rest of us, said, ‘He thinks himself to be the god of Chaos.’ Well, so long as he paid, we weren’t going to care. We kept reminding ourselves that another performance or two and we were off back to Colemaigne and much richer for it, and he could think whatever he liked. But it was about to come clear that we’d been taken there under false pretenses.

“The second morning I was sitting outside his palace when two of his entourage approached to tell me that their lordship wanted to speak with me, and I assumed it was about payment, as I took care of that sort of thing. They led me to his private chambers. Quite lavish, they were. Polished and shiny, marble and smooth reddish wood everywhere, and not a hint of decay. His lordship was still abed, and as with the throne, a gauze surrounded the bed, obscuring him from view behind its shadows, and the servant with the mask on a pole stood beside it. I’d concluded by then that he was deformed in some manner, cruelly shaped by nature or a curse. He was eating his breakfast, and I wondered why he’d felt compelled to bring me in before it was finished.

“The moment I arrived he remarked to me, ‘I know you despise that whore who travels with you.’ And whatever I had ever thought about Leandra, it took me a moment to understand that he meant her. His voice . . . it was like a hive of furious bees, and perhaps that caused me to have to sort out what he’d said.

“ ‘Whore,’ I repeated, like I didn’t know the meaning of the word.

“He clarified by saying, ‘The common dancer. I wish for her to remain behind when you leave, which you may do now at any time. As I’m informed of your hatred for her, I thought it best to apply to you. I want you to arrange to leave her behind. I don’t care how it’s done. Give her to me, take your fortune, and depart.’

“I babbled something about how she was Bardsham’s wife, but that relationship didn’t matter to him, either, nor should it matter to me if I hated her to the degree he believed I did.

“I listened to him and gods forgive me I thought about it. I blamed her for our being there. That much was easy to justify, but not enough to warrant what he asked. Bardsham would have killed me on the spot if I’d suggested it. I was about to try to explain this to the madman—for now I knew he was truly insane—when the door to his chamber opened and two of those gruesome Agents came in. Between them, they were dragging Tahman. He’d been thrashed and beaten, his shirt shredded, sopping blood. His mouth was swollen up, his face all bruised. He saw me and his eyes pleaded and hoped. He tried to say something, and I saw that some of his teeth had been knocked or pulled out. Before a word of explanation was spoken, I knew what had occurred, and under my breath I cursed the stupid bastard.

“Lord Tophet announced, ‘Your drummer is a thief. He attempted to steal from me earlier this morning. I promise you untold wealth and you respond by sending a thief into my private chambers to rob me.’

“ ‘We didn’t send him,’ I said. ‘We didn’t know.’

“ ‘Oh, but you knew he’s a thief.’

“I said, Yes, of course we’d known about that forever, and then added, ‘But we didn’t suspect him to be so infinitely stupid as to rob you.’ Until that moment, I believe Tahman thought I was there to rescue him, to bargain for his freedom.

“ ‘Yes, that is accurate, I think,’ said Tophet, and he parted the curtain and stepped out to confront Tahman.

“The servant with the pole and mask didn’t move to cover him this time, and I saw him clearly. Cloaked in a green robe, he was, his hair long and black. The face—truly it is the face of Chaos. It’s almost indescribable. Horrible. Not because of any deformity or scars like I’d thought, but because it was hundreds or thousands of faces all flowing through each other at once. Faces of agony, of terror, of more pain than can be withstood by any of us. Tahman screamed at the sight of him, because that slithery face was intent upon him alone. The lord rolled back one sleeve, revealing more of that gleaming purple arm. ‘There is a single punishment for theft in my world,’ he explained, and then he grabbed hold of Tahman’s wrists. Tahman twisted, kicking out, but was held in place by the two Agents while the color drained from him and the grayness rose up his arms, his whipped torso, his neck, his face. It must have taken mere seconds but it seemed I stood watching that unspeakable progression for hours, and at the end of it Tahman’s face slid across Tophet’s writhing features and was sucked into the worming mass, and Tahman the thief, the fool, was an eyeless thing of stone like the hundreds we’d encountered upon our arrival. Not statues at all, they were the former citizens of that span—whatever it had been before Tophet claimed it. His body seemed to swell with vigor as he turned to me. ‘One less division of the spoils now,’ he declared. ‘Two, if you give her up.’ He cast off the robe and his attendants came flocking to fit him with costume and wig for the day, but beneath it was that horror of a visage ever in motion until the mask moved up between us again.

“He gestured my dismissal. ‘Now I will have your boat prepared,’ he said. ‘We’ll see you off in the morning. I expect you will explain to your comrades why this one can’t play. I’ll stand him in the dining hall should they need further prompting. Your thief makes your job that much simpler, doesn’t he? This could happen to any or all of you, and for me it would be simpler to execute, but I’ve no wish to deprive the world of its Bardsham just now.’

“I took from his words that he wanted this story performed. He wanted the world to know he existed: Tophet the Destroyer, the god of Chaos, did not reside in Edgeworld, but rather walked the spans of Shadowbridge with us.

“The Agents who’d brought in Tahman took hold of me and dragged me away.

“None of this could I keep from your father or the troupe. Tophet didn’t really grasp the bond at the center of a theatrical troupe, even when they war with each other.

“Unbeknownst to me, he’d already met with your father and your mother. Your father, he’d entertained late into the night, and as was Bardsham’s custom he’d hobnobbed with his lordship, who had wanted to hear only one thing: What stories did Bardsham know of people who’d sold their souls? He’d asked him to list them all, every story he’d ever heard like that, and your father of course obliged. He saw no harm in it. And as he knew literally hundreds of such tales, it meant he got to continue enjoying Tophet’s cellars while he rattled off every one. In the end, it seemed that Tophet had been satisfied with that recitation, and had sent him to bed.

“We were more surprised to find he’d also made overtures to your mother. She’d rebuffed him, no surprise there, but she’d known that wouldn’t be the end of it—she had too much experience of men who thought themselves powerful and desirable. She just didn’t know where it was going to come out next. And do you know what she did?”

Soter leaned forward though it cost him in pain. “Your mother told us to go, the three of us, to leave her behind. She wanted to save you. To save him. I think she knew what was coming if we didn’t comply. As is said of the gods, the best you can hope for is that they don’t take notice of you. This one had fixed on her, and that was that. Your mother . . .

“Bardsham, he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Are they providing us a ship?’ he asked and I said they were, Tophet claimed it was being readied. ‘Well, then, we’ll take it,’ he said. ‘Not tomorrow at his lordship’s convenience, but tonight, after our performance.’ He told Grumelpyn to find out where it was moored, but to be careful not to end up like Tahman.

“And that’s what we did. Bardsham gave one of the best performances of his life, like he was in the grandest hall, in front of the very gods of Edgeworld themselves for an audience. It was so fine that Tophet had to toast him, hail him a genius and all that. For once your father’s excesses and ego came in handy. He matched that monster drink for drink—he’d taken his measure the night before while babbling away—and he drank him into oblivion. When Tophet finally collapsed and had to be carried to bed, Bardsham retired, too, unsteady on his pins and having to be helped to his room. Of course he wasn’t half so drunk as he feigned, but it convinced the staff, which was what we wanted. Grumelpyn had mapped the palace for an escape route to the quay below. Nothing was secured—they weren’t used to having to guard things. We found our boat, loaded with bags of silver. Bardsham dumped most of that into the harbor to lighten our load. We were away and gone within half an hour.

“Then it was sailing halfway round the world and us not knowing where we was going for most of it. We’d stop on a span and ask where we were, use the silver we’d kept to provision the ship and buy anyone’s silence—at least we hoped as much—and then we sailed on. I suppose it should have come as no surprise, but we were surprised to encounter a few people on those nearer spirals who’d fled the spans that Tophet had taken over. Whether they recognized the silver coins, or maybe just our furtiveness, I don’t know. They told us he’d been moving across the face of Shadowbridge slowly, for centuries, like a great devouring juggernaut. A sucking louse in no hurry to kill what it lives off. No one knew where to run to next. Maybe they prayed he would just go away.

“We sailed on and never saw pursuit, but they’d no idea which way we’d gone and neither did we, and they thought we would be drafting deeper, slowed by the weight of our abandoned fortune.

“Eventually we reached familiar waters, the Adamantine and a span we’d played on, and from there we were able to make our way back to Colemaigne, coming into Sacbé, one span below it, at night, in case the Agents were there ahead of us. They didn’t know about you. We collected you right away along with what belongings we had, bid Orinda farewell, and sailed on to a span called Remorva, way down the far end of another spiral, well away from our usual circuit. After we’d hidden there a couple of weeks, there was no sign of anyone coming. We thought maybe we were safe. Just to make sure, though, we put two more spirals between us and Remorva before we tried performing again, settling in Emeldora. That copper-faced kingdom had never seen our like before. They had pantomime but no tradition of puppets, and Bardsham was a wonder to ’em. Leandra, though, stayed hidden. She didn’t dance any longer, and Bardsham performed simple, unembellished stories, the way Peeds had taught them to him when he was a boy. That’s what he called himself there, too: Peeds. It was a small place. You couldn’t have packed but a dozen people into it. Two weeks we were there and no hint anyone was hunting us. It looked like we’d rid ourselves of them.

“Then one night while Bardsham was performing ‘The Armless Maiden,’ I went outside and they grabbed me. Tugged a bag over my head and when they removed it, I was on board a boat and in front of me was one of those hairless gobshites holding up a gold mask on a pole. This one didn’t look serene, either. It was a mask of rage, of fury, and I knew who was sitting in the shadows behind it.

“ ‘We had a bargain,’ his voice buzzed at me, ‘and I’m going well out of my way to allow you to fulfill your part of it.’ He suddenly closed the distance between us and took hold of two of my fingers. It didn’t last but a moment, but I cannot describe how much it hurt, the two fingertips turning to stone in his gelid grip. Pain sliced right into my bones, all up my arm like you’d run a blade to split my marrow. I thought I must have screamed so loud the sky cracked. What this feels like now, creeping up me like a vine, is nothing compared with that pain from him directly. He pushed the fingertips he’d taken onto the floor and leaned past the mask, so close that I could see every wriggling snake of his face, all the shifting hollows around his eyes. ‘You’ll get her for me this time,’ he said. They’d already come to Colemaigne and destroyed half the span looking for us, though we didn’t know that then. He’d drunk up half the lives there, finally settling on Burbage’s theater. But Burbage was dying from something else already and so Tophet’s threats didn’t move him. Instead he had his Agents torture those two decent fellows standing at the end of my bed. Bois and Glaise. You know what he did to them. He could have destroyed the whole span, but gods are chimerical, who knows what—”

“He’s not a god,” Leodora scorned.

“Oh, Leodora, you don’t know, you haven’t faced him.”

“What god chases a mortal woman across the world?”

“In stories, girl—”

“Only in stories, Soter. Nowhere else.” She drew a deep breath. “What happened, then? What did she do? Did she give herself up?”

Soter tried to look her in the eye, to hold ground one final time against her ever-challenging sureness, but he finally lowered his gaze. Blanched tendrils crawled like worms up his neck as she awaited his answer. He squeezed his eyes against the pain. Tears leaked from the corners.

“No,” he said at last, then gasped a breath. “I gave Leandra up. Out of my own terror. I’m a coward, Leodora. I gave her to them. I betrayed everyone. I made up a story, led her outside, and they took her. She looked at me . . . like she’d foreseen it all and had already accepted it. Like she was forgiving me. That was worse—infinitely worse—than if she’d spat on me.”

“My father?”

“Asleep after his performance. Exhausted. By the time he came around, they were long gone, and there was Agents left behind to keep him from ever trying to leave Emeldora again. Two of them with another boat. He knew I’d been the one, sold him out. I couldn’t work up enough bile to lie to him. He made me swear to protect you, keep you away from them, keep you off the spans. Whatever happened, you were my responsibility from now on. Then we hatched a plan that used poor Grumelpyn as a decoy. We couldn’t tell him. Sent him down to our own little ship with one of the undaya cases. It was empty, but he didn’t know it. He was to make ready to sail back to Remorva. Of course those Agents went right after him. They must have tortured him awfully—Scratta said as much—but we’d told him nothing so he couldn’t tell them anything they wanted to know and I suppose they kept at him and at him, and meanwhile Bardsham had stolen their boat and gone after your mother. I never saw him again.

“Someone, a mangy fellow, recognized the undaya case quayside and brought it to me. The boat was gone, he said. I paid him and gave him some money to give Grumelpyn but for all I know he kept it or drank it and never even looked for Grumelpyn. For all I knew there was no Grumelpyn anymore anyway. I didn’t dare look for him myself. I had to look after you. If anything had happened to me, there was no one. I hid on Emeldora with you a full month before I bought a boat and sailed to Ningle. I knew that if either of them lived, your parents would know to find you on Bouyan. I buried my guilt, what I’d done, and it would have stayed buried but for your ambition and that damned coral ghoul Tastion found.”

“The Coral Man—”

“It’s your father, girl! Come back to haunt me, to plague me for all I did to him. To her!” He sobbed, and when he inhaled, his chest crackled and the tendrils slid into his jaw. “Oh, gods, it’s coming for me.”

Leodora pushed him back against the pillows. “Soter, the Coral Man isn’t Bardsham,” she said. “He’s not my father.”

He focused on her again. “What do you mean? Of course he is!”

“No. That’s your story, that you’ve told me now. The truth is, he’s part of another story, one that you stumbled into once and that I’ve now been given to know. But you have to tell me, where is Diverus?”

He shook his head, a gesture of pain and denial. “Gone. The Agents took him. Came for you and found him. He’s like your mother—he gave himself to them to save you, told them he was Jax.”

She clenched her jaw and doubled over, her head touching the cot. “Did they . . . did they do the same to him?”

“No,” he said. “Took him is all. They won’t harm him till they’re in front of Tophet. They acted as if they expected to find Bardsham in the booth.”

“How could they think that? They killed Bardsham.”

“I don’t know, Leodora. Maybe because they saw me. But they’ve found out about Leandra’s child, and they think Diverus is him. Is you. That’s why it was ‘Jax’ all the time, why it had to be. You understand?”

“Where are the cases?”

“They took those, took his instruments. Everything.”

“Then the Coral Man’s on his way.” He stared at her without comprehension. “You and me,” she said, “we’ve become part of his story. It’s like Shadowbridge itself, Soter—yours, mine, Bardsham’s, Tophet’s, Orinda’s—all these stories, they’re all coiled together, braided.”

“No,” he said. “He came to me. He haunted me! Look what he did to my arm!” He lifted it to show her the sucker mark where the Coral Man had grabbed him, but the mark was gone.

She shook her head slowly. “Your guilt haunted you, that you’d tried to bury on Bouyan. When you returned to the tales to give them to me, I think you made it manifest. You’ve haunted yourself, Soter, all along. Back on the island, too. Those weren’t my parents’ ghosts. They were never there.”

Miserably, he looked up from his arm and stared at her. Then he began to cry, keening for the burden he’d carried for so long, which had made him mistreat Diverus and lie to her, and had twisted his every decency into an act of diversion and mendacity. He sobbed, and the anguish seemed to speed the effects of the jewel’s poison. The veins in his neck went powdery white. Suddenly he took one ragged breath and his back seemed to bow up. He looked at her with eyes that knew the time had come. “Forgive me, sweet child,” he said.

“Soter.” She fell across him. “You taught me everything,” she whispered to him.

He made a small dry sound, and it was as though the venom surged up into him. She felt the change and drew upright. The face below her was as blank and dead as Shumyzin’s at the top of a tower so long ago that it felt like years. Upon the bed lay a lifeless statue.

The Brazen Head opened its eyes, and softly it iterated, “Time is that which ends.”

She sat alone on top of the southern tower of Colemaigne. This one sported no statues, just the pennants seen from the street, hanging listless now. A storm had passed, its clouds scudding away across the sea in a single line, leaving her bathed in late-afternoon sunlight, all too reminiscent of Vijnagar where they’d all been alive, and surrounded by puddles of water. She knew she should go, but could not compel herself. Her thoughts churned through everything she’d shared with Soter—starting with all the tales she’d learned to perform, the people and traditions she’d defied on Bouyan; the gods and demigods who’d intervened along the way, and the avatars and tricksters she’d encountered; ending with the quiet musician she’d rescued from a randomly chosen paidika, who had now sacrificed himself for her. Closing her eyes, she could see Soter as he held up the figure of Meersh in his hut, dazzling her with the revelation of who her father had been and what powers might be hers. From then on, it was a jumble of events, disconnected and disparate, that had brought her here, and Diverus—what was Diverus? Did she love him? She wanted to but doubted the authenticity of her own feelings. What did she know of love, whose reliable examples were all from stories. Soter had perhaps loved her most, but he’d feuded with her at every turn, lied to her, tried to rein her in. It didn’t feel like love. Dymphana, she supposed, was a better model, but a surrogate one, and yoked to a bastard upon whom that tender word could not find purchase. Tastion? He’d been unable to distinguish love from lust. And what did Diverus have on his side of it? A mother he’d invented, conjuring her as a merwoman and a sphinx long after she was gone—fantastic illusions that couldn’t be credited. Not one reliable example between them, yet they proposed to love each other because they’d gone together to a place where the truth of the heart was revealed. He had acted on that to save her.

Soter had known Diverus loved her without the pool of true desire, because he’d recognized what he was jealous of. He’d seen Diverus look at her the way Bardsham had looked at her mother and had done everything he could to stamp out that passion before it caught fire. Soter had known so much and hidden so much more. In the end, he’d been protecting her from her own heart. Now that was over, the shield gone.

She sat, gazing out to sea, and grief grew tangled in the complexities. She could have awakened the Brazen Head and asked for advice again, but she had no desire for riddles now, no interest in clever puzzles, and anyway she wanted no one’s advice anymore.

Soter had always been. He was a permanent fixture in the world, dependably grouchy, as adamant as she was recalcitrant. She’d no concept of what a world without him was like, but one thing she did know: She would be damned before she gave up Diverus, too. The gods could hang themselves if they thought she would sit by and allow it. As she’d said to Soter, while they thought they were forging their own, they had all become characters in a different story, one belonging to a seemingly lifeless husk, which Soter had mistaken for Bardsham’s body and ghost. They were like bees carrying pollen from one place to another, from an island, across spirals, to its proper destination, although it might well be to death that she was delivering. Bees acted out of their own needs. They didn’t realize that flowers would bloom as a result. Were the patterns of the world as capricious as the gods or merely inscrutable? There was a question for the Brazen Head to answer sometime. Some other time.

Now it was time to go.

She got up, and even as she did, one lone straggling gray cloud let loose a few drops of rain on her.

Then out of the turret at the end of the bridge a figure emerged, and she was astonished to recognize Orinda in a violet mourning gown.

Soter’s body lay on the cot back in the costume room of the theater. No one knew what to do with him now. The theater itself was closed until further notice. Somebody would have to send to Sacbé for wood to repair the stage and the galleries—Colemaigne had none. Probably it would fall to Bois and Glaise to do it.

Orinda took in the view as she approached, her face encased in a violet veil. Only her eyes showed above it, and Leodora realized it was her poise that had identified her. “I have never been up here before,” she said. “I wasn’t aware it was accessible. You can see everything, can’t you?“

“You can see a lot.”

“Sometimes a different perspective helps.”

“How did you—”

“Glaise followed you. I think he was worried you might do yourself harm. I knew better, but still I didn’t want you to go.” She hesitated before adding, “We’d hoped you might stay on with us.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Of course. Your puppets are gone.”

Leodora asked, “Did you love him?”

The eyes widened, stung and unprepared. Orinda raised a trembling hand to her mouth, hidden though it was. Her eyes looked inward awhile before she spoke. “I suppose I must have. He whinged a good deal, and was unnecessarily harsh to you, but he always brought me in mind of Mr. Burbage, and of the best times ever this theater knew. And now you go, too, and that will be the last ember. The fire dies and I’ve no energy to kindle it afresh. Gods come to the rescue just so many times, I think.”

“Love makes no sense.”

“Nor ever has, dear. The theater is full of examples.”

“He named that puppet after you, didn’t he? There was no figure in any stories with the name Orinda.”

Above the veil, Orinda’s eyes teared and she squeezed them closed until she had fought back the urge to give in to sorrow. “Where do you go now?” she asked.

“Back through the Pons Asinorum again. From there to . . . wherever it is Diverus has been taken. I’m not certain where that is, but I know now who lies at the far end of it.”

“Nothing can be in this world certain but uncertainty,” Orinda proclaimed. She reached out and grasped Leodora’s arm. “Return to us,” she said in words laced with fear. As she had already given an answer to that, Leodora said nothing and, when Orinda let go, she stood her ground. Orinda turned and walked quickly back into the turret. Above the crenellations, she gave one last look out across the ocean, then descended.

The sun hugged the horizon now, and the puddles on the rampart were dark enough for her needs. She straddled one and took out the stone phial from the recesses of her tunic. As she let one drop fall, the Brazen Head animated. It watched the drop splash into the puddle and the reaction ripple out to the edges.

“You’re wondering why you have to pass through Epama Epam like a gateway each time,” said the Brazen Head.

“I was, that is, yes.”

“Well, you don’t have to, you know. You can go where you want to go directly from here or anywhere so long as that fluid holds out.”

“Then why wouldn’t I?” she asked.

“Direct doorways open both ways, and what lies there can then come here. The continuum of Epama serves as a buffer.”

“You might have said earlier,” she scolded it.

“You might have asked.” It closed its eyes. It might not have been Soter, she thought, but the Brazen Head shared enough of his traits that she would never forget how he’d vexed her.

She stepped forward and sank as if into the great broad tower.

It was night and the sea-lane of Epama Epam was deserted. No one awaited her arrival this time. No one was celebrating her return. She supposed that by the perverse rules of this place, as she was neither a traveler to be tricked nor someone to whom they now owed anything, she was of no interest to them—not so much unwelcome as dismissed. At least physically it looked like Colemaigne again instead of the dusty prisons of Palipon.

Nevertheless, she didn’t intend to stay long this time. She walked the street in search of a puddle of water, but could find no moisture on the stones. She went to the houses lining the lane and knocked on doors, but there were no answers. No one was about and no lights shone anywhere. It was as if everyone had gone someplace else. She recalled glimpsing the monstrous parade from Hyakiyako and wondered if all manner of unnatural things sooner or later must thread through here. By whatever name, it connected to everything else. The goddess had called it the world mountain, although Leodora could see nothing anywhere in Epama Epam that qualified as a mountain.

She finally abandoned the houses, crossed the lane to the railing, and peered over.

Below, stars twinkled back at her from a black tapestry of sky. The effect was not so unnerving as it had been in the day. Night made it seem a reflection, as if an impossible liquid sky didn’t lie above. “A dark reflection,” said the Brazen Head.

She glanced at it but it had already gone back to sleep—or had she only heard it in her mind? How far away the undersky lay she couldn’t be sure. Darkness made it appear terribly close. She climbed over the railing then, and stood on the narrow ledge of hard, glistening street over what seemed to be a bottomless gulf. She drew out the phial on its cord, uncorked it, and poured a single drop into the night sky. Then she stood craned over the rail, expecting . . . something. The drop, she concluded, must have fallen forever without reaching anywhere. It wasn’t really a reflection. She would have to go back to the houses, maybe break into one to get what she needed. She didn’t like that idea much.

Then as she drew back, ready to climb over the rail to safety, the stars below rippled. She craned her head back and stared. A pure darkness unwound from directly beneath her. Swiftly it blotted out the stars. Nothing showed in it but a huge emptiness: She had not fixed upon any destination. But she didn’t know the destination; didn’t know how far along the journey the Agents might be; didn’t know where Tophet might have moved to since Soter had seen him. Nothing in the confession had told her where the Destroyer might be now. How much more of Shadowbridge would he have devoured while she grew up on her little island? How many years remained before he banqueted in the long house of Tenikemac?

Meanwhile, the darkness absorbed all. She could not wait.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped off the ledge and into the sky below that was no longer sky. “Diverus,” she said, and fell. She held him in her thoughts, his face in the darkness ahead, remembering him with his eyes closed as he played some tune that snatched him away, his fingers delicate upon the shawm. Down and down she fell, knowing all the while that it was up, that everything about this journey was inverted, and that she was drifting down so slowly because there was no surface below to pull her to it, no wind, no sense of motion save that the blackness where the stars had hung expanded and engulfed her. Then it was as if she passed through a membrane.

Her feet touched and she bent her knees to take the compression of landing, even though it was gentle. She settled in a crouch like a tumbler, coiled to spring and roll if need be. Rising up, she found herself inside a small room with a low ceiling through which it seemed she must have passed without any sign. A pad lay on the floor for a bed, and upon it were empty shackles. These were a prisoner’s quarters, then.

Light spilled in from a small porthole in the wall, and that combined with a sense of motion told her she was on board a ship.

The view through the porthole was of a shifting gray fog behind which towered sheer walls, so high that she couldn’t see the crest from there.

In turning, she kicked something that clittered across the floor. She picked it up—a flat reed set in a piece of wood that penetrated the center of a thin disk. She turned it in her hands, not recognizing it immediately. The reed had been scraped unevenly, and the whole piece had obviously broken off something larger. She realized then that she held part of the shawm that Diverus played. It looked as if someone had stepped on it.

She glanced at the bed again, imagining him shackled there. They had kept him a prisoner in here, and the mouthpiece of the shawm had acted as a magnet to her, even though Diverus was no longer here. She had arrived too late.

She opened the door and entered a corridor leading past other small rooms and out into a galley strewn with clay pots and jugs, bottles and cups. Curiously none of these things looked used. The bottles, full of wine, were corked and wax-sealed; the uneven darkness of the pots suggested use, but it must have been long ago. They were dusty now. The door on the far side of the galley led her onto the deck of the ship.

The rails and masts were lacquered black. At the stern, red bulbous lanterns hung like two extinguished eyes off a wing-shaped taffrail. The place she had just emerged from was a foredeck house. A ladder ran up the side of it. She climbed high enough to look across the top. A curious waist-high cylinder protruded from the center of the foredeck, looking something like a capstan, but at a location that made no sense.

She climbed the rest of the way up and went to it. Recessed in the top was an elaborately etched brass plate. She traced a finger across the black lines in it, which fanned out from a second, smaller pocket in the lower half of the plate. Other, curving lines intersected the rays, and at the top of the circle was a kind of gnomon on a swiveling needle. The small niche at the bottom was empty, but it seemed intended to hold some object smaller than her palm. She rubbed her finger on the projecting gnomon, then pushed at it. The ship abruptly canted, and she pulled her hand back. The ship settled against the jetty again, and its lines went slack. Whatever it was, the device exercised control over the ship. She left it and walked to the prow.

The ship had sailed into a channel of some sort. The high walls loomed everywhere, curving out of sight in both directions, suggesting that they’d sailed into a giant’s labyrinth. The ship was moored at the end of a jetty, one of three that lay like huge fingers upon the glass-like surface of the water. Two additional boats were tied up at the others, and the three jetties led to a single pier running along another stretch of wall. She could make out the zigzag of steps leading up, up into the fog.

She reached into her tunic, clutched the Brazen Head. “Where are we?” she asked.

The head yawned, showing its fangs. “At an end,” it replied, as cryptic as ever.

“Might you unravel that?”

“All spirals,” it told her, “come to an end. This is one such. Called Calcaria once upon a time, but no longer.”

“The end of a spiral,” she said in wonderment. Soter had told her that all the spirals on Shadowbridge began or ended in a helical span, which was why they were called spirals in the first place, but she had never reached one before. Spirals stretched far across the oceans before coming to an end. She imagined the nautiloid shape enclosing her, and wondered where the ship had entered the maze and how far she might be from where she’d begun.

“You are halfway across the infinite,” the head told her as if she’d asked it aloud. “Given the nature of infinity, however, I’m sure that’s not helpful.”

“And where is Diverus?”

The lion’s brow creased. Its gold eyes shifted away from her. “He is above. A soul in torment. Another displaced.” The eyes rolled back to her again. “Act wisely and take care to be Jax.” It became still again.

She held it a moment longer to be certain it had finished riddling. She gnawed awhile on what that was supposed to mean, and finally reached into her tunic and pulled out her domino mask. Wrapping it around her face and the top of her head, she tied it firmly in back, tucked her hair into her cowl, and pulled the cowl up. She didn’t know why the pendant thought it important, but she knew better than to disregard its advice.

She left the foredeck, then stepped up over the rail and down a plank to the jetty. Even from directly below, the end of the span seemed to rise up forever. All the same and however far, that was where she was going.

If the span that had once been Calcaria looked like anything at all, it looked like her first glimpse of Colemaigne, but in far worse condition. Here a powdery shale covered the surface and billowed with each step she took. The buildings, however they had once stood, were decomposed into gritty heaps that made it seem she walked through an antediluvian graveyard of enormous creatures, their bulk decayed and deformed into mounds over skulls and ribs and long, broken limbs. And everywhere beneath these grotesque heaps stood the statues. She knew too well how these statues had come to be, and what they really represented. The citizens of this span had been round-eyed and long-snouted creatures, reminiscent of Yemoja but with longer, thinner snouts, inhuman round eyes, and crested foreheads. Weaving through their various silent poses, she mourned not merely their obliteration but the eradication of their collective story of themselves, a world of tales that would now never be heard.

The only sound on that windless span was her feet crunching through the ruins. Unlike Colemaigne, nowhere here did any pristine structures remain, and no live creatures lurked among the groves of the pale dead.

Then somewhere in the middle of the span, she turned a corner and stopped, amazed.

There, as if grown from the debris surrounding it, stood a stepped ziggurat of the same grayish white hue, except that this shape gleamed. Its curved edges were smooth and hard. Against the gloomy backdrop of fog the structure seemed an illusion, a place where the lowering clouds had congealed. Barely visible from the ground, a bluish dome capped its heights.

A great rectangular arch had been cut out of the lowest step of the ziggurat, an entrance that could have accommodated the Agents’ abandoned ship in the harbor.

In no doubt of her destination, Leodora walked into the ziggurat. No torches or lamps were visible, but the walls themselves gave off a glow, a phosphorescence that she’d seen before in sea creatures at night. The entrance became a ramp. She had no choice but to ascend, though her legs were already tired from the climb onto the span. She found it odd that the ramp took her up without any access to lower levels, of which there surely had to be at least three or four. Instead it rose steadily until she reached a landing that opened upon a chamber so vast she couldn’t see the far side of it. Ahead, light poured down from the blue dome she’d seen. It made her feel that she was moving through water. She thought of Oceanus and his pool of the true heart, but this was nothing as benign.

Furniture and objects lay scattered everywhere—benches, rugs, draperies, hookahs, filigreed trays and stands, painted amphorae, faience bottles, and real statuary—a treasure hoard taken from spans too numerous to count, the final remains of whole worlds devoured and destroyed in Tophet’s passing.

Directly under the dome stood a dais covered on the sides she could see by gauzy curtains. Shapes moved behind the curtains, although she couldn’t tell what they were. She drew nearer, but a movement on her left caught her attention. For a moment she didn’t know what she was seeing. Then as it dawned on her she gasped. Swiftly she wove her way around the various furnishings and toward the object, the impossible object.

Her first impression had been that the thing was a tall mirror. It stood on a pedestal of granite. Reflected or held in its surface was a room virtually identical to this one, filled with treasures, but not quite the same ones or in the same place. Within the field of them, an image of herself wandered. The image wore a gossamer white gown that left her taut but scarred belly exposed. A jewel-studded collar circled her throat, but the jewels could hardly compete with her flaming red hair. Coming nearer, Leodora saw that this near twin was barefoot and wore bangles with tiny bells around her ankles. A heavy belt of garnets pulled the skirt almost obscenely low on her hips. The image did not match her own movements as she worked her way to the mirror, and when she stood directly in front of it, the image looked out past her, as if scanning a distant landscape, but then did approach, walking right up to the glass until they were almost face-to-face and might have been watching each other had the other’s forlorn gaze only found her. She felt as if she were peering into the future, perhaps ten years from now if those years served to take a heavy toll on her, deaden her features, kill her spirit. But by then Leodora knew the truth.

“Mother,” she said, the word spilling anguish. For a horrible instant it seemed that the image heard her and stared into her eyes. She pressed her hand to the glass as if she might reach through it, but Leandra’s eyes did not see the hand, or her; and she recalled the man who had come upon her lying on the beach of Bouyan and cried out “Witch!” in the misapprehension that Leandra had returned. Now she understood that in a sense Leandra had. “I can see you,” she told the image.

“She doesn’t hear,” said a voice behind her. Even as she started to turn, two of Tophet’s Agents grabbed her by the arms. A third, the one who’d spoken, eyed her menacingly. “What manner of creature strays into Tophet’s realm?” he asked.

Her heartbeat pounded and for an instant reason left her; she felt undone. Then it was as if all the terror fell away: These creatures had taken Diverus, and a surge of anger doused her fear. She answered him: “One who resents being misrepresented by fools.”

The Agent massaged his chin with thumb and forefinger. The one gripping her left arm asked, “What’s she mean, Scratta?”

“What we already know—that the old man lied to us, and we’re set about torturing the wrong captive.”

Her heart sank. “Torturing?”

“What else are we to do when the boy can’t provide Tophet with any stories other than his own? And it’s a paltry thing at best, one for the weepers—a mother turned into a mermaid, the boy abandoned and sold into slavery, into supper for some demented afrits. I expect by now he’s told them how he was rescued, but it’s evident he’s not withholding, he really doesn’t know any stories. Does he?”

“He’s only a musician,” she said.

Scratta smiled flatly. For a moment his eyes looked away from her, looked at some internal discomfort, and she suspected he was taking stock of the trouble he was in, having kidnapped the wrong person. Then he came back to her. “The lord is not going to be pleased. Although your presence may ameliorate.” He pointed at the curtained dais. “Take Jax to him now.”

“What? This one’s Jax, too?”

Scratta almost tried to explain, then sighed. “Yes, this one’s Jax, too. Take her to the lord.”

The two dragged her past Scratta. From behind he taunted, “You’re no clever boy, are you? Jax, the masked storyteller—you had no choice, did you, but to hide your real self. Why, on some spans, they’d have thrown you into the sea.”

They dragged her through the treasure trove to the dais. Closer, she saw that what she’d taken to be more statuary was in fact a line of the round-eyed and long-snouted natives, lushly appareled in a rainbow of surcoats and coathardies, the females adorned with heavy wigs. They watched her dragged past them, never moving, their expressions an admixture of silent horror and supplication—but what were they begging her to do? Free them or cause no trouble and give in? At least, she thought, he hadn’t killed all of them, though they had been transformed like the Agents into something other than their original substance. They might have been standing there like that since the day Tophet arrived and took their span.

Behind the curtains, behind the dais, the treasures thinned and the space opened up. One group of figures clustered in a semicircle directly under the dome, its blue cast distorting their intent in its soothing color. In their center was a high-backed throne.

A three-sided puppeteer’s screen had been set up before them, its white square burning like a blind rectangular eye. In front of it, hanging from chains, was Diverus. His body, as naked as when he’d entered Oceanus’s pool, ran with sweat, and he was babbling, his tormented words falling over themselves as if he couldn’t keep up with what he had to say even though it was nonsense.

An Agent stood just behind him beside a brazier. He held a set of tongs from which something long and paper-thin dangled. She twisted in the grip of her captors as she recognized that it was skin.

The Agents hauled her around the end of the semicircle. More of the natives in their forced finery stood there as if watching a play. Some of them were weeping silently, their terror palpable. At the midpoint of the group, upon the throne, sat a figure in a dark robe that might have been green under other light. To the side of him a naked and ice-pale bald female held up a pole that was like a gibbet. From the crosspiece at the top of the pole hung a golden oval mask portraying a sun god’s cherubic face. It was at least five times the size of a human face, a sun disk. The attendant herself was either blind or else had eyes that were utterly black. From behind the mask, a voice said, “What is this, Scratta?” It buzzed like a hive of hornets.

“Lord,” answered Scratta. “I believe I have solved the puzzle of Jax.”

Behind the mask, he drummed long fingertips on the arm of the throne. They were shiny, of the same blue as the dome overhead. “That’s good,” Tophet replied, “because this one has passed the point of making any sense, and all we can do is finish stripping the surface off him for the mere pleasure of doing it, not in order to learn anything.” Another pause. “So what is the puzzle’s solution?”

“This is Jax, Lord.” He turned, and the two behind him dragged her forward.

“Well. Is that right?”

She didn’t realize he was asking her until Scratta raised a hand as if to cuff her. “Answer him.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m Jax. The one you’re torturing is my musician and I would like him back intact, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

The laughter began low, sounding as inhuman as his speech, like metal grinding against metal, ending finally in the words, “A female puppeteer. That’s unheard of, isn’t it?”

“Lord, we have never encountered one to bring before you. Storytellers, yes, but not a puppeteer, much less one compared to—” He faltered.

Tophet seemed not to notice. “But how did she escape your attention, Scratta?”

“Lord?” Scratta asked, the word rimed with fear.

“She had to have come here on your boat along with this useless creature. How did she elude all of you?”

“I don’t know, Lord. We saw no sign of her.”

“Perhaps your eyes are going in your dotage, hmm? I may have to consider that it’s time you were freed from your position, Scratta.”

From the way he stiffened, Leodora could tell that freed didn’t mean anything as pleasant as it sounded. “I shouldn’t care to leave your service, Lord Chaos.”

“Mmmm,” Tophet answered equivocally. “So Jax has come to rescue a musician. I’m impressed you didn’t flee. Most are disinclined when they receive my invitation.”

“I suppose that’s why you lie and promise them great wealth?”

“Who have you been talking to?”

She shrugged. “I was told you were looking for a storyteller and that you pay handsomely for a good performance.”

Tophet shifted upon his throne. “Where would you have heard such a thing?”

“From . . . oh, what was that name?” She seemed to be asking Scratta, who gave her an anxious look. “Oh, yes, now I recall. Bardsham.”

The entire group became a diorama in blue. For moments, no one moved. Only Diverus made a sound, whimpering, half out of his mind. She desperately wanted to go to him, but knew they would both die if she did. She had to stand her ground.

The buzzing voice of the Lord of Chaos slashed the air, dismissing her claim: “Bardsham is long dead. He told you nothing.”

“Yet your Agents here sought that name in seeking me. How is it they were thus confused?”

“It was your skill that confused the masses. They compared you to him. Bardsham was thrown from a span just like this one. A great height, wasn’t it, Scratta?”

“Thrown? Not turned into stone like all the others?”

Chaos rose up. “Why am I explaining myself to a puppeteer?” he shouted. “Scratta!”

“If I may,” she interjected and waited until the tension dampened. “You requested a story, a proof from him”—she pointed to Diverus—“and he couldn’t provide you with that.”

“Your musician. You said.”

“I did. Allow me to recompense you with such a tale. It will make up for his inability and satisfy you that I am she whom you’ve sought.” With a gesture at the undaya cases, she added, “You’ve kindly provided me my puppets, too, so I will give you a tale to hold you rapt and you will give us safe passage come morning.”

Tophet the Destroyer chuckled. “I’ve seen hundreds of your kind, and most of them you’ll find strewn among my possessions—the ones we haven’t left behind. You are brazen for someone so young and untested. You had best hope your talents match your presumption.”

“Lord.” Scratta filled that single syllable with all his misgivings.

“Yes,” Tophet answered and likewise in a syllable dismissed those doubts. “I’ll have her shadowplay now. What is your concern in it? You failed even to collect the right individual, tricked by an old sot.”

Scratta bowed his head. He looked at Leodora from beneath his brow. His lips stretched in what might have been a retributive smirk. “Yes, Lord,” he answered softly.

Leodora didn’t move.

“Well?” Tophet asked.

“My musician?” she said.

“One of you get him down.”

“I’ll need water for his wounds. Wine for him to drink.”

“Brazen,” he said again, and she unconsciously wrapped one hand around her pendant to keep it from speaking up.

“I don’t have to perform. We might instead take a meal with all your friends, Lord Tophet.”

His fingers squeezed the arms of the throne. “Do you appreciate at all to whom you speak in this manner?”

“I’m well aware,” she said.

Another pause followed, and then he sighed. “You remind me of someone, girl, who defied me even though she drowned in fear. Why don’t you remove that mask and show us your face?”

“Perhaps after my performance, and you can show me yours.”

Diverus, lowered from the chains, collapsed on the floor. They had torn three strips the length of his back. She could hardly keep from screaming at the sight of what they’d done to him. He babbled softly with foam and vomit on his lips.

“I doubt he’ll play you any tunes today,” Scratta said to her.

“Maybe not, but he won’t suffer any further because of me.”

The pale Agent shook his head slowly. “The day is long from over, storyteller.”

“You’re wrong,” she argued. “The day’s nearly done.” She carefully took hold of Diverus. His eyes fluttered open and focused on her a moment. He breathed her name and she shushed him. If Scratta heard the name, he didn’t respond. She held him to her, raised him to his feet, and then supported him while they shambled around the broad puppet screen.

An attendant delivered a goblet, a bowl of water, and a cloth. Leodora directed him to place them on the performer’s stool under the burning lantern that cast the silk screen in glaring light—too much light. She eased Diverus against the stool, where he stood leaning, his legs trembling but holding him up. She walked back into view of Tophet and his terrified audience, and struggled to remove the lid from the larger puppet case. Then she pulled it around the side of the screen. The second one she lifted as it was and carried out of sight. She stood the case on end directly in back of the lantern, where it threw a long shadow across the polished floor.

She took the bowl from the stool, rolled the cloth in it and then washed his face and mouth, soaked the cloth again and squeezed some of the water over Diverus’s back. He cried out, then hung his head and muttered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Again she hushed him. Then she turned away with the bowl and crouched down and poured the rest of the water in the stripe of shadow cast by the puppet case. A few moments longer she knelt there, her back to Diverus.

She set aside the bowl and stood. Beside her, the other puppet case lay open. Glancing down, she found that the figure of Meersh lay on top of the pile. She picked it up and carried it to Diverus.

“Hold this,” she told him. Then gingerly she wrapped her arms around his waist and guided him to the standing case.

Either he realized or saw what she intended and tried to struggle. “No, Leodora, no,” but she covered his mouth with her hand.

“Epama Epam,” she said. “Go into the pool. The goddess will help you. She’s called Yemoja.”

“No. I have to—”

“Do it, Diverus, you’ll die if you don’t. You’re dying right now. And someone has to look after Meersh.” She lifted him, and he hadn’t enough strength to defy her.

She pressed her lips to his, tasting his sweat, his pain like cold fire. “Goodbye, my love,” she whispered in his ear, and then let go.

The moment he was gone, she pulled the case aside and laid it down. There was only a shiny puddle of water on the floor, a many-colored oil sliding snake-like upon its surface.

She opened the second case. The flat-piled puppets waited for her to bring them to life. She crossed to the larger case.

“What is wrong, storyteller?” called Tophet the Destroyer. “Can’t get your musician to play?” Then, “Where is my story?”

“It’s here,” she answered. From the larger case, she took out the puppets and set them aside, then reached in and tugged the ribbon, lifting the lid on the secret compartment.

A hiss of surprise escaped her. She took a step back.

In his cavity in the case, the Coral Man had turned to dust.

Kneeling beside the open case, she sorted through the puppets but kept staring at the powdered coral. In the middle of it something black sparkled in the lantern light. She turned from the puppets and dusted the thing off. It wasn’t very big, a knobbly fused lump like a clump of beach sand that had been struck and transformed by lightning. She smiled grimly. Her last lingering doubts of the Coral Man—doubts she had kept even from Soter—had been banished.

Rising, she carried a piece of setting with her to the stool.

“I want my story!” yelled Tophet like an angry child.

“Here, then,” she replied, and she hooked the flat strip of scenery onto the screen. It cast the shadow of a rough surface, representing a span, any span, all spans.

“This tale,” she announced, “took place long ago and far away in the season of the monsoon on a span called Dyauspitar.”

There was a commotion on the far side of the screen.

“Dyauspitar sat low, a curl hovering just over shallow marshy water. Gnarled and twisted trees grew on either side of it in incalculable numbers, and the people harvested the wood for their every need. The buildings were made of strips of this wood woven with great skill, houses like giant baskets that could flex and bend against the terrible winds that came with the season of monsoons.”

While she spoke, she lifted up a handful of the dust and threw it at the screen. It burst like a cloud into the air, and as it floated between the lantern and the screen it created an illusion of soft rain. Then she took the goblet of wine and flung the contents across the screen, and the sky burst crimson.

“Stop!” cried Tophet. “Stop it now!”

She only lifted another handful of dust and flung it into the air above herself. Then she grabbed the strap of the large undaya case and hauled it, empty of puppets, around the screen in front of the throne.

“You will not tell that story!” commanded Chaos.

“Why?” she asked. “It’s the one you’ve asked to hear, time and again. From every single storyteller you kidnapped and killed—all of these petrified forms surrounding us—you anticipated that story, the only one that ever concerned you. Bardsham with his tales of Meersh, of girls who gave up their arms for their fathers, of brothers who fought over magical gifts out of a Dragon Bowl—you didn’t really care about any of those. There was only the one, and nobody knew it. But you put them to death anyway, just in case. As someone said to me not so long ago, how many stories we keep is the secret everyone wants to know.”

She tipped the box and poured the dust of the Coral Man across the floor, into a large ring. Setting it down, she stepped into the ring and sat down, cross-legged.

Tophet was on his feet, and the blind attendant had somehow lost her sense of things, had forgotten him. His true face glared at her over the golden mask. As Soter had described, it was a gruesome war of expressions, a horrible roiling, writhing coil of slaughtered features.

“Dyauspitar was home to a priesthood,” she continued, “dedicated to the god Dyaus, who had once been a celebrated sky god, until a collective of demigods struck him down for his excesses and drove him into the sea. That span, according to legend, was built along the spine of Dyaus, which kept the waters shallow there. The truth is, the ousted god embraced his submarine exile and gave himself a new name: Oceanus.

“I doubt you knew that, but it hardly matters, for this tale doesn’t concern him anyway.”

“You will stop now, storyteller.”

She stared at his terrible face and replied, “I think I will begin now.” She pushed back the cowl, caught the thong in her hair, and unwound it. Then she clutched the mask and dragged it from her face.

At the sight of her, Tophet sat down upon his throne again. From behind the gold mask his voice emerged: “I don’t have to stay for this.”

“You can’t leave. You’ve breathed in my dust, and you’ll stay put now for the story you’ve ensured no one could know.” She gathered another handful of coral dust.

“Leandra.” His voice cracked.

The name cut her and angrily she flung the dust at him, but when she spoke, her voice was calm and controlled. “On Dyauspitar when a child reached the end of his childhood he endured a ritual of passage where his soul was removed for three days from his body and for three days he lay dead while his soul entered an animal selected by a class of priests known as enchanters. And when the spirit of the boy was put back in his body, it was mixed with that animal spirit and he was a man. This was the ritual of manhood and it had gone on since Dyaus fell. It was so perilous that the priests who could perform it were few.

“Our story concerns one of them, whose name was Auuenau. He’d come to the order early, an orphan, and his training had begun well before he was ready to pass through that ritual. He was better versed in the mysteries of the enchanters than most of his elders. He knew, for instance, that one member of his brotherhood guarded a cache of scrolls containing the secrets of Dyaus, which had been found floating upon the water after he fell. In them were secrets of life and death and eternity. Had the archivists of the fabled Library of Shadowbridge known of its existence, they would have taken the cache from Dyauspitar to protect the world. Even the gods of Edgeworld would never have bestowed such knowledge upon any mortal, else risk the destruction of the world.

“Auuenau coveted the hidden knowledge, and for years he collected hints, clues, and inadvertent comments that knit together to lead him to the scrolls. They were concealed in a rough stone kist in the order’s ossuary.

“He was careful to present his interest in the ossuary as an expression of reverence. He tended to the bones of his forebears. One by one, however, he removed the scrolls, replacing each with a blank, until he had them all. He hid them in the cistern inside his house.

“The house was filled with seashells and coral and desiccated sea creatures that he’d collected, some shells so large that it took two hands to lift them. He shared the small house with an apprentice under his tutelage, and out of fear of discovery he had to limit his examination of the scrolls to the times when the apprentice was absent. Thus he read with the intention of memorizing every detail of every spell and ritual. In those texts he found the source of the enchanters’ power to remove the soul at puberty. The grander shape of the simple rituals he had learned was explicated, and soon enough he had the means to expand upon the limited powers granted the enchanters—to cleave body and soul completely, achieving true immortality. No one can say what might have happened if he had accomplished this as he intended, unhindered. Unnoticed.

“On Dyauspitar when the monsoon arrived, everyone retreated to their houses and remained inside until the storm abated. It was called the Month of Cold Rice. To go outside during the monsoon was to risk disappearing forever. Although ropes were strung from end to end, and looped around bollards down the main avenues, these were no guarantees against the screaming winds and the crashing waves. Let go for even a moment and you would be blown into the trees or over their tops and out to sea. Only a fool ventured out during the monsoon. As the storm began, Auuenau sent his apprentice out on a fabricated mission to the far end of the span, from which he could not possibly return before it struck. Thus safely isolated by the storm, Auuenau assumed he could achieve what he’d read in the scrolls.

“To begin he had to score a specific and intricate pattern into the woven floor of his house. Drawing it first with a stick of charcoal, he discovered that it took up almost the entire space. He had to tear up his bedding, and shove aside tables and cushions. His collection of shells and dead sea creatures he piled up in the corners. Then began the task of carving the pattern he’d drawn, using a mallet and small chisel. This proved to be exhausting. It took him days to chisel out its symmetrical curves and whorls. All the while the storm pushed the walls and roof so that the house seemed to breathe in and out like a living sea creature itself, with curved window eyes and slatted ribs.

“At last he completed it. He rested, he couldn’t say how long, for the monsoon made everything dark, everything the same, so that night and day melted together. But finally he stuffed the scrolls into the front of his tunic and began to walk the pattern. At various points he was to stop and recite certain text. Most of it was in arcane languages he did not know the meaning of, forcing him carefully to sound out the words, the phrases. What the scrolls failed to mention was how enervating each recitation was, as if at each stage some part of him was siphoned off. He found that he could not go any farther than the first two stops upon the pattern that first day. Having arrived at the second branch, he had to retreat, his legs barely holding him up as he backed carefully along the line he’d walked, and out again. Then, in the corner, he collapsed, sleeping as if dead.

“Hours later, perhaps the next day, when he awoke, he entered again, finding that he could pass the points where he had already recited from the scrolls. He entered deeper into the pattern, making it through the third and fourth stages before he had to withdraw again and rest.

“The storm never let up. It shrieked and shook the house, and the walls and roof continued to flex. By the time he entered the fifth stage, the outer darkness seemed to have entered the house and penetrated him as well. He could feel the blood in his veins going gray, then black. It seemed he’d been walking this pattern for eternity. There were places along it, so the scrolls claimed, where a wrong step could suck him into nonexistence, into some other world, or turn him inside out. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d backed out and come back in, how many times he’d passed out from exhaustion, nor when he’d last eaten. The swirling pattern of spirals was no larger than this room, this hut, yet it seemed to have expanded to the size of Shadowbridge itself. As he cleared the tenth and final stage and dizzily walked toward the center, he sensed a second self beside him, an umbra in his shape walking at his shoulder. Precariously he stepped, balanced on one leg, and then set the other foot down in the center of the pattern.

“He had arrived.

“Auuenau glanced sidelong at the dark self sharing the center with him. It hadn’t gone away, but turned and looked back at him with blackness for eyes, and in the blackness stars sparkled.

“He stood, waiting for something explosive—for the fabric of space to tear apart, for the gods to unveil themselves and embrace him, for the sense of cleaving, for anything to tell him that the transformation had occurred. There was nothing. He dangled in the wedge between wholeness and split.

The thing hadn’t happened but hung on the brink. Exhausted, he fumbled for the final scroll again, peeled it apart, and read. What had he forgotten? Nothing. He was sure of it. He scanned the text, his vision blurring. He rubbed his eyes, stretched the scroll out again. And there, amid the warnings of dire consequences awaiting he who failed to follow the path to the end, there was the final opaque phrase that had to be recited from the center of the pattern. He laughed at his simple foolishness. Then he read the lines, whatever they meant, in whatever language it was.

“The darkness closed in from all sides. It circled the pattern, pressed down from above. The shade beside him began to spin. He watched tendrils drawn out of him, pulled into the whirling thing, which grew smaller as it spun faster. Warmth left him, beginning in the core of him and withdrawing to his extremities. Behind it came a sharp chill, like the touch of marble. When the last warmth left him, the tendrils vanished and the spinning form compressed still further, until it was a small flickering thing, hard, burnished and knurled. He reached out to close his hand around it . . . at which point the door to his house flew open.

“The head of his order stood there, clinging to the sides of the door, and clinging to him was Auuenau’s apprentice. The apprentice let go one hand and pointed. ‘See?’ he cried.

“Auuenau, standing with an unfurled scroll in one hand and the pearl of his soul gripped in the other, could only shout, ‘No!’ Even as he said this, the room changed. The chaos of the monsoon was pulled through the doorway and into the pattern. It sucked the hapless priest and apprentice with it, whirled them like dolls around the pattern and straight at him. He watched them scream as the forces of the storm and of the magic he’d unleashed tore them apart, shredding skin from bones and grinding the bones to dust. He howled and the dust of their deaths poured into his open mouth, down inside him, filling him. What was cold as marble became as jagged as fishhooks within. The floor beneath him was disintegrating. The pattern itself turned to blue crystal, flowing out from him. Still he clung to the twisted pearl that was his separate soul. The scrolls had made it clear that he could not leave the pattern so long as he held on to it, yet he dared not let it go with disaster unfolding about him. He stretched his arm across the pattern, and the only thing he could reach was a nautilus shell in the heap of those he’d collected. He dropped the pearl that was his soul into the shell, listened to it rattle through the chambers and into the center.

“He found that he could move then and walked quickly back around the pattern. He tucked the shell into his robe. The other scrolls blew and tumbled about the room. He dashed to grab them as he balanced on the path, but they were being torn apart, too, and he managed only to snatch shreds. The knowledge contained within them was lost forever. Even had he wanted to, Auuenau could not now undo what he’d set in motion, which his apprentice had disordered; but he did not want to undo it. His very substance had by then become Chaos, and what was happening around him was his doing.

“He exited the crystalline pattern and from the doorway watched as it began to unthread, the scored boards torn loose and drawn down into the center. Then the floor outside the vortex broke apart, whirling around it. Shards of crystal gashed him, embedded in his flesh. The woven walls of the building shredded and fell in, every moment the great whirlpool growing, expanding as if unappeasable. Auuenau remained in the avenue for only a moment before the storm seized him and yanked him off his feet. Instinctively he clutched a guide-rope, but in doing so he let go of the final scroll, and it flitted away on the wind.

“The surface of the span of Dyauspitar cracked beneath him and collapsed into the maw of the whirlpool. Like the dark form that had arisen beside him, that core seemed shot with stars.

“He dragged himself along the rope, and the darkness circled after him. The rope came suddenly unmoored and flung him into the air, all the way to the opposite side of the span. He struck the rail, doubled over it, but hung on. Below lay a skiff, anchored and storm-tossed. As the span shook apart, he leapt over the rail and down into it. It was half full of water and he fell, but he untied the lines and with a long pole pushed away. The edge of the span split behind him and the wind threw flinders at him. Between the piers the water swirled, capturing the collapsing fragments in its force, sucking them in, and like a fire fueled by new wood, the whirlpool expanded across the water.

“Auuenau tried to pole his skiff away, but he couldn’t. The thing had caught him, and helplessly he began to whirl around it, faster and faster, riding the crest but certain to follow everything else down into the star-shot blackness of eternity in the maw of the pool.

“He comprehended suddenly what would satisfy it. As he clung with one hand to the side of the skiff, he tore the small shell out of his robe as if tearing out his own heart. He stared at the striped nautilus and understood that he and the whirlpool were of one substance now, one purpose shared. It was his shadow self, rapacious and unappeasable unless he gave it the one thing it wanted. He lifted the shell, and the pearl rattled inside it. He grinned sickly, and that was the first moment when he felt the faces of those he’d absorbed moving across his own—the features of the monk and his apprentice.

“He tossed the shell over the side and into the mouth of the maelstrom. He didn’t even watch it vanish, but set down the pole and lay back to let events play out.

“The whirlpool devoured his soul. At once it shrank beneath him.

“Within moments Auuenau’s skiff was circling a patch of foam, of nothing, of water indistinguishable from any other. Of the span of Dyauspitar all that remained was the ridge of rock that had supported it, the spine of Dyaus. The rest, all of his brethren, all of the people, were gone, absorbed, the fuel that fed his immortality.

“He, the embodiment of Chaos, began to laugh. He looked at his hands, his arms, his skin transformed into something harder than flesh.

“Light rain sprayed over him, but the winds had ceased their howl and sun-speckled clouds floated overhead. Even the storm had been sucked down into the horror of the force he’d unleashed. Lying back in the skiff, he let the currents of the ocean take him wherever they would. He was deathless and fearsome now. He needed a new name for his new self, and by the time he reached another spiral, he had one, extracted from ancient legends, the name of a god: Tophet the Destroyer, the Lord of Chaos. Thus Auuenau became a god, and no one the wiser save for a real god whose span he’d destroyed.”

She reached into the dust and picked up the gnarled burnished pearl in her fist.

Casually, she added, “If you like I could repeat the whole tale for you with puppets,” she said. “It’s better with puppets.”

When he said nothing, she gathered herself up and walked to the throne. No one tried to stop her. No one moved at all. The golden mask hung before her, his last protection.

“When you had Bardsham’s puppet cases brought here—you didn’t know that, did you? That these are his?—when you did that, you brought the very thing you feared, not just the story of it. Your tale, like the whirlpool in it, comes full circle. After all, you never were a god.”

She went around the mask. He sat defiantly, but his head was tilted away as if in fear of her. His robe had fallen open, and she saw that his body was covered in spurs and sharp splinters of bone that had pushed out of his skin. She stepped up to the end of the throne, between his knees. He reached out suddenly, triumphantly, and grabbed her wrist. She winced, stiffening at the frigid pain that burned to her marrow. But then suddenly the flow reversed and a charge ran out of her fist into him.

His fingers leapt free of her and he bucked violently with a great cracking gasp.

She opened her palm and the knobby black pearl was gone.

Tophet’s head began to vibrate from side to side faster and faster until she couldn’t distinguish the awful features anymore, the millions of faces blurring into a smudge upon the air. The blur flung off sparks that spun through the room. She recalled the story the Ondiont snake had told her of the bride of Death, who had captured souls like tiny lights; and of the brothers who were turned to rock with a final wish to be worshipped; of the thousand stories of people who wished for something before they understood the price of it.

The sparks flicked and vanished, flicked and vanished, around her, past her, through her. They pitted the gold mask behind her where they hit it until it became as thin as mesh. And when the last one burst forth and died, the body of Tophet stopped moving. The indurate form had become a dried husk, a gaping mummified thing without a face.

She stepped back from the corpse and brushed against the huge mask. It fell, slipping past her shoulders as she turned to see the figure of the attendant stumble and release the pole on which it hung. The mask bent when it hit, and slid across the floor like a leaf skimming a pond. The pole clattered after it. The blind attendant caught her balance against Scratta. He in turn rocked to and fro and then fell, shattering when he hit the floor. All around Leodora, the Agents of Chaos had become stone that within moments had begun to crumble away. The force that had knit them together was gone.

Her hand where Tophet had grabbed her was burned white as if covered with powder, but it hadn’t turned to stone. She looked at the people around her, the survivors of this span, who were too fearful yet to believe that the Destroyer was really gone. She stepped down from the throne and walked away, out from under the dome, and by the time she passed the curtained dais she was runnning, weaving back through his trove of treasures until she reached the mirror. In dread she approached it, hopeful that the magic behind it had been banished; and yet her heart swelled when she discovered it had not and her mother still agitatedly filled the frame.

“Why didn’t she go?” she asked as she touched the pendant.

The Brazen Head awoke. “His magic was cast in the glass, independent of him, as with the dome. Magic needs magic to be undone.”

“How do I set her free? I can’t leave her this way.”

“What is she?”

“My mother.”

“But if I say your mother is long dead, then what does she become?”

“I don’t know. A reflection.”

“A reflection,” he repeated. And he fell silent again.

She stared around her, turning in a circle, then looked up through the dome and shouted, “You knew all along! All of you! Shumyzin! Cardeo!” Her voice echoed through the vast chamber and came back to her unanswered. The most important questions were the ones they never asked.

She gripped the phial. It had to be nearly empty. The drop that had rescued Diverus had taken forever to spill from it. She couldn’t pour the last drops on the upright mirror and couldn’t tilt the mirror on its stony base. Instead she held out her hand and tipped the phial over her palm. Two drops splashed out.

For a moment she hesitated. The air filled with distant cries of “Jax!” as if the crowds from the Terrestre were clamoring for more; but she knew it was the survivors of Calcaria, freed and seeking after their savior.

“Good-bye, Mother,” she said, then she wiped her hand over the glass, smearing the reflection from top to bottom. She stepped back and the image in the mirror rippled and faded. The mirror turned black.

“Diverus!” Leodora called, and she stepped through the darkness.